THE NEW CAMP
The fame of Ten Bow travelled to far reaches, and because in the gold
country men are fascinated by prosperity, even though it is the
prosperity of others, the shortening days brought many new faces into
the mining camp of Ten Bow. Notwithstanding the fact that every square
foot of the valley was staked, gaunt men, whose hollow eyes and depleted
outfits spoke failure, mushed in from the hills, knowing that here
cordwood must be chopped, windlasses cranked, and fires kept going, and
preferring the certainty of high wages at day labour to the uncertainty
of a new strike in unscarred valleys.
It was six months since Waseche Bill had burst into Scotty McCollough's
store at Hesitation with the news of his great strike in the red rock
valley to the southward--news that spread like wildfire through the camp
and sent two hundred men over the trail in a frenzied rush for gold.
It was a race long to be remembered in the Northland--the Ten Bow
stampede. It is told to this day on the trails, by bearded _tillicums_
amid roars of bull-throated laughter and deep man-growls of approval,
how the race was won by a boy--a slight, wiry, fifteen-year-old
_chechako_ who, scorning the broad river trail with its hundred rushing
dog teams, struck straight through the hill with a misfit three-dog
outfit, and staked "One Below Discovery" under the very noses of Big
McDougall and his mail team of gaunt _malamutes_, and Dutch Henry with
his Hudson Bays.
From the glacier-studded seaboard to the great white death barriers
beyond the Yukon, wherever men forgathered, the fame of Connie Morgan,
and old Boris, Mutt, and Slasher, passed from bearded lip to bearded
lip, and the rough hearts of big, trail-toughened prospectors swelled
with pride at the mention of his name. Only, in the big white country,
he is never called Connie Morgan, but Sam Morgan's boy; for Sam Morgan
was Alaska's--big, quiet Sam Morgan, who never made a "strike," but
stood for a square deal and the right of things as they are. And, as
they loved Sam Morgan, these men loved Sam Morgan's boy. For it had been
told in the hills how Dick Colton found him, ill-clad and ragged,
forlornly watching the wheezy little Yukon steamer swing out into the
stream at Anvik, whence he had come in search of his father. And how,
when he learned that Sam Morgan had crossed the Big Divide, he bravely
clenched his little fists, choked back the hot tears, and told the big
men of the North, as he faced them there, that he would stay in Alaska
and dig for the gold his father never found.
The Ten Bow stampede depopulated Hesitation, and the new camp of Ten Bow
sprang up in a day, two hundred miles to the southward. A camp of tents
and _igloos_ it was, for in the mad scramble for gold men do not stop
to build substantial cabins, but improvise makeshift shelters from the
bitter cold of the long nights, out of whatever material is at hand. For
the Ten Bow strike came late in the season and, knowing that soon the
water from the melting snows would drive them from their claims, men
worked feverishly in the black-mouthed shafts that dotted the valley,
and at night chopped cordwood and kept the fires blazing that thawed out
the gravel for the morrow's digging. When the break-up came men
abandoned the shafts and, with rude cradles and sluices, and deep gold
pans, set to work on the frozen gravel of the dumps.
And then it was men realized the richness of the Ten Bow strike. Not
since the days of Sand Creek and the Klondike had gravel yielded such
store of the precious metal. As they cleaned up the riffles they laughed
and talked wildly of wealth undreamed; for the small dumps, representing
a scant sixty days' digging, panned out more gold than any man in Ten
Bow had ever taken out in a year--more than most men had taken out in
many years of disheartening, bone-racking toil.
During the long days of the short summer, while the cold waters of Ten
Bow rushed northward toward the Yukon, log cabins replaced the tents and
_igloos_, and by the end of August Ten Bow assumed an air of stability
which its prosperity warranted. Scotty McCollough freighted his goods
from Hesitation and soon presided over a brand new log store, which
varied in no whit nor particular from the other log stores of other
camps.
Those were wonderful days for Connie Morgan. Days during which the
vague, half-formed impressions of youth were recast in a rough mould by
association with the bearded men who treated him as an equal. He learned
their likes and dislikes, their joys and sorrows, their shortcomings and
virtues, and in the learning, he came instinctively to look under the
surface and gauge men by their true worth--which is so rarely the great
world's measure of men. And, under the unconscious tutelage of these
men, was laid the foundation for the uncompromising sense of right and
justice which was to become the underlying principle of the
hand-hammered character of the man who would one day help shape the
destiny of Alaska, and safeguard her people from the outreaching greed
of monopoly.
Daily the boy worked shoulder to shoulder with his partner, Waseche
Bill, the man who had presented him with old Boris, and whispered of the
short-cut through the hills which had enabled him to beat out the Ten
Bow stampede.
Now, the building of cabins is not easy work. Getting out logs, notching
their ends, and rolling them into place, one above another, is a man's
job. And many were the pretexts and fictions by which the men of Ten Bow
contrived to relieve Connie of the heavier work in the building of his
home.
"Sonny," said Big McDougall one day, loafing casually over from the
adjoining claim where his own cabin was nearing completion, "swar to
gudeness, my back's like to bust wi' stoopin' over yon chinkin'.
C'u'dn't ye jist slip over to my place an' spell the auld mon off a bit.
I'm mos' petered out." So Connie obligingly departed and, as he rammed
in the moss and daubed it with mud, peered through a crack and smiled
knowingly as he watched the "petered out" man heaving and straining by
the side of Waseche Bill in the setting of a log. And the next day it
was Dutch Henry who removed the short pipe from his mouth and called
from his doorway:
"Hey, kid! Them dawgs o' mine is gittin' plumb scan'lous fat an' lazy.
Seems like ef they don't git a workin' out they'll spile on me complete.
Looks like I never fin' no time to fool with 'em. Now, ef you c'd make
out to take 'em down the trail today, I'd sure take it mighty kind of
ye." And when Connie returned to the camp it was to find Dutch Henry
helping Waseche Bill in the rope-rolling of a roof log. And so it went
each day until the cabin stood complete under its dirt roof. Some one or
another of the big-hearted miners, with a sly wink at Waseche Bill,
invented a light job which would take the boy from the claim and then
took his place, grinning happily.
But Connie Morgan understood, and because he loved these men, kept his
own counsel, and the big men never knew that the small, serious-eyed boy
saw through their deception.
At last the cabin was finished and the boy took a keen delight in
helping his big partner in the building of the furniture. Two bunks, a
table, three or four chairs, and a wash bench--rude but
serviceable--were fashioned from light saplings and packing case boards,
brought up from Scotty's store. In the new camps lumber is scarce, and
the canny Scotchman realized a tidy sum from the sale of his empty
boxes.
In the shortening days men returned to the diggings and sloshed about in
the wet gravel, cleaning up as they went; for before long, the freezing
of the water would compel them to throw the gravel onto dumps to be
worked out the following spring.
The partners hired a man to help with the heavier work and Connie busied
himself with the hundred and one odd jobs about the claims and cabin. He
became a wonderful cook, and Waseche Bill, returning from the diggings,
always found a hot meal of well-prepared food awaiting his ravenous
appetite, while the men of other cabins returned tired and wet to growl
and grumble over the cooking of their grub.
Late in September the creek froze. Blizzard after whirling blizzard
followed upon the heels of a heavy snowfall, and the Northland lay white
and cold in the grip of the long winter. Ten Bow was a humming hive of
activity. Windlasses creaked in the thin, frosty air, to the
half-muffled cries of "haul away" which floated upward from the depths
of the shafts, and the hillsides rang with the stroke of axes and the
long crash of falling trees. By night the red flare of a hundred fires
lighted the snow for miles and seemed reflected in the aurora-shot sky;
and with each added bucketful, the dumps grew larger and showed black
and ugly against the white snow of the valley.
To conform to the mining laws the partners sank a shaft on each claim,
working them alternately, and the experienced eye of Waseche Bill told
him that the gravel he daily shovelled into the bucket was fabulously
rich in gold.
And then, one day, at a depth of ten feet, Waseche Bill's pick struck
against something hard. He struck again and the steel rang loudly in the
cistern-like shaft. With his shovel he scraped away the thin covering of
loose gravel which was deepest where his claim joined Connie's.
That evening the boy wondered at the silence of his big partner, who
devoured his beans and bacon and sourdough bread, and washed them down
with great draughts of black coffee. But he spoke no word, and after
supper helped Connie with the dishes and then, filling his pipe, tilted
his chair against the log wall and smoked, apparently engrossed in deep
thought. At the table, Connie, poring over the contents of a year-old
illustrated magazine, from time to time cast furtive glances toward the
man and wondered at his strange silence. After a while the boy laid the
magazine aside, drew the bootjack from beneath the bunk, pulled off his
small boots, and with a sleepy "good-night, pardner," rolled snugly into
his blankets.