Theodore Seixas Solomons

“ Near a summer resort, in the big timber of the Cascades, he found Bruce Waring burying his mother and shipping his young sister to an aunt, to go to school. Beyond a meager education, all the fellow possessed of tangible assets was a worthless homestead and a strong back. But he had ambition and a slow, steady, implacable sort of purpose to be something, if he could be it in his own way—which was a way that Frederick Ticely was one day to learn was not his way, till life, aided by Bruce Waring, ground him into something like the shape of that way. ”

“ With the glazing of the marshes, in the first sharp cold, off they started, Ivan the Indian, with his three mongrels hitched to a flat Yukon sled, trailing Waring with his big basket sled, loaded to the rails. The ice of the marshes and sloughs held to the base of the fifty-mile slops of tundra, whose rise and fall, scarcely perceptible except to a straining husky, marks the height of land between the Kuskokwim and the Yukon. ”

“ He would equally understand that a chance won is not to be renounced, either in whole or in part. He told his friend—as they drank the wine—obscured, rather by symbol and parable, of Dick, the drudge, the drone—of the day after day of his arid, stupid, obvious comments upon things and people. The gambler—a brilliant fellow—could comprehend the hate, or something quite akin to it, that six months of constant propinquity had bred in Lederer's heart for the plain, flat partner of the yoeman breed. ”

“ As they approached Midas, the hour of fate upon him, the second current gathered force within the soul of Frederick Ticely—a force strengthened by a picture he could not banish: his wife in her white raiment reading the “clean books” to the emaciated youth she had snatched from the brink of eternity, telling him pridefully of the triumph of the spirit, of her preference of death to the cowardice of dishonor. ”

“ Bruce sped to the bottom of the hill in long strides, and swung into the trail at a trot.
A few men, back early after their noon grub, hung about the place waiting for the rest. As Bruce approached them, he did some hard thinking. He had agreed with Ticely upon a “front”—an attitude based on falsehood for the good of all. He must begin right now, and never swerve! If Joan had spoken, all was lost. They might escape the necessity of fighting for their lives, if the bench pay improved, but hatred, contempt, and dishonor would be their portion. ”

“ Joan's misery was a divided one. If she stayed, her father, Judge Manners, who was waiting for her in Nome, would go crazy with anxiety. If she accepted this invitation, she placed herself in the hands of two men whom she distrusted. No rough externals deceived this young frontierswoman, who would have seen in them rather insignia of dependability. But Slim Jim Collins, in the trimmest rig of the northern miner, well-to-do, ostentatious, wearing nuggets—he was of a type she knew. He and his like made good trailmates, often, but—she could not forget his obvious admiration of her. ”

“ Dalton might be there. To approach him openly was, of course, simply to be shot, for after deserting Harold, Dalton must know he was guilty of intent to murder and that he must either kill the younger man, be killed by him, or go ultimately to the penitentiary.
Harold could see no signs of life in the little valley, but, as he had surmised, it had been the guide’s haven for the night. From the base of the rocky slope the tracks led him to a grove at the meadow’s edge, and here was the camp. He was racked; exhausted; he felt himself to be just hollow, aching bones strung together. ”

“ After nearly a day of this, the native led up a right limit branch and an hour after noon, next day, Ak Tuk's dogs smelled spruce smoke, and with straightened necks, and muzzles howling welcome, swerved sharply up the steep bank. Ticely, drawn swiftly up by his own closely following team, beheld, in that remote, tenantless world, the miracle of human habitancy—a camp lay before him! The door of a well-chinked cabin was ajar, and through it stalked the familiar figure, in unfamiliar raiment, of his partner—his partner now in very truth—Bruce Waring. ”

“ But it was a success destined to be as ephemeral as the conviction that had achieved it, unless those bench values—which Ticely now knew—should be very like the values that Ticely had noted in his Klondike diary!
As he threaded his devious way through the dark spruce of the bench land, dogged by the little procession of men who were still his enemies—unless he made good, Bruce Waring hoped as he had never hoped before, that his “front” would be justified when next he looked into the face of the man whom he had snatched back from safety to meet the fury of a raging mob! ”

“ Gold at the grass roots! That’s it. That’s what they promised us when we come North. ‘Land o’ wealth untold—grave that’s decked with gold—’”
It was impossible to quiet him. Turner’s dignified gentleness, when old Whipple’s ravings disturbed his reading, was as unavailing as McAdams’ rough admonishings, which turned, finally, into severity. “Shut up and go to sleep, you!” It was the only way he knew of impressing the wandering mind of the old frontiersman, but it was inexpressibly shocking to Alfred Turner, of finer mold. He glared at McAdams balefully. McAdams only laughed. ”

“ Never in the secret recesses of his being questioning the sincerity of that sentiment or the loyalty to him of the man, he raged at Waring only as we rage at those forces which, whether sentient, as in man, or insentient, as in the wave of the hurricane, surge across the pathway of our vital needs and purposes, menacing our liberty or our life. A lunatic noble enough, where those of Midas were ignoble, but a lunatic just the same, Ticely hated him as we sometimes hate transiently our loved ones. ”

“ A big fire, plus general stagnation in the West, had held the energies of that city in leash, for some years, when the great gold strike in the Yukon flashed upon the world. Men who, a few years later, would never have dreamed of a raw life in the outlands, disgusted with the torpor of the times, converted their assets into flour and bacon and took, therefore, a bill of lading on any crazy craft that could be patched up for a run up the Inside Passage.
Ticely, then a young and unmarried hardware salesman, was one of the argonauts. ”

“ Her second and more perturbing discovery came gradually, as she grew acquainted with one after another of these travelers, bound for a common destination, and bound to each other by a common purpose, a common expectation. With tongues fettered no longer by the imagined secrecy that had made them in Nome the butt of many a droll jest, in their forgatherings on the trail they compared notes and discussed the pros and cons of their prospects with the utmost freedom and candor. ”

“ Most of the freighters had arrived with their stores of building materials and merchandise—all the diversified paraphernalia of a brand-new, booming mining camp of the northern placer fields. With the arrival of each new craft at the landing, whether it were canoe, poling boat, or slender barge, new white tents sprang up on the flat, goods were piled up, men, and not a few women rushed about, entering into “deals” of all sorts—buying or leasing lots, contracting for log buildings, or earnestly discussing, and often squabbling over, “lay” agreements to work ground on the creek. ”

“ There was a chance—a chance in a hundred with Yukon streams in that great alluvial basin—that there might be rocks a little below and a constricting of the water—a chance to jump from rock to rock. As he went staggering along the bank he saw his final mirage, The Last Phantom. A horse browsing on the hillside was the first of it. A little farther down—yes, there was the inevitable cabin. Soon he would see that infernal, damnable, imaginary string of sluice boxes, and men shoveling in. ”

“ But, still, beyond even that, there must have been something that gave them the key to those things—something in the way you acted!”
“Look here, Bruce,” said Ticely, very deliberately, “I'll be frank with you—franker than I have ever been. You are innocent in business. You're too—well, you're too matter of fact. Don't you know yet what business is? Any kind of business, from shoeing horses to organizing a trust? It's exactly and precisely the same. You put your best foot foremost. You try in every way you can, without, of course, doing anything actually wrong, to put your proposition over. ”

“ He would simulate no more, not unless it were absolutely necessary. To be alone with his partner was what he too wanted. He had no doubt of his power. No honest man like Dick Kibble, feeling as Dick Kibble felt, has doubt of his power.
There was a small, hidden camp a thousand yards down the river in the timber. There was a blanket, a frying pan and a small—a pitifully small—pack of grub, the last of the Lederer-Kibble outfit, which had been rather a brave one, in a modest way, when it had left Seattle. ”

“ Yet you knew, Madge, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said steadily.
“Well, think of that bedeviled weakling out there. A sick whelp with a small jack knife and the clothes on his back. He had nothing to offer the frowning gods of the wild—nothing but hate and his oath. Yet they saw him through—they and his father. I’m here——” he struck the sod. “Alive on the good earth, not moldering upon it. And now, would you have me false—a traitor to it all?”
Harold had learned the ways of the gods of earth, but not of the goddesses that hover half on, half over it. Of these was Madge. ”

“ There was no holding them back, even if Ticely had tried. The bed rock under the muck and gravel of Midas Creek was the unseen cynosure of all eyes; and in the morning a bailing crew was started at one of the upper holes and another at a lower. They would have put a couple of men at constructing a “Chinese pump,” a time-worn device of the nature of an endless chain of pockets, had not Ticely promised them, among his own supplies which were being rushed up the river, a very efficient little hand pump, which would lift water faster than any windlass and bucket crew could hoist it. ”

“ For now it was turn about, with the iron-legged Eskimo, in breaking trail on a drifted river, and its brush and sedge-grown portages, till his thigh muscles numbed and almost paralyzed under the strain. He froze his cheeks the third day out, and, on the seventh, they lay for eighteen hours in their bags, under a partly collapsed and drifted-over tent. The Eskimo took it as one takes mosquitos—a nuisance; but Ticely, from his long interlude of “civilized” living, nearly lost his nerve. ”

“ Nobody's going to kill you. You're in Alaska now!”
“I've been in Alaska perhaps as long as you have, Mr. Collins; and it isn't my way, and you know it very well. Please let us have an understanding, If you take me to Nome, in the way I wish to go, I shall be very grateful to you, and I or my father will repay you my full share of the cost. But if you force any caresses upon me, I shall have to kill you!” ”

“ Ticely shrugged his shoulders—and smiled. While the crowd, partly dispersing, wandered along the bench ground, discussing the direction and formation of the old channel, Waring lured Joan into the little tent. He knew she must be utterly at sea—fairly dizzy with puzzlement over these new developments. ”

“ But in Waring's veins coursed blood of no strains but the indomitable. The instincts that make for the open, where no boldness of brain, no keenness of eye, no strength of arm, but one's own wrests from the earth the wherewithal of happiness and content, were Waring's. A scion of frontiersmen, he looked to no man for help and shrank from no man in fear. ”

“ He was a kind of Martha, a useful camp keeper and worker; reliable, steady, giving in always to the better judgment of Lederer the educated, the clever, the brilliant, the fine fellow. So Kibble had plugged away for months on the fraction, working alone—for Lederer saw to it that he was seldom in camp long enough to lend a hand—slaving in a narrow tunnel and a deep, slimy shaft in air that had killed three men in Gold Hill since the benches were opened up. ”

“ In principle they are one—The Stampede, that tense, fantastic drama of the North, whose placers, locked in frost and hidden beneath an inexpressive mantle of tundra mosses as spacious as a nation's territory, must still challenge the red-rimmed eyes and staggering feet of generations of prospectors to come. ”

“ But on the theory of murder for theft—a more likely explanation, he felt—Dalton would have no intention of returning, either with or without an alibi; and he would be striking out for another part of North America—Alaska or the Yukon, it would be. Sure of the death of the weakling by starvation in the camp in which he had left him, he would travel north and west, hunting and fishing, riding along between times, whistling those old-fashioned, loutish tunes of his—the man was a moral idiot! He would almost forget that Harold Hazeltine had ever existed. ”

“ He was always amused but never in the least excited by what he saw in those wild, empty, narrow, winding stream valleys—the camps, the tents, the cabins, the strings of sluice boxes—in a word, the objects with which he had of late years associated his fellow beings, to whom now his subconscious as well as his conscious mind looked for succor! ”

“ Then he turned with sudden interest to Ticely's letter:
My Dear Bruce: How are you, my son? How are the ptarmigan and the arctic hares, and—particularly—how is the pay streak? I assume you are well, barring accidents, and your old failing of working too hard. I'm the busiest man you ever saw, and will be till I and the others get up to Midas late in May or early in June. Who are the others? Sit down, my boy, while I break it to you gently. There are many of them. In fact, we've got a young stampede brewing here. ”

“ I handle an ugly gun, some say! They're not liable to stand for bloodshed to get him; they don't hate him bad enough for that. I'll treat you the best I know how—like a man would have to treat my own sister. And I can do it. I'm well fixed, you know. This Midas is just a side spec with me. You might do worse, little girl. You're broke, dead broke, you and your dad, and his good name is gone besides!”
Joan jerked up her head. “That is a lie. No man like you can smirch him. There's not a thing against him, and you know it. If you mean this red canoe, I tell you I did it, alone. ”

“ But, whether, twenty or forty thousand strong, the stampeders crowd the waterways in great ocean liners, in river steamers, in boats and barges and canoes, to Kondike or Nome; or, on the other hand, in modest hundreds, equipped with pack horses, sleds, and dogs, they break new overland trails to lesser camps like Candle, Kougarok, Squirrel, or Midas—the phenomena of human life, of human struggle, is the same. ”

“ The subtler were debarred from Dick—or he from them—by reason of the simpler mind and simpler education of the young New Zealander whom Lederer had met on the steamer crossing the Pacific and hooked up with as a very fitting partner for one who needed a man Friday. There had been no difficulty in accomplishing the partnership, for Dick, alone, like himself, venturing, like himself, half across the world in search of the gold of the Klondike, was but too glad to become associated with a man so much his superior, so magnetic, so charming, so wonderfully educated and well-informed. ”

“ Bill Dalton, as big as Hazeltine, somewhat older in years and very much older in experience, quiet, and pithily spoken, had many of the earmarks of the genial philosopher of the great outdoors. But the test of true philosophy is its staying powers, and each passing day of their outward bound had drawn more and more heavily upon the guide’s reserve of patience and forbearance. Though he had doubtless been admonished to regard the youth as unfit, it was likely that Dalton had expected a certain amount of help from Hazeltine as soon as the latter should learn the rudiments of camp craft. ”

“ You make everything look as pretty as you can. You don't make things really pretty. The artist, designer, or manufacturer does that. The salesman merely creates a belief that things are attractive. And the less attractive they really are, the greater the triumph of salesmanship. I'm accounted a good salesman, as perhaps you know.” Ticely bit his lip thoughtfully: “I'm beginning to believe I'm too good a salesman!”
“You certainly have been in this case, Fred Ticely, or I miss my guess,” replied Waring soberly. ”

“ If Dalton had smiled, Hazeltine, despite his promise, might have sprung at the man’s throat, for he was as yet unpracticed in the restraint of those virile passions which had so long lain dormant. But the guide’s face was stoical. He waited, hat in hand—a strong man, sure of his strength.
As the silence grew tense, the girl’s face flamed. She sprang imperiously toward the sullen, glowering youth and said in a resonant voice:
“Harold Hazeltine, you listen to me. You know what you were—a miserable creature, a chronic, hopeless hypochondriac. The doctors gave you up. ”