BURNING DAYLIGHT
by Jack London
PART I
CHAPTER I
It was a quiet night in the Shovel. At the bar, which ranged along one side of the large chinked-log room, leaned half a dozen men, two of whom were discussing the relative merits of spruce-tea and lime-juice as remedies for scurvy. They argued with an air of depression and with intervals of morose silence. The other men scarcely heeded them. In a row, against the opposite wall, were the gambling games. The crap-table was deserted. One lone man was playing at the faro-table. The roulette-ball was not even spinning, and the gamekeeper stood by the roaring, red-hot stove, talking with the young, dark-eyed woman, comely of face and figure, who was known from Juneau to Fort Yukon as the Virgin. Three men sat in at stud-poker, but they played with small chips and without enthusiasm, while there were no onlookers. On the floor of the dancing-room, which opened out at the rear, three couples were waltzing drearily to the strains of a violin and a piano.
Circle City was not deserted, nor was money tight. The miners were in from Moseyed Creek and the other diggings to the west, the summer washing had been good, and the men’s pouches were heavy with dust and nuggets. The Klondike had not yet been discovered, nor had the miners of the Yukon learned the possibilities of deep digging and wood-firing. No work was done in the winter, and they made a practice of hibernating in the large camps like Circle City during the long Arctic night. Time was heavy on their hands, their pouches were well filled, and the only social diversion to be found was in the saloons. Yet the Shovel was practically deserted, and the Virgin, standing by the stove, yawned with uncovered mouth and said to Charley Bates:-
“If something don’t happen soon, I’m gin’ to bed. What’s the matter with the camp, anyway? Everybody dead?”
Bates did not even trouble to reply, but went on moodily rolling a cigarette. Dan MacDonald, pioneer saloonman and gambler on the upper Yukon, owner and proprietor of the Tivoli and all its games, wandered forlornly across the great vacant space of floor and joined the two at the stove.
“Anybody dead?” the Virgin asked him.
“Looks like it,” was the answer.
“Then it must be the whole camp,” she said with an air of finality and with another yawn.
MacDonald grinned and nodded, and opened his mouth to speak, when the front door swung wide and a man appeared in the light. A rush of frost, turned to vapor by the heat of the room, swirled about him to his knees and poured on across the floor, growing thinner and thinner, and perishing a dozen feet from the stove. Taking the wisp broom from its nail inside the door, the newcomer brushed the snow from his moccasins and high German socks. He would have appeared a large man had not a huge French-Canadian stepped up to him from the bar and gripped his hand.
“Hello, Daylight!” was his greeting. “By Gar, you good for sore eyes!”
“Hello, Louis, when did you-all blow in?” returned the newcomer. “Come up and have a drink and tell us all about Bone Creek. Why, dog-gone you-all, shake again. Where’s that pardner of yours? I’m looking for him.”
Another huge man detached himself from the bar to shake hands. Olaf Henderson and French Louis, partners together on Bone Creek, were the two largest men in the country, and though they were but half a head taller than the newcomer, between them he was dwarfed completely.
“Hello, Olaf, you’re my meat, savvee that,” said the one called Daylight. “To-morrow’s my birthday, and I’m going to put you-all on your back–savvee? And you, too, Louis. I can put you-all on your back on my birthday–savvee? Come up and drink, Olaf, and I’ll tell you-all about it.”
The arrival of the newcomer seemed to send a flood of warmth through the place. “It’s Burning Daylight,” the Virgin cried, the first to recognize him as he came into the light. Charley Bates’ tight features relaxed at the sight, and MacDonald went over and joined the three at the bar. With the advent of Burning Daylight the whole place became suddenly brighter and cheerier. The barkeepers were active. Voices were raised. Somebody laughed. And when the fiddler, peering into the front room, remarked to the pianist, “It’s Burning Daylight,” the waltz-time perceptibly quickened, and the dancers, catching the contagion, began to whirl about as if they really enjoyed it. It was known to them of old time that nothing languished when Burning Daylight was around.
He turned from the bar and saw the woman by the stove and the eager look of welcome she extended him.
“Hello, Virgin, old girl,” he called. “Hello, Charley. What’s the matter with you-all? Why wear faces like that when coffins cost only three ounces? Come up, you-all, and drink. Come up, you unburied dead, and name your poison. Come up, everybody. This is my night, and I’m going to ride it. To-morrow I’m thirty, and then I’ll be an old man. It’s the last fling of youth. Are you-all with me? Surge along, then. Surge along.
“Hold on there, Davis,” he called to the faro-dealer, who had shoved his chair back from the table. “I’m going you one flutter to see whether you-all drink with me or we-all drink with you.”
Pulling a heavy sack of gold-dust from his coat pocket, he dropped it on the HIGH CARD.
“Fifty,” he said.
The faro-dealer slipped two cards. The high card won. He scribbled the amount on a pad, and the weigher at the bar balanced fifty dollars’ worth of dust in the gold-scales and poured it into Burning Daylight’s sack. The waltz in the back room being finished, the three couples, followed by the fiddler and the pianist and heading for the bar, caught Daylight’s eye.
“Surge along, you-all” he cried. “Surge along and name it. This is my night, and it ain’t a night that comes frequent. Surge up, you Siwashes and Salmon-eaters. It’s my night, I tell you-all–“
“A blame mangy night,” Charley Bates interpolated.
“You’re right, my son,” Burning Daylight went on gaily.
“A mangy night, but it’s MY night, you see. I’m the mangy old he-wolf. Listen to me howl.”
And howl he did, like a lone gray timber wolf, till the Virgin thrust her pretty fingers in her ears and shivered. A minute later she was whirled away in his arms to the dancing-floor, where, along with the other three women and their partners, a rollicking Virginia reel was soon in progress. Men and women danced in moccasins, and the place was soon a-roar, Burning Daylight the centre of it and the animating spark, with quip and jest and rough merriment rousing them out of the slough of despond in which he had found them.
The atmosphere of the place changed with his coming. He seemed to fill it with his tremendous vitality. Men who entered from the street felt it immediately, and in response to their queries the barkeepers nodded at the back room, and said comprehensively, “Burning Daylight’s on the tear.” And the men who entered remained, and kept the barkeepers busy. The gamblers took heart of life, and soon the tables were filled, the click of chips and whir of the roulette-ball rising monotonously and imperiously above the hoarse rumble of men’s voices and their oaths and heavy laughs.
Few men knew Elam Harnish by any other name than Burning Daylight, the name which had been given him in the early days in the land because of his habit of routing his comrades out of their blankets with the complaint that daylight was burning. Of the pioneers in that far Arctic wilderness, where all men were pioneers, he was reckoned among the oldest. Men like Al Mayo and Jack McQuestion antedated him; but they had entered the land by crossing the Rockies from the Hudson Bay country to the east. He, however, had been the pioneer over the Chilcoot and Chilcat passes. In the spring of 1883, twelve years before, a stripling of eighteen, he had crossed over the Chilcoot with five comrades.
In the fall he had crossed back with one. Four had perished by mischance in the bleak, uncharted vastness. And for twelve years Elam Harnish had continued to grope for gold among the shadows of the Circle.
And no man had groped so obstinately nor so enduringly. He had grown up with the land. He knew no other land. Civilization was a dream of some previous life. Camps like Forty Mile and Circle City were to him metropolises. And not alone had he grown up with the land, for, raw as it was, he had helped to make it. He had made history and geography, and those that followed wrote of his traverses and charted the trails his feet had broken.
Heroes are seldom given to hero-worship, but among those of that young land, young as he was, he was accounted an elder hero. In point of time he was before them. In point of deed he was beyond them. In point of endurance it was acknowledged that he could kill the hardiest of them. Furthermore, he was accounted a nervy man, a square man, and a white man.
In all lands where life is a hazard lightly played with and lightly flung aside, men turn, almost automatically, to gambling for diversion and relaxation. In the Yukon men gambled their lives for gold, and those that won gold from the ground gambled for it with one another. Nor was Elam Harnish an exception. He was a man’s man primarily, and the instinct in him to play the game of life was strong. Environment had determined what form that game should take. He was born on an Iowa farm, and his father had emigrated to eastern Oregon, in which mining country Elam’s boyhood was lived. He had known nothing but hard knocks for big stakes. Pluck and endurance counted in the game, but the great god Chance dealt the cards. Honest work for sure but meagre returns did not count. A man played big. He risked everything for everything, and anything less than everything meant that he was a loser. So for twelve Yukon years, Elam Harnish had been a loser. True, on Moosehide Creek the past summer he had taken out twenty thousand dollars, and what was left in the ground was twenty thousand more. But, as he himself proclaimed, that was no more than getting his ante back. He had ante’d his life for a dozen years, and forty thousand was a small pot for such a stake–the price of a drink and a dance at the Tivoli, of a winter’s flutter at Circle City, and a grubstake for the year to come.
The men of the Yukon reversed the old maxim till it read: hard come, easy go. At the end of the reel, Elam Harnish called the house up to drink again. Drinks were a dollar apiece, gold rated at sixteen dollars an ounce; there were thirty in the house that accepted his invitation, and between every dance the house was Elam’s guest. This was his night, and nobody was to be allowed to pay for anything.
Not that Elam Harnish was a drinking man. Whiskey meant little to him. He was too vital and robust, too untroubled in mind and body, to incline to the slavery of alcohol. He spent months at a time on trail and river when he drank nothing stronger than coffee, while he had gone a year at a time without even coffee. But he was gregarious, and since the sole social expression of the Yukon was the saloon, he expressed himself that way. When he was a lad in the mining camps of the West, men had always done that. To him it was the proper way for a man to express himself socially. He knew no other way.
He was a striking figure of a man, despite his garb being similar to that of all the men in the Tivoli. Soft-tanned moccasins of moose-hide, beaded in Indian designs, covered his feet. His trousers were ordinary overalls, his coat was made from a blanket. Long-gauntleted leather mittens, lined with wool, hung by his side. They were connected in the Yukon fashion, by a leather thong passed around the neck and across the shoulders. On his head was a fur cap, the ear-flaps raised and the tying-cords dangling. His face, lean and slightly long, with the suggestion of hollows under the cheek-bones, seemed almost Indian. The burnt skin and keen dark eyes contributed to this effect, though the bronze of the skin and the eyes themselves were essentially those of a white man. He looked older than thirty, and yet, smooth-shaven and without wrinkles, he was almost boyish. This impression of age was based on no tangible evidence. It came from the abstracter facts of the man, from what he had endured and survived, which was far beyond that of ordinary men. He had lived life naked and tensely, and something of all this smouldered in his eyes, vibrated in his voice, and seemed forever a-whisper on his lips.
The lips themselves were thin, and prone to close tightly over the even, white teeth. But their harshness was retrieved by the upward curl at the corners of his mouth. This curl gave to him sweetness, as the minute puckers at the corners of the eyes gave him laughter. These necessary graces saved him from a nature that was essentially savage and that otherwise would have been cruel and bitter. The nose was lean, full-nostrilled, and delicate, and of a size to fit the face; while the high forehead, as if to atone for its narrowness, was splendidly domed and symmetrical. In line with the Indian effect was his hair, very straight and very black, with a gloss to it that only health could give.
“Burning Daylight’s burning candlelight,” laughed Dan MacDonald, as an outburst of exclamations and merriment came from the dancers.
“An’ he is der boy to do it, eh, Louis?” said Olaf Henderson.
“Yes, by Gar! you bet on dat,” said French Louis. “Dat boy is all gold–“
“And when God Almighty washes Daylight’s soul out on the last big slucin’ day,” MacDonald interrupted, “why, God Almighty’ll have to shovel gravel along with him into the sluice-boxes.”
“Dot iss goot,” Olaf Henderson muttered, regarding the gambler with profound admiration.
“Ver’ good,” affirmed French Louis. “I t’ink we take a drink on dat one time, eh?”
CHAPTER II
It was two in the morning when the dancers, bent on getting something to eat, adjourned the dancing for half an hour. And it was at this moment that Jack Kearns suggested poker. Jack Kearns was a big, bluff-featured man, who, along with Bettles, had made the disastrous attempt to found a post on the head-reaches of the Koyokuk, far inside the Arctic Circle. After that, Kearns had fallen back on his posts at Forty Mile and Sixty Mile and changed the direction of his ventures by sending out to the States for a small sawmill and a river steamer. The former was even then being sledded across Chilcoot Pass by Indians and dogs, and would come down the Yukon in the early summer after the ice-run. Later in the summer, when Bering Sea and the mouth of the Yukon cleared of ice, the steamer, put together at St. Michaels, was to be expected up the river loaded to the guards with supplies.
Jack Kearns suggested poker. French Louis, Dan MacDonald, and Hal Campbell (who had make a strike on Moosehide), all three of whom were not dancing because there were not girls enough to go around, inclined to the suggestion. They were looking for a fifth man when Burning Daylight emerged from the rear room, the Virgin on his arm, the train of dancers in his wake. In response to the hail of the poker-players, he came over to their table in the corner.
“Want you to sit in,” said Campbell. “How’s your luck?”
“I sure got it to-night,” Burning Daylight answered with enthusiasm, and at the same time felt the Virgin press his arm warningly. She wanted him for the dancing. “I sure got my luck with me, but I’d sooner dance. I ain’t hankerin’ to take the money away from you-all.”
Nobody urged. They took his refusal as final, and the Virgin was pressing his arm to turn him away in pursuit of the supper-seekers, when he experienced a change of heart. It was not that he did not want to dance, nor that he wanted to hurt her; but that insistent pressure on his arm put his free man-nature in revolt. The thought in his mind was that he did not want any woman running him. Himself a favorite with women, nevertheless they did not bulk big with him. They were toys, playthings, part of the relaxation from the bigger game of life. He met women along with the whiskey and gambling, and from observation he had found that it was far easier to break away from the drink and the cards than from a woman once the man was properly entangled.
He was a slave to himself, which was natural in one with a healthy ego, but he rebelled in ways either murderous or panicky at being a slave to anybody else. Love’s sweet servitude was a thing of which he had no comprehension. Men he had seen in love impressed him as lunatics, and lunacy was a thing he had never considered worth analyzing. But comradeship with men was different from love with women. There was no servitude in comradeship. It was a business proposition, a square deal between men who did not pursue each other, but who shared the risks of trail and river and mountain in the pursuit of life and treasure. Men and women pursued each other, and one must needs bend the other to his will or hers. Comradeship was different. There was no slavery about it; and though he, a strong man beyond strength’s seeming, gave far more than he received, he gave not something due but in royal largess, his gifts of toil or heroic effort falling generously from his hands. To pack for days over the gale-swept passes or across the mosquito-ridden marshes, and to pack double the weight his comrade packed, did not involve unfairness or compulsion. Each did his best. That was the business essence of it. Some men were stronger than others–true;
but so long as each man did his best it was fair exchange, the business spirit was observed, and the square deal obtained.
But with women–no. Women gave little and wanted all. Women had apron-strings and were prone to tie them about any man who looked twice in their direction. There was the Virgin, yawning her head off when he came in and mightily pleased that he asked her to dance. One dance was all very well, but because he danced twice and thrice with her and several times more, she squeezed his arm when they asked him to sit in at poker. It was the obnoxious apron-string, the first of the many compulsions she would exert upon him if he gave in. Not that she was not a nice bit of a woman, healthy and strapping and good to look upon, also a very excellent dancer, but that she was a woman with all a woman’s desire to rope him with her apron-strings and tie him hand and foot for the branding. Better poker. Besides, he liked poker as well as he did dancing.
He resisted the pull on his arm by the mere negative mass of him, and said:-
“I sort of feel a hankering to give you-all a flutter.”
Again came the pull on his arm. She was trying to pass the apron-string around him. For the fraction of an instant he was a savage, dominated by the wave of fear and murder that rose up in him. For that infinitesimal space of time he was to all purposes a frightened tiger filled with rage and terror at the apprehension of the trap. Had he been no more than a savage, he would have leapt wildly from the place or else sprung upon her and destroyed her. But in that same instant there stirred in him the generations of discipline by which man had become an inadequate social animal. Tact and sympathy strove with him, and he smiled with his eyes into the Virgin’s eyes as he said:-
“You-all go and get some grub. I ain’t hungry. And we’ll dance some more by and by. The night’s young yet. Go to it, old girl.”
He released his arm and thrust her playfully on the shoulder, at the same time turning to the poker-players.
“Take off the limit and I’ll go you-all.”
“Limit’s the roof,” said Jack Kearns.
“Take off the roof.”
The players glanced at one another, and Kearns announced, “The roof’s off.”
Elam Harnish dropped into the waiting chair, started to pull out his gold-sack, and changed his mind. The Virgin pouted a moment, then followed in the wake of the other dancers.
“I’ll bring you a sandwich, Daylight,” she called back over her shoulder.
He nodded. She was smiling her forgiveness. He had escaped the apron-string, and without hurting her feelings too severely.
“Let’s play markers,” he suggested. “Chips do everlastingly clutter up the table….If it’s agreeable to you-all?”
“I’m willing,” answered Hal Campbell. “Let mine run at five hundred.”
“Mine, too,” answered Harnish, while the others stated the values they put on their own markers, French Louis, the most modest, issuing his at a hundred dollars each.
In Alaska, at that time, there were no rascals and no tin-horn gamblers. Games were conducted honestly, and men trusted one another. A man’s word was as good as his gold in the blower. A marker was a flat, oblong composition chip worth, perhaps, a cent. But when a man betted a marker in a game and said it was worth five hundred dollars, it was accepted as worth five hundred dollars. Whoever won it knew that the man who issued it would redeem it with five hundred dollars’ worth of dust weighed out on the scales. The markers being of different colors, there was no difficulty in identifying the owners. Also, in that early Yukon day, no one dreamed of playing table-stakes. A man was good in a game for all that he possessed, no matter where his possessions were or what was their nature.
Harnish cut and got the deal. At this good augury, and while shuffling the deck, he called to the barkeepers to set up the drinks for the house. As he dealt the first card to Dan MacDonald, on his left, he called out:
“Get down to the ground, you-all, Malemutes, huskies, and Siwash purps! Get down and dig in! Tighten up them traces! Put your weight into the harness and bust the breast-bands! Whoop-la! Yow! We’re off and bound for Helen Breakfast! And I tell you-all clear and plain there’s goin’ to be stiff grades and fast goin’ to-night before we win to that same lady. And somebody’s goin’ to bump…hard.”
Once started, it was a quiet game, with little or no conversation, though all about the players the place was a-roar. Elam Harnish had ignited the spark. More and more miners dropped in to the Tivoli and remained. When Burning Daylight went on the tear, no man cared to miss it. The dancing-floor was full. Owing to the shortage of women, many of the men tied bandanna handkerchiefs around their arms in token of femininity and danced with other men. All the games were crowded, and the voices of the men talking at the long bar and grouped about the stove were accompanied by the steady click of chips and the sharp whir, rising and falling, of the roulette-ball. All the materials of a proper Yukon night were at hand and mixing.
The luck at the table varied monotonously, no big hands being out. As a result, high play went on with small hands though no play lasted long. A filled straight belonging to French Louis gave him a pot of five thousand against two sets of threes held by Campbell and Kearns. One pot of eight hundred dollars was won by a pair of trays on a showdown. And once Harnish called Kearns for two thousand dollars on a cold steal. When Kearns laid down his hand it showed a bobtail flush, while Harnish’s hand proved that he had had the nerve to call on a pair of tens.
But at three in the morning the big combination of hands arrived.
It was the moment of moments that men wait weeks for in a poker game. The news of it tingled over the Tivoli. The onlookers became quiet. The men farther away ceased talking and moved over to the table. The players deserted the other games, and the dancing-floor was forsaken, so that all stood at last, fivescore and more, in a compact and silent group, around the poker-table. The high betting had begun before the draw, and still the high betting went on, with the draw not in sight. Kearns had dealt, and French Louis had opened the pot with one marker–in his case one hundred dollars. Campbell had merely “seen” it, but Elam Harnish, corning next, had tossed in five hundred dollars, with the remark to MacDonald that he was letting him in easy.
MacDonald, glancing again at his hand, put in a thousand in markers. Kearns, debating a long time over his hand, finally “saw.” It then cost French Louis nine hundred to remain in the game, which he contributed after a similar debate. It cost Campbell likewise nine hundred to remain and draw cards, but to the surprise of all he saw the nine hundred and raised another thousand.
“You-all are on the grade at last,” Harnish remarked, as he saw the fifteen hundred and raised a thousand in turn. “Helen Breakfast’s sure on top this divide, and you-all had best look out for bustin’ harness.”
“Me for that same lady,” accompanied MacDonald’s markers for two thousand and for an additional thousand-dollar raise.
It was at this stage that the players sat up and knew beyond peradventure that big hands were out. Though their features showed nothing, each man was beginning unconsciously to tense. Each man strove to appear his natural self, and each natural self was different. Hal Campbell affected his customary cautiousness.
French Louis betrayed interest. MacDonald retained his whole-souled benevolence, though it seemed to take on a slightly exaggerated tone. Kearns was coolly dispassionate and noncommittal, while Elam Harnish appeared as quizzical and jocular as ever. Eleven thousand dollars were already in the pot, and the markers were heaped in a confused pile in the centre of the table.
“I ain’t go no more markers,” Kearns remarked plaintively. “We’d best begin I.O.U.’s.”
“Glad you’re going to stay,” was MacDonald’s cordial response.
“I ain’t stayed yet. I’ve got a thousand in already. How’s it stand now?”
“It’ll cost you three thousand for a look in, but nobody will stop you from raising.”
“Raise–hell. You must think I got a pat like yourself.” Kearns looked at his hand. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mac.
I’ve got a hunch, and I’ll just see that three thousand.”
He wrote the sum on a slip of paper, signed his name, and consigned it to the centre of the table.
French Louis became the focus of all eyes. He fingered his cards nervously for a space. Then, with a “By Gar! Ah got not one leetle beet hunch,” he regretfully tossed his hand into the discards.
The next moment the hundred and odd pairs of eyes shifted to Campbell.
“I won’t hump you, Jack,” he said, contenting himself with calling the requisite two thousand.
The eyes shifted to Harnish, who scribbled on a piece of paper and shoved it forward.
“I’ll just let you-all know this ain’t no Sunday-school society of philanthropy,” he said. “I see you, Jack, and I raise you a thousand. Here’s where you-all get action on your pat, Mac.”
“Action’s what I fatten on, and I lift another thousand,” was MacDonald’s rejoinder. “Still got that hunch, Jack?”
“I still got the hunch.” Kearns fingered his cards a long time. “And I’ll play it, but you’ve got to know how I stand. There’s my steamer, the Bella–worth twenty thousand if she’s worth an ounce. There’s Sixty Mile with five thousand in stock on the shelves. And you know I got a sawmill coming in. It’s at Linderman now, and the scow is building. Am I good?”
“Dig in; you’re sure good,” was Daylight’s answer. “And while we’re about it, I may mention casual that I got twenty thousand in Mac’s safe, there, and there’s twenty thousand more in the ground on Moosehide. You know the ground, Campbell. Is they that-all in the dirt?”
“There sure is, Daylight.”
“How much does it cost now?” Kearns asked.
“Two thousand to see.”
“We’ll sure hump you if you-all come in,” Daylight warned him.
“It’s an almighty good hunch,” Kearns said, adding his slip for two thousand to the growing heap. “I can feel her crawlin’ up and down my back.”
“I ain’t got a hunch, but I got a tolerable likeable hand,” Campbell announced, as he slid in his slip; “but it’s not a raising hand.”
“Mine is,” Daylight paused and wrote. “I see that thousand and raise her the same old thousand.”
The Virgin, standing behind him, then did what a man’s best friend was not privileged to do. Reaching over Daylight’s shoulder, she picked up his hand and read it, at the same time shielding the faces of the five cards close to his chest. What she saw were three queens and a pair of eights, but nobody guessed what she saw. Every player’s eyes were on her face as she scanned the cards, but no sign did she give. Her features might have been carved from ice, for her expression was precisely the same before, during, and after. Not a muscle quivered; nor was there the slightest dilation of a nostril, nor the slightest increase of light in the eyes. She laid the hand face down again on the table, and slowly the lingering eyes withdrew from her, having learned nothing.
MacDonald smiled benevolently. “I see you, Daylight, and I hump this time for two thousand. How’s that hunch, Jack?”
“Still a-crawling, Mac. You got me now, but that hunch is a rip-snorter persuadin’ sort of a critter, and it’s my plain duty to ride it. I call for three thousand. And I got another hunch: Daylight’s going to call, too.”
“He sure is,” Daylight agreed, after Campbell had thrown up his hand. “He knows when he’s up against it, and he plays accordin’.
I see that two thousand, and then I’ll see the draw.”
In a dead silence, save for the low voices of the three players, the draw was made. Thirty-four thousand dollars were already in the pot, and the play possibly not half over. To the Virgin’s amazement, Daylight held up his three queens, discarding his eights and calling for two cards. And this time not even she dared look at what he had drawn. She knew her limit of control. Nor did he look. The two new cards lay face down on the table where they had been dealt to him.
“Cards?” Kearns asked of MacDonald.
“Got enough,” was the reply.
“You can draw if you want to, you know,” Kearns warned him.
“Nope; this’ll do me.”
Kearns himself drew two cards, but did not look at them.
Still Harnish let his cards lie.
“I never bet in the teeth of a pat hand,” he said slowly, looking at the saloon-keeper. “You-all start her rolling, Mac.”
MacDonald counted his cards carefully, to make doubles sure it was not a foul hand, wrote a sum on a paper slip, and slid it into the pot, with the simple utterance:-
“Five thousand.”
Kearns, with every eye upon him, looked at his two-card draw, counted the other three to dispel any doubt of holding more than five cards, and wrote on a betting slip.
“I see you, Mac,” he said, “and I raise her a little thousand just so as not to keep Daylight out.”
The concentrated gaze shifted to Daylight. He likewise examined his draw and counted his five cards.
“I see that six thousand, and I raise her five thousand…just to try and keep you out, Jack.”
“And I raise you five thousand just to lend a hand at keeping Jack out,” MacDonald said, in turn.
His voice was slightly husky and strained, and a nervous twitch in the corner of his mouth followed speech.
Kearns was pale, and those who looked on noted that his hand trembled as he wrote his slip. But his voice was unchanged.
“I lift her along for five thousand,” he said.
Daylight was now the centre. The kerosene lamps above flung high lights from the rash of sweat on his forehead. The bronze of his cheeks was darkened by the accession of blood. His black eyes glittered, and his nostrils were distended and eager. They were large nostrils, tokening his descent from savage ancestors who had survived by virtue of deep lungs and generous air-passages. Yet, unlike MacDonald, his voice was firm and customary, and, unlike Kearns, his hand did not tremble when he wrote.
“I call, for ten thousand,” he said. “Not that I’m afraid of you-all, Mac. It’s that hunch of Jack’s.”
“I hump his hunch for five thousand just the same,” said MacDonald. “I had the best hand before the draw, and I still guess I got it.”
“Mebbe this is a case where a hunch after the draw is better’n the hunch before,” Kearns remarked; “wherefore duty says, ‘Lift her, Jack, lift her,’ and so I lift her another five thousand.”
Daylight leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the kerosene lamps while he computed aloud.
“I was in nine thousand before the draw, and I saw and raised eleven thousand–that makes thirty. I’m only good for ten more.”
He leaned forward and looked at Kearns. “So I call that ten thousand.”
“You can raise if you want,” Kearns answered. “Your dogs are good for five thousand in this game.”
“Nary dawg. You-all can win my dust and dirt, but nary one of my dawgs. I just call.”
MacDonald considered for a long time. No one moved or whispered.
Not a muscle was relaxed on the part of the onlookers. Not the weight of a body shifted from one leg to the other. It was a sacred silence. Only could be heard the roaring draft of the huge stove, and from without, muffled by the log-walls, the howling of dogs. It was not every night that high stakes were played on the Yukon, and for that matter, this was the highest in the history of the country. The saloon-keeper finally spoke.
“If anybody else wins, they’ll have to take a mortgage on the Tivoli.”
The two other players nodded.
“So I call, too.” MacDonald added his slip for five thousand.
Not one of them claimed the pot, and not one of them called the size of his hand. Simultaneously and in silence they faced their cards on the table, while a general tiptoeing and craning of necks took place among the onlookers. Daylight showed four queens and an ace; MacDonald four jacks and an ace; and Kearns four kings and a trey. Kearns reached forward with an encircling movement of his arm and drew the pot in to him, his arm shaking as he did so.
Daylight picked the ace from his hand and tossed it over alongside MacDonald’s ace, saying:-
“That’s what cheered me along, Mac. I knowed it was only kings that could beat me, and he had them.
“What did you-all have?” he asked, all interest, turning to Campbell.
“Straight flush of four, open at both ends–a good drawing hand.”
“You bet! You could a’ made a straight, a straight flush, or a flush out of it.”
“That’s what I thought,” Campbell said sadly. “It cost me six thousand before I quit.”
“I wisht you-all’d drawn,” Daylight laughed. “Then I wouldn’t a’ caught that fourth queen. Now I’ve got to take Billy Rawlins’ mail contract and mush for Dyea. What’s the size of the killing, Jack?”
Kearns attempted to count the pot, but was too excited. Daylight drew it across to him, with firm fingers separating and stacking the markers and I.O.U.’s and with clear brain adding the sum.
“One hundred and twenty-seven thousand,” he announced. “You-all can sell out now, Jack, and head for home.”
The winner smiled and nodded, but seemed incapable of speech.
“I’d shout the drinks,” MacDonald said, “only the house don’t belong to me any more.”
“Yes, it does,” Kearns replied, first wetting his lips with his tongue. “Your note’s good for any length of time. But the drinks are on me.”
“Name your snake-juice, you-all–the winner pays!” Daylight called
out loudly to all about him, at the same time rising from his chair
and catching the Virgin by the arm. “Come on for a reel, you-all dancers. The night’s young yet, and it’s Helen Breakfast and the mail contract for me in the morning. Here, you-all Rawlins, you–I
hereby do take over that same contract, and I start for salt water
at nine A.M.–savvee? Come on, you-all! Where’s that fiddler?”
CHAPTER III
It was Daylight’s night. He was the centre and the head of the revel, unquenchably joyous, a contagion of fun. He multiplied himself, and in so doing multiplied the excitement. No prank he suggested was too wild for his followers, and all followed save those that developed into singing imbeciles and fell warbling by the wayside. Yet never did trouble intrude. It was known on the Yukon that when Burning Daylight made a night of it, wrath and evil were forbidden. On his nights men dared not quarrel. In the younger days such things had happened, and then men had known what real wrath was, and been man-handled as only Burning Daylight could man-handle. On his nights men must laugh and be happy or go home. Daylight was inexhaustible. In between dances he paid over to Kearns the twenty thousand in dust and transferred to him his Moosehide claim. Likewise he arranged the taking over of Billy Rawlins’ mail contract, and made his preparations for the start. He despatched a messenger to rout out Kama, his dog-driver–a Tananaw Indian, far-wandered from his tribal home in the service of the invading whites. Kama entered the Tivoli, tall, lean, muscular, and fur-clad, the pick of his barbaric race and barbaric still, unshaken and unabashed by the revellers that rioted about him while Daylight gave his orders. “Um,” said Kama, tabling his instructions on his fingers. “Get um letters from Rawlins. Load um on sled. Grub for Selkirk–you think um plenty dog-grub stop Selkirk?”
“Plenty dog-grub, Kama.”
“Um, bring sled this place nine um clock. Bring um snowshoes. No bring um tent. Mebbe bring um fly? um little fly?”
“No fly,” Daylight answered decisively.
“Um much cold.”
“We travel light–savvee? We carry plenty letters out, plenty letters back. You are strong man. Plenty cold, plenty travel, all right.”
“Sure all right,” Kama muttered, with resignation.
“Much cold, no care a damn. Um ready nine um clock.”
He turned on his moccasined heel and walked out, imperturbable, sphinx-like, neither giving nor receiving greetings nor looking to right or left. The Virgin led Daylight away into a corner.
“Look here, Daylight,” she said, in a low voice, “you’re busted.”
“Higher’n a kite.”
“I’ve eight thousand in Mac’s safe–” she began.
But Daylight interrupted. The apron-string loomed near and he shied like an unbroken colt.
“It don’t matter,” he said. “Busted I came into the world, busted I go out, and I’ve been busted most of the time since I arrived. Come on; let’s waltz.”
“But listen,” she urged. “My money’s doing nothing. I could lend it to you–a grub-stake,” she added hurriedly, at sight of the alarm in his face.
“Nobody grub-stakes me,” was the answer. “I stake myself, and when I make a killing it’s sure all mine. No thank you, old girl. Much obliged. I’ll get my stake by running the mail out and in.”
“Daylight,” she murmured, in tender protest.
But with a sudden well-assumed ebullition of spirits he drew her toward the dancing-floor, and as they swung around and around in a waltz she pondered on the iron heart of the man who held her in his arms and resisted all her wiles.
At six the next morning, scorching with whiskey, yet ever himself, he stood at the bar putting every man’s hand down. The way of it was that two men faced each other across a corner, their right elbows resting on the bar, their right hands gripped together, while each strove to press the other’s hand down. Man after man came against him, but no man put his hand down, even Olaf Henderson and French Louis failing despite their hugeness. When they contended it was a trick, a trained muscular knack, he challenged them to another test.
“Look here, you-all” he cried. “I’m going to do two things: first, weigh my sack; and second, bet it that after you-all have lifted clean from the floor all the sacks of flour you-all are able, I’ll put on two more sacks and lift the whole caboodle clean.”
“By Gar! Ah take dat!” French Louis rumbled above the cheers.
“Hold on!” Olaf Henderson cried. “I ban yust as good as you, Louis. I yump half that bet.”
Put on the scales, Daylight’s sack was found to balance an even four hundred dollars, and Louis and Olaf divided the bet between them. Fifty-pound sacks of flour were brought in from MacDonald’s cache. Other men tested their strength first. They straddled on two chairs, the flour sacks beneath them on the floor and held together by rope-lashings. Many of the men were able, in this manner, to lift four or five hundred pounds, while some succeeded with as high as six hundred. Then the two giants took a hand, tying at seven hundred. French Louis then added another sack, and swung seven hundred and fifty clear. Olaf duplicated the performance, whereupon both failed to clear eight hundred. Again and again they strove, their foreheads beaded with sweat, their frames crackling with the effort. Both were able to shift the weight and to bump it, but clear the floor with it they could not.
“By Gar! Daylight, dis tam you mek one beeg meestake,” French Louis said, straightening up and stepping down from the chairs. “Only one damn iron man can do dat. One hundred pun’ more–my frien’, not ten poun’ more.” The sacks were unlashed, but when two sacks were added, Kearns interfered. “Only one sack more.”
“Two!” some one cried. “Two was the bet.”
“They didn’t lift that last sack,” Kearns protested.
“They only lifted seven hundred and fifty.”
But Daylight grandly brushed aside the confusion.
“What’s the good of you-all botherin’ around that way? What’s one more sack? If I can’t lift three more, I sure can’t lift two. Put ’em in.”
He stood upon the chairs, squatted, and bent his shoulders down till his hands closed on the rope. He shifted his feet slightly, tautened his muscles with a tentative pull, then relaxed again, questing for a perfect adjustment of all the levers of his body.
French Louis, looking on sceptically, cried out,
“Pool lak hell, Daylight! Pool lak hell!”
Daylight’s muscles tautened a second time, and this time in earnest, until steadily all the energy of his splendid body was applied, and quite imperceptibly, without jerk or strain, the bulky nine hundred pounds rose from the door and swung back and forth, pendulum like, between his legs.
Olaf Henderson sighed a vast audible sigh. The Virgin, who had tensed unconsciously till her muscles hurt her, relaxed. While French Louis murmured reverently:-
“M’sieu Daylight, salut! Ay am one beeg baby. You are one beeg man.”
Daylight dropped his burden, leaped to the floor, and headed for the bar.
“Weigh in!” he cried, tossing his sack to the weigher, who transferred to it four hundred dollars from the sacks of the two losers.
“Surge up, everybody!” Daylight went on. “Name your snake-juice! The winner pays!”
“This is my night! ” he was shouting, ten minutes later. “I’m the lone he-wolf, and I’ve seen thirty winters. This is my birthday, my one day in the year, and I can put any man on his back. Come on, you-all! I’m going to put you-all in the snow. Come on, you chechaquos [1] and sourdoughs[2], and get your baptism!”
[1] Tenderfeet. [2] Old-timers.
The rout streamed out of doors, all save the barkeepers and the singing Bacchuses. Some fleeting thought of saving his own dignity entered MacDonald’s head, for he approached Daylight with outstretched hand.
“What? You first?” Daylight laughed, clasping the other’s hand as if in greeting.
“No, no,” the other hurriedly disclaimed. “Just congratulations on your birthday. Of course you can put me in the snow. What chance have I against a man that lifts nine hundred pounds?”
MacDonald weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, and Daylight had him gripped solely by his hand; yet, by a sheer abrupt jerk, he took the saloon-keeper off his feet and flung him face downward in the snow. In quick succession, seizing the men nearest him, he threw half a dozen more. Resistance was useless. They flew helter-skelter out of his grips, landing in all manner of attitudes, grotesquely and harmlessly, in the soft snow. It soon became difficult, in the dim starlight, to distinguish between those thrown and those waiting their turn, and he began feeling their backs and shoulders, determining their status by whether or not he found them powdered with snow.
“Baptized yet?” became his stereotyped question, as he reached out his terrible hands.
Several score lay down in the snow in a long row, while many others knelt in mock humility, scooping snow upon their heads and claiming the rite accomplished. But a group of five stood upright, backwoodsmen and frontiersmen, they, eager to contest any
man’s birthday.
Graduates of the hardest of man-handling schools, veterans of multitudes of rough-and-tumble battles, men of blood and sweat and endurance, they nevertheless lacked one thing that Daylight possessed in high degree–namely, an almost perfect brain and muscular coordination. It was simple, in its way, and no virtue of his. He had been born with this endowment. His nerves carried messages more quickly than theirs; his mental processes, culminating in acts of will, were quicker than theirs; his muscles themselves, by some immediacy of chemistry, obeyed the messages of his will quicker than theirs. He was so made, his muscles were high-power explosives. The levers of his body snapped into play like the jaws of steel traps. And in addition to all this, his was that super-strength that is the dower of but one human in millions–a strength depending not on size but on degree, a supreme organic excellence residing in the stuff of the muscles themselves. Thus, so swiftly could he apply a stress, that, before an opponent could become aware and resist, the aim of the stress had been accomplished. In turn, so swiftly did he become aware of a stress applied to him, that he saved himself by resistance or by delivering a lightning counter-stress.
“It ain’t no use you-all standing there,” Daylight addressed the waiting group. “You-all might as well get right down and take your baptizing. You-all might down me any other day in the year, but on my birthday I want you-all to know I’m the best man. Is that Pat Hanrahan’s mug looking hungry and willing? Come on, Pat.” Pat Hanrahan, ex-bare-knuckle-prize fighter and roughhouse-expert, stepped forth. The two men came against each other in grips, and almost before he had exerted himself the Irishman found himself in the merciless vise of a half-Nelson that buried him head and shoulders in the snow. Joe Hines, ex-lumber-jack, came down with an impact equal to a fall from a two-story building–his overthrow accomplished by a cross-buttock,
delivered, he claimed, before he was ready.
There was nothing exhausting in all this to Daylight. He did not heave and strain through long minutes. No time, practically, was occupied. His body exploded abruptly and terrifically in one instant, and on the next instant was relaxed. Thus, Doc Watson, the gray-bearded, iron bodied man without a past, a fighting terror himself, was overthrown in the fraction of a second preceding his own onslaught. As he was in the act of gathering himself for a spring, Daylight was upon him, and with such fearful suddenness as to crush him backward and down. Olaf Henderson, receiving his cue from this, attempted to take Daylight unaware, rushing upon him from one side as he stooped with extended hand to help Doc Watson up. Daylight dropped on his hands and knees, receiving in his side Olaf’s knees. Olaf’s momentum carried him clear over the obstruction in a long, flying fall. Before he could rise, Daylight had whirled him over on his back and was rubbing his face and ears with snow and shoving handfuls down his neck. “Ay ban yust as good a man as you ban, Daylight,” Olaf spluttered, as he pulled himself to his feet; “but
by Yupiter, I ban navver see a grip like that.” French Louis was the last of the five, and he had seen enough to make him cautious. He circled and baffled for a full minute before coming to grips; and for another full minute they strained and reeled without either winning the advantage. And then, just as the contest was becoming interesting, Daylight effected one of his lightning shifts, changing all stresses and leverages and at the same time delivering one of his muscular explosions. French Louis resisted till his huge frame crackled, and then, slowly, was forced over and under and downward.
“The winner pays!” Daylight cried; as he sprang to his feet and led the way back into the Tivoli. “Surge along you-all! This way to the snake-room!”
They lined up against the long bar, in places two or three deep, stamping the frost from their moccasined feet, for outside the temperature was sixty below. Bettles, himself one of the gamest of the old-timers in deeds and daring ceased from his drunken lay of the “Sassafras Root,” and titubated over to congratulate Daylight. But in the midst of it he felt impelled to make a speech, and raised his voice oratorically.
“I tell you fellers I’m plum proud to call Daylight my friend. We’ve hit the trail together afore now, and he’s eighteen carat from his moccasins up, damn his mangy old hide, anyway. He was a shaver when he first hit this country. When you fellers was his age, you wa’n’t dry behind the ears yet. He never was no kid. He was born a full-grown man. An’ I tell you a man had to be a man in them days. This wa’n’t no effete civilization like it’s come to be now.” Bettles paused long enough to put his arm in a proper bear-hug around Daylight’s neck. “When you an’ me mushed into the Yukon in the good ole days, it didn’t rain soup and they wa’n’t no free-lunch joints. Our camp fires was lit where we killed our game, and most of the time we lived on salmon-tracks and rabbit-bellies–ain’t I right?”
But at the roar of laughter that greeted his inversion, Bettles released the bear-hug and turned fiercely on them. “Laugh, you mangy short-horns, laugh! But I tell you plain and simple, the best of you ain’t knee-high fit to tie Daylight’s moccasin strings.
Ain’t I right, Campbell? Ain’t I right, Mac? Daylight’s one of the old guard, one of the real sour-doughs. And in them days they
wa’n’t ary a steamboat or ary a trading-post, and we cusses had to
live offen salmon-bellies and rabbit-tracks.”
He gazed triumphantly around, and in the applause that followed arose cries for a speech from Daylight. He signified his consent. A chair was brought, and he was helped to stand upon it. He was no more sober than the crowd above which he now towered–a wild crowd, uncouthly garmented, every foot moccasined or muc-lucked[3], with mittens dangling from necks and with furry ear-flaps raised so that they took on the seeming of the winged helmets of the Norsemen. Daylight’s black eyes were flashing, and the flush of strong drink flooded darkly under the bronze of his cheeks. He was greeted with round on round of affectionate cheers, which brought a suspicious moisture to his eyes, albeit many of the voices were inarticulate and inebriate. And yet, men have so behaved since the world began, feasting, fighting, and carousing, whether in the dark cave-mouth or by the fire of the squatting-place, in the palaces of imperial Rome and the rock strongholds of robber barons, or in the sky-aspiring hotels of modern times and in the boozing-kens of sailor-town. Just so were these men, empire-builders in the Arctic Light, boastful and drunken and clamorous, winning surcease for a few wild moments from the grim reality of their heroic toil. Modern heroes they, and in nowise different from the heroes of old time. “Well, fellows, I don’t know what to say to you-all,” Daylight began lamely, striving still to control his whirling brain. “I think I’ll tell you-all a story. I had a pardner wunst, down in Juneau. He come from North Caroliney, and he used to tell this same story to me. It was down in the mountains in his country, and it was a wedding. There they was, the family and all the friends. The parson was just puttin’ on the last touches, and he says, ‘They as the Lord have joined let no man put asunder.’
[3] Muc-luc: a water-tight, Eskimo boot, made from walrus-hide and trimmed with fur.
“‘Parson,’ says the bridegroom, ‘I rises to question your grammar in that there sentence. I want this weddin’ done right.’
“When the smoke clears away, the bride she looks around and sees a dead parson, a dead bridegroom, a dead brother, two dead uncles, and five dead wedding-guests.
“So she heaves a mighty strong sigh and says, ‘Them new-fangled, self-cocking revolvers sure has played hell with my prospects.’
“And so I say to you-all,” Daylight added, as the roar of laughter died down, “that them four kings of Jack Kearns sure has played hell with my prospects. I’m busted higher’n a kite, and I’m hittin’ the trail for Dyea–“
“Goin’ out?” some one called. A spasm of anger wrought on his face for a flashing instant, but in the next his good-humor was back again.
“I know you-all are only pokin’ fun asking such a question,” he said, with a smile. “Of course I ain’t going out.”
“Take the oath again, Daylight,” the same voice cried.
“I sure will. I first come over Chilcoot in ’83. I went out over the Pass in a fall blizzard, with a rag of a shirt and a cup of raw flour. I got my grub-stake in Juneau that winter, and in the spring I went over the Pass once more. And once more the famine drew me out. Next spring I went in again, and I swore then that I’d never come out till I made my stake. Well, I ain’t made it, and here I am. And I ain’t going out now. I get the mail and I come right back. I won’t stop the night at Dyea. I’ll hit up Chilcoot soon as I change the dogs and get the mail and grub. And so I swear once more, by the mill-tails of hell and the head of John the Baptist, I’ll never hit for the Outside till I make my pile. And I tell you-all, here and now, it’s got to be an almighty big pile.”
“How much might you call a pile?” Bettles demanded from beneath, his arms clutched lovingly around Daylight’s legs.
“Yes, how much? What do you call a pile?” others cried.
Daylight steadied himself for a moment and debated. “Four or five millions,” he said slowly, and held up his hand for silence as his statement was received with derisive yells. “I’ll be real conservative, and put the bottom notch at a million. And for not an ounce less’n that will I go out of the country.”
Again his statement was received with an outburst of derision. Not only had the total gold output of the Yukon up to date been below five millions, but no man had ever made a strike of a hundred thousand, much less of a million.
“You-all listen to me. You seen Jack Kearns get a hunch to-night. We had him sure beat before the draw. His ornery three kings was no good. But he just knew there was another king coming–that was his hunch–and he got it. And I tell you-all I got a hunch. There’s a big strike coming on the Yukon, and it’s just about due. I don’t mean no ornery Moosehide, Birch-Creek kind of a strike. I mean a real rip-snorter hair-raiser. I tell you-all she’s in the air and hell-bent for election. Nothing can stop her, and she’ll come up river. There’s where you-all track my moccasins in the near future if you-all want to find me–somewhere in the country around Stewart River, Indian River, and Klondike River. When I get back with the mail, I’ll head that way so fast you-all won’t see my trail for smoke. She’s a-coming, fellows, gold from the grass roots down, a hundred dollars to the pan, and a stampede in from the Outside fifty thousand strong. You-all’ll think all hell’s busted loose when that strike is made.”
He raised his glass to his lips. “Here’s kindness, and hoping you-all will be in on it.”
He drank and stepped down from the chair, falling into another one of Bettles’ bear-hugs.
“If I was you, Daylight, I wouldn’t mush to-day,” Joe Hines counselled, coming in from consulting the spirit thermometer outside the door. “We’re in for a good cold snap. It’s sixty-two below now, and still goin’ down. Better wait till she breaks.”
Daylight laughed, and the old sour-doughs around him laughed.
“Just like you short-horns,” Bettles cried, “afeard of a little frost. And blamed little you know Daylight, if you think frost kin stop ‘m.”
“Freeze his lungs if he travels in it,” was the reply.
“Freeze pap and lollypop! Look here, Hines, you only ben in this here country three years. You ain’t seasoned yet. I’ve seen Daylight do fifty miles up on the Koyokuk on a day when the thermometer busted at seventy-two.”
Hines shook his head dolefully.
“Them’s the kind that does freeze their lungs,” he lamented. “If Daylight pulls out before this snap breaks, he’ll never get through–an’ him travelin’ without tent or fly.”
“It’s a thousand miles to Dyea,” Bettles announced, climbing on the chair and supporting his swaying body by an arm passed around Daylight’s neck. “It’s a thousand miles, I’m sayin’ an’ most of the trail unbroke, but I bet any chechaquo–anything he wants–that
Daylight makes Dyea in thirty days.”
“That’s an average of over thirty-three miles a day,” Doc Watson warned, “and I’ve travelled some myself. A blizzard on Chilcoot would tie him up for a week.”
“Yep,” Bettles retorted, “an’ Daylight’ll do the second thousand back again on end in thirty days more, and I got five hundred dollars that says so, and damn the blizzards.”
To emphasize his remarks, he pulled out a gold-sack the size of a bologna sausage and thumped it down on the bar. Doc Watson thumped his own sack alongside.
“Hold on!” Daylight cried. “Bettles’s right, and I want in on this. I bet five hundred that sixty days from now I pull up at the Tivoli door with the Dyea mail.”
A sceptical roar went up, and a dozen men pulled out their sacks.
Jack Kearns crowded in close and caught Daylight’s attention.
“I take you,Daylight,” he cried. “Two to one you don’t–not in seventy-five days.”
“No charity, Jack,” was the reply. “The bettin’s even, and the time is sixty days.”
“Seventy-five days, and two to one you don’t,” Kearns insisted. “Fifty Mile’ll be wide open and the rim-ice rotten.”
“What you win from me is yours,” Daylight went on. “And, by thunder, Jack, you can’t give it back that way. I won’t bet with you. You’re trying to give me money. But I tell you-all one thing, Jack, I got another hunch. I’m goin’ to win it back some one of these days. You-all just wait till the big strike up river. Then you and me’ll take the roof off and sit in a game that’ll be full man’s size. Is it a go?”
They shook hands.
“Of course he’ll make it,” Kearns whispered in Bettles’ ear. “And there’s five hundred Daylight’s back in sixty days,” he added aloud.
Billy Rawlins closed with the wager, and Bettles hugged Kearns ecstatically.
“By Yupiter, I ban take that bet,” Olaf Henderson said, dragging Daylight away from Bettles and Kearns.
“Winner pays!” Daylight shouted, closing the wager.
“And I’m sure going to win, and sixty days is a long time between drinks, so I pay now. Name your brand, you hoochinoos! Name your
brand!”
Bettles, a glass of whiskey in hand, climbed back on his chair, and swaying back and forth, sang the one song he knew:-
“O, it’s Henry Ward Beecher
And Sunday-school teachers
All sing of the sassafras-root;
But you bet all the same,
If it had its right name
It’s the juice of the forbidden fruit.”
The crowd roared out the chorus:-
“But you bet all the same
If it had its right name
It’s the juice of the forbidden fruit.”
Somebody opened the outer door. A vague gray light filtered in.
“Burning daylight, burning daylight,” some one called warningly.
Daylight paused for nothing, heading for the door and pulling down his ear-flaps. Kama stood outside by the sled, a long, narrow affair, sixteen inches wide and seven and a half feet in length, its slatted bottom raised six inches above the steel-shod runners. On it, lashed with thongs of moose-hide, were the light canvas bags that contained the mail, and the food and gear for dogs and men. In front of it, in a single line, lay curled five frost-rimed dogs. They were huskies, matched in size and color, all unusually large and all gray. From their cruel jaws to their bushy tails they were as like as peas in their likeness to timber-wolves. Wolves they were, domesticated, it was true, but wolves in appearance and in all their characteristics. On top the sled load, thrust under the lashings and ready for immediate use, were two pairs of snowshoes.
Bettles pointed to a robe of Arctic hare skins, the end of which showed in the mouth of a bag.
“That’s his bed,” he said. “Six pounds of rabbit skins. Warmest thing he ever slept under, but I’m damned if it could keep me warm, and I can go some myself. Daylight’s a hell-fire furnace, that’s what he is.”
“I’d hate to be that Indian,” Doc Watson remarked.
“He’ll kill’m, he’ll kill’m sure,” Bettles chanted exultantly. “I know. I’ve ben with Daylight on trail. That man ain’t never ben tired in his life. Don’t know what it means. I seen him travel all day with wet socks at forty five below. There ain’t another man living can do that.”
While this talk went on, Daylight was saying good-by to those that clustered around him. The Virgin wanted to kiss him, and, fuddled slightly though he was with the whiskey, he saw his way out without compromising with the apron-string. He kissed the Virgin, but he kissed the other three women with equal partiality. He pulled on his long mittens, roused the dogs to their feet, and took his Place at the gee pole.[4]
[4] A gee-pole: stout pole projecting forward from one side of the front end of the sled, by which the sled is steered.
“Mush, you beauties!” he cried.
The animals threw their weights against their breastbands on the instant, crouching low to the snow, and digging in their claws. They whined eagerly, and before the sled had gone half a dozen lengths both Daylight and Kama (in the rear) were running to keep up. And so, running, man and dogs dipped over the bank and down to the frozen bed of the Yukon, and in the gray light were gone.
CHAPTER IV
On the river, where was a packed trail and where snowshoes were unnecessary, the dogs averaged six miles an hour. To keep up with them, the two men were compelled to run. Daylight and Kama relieved each other regularly at the gee-pole, for here was the hard work of steering the flying sled and of keeping in advance of it. The man relieved dropped behind the sled, occasionally leaping upon it and resting.
It was severe work, but of the sort that was exhilarating.
They were flying, getting over the ground, making the most of the packed trail. Later on they would come to the unbroken trail, where three miles an hour would constitute good going. Then there would be no riding and resting, and no running. Then the gee-pole would be the easier task, and a man would come back to it to rest after having completed his spell to the fore, breaking trail with the snowshoes for the dogs. Such work was far from exhilarating also, they must expect places where for miles at a time they must toil over chaotic ice-jams, where they would be fortunate if they made two miles an hour. And there would be the inevitable bad jams, short ones, it was true, but so bad that a mile an hour would require terrific effort. Kama and Daylight did not talk. In the nature of the work they could not, nor in their own natures were they given to talking while they worked. At rare intervals, when necessary, they addressed each other in monosyllables, Kama, for the most part, contenting himself with grunts. Occasionally a dog whined or snarled, but in the main the team kept silent. Only could be heard the sharp, jarring grate of the steel runners over the hard surface and the creak of the straining sled.
As if through a wall, Daylight had passed from the hum and roar of the Tivoli into another world–a world of silence and immobility. Nothing stirred. The Yukon slept under a coat of ice three feet thick. No breath of wind blew. Nor did the sap move in the hearts of the spruce trees that forested the river banks on either hand. The trees, burdened with the last infinitesimal pennyweight of snow their branches could hold, stood in absolute petrifaction. The slightest tremor would have dislodged the snow, and no snow was dislodged. The sled was the one point of life and motion in the midst of the solemn quietude, and the harsh churn of its runners but emphasized the silence through which it moved.
It was a dead world, and furthermore, a gray world. The weather was sharp and clear; there was no moisture in the atmosphere, no fog nor haze; yet the sky was a gray pall. The reason for this was that, though there was no cloud in the sky to dim the brightness of day, there was no sun to give brightness. Far to the south the sun climbed steadily to meridian, but between it and the frozen Yukon intervened the bulge of the earth. The Yukon lay in a night shadow, and the day itself was in reality a long twilight-light. At a quarter before twelve, where a wide bend of the river gave a long vista south, the sun showed its upper rim above the sky-line. But it did not rise perpendicularly. Instead, it rose on a slant, so that by high noon it had barely lifted its lower rim clear of the horizon. It was a dim, wan sun. There was no heat to its rays, and a man could gaze squarely into the full orb of it without hurt to his eyes. No sooner had it reached meridian than it began its slant back beneath the horizon, and at quarter past twelve the earth threw its shadow again over the land.
The men and dogs raced on. Daylight and Kama were both savages so far as their stomachs were concerned. They could eat irregularly in time and quantity, gorging hugely on occasion, and on occasion going long stretches without eating at all. As for the dogs, they ate but once a day, and then rarely did they receive more than a pound each of dried fish. They were ravenously hungry and at the same time splendidly in condition. Like the wolves, their forebears, their nutritive processes were rigidly economical and perfect. There was no waste. The last least particle of what they consumed was transformed into energy.
And Kama and Daylight were like them. Descended themselves from the generations that had endured, they, too, endured. Theirs was the simple, elemental economy. A little food equipped them with prodigious energy. Nothing was lost. A man of soft civilization, sitting at a desk, would have grown lean and woe-begone on the fare that kept Kama and Daylight at the top-notch of physical efficiency. They knew, as the man at the desk never knows, what it is to be normally hungry all the time, so that they could eat any time. Their appetites were always with them and on edge, so that they bit voraciously into whatever offered and with an entire innocence of indigestion.
By three in the afternoon the long twilight faded into night. The stars came out, very near and sharp and bright, and by their light dogs and men still kept the trail. They were indefatigable. And this was no record run of a single day, but the first day of sixty such days. Though Daylight had passed a night without sleep, a night of dancing and carouse, it seemed to have left no effect. For this there were two explanations first, his remarkable vitality; and next, the fact that such nights were rare in his experience. Again enters the man at the desk, whose physical efficiency would be more hurt by a cup of coffee at bedtime than could Daylight’s by a whole night long of strong drink and excitement.
Daylight travelled without a watch, feeling the passage of time and largely estimating it by subconscious processes. By what he considered must be six o’clock, he began looking for a camping-place. The trail, at a bend, plunged out across the river. Not having found a likely spot, they held on for the opposite bank a mile away. But midway they encountered an ice-jam which took an hour of heavy work to cross. At last Daylight glimpsed what he was looking for, a dead tree close by the bank. The sled was run in and up. Kama grunted with satisfaction, and the work of making camp was begun.
The division of labor was excellent. Each knew what he must do. With one ax Daylight chopped down the dead pine. Kama, with a snowshoe and the other ax, cleared away the two feet of snow above the Yukon ice and chopped a supply of ice for cooking purposes. A piece of dry birch bark started the fire, and Daylight went ahead with the cooking while the Indian unloaded the sled and fed the dogs their ration of dried fish. The food sacks he slung high in the trees beyond leaping-reach of the huskies. Next, he chopped down a young spruce tree and trimmed off the boughs. Close to the fire he trampled down the soft snow and covered the packed space with the boughs. On this flooring he tossed his own and Daylight’s gear-bags, containing dry socks and underwear and their sleeping-robes. Kama, however, had two robes of rabbit skin to Daylight’s one.
They worked on steadily, without speaking, losing no time. Each did whatever was needed, without thought of leaving to the other the least task that presented itself to hand. Thus, Kama saw when more ice was needed and went and got it, while a snowshoe, pushed over by the lunge of a dog, was stuck on end again by Daylight. While coffee was boiling, bacon frying, and flapjacks were being mixed, Daylight found time to put on a big pot of beans. Kama came back, sat down on the edge of the spruce boughs, and in the interval of waiting, mended harness.
“I t’ink dat Skookum and Booga make um plenty fight maybe,” Kama remarked, as they sat down to eat.
“Keep an eye on them,” was Daylight’s answer.
And this was their sole conversation throughout the meal. Once, with a muttered imprecation, Kama leaped away, a stick of firewood in hand, and clubbed apart a tangle of fighting dogs. Daylight, between mouthfuls, fed chunks of ice into the tin pot, where it thawed into water. The meal finished, Kama replenished the fire, cut more wood for the morning, and returned to the spruce bough bed and his harness-mending. Daylight cut up generous chunks of bacon and dropped them in the pot of bubbling beans. The moccasins of both men were wet, and this in spite of the intense cold; so when there was no further need for them to leave the oasis of spruce boughs, they took off their moccasins and hung them on short sticks to dry before the fire, turning them about from time to time. When the beans were finally cooked, Daylight ran part of them into a bag of flour-sacking a foot and a half long and three inches in diameter. This he then laid on the snow to freeze. The remainder of the beans were left in the pot for breakfast.
It was past nine o’clock, and they were ready for bed. The squabbling and bickering among the dogs had long since died down, and the weary animals were curled in the snow, each with his feet and nose bunched together and covered by his wolf’s brush of a tail. Kama spread his sleeping-furs and lighted his pipe. Daylight rolled a brown-paper cigarette, and the second conversation of the evening took place.
“I think we come near sixty miles,” said Daylight.
“Um, I t’ink so,” said Kama.
They rolled into their robes, all-standing, each with a woolen Mackinaw jacket on in place of the parkas[5] they had worn all day. Swiftly, almost on the instant they closed their eyes, they were asleep. The stars leaped and danced in the frosty air, and overhead the colored bars of the aurora borealis were shooting like great searchlights.
[5] Parka: a light, hooded, smock-like garment made of cotton drill.
In the darkness Daylight awoke and roused Kama. Though the aurora still flamed, another day had begun. Warmed-over flapjacks, warmed-over beans, fried bacon, and coffee composed the breakfast. The dogs got nothing, though they watched with wistful mien from a distance, sitting up in the snow, their tails curled around their paws. Occasionally they lifted one fore paw or the other, with a restless movement, as if the frost tingled in their feet. It was bitter cold, at least sixty-five below zero, and when Kama harnessed the dogs with naked hands he was compelled several times to go over to the fire and warm the numbing finger-tips. Together the two men loaded and lashed the sled. They warmed their hands for the last time, pulled on their mittens, and mushed the dogs over the bank and down to the river-trail. According to Daylight’s estimate, it was around seven o’clock; but the stars danced just as brilliantly, and faint, luminous streaks of greenish aurora still pulsed overhead.
Two hours later it became suddenly dark–so dark that they kept to
the trail largely by instinct; and Daylight knew that his time-estimate had been right. It was the darkness before dawn, never anywhere more conspicuous than on the Alaskan winter-trail.
Slowly the gray light came stealing through the gloom, imperceptibly at first, so that it was almost with surprise that they noticed the vague loom of the trail underfoot. Next, they were able to see the wheel-dog, and then the whole string of running dogs and snow-stretches on either side. Then the near bank loomed for a moment and was gone, loomed a second time and remained. In a few minutes the far bank, a mile away, unobtrusively came into view, and ahead and behind, the whole frozen river could be seen, with off to the left a wide-extending range of sharp-cut, snow-covered mountains. And that was all. No sun arose. The gray light remained gray.
Once, during the day, a lynx leaped lightly across the trail, under the very nose of the lead-dog, and vanished in the white woods. The dogs’ wild impulses roused. They raised the hunting-cry of the pack, surged against their collars, and swerved aside in pursuit. Daylight, yelling “Whoa!” struggled with the gee-pole and managed to overturn the sled into the soft snow. The dogs gave up, the sled was righted, and five minutes later they were flying along the hard-packed trail again. The lynx was the only sign of life they had seen in two days, and it, leaping velvet-footed and vanishing, had been more like an apparition.
At twelve o’clock, when the sun peeped over the earth-bulge, they stopped and built a small fire on the ice. Daylight, with the ax, chopped chunks off the frozen sausage of beans. These, thawed and warmed in the frying-pan, constituted their meal. They had no coffee. He did not believe in the burning of daylight for such a luxury. The dogs stopped wrangling with one another, and looked on wistfully. Only at night did they get their pound of fish. In the meantime they worked.
The cold snap continued. Only men of iron kept the trail at such low temperatures, and Kama and Daylight were picked men of their races. But Kama knew the other was the better man, and thus, at the start, he was himself foredoomed to defeat. Not that he slackened his effort or willingness by the slightest conscious degree, but that he was beaten by the burden he carried in his mind. His attitude toward Daylight was worshipful. Stoical, taciturn, proud of his physical prowess, he found all these qualities incarnated in his white companion. Here was one that excelled in the things worth excelling in, a man-god ready to hand, and Kama could not but worship–withal he gave no signs of it. No wonder the race of white men conquered, was his thought, when it bred men like this man. What chance had the Indian against such a dogged, enduring breed? Even the Indians did not travel at such low temperatures, and theirs was the wisdom of thousands of generations; yet here was this Daylight, from the soft Southland, harder than they, laughing at their fears, and swinging along the trail ten and twelve hours a day. And this Daylight thought that he could keep up a day’s pace of thirty-three miles for sixty days! Wait till a fresh fall of snow
came down, or they struck the unbroken trail or the rotten rim-ice
that fringed open water.
In the meantime Kama kept the pace, never grumbling, never shirking. Sixty-five degrees below zero is very cold. Since water freezes at thirty-two above, sixty-five below meant ninety-seven degrees below freezing-point. Some idea of the significance of this may be gained by conceiving of an equal difference of temperature in the opposite direction. One hundred and twenty-nine on the thermometer constitutes a very hot day, yet such a temperature is but ninety-seven degrees above freezing. Double this difference, and possibly some slight conception may be gained of the cold through which Kama and Daylight travelled between dark and dark and through the dark.
Kama froze the skin on his cheek-bones, despite frequent rubbings, and the flesh turned black and sore. Also he slightly froze the edges of his lung-tissues–a dangerous thing, and the basic reason why a man should not unduly exert himself in the open at sixty-five below. But Kama never complained, and Daylight was a furnace of heat, sleeping as warmly under his six pounds of rabbit skins as the other did under twelve pounds.
On the second night, fifty more miles to the good, they camped in the vicinity of the boundary between Alaska and the Northwest Territory. The rest of the journey, save the last short stretch to Dyea, would be travelled on Canadian territory. With the hard trail, and in the absence of fresh snow, Daylight planned to make the camp of Forty Mile on the fourth night. He told Kama as much, but on the third day the temperature began to rise, and they knew snow was not far off; for on the Yukon it must get warm in order to snow. Also, on this day, they encountered ten miles of chaotic ice-jams, where, a thousand times, they lifted the loaded sled over the huge cakes by the strength of their arms and lowered it down again. Here the dogs were well-nigh useless, and both they and the men were tried excessively by the roughness of the way. An hour’s extra running that night caught up only part of the lost time.
In the morning they awoke to find ten inches of snow on their robes. The dogs were buried under it and were loath to leave their comfortable nests. This new snow meant hard going. The sled runners would not slide over it so well, while one of the men must go in advance of the dogs and pack it down with snowshoes so that they should not wallow. Quite different was it from the ordinary snow known to those of the Southland. It was hard, and fine, and dry. It was more like sugar. Kick it, and it flew with a hissing noise like sand. There was no cohesion among the particles, and it could not be moulded into snow- balls. It was not composed of flakes, but of crystals–tiny, geometrical frost-crystals. In truth, it was not snow, but frost.
The weather was warm, as well, barely twenty below zero, and the two men, with raised ear-flaps and dangling mittens, sweated as they toiled. They failed to make Forty Mile that night, and when they passed that camp next day Daylight paused only long enough to get the mail and additional grub. On the afternoon of the following day they camped at the mouth of the Klondike River. Not a soul had they encountered since Forty Mile, and they had made their own trail. As yet, that winter, no one had travelled the river south of Forty Mile, and, for that matter, the whole winter through they might be the only ones to travel it. In that day the Yukon was a lonely land. Between the Klondike River and Salt Water at Dyea intervened six hundred miles of snow-covered wilderness, and in all that distance there were but two places where Daylight might look forward to meeting men. Both were isolated trading-posts, Sixty Mile and Fort Selkirk. In the summer-time Indians might be met with at the mouths of the Stewart and White rivers, at the Big and Little Salmons, and on Lake Le Barge; but in the winter, as he well knew, they would be on the trail of the moose-herds, following them back into the mountains.
That night, camped at the mouth of the Klondike, Daylight did not turn in when the evening’s work was done. Had a white man been present, Daylight would have remarked that he felt his “hunch” working. As it was, he tied on his snowshoes, left the dogs curled in the snow and Kama breathing heavily under his rabbit skins, and climbed up to the big flat above the high earth-bank. But the spruce trees were too thick for an outlook, and he threaded his way across the flat and up the first steep slopes of the mountain at the back. Here, flowing in from the east at right angles, he could see the Klondike, and, bending grandly from the south, the Yukon. To the left, and downstream, toward Moosehide Mountain, the huge splash of white, from which it took its name, showing clearly in the starlight. Lieutenant Schwatka had given it its name, but he, Daylight, had first seen it long before that intrepid explorer had crossed the Chilcoot and rafted down the Yukon.
But the mountain received only passing notice. Daylight’s interest was centered in the big flat itself, with deep water all along its edge for steamboat landings.
“A sure enough likely town site,” he muttered. “Room for a camp of forty thousand men. All that’s needed is the gold-strike.” He meditated for a space. “Ten dollars to the pan’ll do it, and it’d be the all-firedest stampede Alaska ever seen. And if it don’t come here, it’ll come somewhere hereabouts. It’s a sure good idea to keep an eye out for town sites all the way up.”
He stood a while longer, gazing out over the lonely flat and visioning with constructive imagination the scene if the stampede did come. In fancy, he placed the sawmills, the big trading stores, the saloons, and dance-halls, and the long streets of miners’ cabins. And along those streets he saw thousands of men passing up and down, while before the stores were the heavy freighting-sleds, with long strings of dogs attached. Also he saw the heavy freighters pulling down the main street and heading up the frozen Klondike toward the imagined somewhere where the diggings must be located.
He laughed and shook the vision from his eyes, descended to the level, and crossed the flat to camp. Five minutes after he had rolled up in his robe, he opened his eyes and sat up, amazed that he was not already asleep. He glanced at the Indian sleeping beside him, at the embers of the dying fire, at the five dogs beyond, with their wolf’s brushes curled over their noses, and at the four snowshoes standing upright in the snow.
“It’s sure hell the way that hunch works on me” he murmured. His mind reverted to the poker game. “Four kings!” He grinned reminiscently. “That WAS a hunch!”
He lay down again, pulled the edge of the robe around his neck and over his ear-flaps, closed his eyes, and this time fell asleep.
CHAPTER V
At Sixty Mile they restocked provisions, added a few pounds of letters to their load, and held steadily on. From Forty Mile they had had unbroken trail, and they could look forward only to unbroken trail clear to Dyea. Daylight stood it magnificently, but the killing pace was beginning to tell on Kama. His pride kept his mouth shut, but the result of the chilling of his lungs in the cold snap could not be concealed. Microscopically small had been the edges of the lung-tissue touched by the frost, but they now began to slough off, giving rise to a dry, hacking cough. Any unusually severe exertion precipitated spells of coughing, during which he was almost like a man in a fit. The blood congested in his eyes till they bulged, while the tears ran down his cheeks. A whiff of the smoke from frying bacon would start him off for a half-hour’s paroxysm, and he kept carefully to windward when Daylight was cooking.
They plodded days upon days and without end over the soft, unpacked snow. It was hard, monotonous work, with none of the joy and blood-stir that went with flying over hard surface. Now one man to the fore in the snowshoes, and now the other, it was a case of stubborn, unmitigated plod. A yard of powdery snow had to be pressed down, and the wide-webbed shoe, under a man’s weight, sank a full dozen inches into the soft surface. Snowshoe work, under such conditions, called for the use of muscles other than those used in ordinary walking. From step to step the rising foot could not come up and forward on a slant. It had to be raised perpendicularly. When the snowshoe was pressed into the snow, its nose was confronted by a vertical wall of snow twelve inches high. If the foot, in rising, slanted forward the slightest bit, the nose of the shoe penetrated the obstructing wall and tipped downward till the heel of the shoe struck the man’s leg behind. Thus up, straight up, twelve inches, each foot must be raised every time and all the time, ere the forward swing from the knee could begin.
On this partially packed surface followed the dogs, the man at the gee-pole, and the sled. At the best, toiling as only picked men could toil, they made no more than three miles an hour. This meant longer hours of travel, and Daylight, for good measure and for a margin against accidents, hit the trail for twelve hours a day. Since three hours were consumed by making camp at night and cooking beans, by getting breakfast in the morning and breaking camp, and by thawing beans at the midday halt, nine hours were left for sleep and recuperation, and neither men nor dogs wasted many minutes of those nine hours.
At Selkirk, the trading post near Pelly River, Daylight suggested that Kama lay over, rejoining him on the back trip from Dyea. A strayed Indian from Lake Le Barge was willing to take his place; but Kama was obdurate. He grunted with a slight intonation of resentment, and that was all. The dogs, however, Daylight changed, leaving his own exhausted team to rest up against his return, while he went on with six fresh dogs.
They travelled till ten o’clock the night they reached Selkirk, and at six next morning they plunged ahead into the next stretch of wilderness of nearly five hundred miles that lay between Selkirk and Dyea. A second cold snap came on, but cold or warm it was all the same, an unbroken trail. When the thermometer went down to fifty below, it was even harder to travel, for at that low temperature the hard frost-crystals were more like sand-grains in the resistance they offered to the sled runners. The dogs had to pull harder than over the same snow at twenty or thirty below zero. Daylight increased the day’s travel to thirteen hours. He jealously guarded the margin he had gained, for he knew there were difficult stretches to come.
It was not yet quite midwinter, and the turbulent Fifty Mile River vindicated his judgment. In many places it ran wide open, with precarious rim-ice fringing it on either side. In numerous places, where the water dashed against the steep-sided bluffs, rim-ice was unable to form. They turned and twisted, now crossing the river, now coming back again, sometimes making half a dozen attempts before they found a way over a particularly bad stretch. It was slow work. The ice-bridges had to be tested, and either Daylight or Kama went in advance, snowshoes on their feet, and long poles carried crosswise in their hands. Thus, if they broke through, they could cling to the pole that bridged the hole made by their bodies. Several such accidents were the share of each. At fifty below zero, a man wet to the waist cannot travel without freezing; so each ducking meant delay. As soon as rescued, the wet man ran up and down to keep up his circulation, while his dry companion built a fire. Thus protected, a change of garments could be made and the wet ones dried against the next misadventure.
To make matters worse, this dangerous river travel could not be done in the dark, and their working day was reduced to the six hours of twilight. Every moment was precious, and they strove never to lose one. Thus, before the first hint of the coming of gray day, camp was broken, sled loaded, dogs harnessed, and the two men crouched waiting over the fire. Nor did they make the midday halt to eat. As it was, they were running far behind their schedule, each day eating into the margin they had run up. There were days when they made fifteen miles, and days when they made a dozen. And there was one bad stretch where in two days they covered nine miles, being compelled to turn their backs three times on the river and to portage sled and outfit over the mountains.
At last they cleared the dread Fifty Mile River and came out on Lake Le Barge. Here was no open water nor jammed ice. For thirty miles or more the snow lay level as a table; withal it lay three feet deep and was soft as flour. Three miles an hour was the best they could make, but Daylight celebrated the passing of the Fifty Mile by traveling late. At eleven in the morning they emerged at the foot of the lake. At three in the afternoon, as the Arctic night closed down, he caught his first sight of the head of the lake, and with the first stars took his bearings. At eight in the evening they left the lake behind and entered the mouth of the Lewes River. Here a halt of half an hour was made, while chunks of frozen boiled beans were thawed and the dogs were given an extra ration of fish. Then they pulled on up the river till one in the morning, when they made their regular camp.
They had hit the trail sixteen hours on end that day, the dogs had come in too tired to fight among themselves or even snarl, and Kama had perceptibly limped the last several miles; yet Daylight was on trail next morning at six o’clock. By eleven he was at the foot of White Horse, and that night saw him camped beyond the Box Canon, the last bad river-stretch behind him, the string of lakes before him.
There was no let up in his pace. Twelve hours a day, six in the twilight, and six in the dark, they toiled on the trail. Three hours were consumed in cooking, repairing harnesses, and making and breaking camp, and the remaining nine hours dogs and men slept as if dead. The iron strength of Kama broke. Day by day the terrific toil sapped him. Day by day he consumed more of his reserves of strength. He became slower of movement, the resiliency went out of his muscles, and his limp became permanent. Yet he labored stoically on, never shirking, never grunting a hint of complaint. Daylight was thin-faced and tired.
He looked tired; yet somehow, with that marvelous mechanism of a body that was his, he drove on, ever on, remorselessly on. Never was he more a god in Kama’s mind than in the last days of the south-bound traverse, as the failing Indian watched him, ever to the fore, pressing onward with urgency of endurance such as Kama had never seen nor dreamed could thrive in human form.
The time came when Kama was unable to go in the lead and break trail, and it was a proof that he was far gone when he permitted Daylight to toil all day at the heavy snowshoe work. Lake by lake they crossed the string of lakes from Marsh to Linderman, and began the ascent of Chilcoot. By all rights, Daylight should have camped below the last pitch of the pass at the dim end of day; but he kept on and over and down to Sheep Camp, while behind him raged a snow-storm that would have delayed him twenty-four hours.
This last excessive strain broke Kama completely. In the morning he could not travel. At five, when called, he sat up after a struggle, groaned, and sank back again. Daylight did the camp work of both, harnessed the dogs, and, when ready for the start, rolled the helpless Indian in all three sleeping robes and lashed him on top of the sled. The going was good; they were on the last lap; and he raced the dogs down through Dyea Canon and along the hard-packed trail that led to Dyea Post. And running still, Kama groaning on top the load, and Daylight leaping at the gee-pole to avoid going under the runners of the flying sled, they arrived at Dyea by the sea.
True to his promise, Daylight did not stop. An hour’s time saw the sled loaded with the ingoing mail and grub, fresh dogs harnessed, and a fresh Indian engaged. Kama never spoke from the time of his arrival till the moment Daylight, ready to depart, stood beside him to say good-by. They shook hands.
“You kill um dat damn Indian,” Kama said. “Sawee, Daylight? You kill um.”
“He’ll sure last as far as Pelly,” Daylight grinned.
Kama shook his head doubtfully, and rolled over on his side, turning his back in token of farewell.
Daylight won across Chilcoot that same day, dropping down five hundred feet in the darkness and the flurrying snow to Crater Lake, where he camped. It was a ‘cold’ camp, far above the timber-line, and he had not burdened his sled with firewood. That night three feet of snow covered them, and in the black morning, when they dug themselves out, the Indian tried to desert. He had had enough of traveling with what he considered a madman. But Daylight persuaded him in grim ways to stay by the outfit, and they pulled on across Deep Lake and Long Lake and dropped down to the level-going of Lake Linderman. It was the same killing pace going in as coming out, and the Indian did not stand it as well as Kama. He, too, never complained. Nor did he try again to desert. He toiled on and did his best, while he renewed his resolve to steer clear of Daylight in the future. The days slipped into days, nights and twilight’s alternating, cold snaps gave way to snow-falls, and cold snaps came on again, and all the while, through the long hours, the miles piled up behind them.
But on the Fifty Mile accident befell them. Crossing an ice-bridge, the dogs broke through and were swept under the down-stream ice. The traces that connected the team with the wheel-dog parted, and the team was never seen again. Only the one wheel-dog remained, and Daylight harnessed the Indian and himself to the sled. But a man cannot take the place of a dog at such work, and the two men were attempting to do the work of five dogs. At the end of the first hour, Daylight lightened up. Dog-food, extra gear, and the spare ax were thrown away. Under the extraordinary exertion the dog snapped a tendon the following day, and was hopelessly disabled. Daylight shot it, and abandoned the sled. On his back he took one hundred and sixty pounds of mail and grub, and on the Indian’s put one hundred and twenty-five pounds. The stripping of gear was remorseless. The Indian was appalled when he saw every pound of worthless mail matter retained, while beans, cups, pails, plates, and extra clothing were thrown by the board. One robe each was kept, one ax, one tin pail, and a scant supply of bacon and flour. Bacon could be eaten raw on a pinch, and flour, stirred in hot water, could keep men going. Even the rifle and the score of rounds of ammunition were left behind.
And in this fashion they covered the two hundred miles to Selkirk. Daylight travelled late and early, the hours formerly used by camp-making and dog-tending being now devoted to the trail. At night they crouched over a small fire, wrapped in their robes, drinking flour broth and thawing bacon on the ends of sticks; and in the morning darkness, without a word, they arose, slipped on their packs, adjusted head-straps, and hit the trail. The last miles into Selkirk, Daylight drove the Indian before him, a hollow-cheeked, gaunt-eyed wraith of a man who else would have lain down and slept or abandoned his burden of mail.