Frederick R. Bechdolt

“ At last we was sharing the salmon with the dogs. And I begun to think we would be getting down to the dogs themselves. They was in a hard way, what with sore feet and being half starved. One day, when we was limping along through deep snow with Jefferey ahead breaking trail, and me back at the sled handles, we come on the track of a toboggan. We knowed that we was in the country where men had come up from Fort Yukon, which was a trading post then. ”

“ The snow come; the ice drifted in from the no'th, piled high, and then froze fast to the bottom for a mile out from shore. The days kept growing shorter. Grey night around us and white snow under foot; and nothing to do. All them exercises with the dumb-bells that I used to take every marnin' on the Condor was done with now. I put on flesh.
“'Twas well along in the month of November, and we had not made any move at all, when a pair of half-breed traders come to Herschel Island one day from somwheres to the south'ard. Jefferey had a long talk with the two of them. ”

“ He broke his leg and Jefferey shot him. He loaded the carcass on the sled. 'We can feed him to the others,' says he. 'And we're in luck if we don't have to eat them in our own turn.'
“I can see him now, a-standing there in the snow with his rifle in his hands, his cheeks all black where the frost bites had broke the skin, and the ice in his beard.
“Well, what with being off our course and beating up agin head winds, as ye might say, and the way we wore ourselves out, we lost nigh a month. When we did reach our proper course we had more bad luck. ”

“ There is some men that, when ye look at them, ye want to lick them on general principles, because ye know they have it coming to them. I had been watching this big Louis, and the more I laid eyes on him the more I took a grudge again him.
“He had not said a word. But when I dropped my mackinaw in the snow, he peeled his own. Jefferey sat there on the sled. 'Remember, Tom,' says he, as the two of us was coming together, 'knock the head off of his shoulders.'
“Give and take was always my way of fighting. ”

“ He give me their names; there is none better in San Francisco. With that I left him.
“Well, when I got done with finding out about him, there was one thing plain: this here Walter Jefferey was of good people. He was good for the money and he was respectable. Matter of fact, he drawed lots of water, so far as that goes. The law shark told me he was a fair man to deal with; the banker said his check was good for half a million. And I had him sized up for being square and aboveboard: the kind that pays his money and looks to get what he has paid for.
“I went home to the Lass. ”

“ Nice marnin,' too, in March, with no wind and the sky clear.
“Jefferey give the cabin a good look; then he turned around to me and he smiled. It was the the first time I had seen him do that. It cracked the black patches where the frost had burned his cheeks.:
“'Tom,' says he, 'stand here by the sled. Your job lays ahead of ye. What I tell ye to do, ye will do without any words.'
“With that he walked up to the cabin and knocked on the door. Then he stepped back a pace or two. A man come to the door, and opened it. He stood there blinking agin the light on the snow—a big man, as big as me. ”

“ And Jefferey, he would pick up one now and then; but he would drop it pretty quick and go to walking up and down the cabin. Always at them times he would look straight ahead of him like a man a-thinking of one thing.
“At Dutch Harbor he had me ashore for the three days that we laid up there; and every day he kept me climbing that mountain there until he like to wore the legs off of me. But that and the dumb-bells every marnin' was all I had to do. And I come to feel as fine as a fiddle.
“We went on up through Bering. 'Twas in the tail of the summer and there was no ice. ”

“ I was a sick man, carried by Indians. But I have come back.'
“We killed a caribou two days later and we lived on the meat down to Fort Yukon. It was late in June before the river broke, and we got down to St. Michaels. And when we made San Francisco, Jefferey paid me two thousand dollars though his contract called for only one thousand.
“'It was worth the extra thousand,' says he, '—well worth it.'”
FROM our offices it is possible to watch a crew of structural iron-workers building the skeleton of a sky-scraper. ”

“ When they was done and steaming hot, he handed me the pan, and went to cooking some salmon for himself. 'Not much,' says I. 'I will not.'
“He stood up in front of me. And he says, quiet and cold: 'Ye must eat.'
“In the end I did eat them, and he gobbled down his salmon. I went to sleep that night with new strength a-coming back into my bones, and with the blood running hotter in my body. ”

“ They was in one of them tea camps of theirn, a shelter of green trees and boughs with a fire in the lee of it, and the hill ahead of the fire a-throwing back the heat. Jefferey called one of them off to one side and had a long talk with him.
“When he had got done with talking, Jefferey come back to me; and the two of us went on down the trail. We made camp an hour later. When we had got the tent up and the fire a-going, Jefferey reached in under his parka and took out a package. I had never knowed he had it at all. He opened it, and there was bacon and beans. ”

“ In their dare-devil work on sky-scrapers they are only doing the sort of things that were a part of daily routine on board ship.
And it is because Mr. Bechdolt makes you see them as they were, that his narratives have become recognized, since they began running in THE RED BOOK, as the greatest of their kind. ”