Every new and prosperous mining-camp has an Arabian Nights atmosphere,
characteristic, peculiar, indescribable. Especially noticeable was this
atmosphere in the early Arctic camps, made up as they were of men who
knew little about mining, rather less about frontier ways, and next to
nothing about the country in which they found themselves. These men had
built fabulous hopes, they dwelt in illusion, they put faith in the
thinnest of shadows. Now the most practical miner is not a conservative
person; he is erratic, credulous, and extravagant; reasonless optimism
is at once his blessing and his curse. Nevertheless, the "old-timers"
of the Yukon were moderate indeed as compared with the adventurous
holiday-seekers who swarmed in upon their tracks. Being none too well
balanced themselves, it was only natural that the exuberance of these
new arrivals should prove infectious and that a sort of general
auto-intoxication should result. That is precisely what happened at
Dawson. Men lost all caution, all common sense; they lived in a land of
rosy imaginings; hard-bought lessons of experience were forgotten;
reality disappeared; fancy took wing and left fact behind; expectations
were capitalized and no exaggeration was too wild to challenge
acceptance. It became a City of Frenzy.
It was all very fine for an ardent youth like Pierce Phillips; it set
him ablaze, stirring a fever in his blood. Having won thus far, he made
the natural mistake of believing that the race was his; so he wasted
little time in the town, but very soon took to the hills, there to make
his fortune and be done with it.
Here came his awakening. Away from the delirium of the camp, in contact
with cold reality, he began to learn something of the serious,
practical business of gold-mining. Before he had been long on the
creeks he found that it was no child's play to wrest treasure from the
frozen bosom of a hostile wilderness, and that, no matter how rich or
how plentiful the treasure, Mother Earth guarded her secrets jealously.
He began to realize that the obstacles he had so blithely overcome in
getting to the Klondike were as nothing to those in the way of his
further success. Of a sudden his triumphal progress slowed down and he
came to a pause; he began to mark time.
There was work in plenty to be had, but, like most of the new-comers,
he was not satisfied to take fixed wages. They seemed paltry indeed
compared with the drunken figures that were on every lip. In the
presence of the uncertain he could not content himself with a sure
thing. Nevertheless, he was soon forced to the necessity of resorting
to it, for through the fog of his misapprehensions, beneath the
obscurity of his ignorance, he began to discover the true outline of
things and to understand that his ideas were impractical.
To begin with, every foot of ground in the proven districts was taken,
and even when he pushed out far afield he found that the whole country
was plastered with locations: rivers, creeks and tributaries, benches
and hillsides, had been staked. For many miles in every direction
blazed trees and pencil notices greeted him--he found them in places
where it seemed no foot but his had ever trod. In Dawson the Gold
Commissioner's office was besieged by daily crowds of claimants; it
would have taken years of work on the part of a hundred thousand men to
even prospect the ground already recorded on the books.
Back and forth Phillips came and went, he made trips with pack and
hand-sled, he slept out in spruce forests, in prospectors' tents, in
new cabins the sweaty green logs of which were still dripping, and when
he had finished he was poorer by a good many dollars and richer only in
the possession of a few recorder's receipts, the value of which he had
already begun to doubt.
Disappointed he was, but not discouraged. It was all too new and
exciting for that. Every visit to Bonanza or El Dorado inspired him. It
would have inspired a wooden man. For miles those valleys were smoky
from the sinking fires, and their clean white carpets were spotted with
piles of raw red dirt. By day they echoed to blows of axes, the crash
of falling trees, the plaint of windlasses, the cries of freighters; by
night they became vast caldrons filled with flickering fires;
tremendous vats, the vapors from which were illuminated by hidden
furnaces. One would have thought that here gold was being made, not
sought--that this was a region of volcanic hot springs where every
fissure and vent-hole spouted steam. It was a strange, a marvelous
sight; it stirred the imagination to know that underfoot, locked in the
flinty depths of the frozen gravel, was wealth unmeasured and unearned,
rich hoards of yellow gold that yesterday were ownerless.
A month of stampeding dulled the keen edge of Pierce's enthusiasm, so
he took a breathing-spell in which to get his bearings.
The Yukon had closed and the human flotsam and jetsam it had borne
thither was settling. Pierce could feel a metamorphic agency at work in
the town; already new habits of life were crystallizing among its
citizens; and beneath its whirlpool surface new forms were in the
making. It alarmed him to realize that as yet his own affairs were in
suspense, and he argued, with all the hot impatience of youth, that it
was high time he came to rest. Opportunities were on every side of him,
but he knew not where or how to lay hold of them to his best advantage.
More than ever he felt himself to be the toy of circumstance, more than
ever he feared the fallibility of his judgment and the consequences of
a mistake. He was in a mood both dissatisfied and irresolute when he
encountered his two trail friends, Tom Linton and Jerry Quirk. Pierce
had seen them last at Linderman, engaged in prosecuting a stampeders'
divorce; he was surprised to find them reunited.
"I never dreamed you'd get through," he told them, when greetings had
passed. "Did you come in one boat or in two?"
Jerry grinned. "We sawed up that outlaw four times. We'd have split her
end to end finally, only we run out of pitch to cork her up."
"That boat was about worn out with our bickerings," Tom declared. "She
ain't over half the length she was--all the rest is sawdust. If the
nail-holes in her was laid end to end they'd reach to Forty Mile. We
were the last outfit in, as it was, and we'd of missed a landing if a
feller hadn't run out on the shore ice and roped us. First town I ever
entered on the end of a lariat. Hope I don't leave it the same way."
"Guess who drug us in," Jerry urged.
"I've no idea," said Pierce.
"Big Lars Anderson."
"Big Lars of El Dorado?"
"He's the party. He was just drunk enough to risk breakin' through.
When he found who we was--well, he gave us the town; he made us a
present of Dawson and all points north, together with the lands,
premises, privileges, and hereditaments appurtenant thereto. I still
got a kind of a hangover headache and have to take soda after my meals."
"Lars was a sheepman when we knew him," Tom explained. "Jerry and I
purloined him from some prominent cow-gentlemen who had him all
decorated up ready to hang, and he hasn't forgotten it. He got
everybody full the night we landed, and wound up by buying all the
fresh eggs in camp. Forty dozen. We had 'em fried. He's a prince with
his money."
"He owns more property than anybody," said pierce.
"Right! And he gave us a 'lay.'"
Phillips' eyes opened. "A lay? On El Dorado?" he queried, in frank
amazement.
"No. Hunker. He says it's a good creek. We're lookin' for a pardner."
"What kind of a partner?"
It was Linton who answered. "Well, some nice, easy-going, hard-working
young feller. Jerry and I are pretty old to wind a windlass, but we can
work underground where it's warm."
"'Easy-goin',' that's the word," Jerry nodded. "Tom and me get along
with each other like an order of buckwheat cakes, but we're set in our
ways and we don't want anybody to come between us."
"How would I do?" Pierce inquired, with a smile.
Tom answered promptly. "If your name was put to a vote I know one of us
that wouldn't blackball you."
"Sure!" cried his partner. "The ballot-box would look like a settin' of
pigeon eggs. Think it over and let us know. We're leavin' to-morrow."
A lease on Hunker Creek sounded good to Phillips. Big Lars Anderson had
been one of the first arrivals from Circle City; already he was rated a
millionaire, for luck had smiled upon him; his name was one to conjure
with. Pierce was about to accept the offer made when Jerry said:
"Who d'you s'pose got the lay below ours? That feller McCaskey and his
brother."
"McCaskey!"
"He's an old pal of Anderson's."
"Does Big Lars know he's a thief?"
Jerry shrugged. "Lars ain't the kind that listens to scandal and we
ain't the kind that carries it."
Pierce meditated briefly; then he said, slowly, "If your lay turns out
good so will McCaskey's." His frown deepened. "Well, if there's a law
of compensation, if there's such a thing as retributive justice--you
have a bad piece of ground."
"But there ain't any such thing," Tom quickly asserted. "Anyhow, it
don't work in mining-camps. If it did the saloons would be
reading-rooms and the gamblers would take in washing. Look at the lucky
men in this camp--bums, most of 'em. George Carmack was a squaw-man,
and he made the strike."
Pierce felt no fear of Joe McCaskey, only dislike and a desire to avoid
further contact with him. The prospect of a long winter in close
proximity to a proven scoundrel was repugnant. Balanced against this
was the magic of Big Lars' name. It was a problem; again indecision
rose to trouble him.
"I'll think it over," he said, finally.
Farther down the street Phillips' attention was arrested by an
announcement of the opening of the Rialto Saloon and Theater, Miller &
Best, proprietors. Challenged by the name of his former employer and
drawn by the sounds of merriment from within, Pierce entered. He had
seen little of Laure since his arrival; he had all but banished her
from his thoughts, in fact; but he determined now to look her up.
The Rialto was the newest and the most pretentious of Dawson's
amusement palaces. It comprised a drinking-place with a spacious
gambling-room adjoining. In the rear of the latter was the theater, a
huge log annex especially designed as the home of Bacchus and
Terpsichore.
The front room was crowded; through an archway leading to the
gambling-hall came the noise of many voices, and over all the strains
of an orchestra at the rear. Ben Miller, a famous sporting character,
was busy weighing gold dust at the massive scales near the door when
Pierce entered.
The theater, too, was packed. Here a second bar was doing a thriving
business, and every chair on the floor, every box in the balcony
overhanging three sides of it, was occupied. Waiters were scurrying up
and down the wide stairway; the general hubbub was punctuated by the
sound of exploding corks as the Klondike spendthrifts advertised their
prosperity in a hilarious contest of prodigality.
All Dawson had turned out for the opening, and Pierce recognized
several of the El Dorado kings, among them Big Lars Anderson.
These new-born magnates were as thriftless as locusts, and in the midst
of their bacchanalian revels Pierce felt very poor, very obscure. Here
was the roisterous spirit of the Northland at full play; it irked the
young man intensely to feel that he could afford no part in it. Laure
was not long in discovering him. She sped to him with the swiftness of
a swallow; breathlessly she inquired:
"Where have you been so long? Why didn't you let me know you were back?"
"I just got in. I've been everywhere." He smiled down at her, and she
clutched the lapel of his coat, then drew him out of the crowd. "I
dropped in to see how you were getting along."
"Well, what do you think of the place?"
"Why, it looks as if you'd all get rich in a night."
"And you? Have you done anything for yourself?"
Pierce shook his head; in a few words he recounted his goings and his
comings, his efforts and his failures. Laure followed the recital with
swift, birdlike nods of understanding; her dark ayes were warm with
sympathy.
"You're going at it the wrong way," she asserted when he had finished.
"You have brains; make them work. Look at Best, look at Miller, his new
partner; they know better than to mine. Mining is a fool's game. Play a
sure thing, Pierce. Stay here in town and live like a human being;
here's where the money will be made."
"Do you think I WANT to go flying over hill and dale, like a
tumbleweed? I haven't had warm feet in a week and I weep salt tears
when I see a bed. But I'm no Croesus; I've got to hustle. I think I've
landed something finally." He told of Tom and Jerry's offer, but failed
to impress his listener.
"If you go out to Hunker Creek I'll scarcely ever see you," said she.
"That's the first objection. I've nearly died these last three weeks.
But there are other objections. You couldn't get along with those old
men. Why, they can't get along with each other! Then there's Joe
McCaskey to think of. Why run into trouble?"
"I've thought of all that. But Big Lars is on the crest of his wave; he
has the Midas touch; everything he lays his hands on turns to gold. He
believes in Hunker--"
"I'll find out if he does," Laure said, quickly. "He's drinking. He'll
tell me anything. Wait!" With a flashing smile she was off.
She returned with an air of triumph. "You'll learn to listen to me,"
she declared. "He says Hunker is low grade. That's why he lets lays on
it instead of working it himself. Lars is a fox."
"He said that?"
"The best there is in it is wages. Those were his very words. Would you
put up with Linton and Quirk and the two McCaskeys for wages? Of course
not. I've something better fixed up for you." Without explaining, she
led Pierce to the bar, where Morris Best was standing.
Best was genuinely glad to see his former employee; he warmly shook
Pierce's hand.
"I've got 'em going, haven't I?" he chuckled.
Laure broke out, imperiously: "Loosen up. Morris, and let's all have a
drink on the house. You can afford it."
"Sure!" With a happy grin the proprietor ordered a quart bottle of
wine. "I can afford more than that for a friend. We put it over, didn't
we, kid?" He linked arms with Pierce and leaned upon him. "Oy! Such
trouble we had with these girls, eh? But we got 'em here, and now I got
Dawson going. I'll be one of these Rockyfeller magnets, believe me."
Pierce had not tasted liquor since his last farewell to Laure. Three
weeks of hard work in the open air had effected a chemical change in
his make-up, a purification of his tissues, and as a result Best's
liquor mounted quickly to his head and warmed his blood. When he had
emptied his glass Laure saw that it was promptly refilled.
"So you've cut out the stampeding," Morris continued. "Good! You've got
sense. Let the rough-necks do it. This here Front Street is the best
pay-streak in the Klondike and it won't pinch out. Why? Because every
miner empties his poke into it." The speaker nodded, and leaned more
intimately against Phillips. "They bring in their Bonanza dust and
their El Dorado nuggets and salt our sluices. That's the system. It's
simpler as falling down a log. What?"
"Come to the good news," Laure urged.
"This little woman hates you, don't she?" Best winked. "Just like she
hates her right eye. You got her going, kid. Well, you can start work
to-morrow."
"Start work? Where?" Pierce was bewildered.
"Miller's looking for a gold-weigher. We'll put you out in the saloon
proper."
"'Saloon proper'?" Pierce shook his head in good-natured refusal. "I
dare say it's the fault of my bringing-up, but--I don't think there's
any such thing. I'm an outdoor person. I'm one of the rough-necks who
salts your sluice-boxes. I think I'd better stick to the hills. It's
mighty nice of you, though, and I'm much obliged."
"Are you going to take that other offer?" Laure inquired. When Pierce
hesitated she laid hold of his other arm. "I won't let you go," she
cried. "I want you here--"
"Nonsense!" he protested. "I can't do anything for you. I have
nothing--"
"Have I ever asked you for anything?" she blazed at him. "I can take
care of myself, but--I want you. I sha'n't let you go."
"Better think it over," Best declared. "We need a good man."
"Yes!" Laure clung to Pierce's hand. "Don't be in a hurry. Anyhow, stay
and dance with me while we talk about it. We've never had a dance
together. Please!"
The proprietor of the theater was in a genial mood. "Stick around," he
seconded. "Your credit is good and it won't worry me none if you never
take up your tabs. Laure has got the right idea; play 'em safe and
sure, and let the other feller do the work. Now we'll have another
bottle."
The three of them were still standing at the bar when the curtain fell
on the last vaudeville act and the audience swarmed out into the
gambling-room of the main saloon. Hastily, noisily, the chairs were
removed from the dance floor, then the orchestra began a spirited
two-step and a raucous-voiced caller broke into loud exhortations. In a
twinkling the room had refilled, this time with whirling couples.
Laure raised her arms, she swayed forward into Pierce's embrace, and
they melted into the throng. The girl could dance; she seemed to float
in cadence with the music; she became one with her partner and answered
his every impulse. Never before had she seemed so utterly and so
completely to embody the spirit of pleasure; she was ardent, alive, she
pulsated with enjoyment; her breath was warm, her dark, fragrant hair
brushed Phillips' cheek; her olive face was slightly flushed; and her
eyes, uplifted to his, were glowing. They voiced adoration, abandon,
surrender.
The music ended with a crash; a shout, a storm of applause followed;
then the dancers swarmed to the bar, bearing Pierce and his companion
with them. Laure was panting. She clung fiercely, jealously, to
Phillips' arm.
"Dance with me again. Again! I never knew what it was--" She trembled
with a vibrant ecstasy.
Drinks were set before them. The girl spurned hers, but absent-mindedly
pocketed the pasteboard check that went with it. While yet Pierce's
throat was warm from the spirits there began the opening measures of a
languorous waltz and the crowd swept into motion again. There was no
refusing the invitation of that music.
Later in the evening Phillips found Tom and Jerry; his color was deeper
than usual, his eyes were unnaturally bright.
"I'm obliged to you," he told them, "but I've taken a job as weigher
with Miller & Best. Good luck, and--I hope you strike it rich."
When he had gone Tom shook his head. His face was clouded with regret
and, too, with a vague expression of surprise.
"Too bad," he said. "I didn't think he was that kind."
"Sure!" Jerry agreed. "I thought he'd make good."