Silently the men stared into each other"s faces, and then--silently, for none dared trust himself to speak--these big men of the North harnessed their dogs and began the laborious homeward journey with heavy hearts.
And, at that very moment, a small boy, eighty miles beyond the impa.s.sable barrier of the snow-capped divide, tunnelled through a huge drift that sealed the mouth of an ice cavern in the side of an inland glacier, and looked out upon the bewildering tangle of gleaming peaks.
Thanks to the unerring nose of old Boris, and the speed of McDougall"s sled dogs, the trail of Waseche had each day become warmer, and the night before the storm, when Connie camped in the convenient ice-cavern, he judged his partner to be only a day ahead. When the storm continued day after day, he chafed at the delay, but comforted himself with the thought that Waseche must also camp.
As he stood at the mouth of his cave gazing at the unfamiliar mountains, towering range upon range, with their peaks glittering in the cold rays of the morning sun, old Boris crowded past him and plunged into the unbroken whiteness of the little valley. Round and round he circled with lowered head. Up and down the jagged ice wall of the glacier he ran, sniffing the snow and whining with eagerness to pick up the trail that he had followed for so many days. And as the boy watched him, a sudden fear clutched at his heart. For instead of starting off with short, joyous yelps of confidence, the old dog continued his aimless circling, and at length, as if giving up in despair, sat upon his haunches, pointed his sharp muzzle skyward, and lifted his voice in howl after quavering howl of disappointment.
"The trail is buried," groaned the boy, "and I had almost caught up with him!" He glanced hopelessly up and down the valley, realizing for the first time that the landmarks of the back trail were obliterated. His eyes narrowed and he gritted his teeth:
"I"ll find him yet," he muttered. "My Dad always played in hard luck--but he never _quit_! I"ll find Waseche--but, if I don"t find him, the big men back there that knew Sam Morgan--they"ll know Sam Morgan"s boy was no quitter, either!" He turned away from the entrance and began to harness the dogs.
Way down the valley, high on the surface of the glacier, Waseche Bill stopped suddenly to listen. Faint and far, a sound was borne to his ears through the thin, cold air. He jerked back his _parka_ hood and strained to catch the faint echo. Again he heard it--the long, bell-like howl of a dog--and as he listened, the man"s face paled, and a strange p.r.i.c.kling sensation started at the roots of his hair and worked slowly along his spine. For this man of the North knew dogs. Even in the white fastness of the terrible Lillimuit he could not be mistaken.
"Boris! Boris!" he cried, and whirling his wolf-dogs in their tracks, dashed over the windswept surface of the glacier in the direction of the sound.
"I can"t be wrong! I can"t be wrong!" he repeated over and over again, "I raised him from a pup!"
CHAPTER VII
IN THE LILLIMUIT
Speak _desolation_. What does it mean to you? What picture rises before your eyes? A land laid waste by the ravages of war? A brain picture of sodden, trampled fields, leaning fences, grey piles of smoking ashes which are the ruins of homes, flanking a long, white, unpeopled highway strewn with litter, broken wagons, abandoned caissons, and, here and there, long fresh-heaved ridges of brown earth that cover the men who were? Isn"t that the picture? And isn"t it the evening of a dull grey day, just at the time when the gloom of twilight shades into the black pall of night, and way toward the edge of the world, on the indistinct horizon, a lurid red glow tints the low-hung clouds--no flames--only the dull, illusive glow that wavers and fades in the heavens above other burning homes? Yes, that is desolation. And, yet--men have been here--everything about you speaks the presence of people. Here people lived and loved and were happy; and here, also, they were heartbroken and sad. The whole picture breathes humanity--and the inhumanity of men.
And, as people have lived here, instinctively you know that people will live here again; for this is man-made desolation.
Only those to whom it has been given to know the Big North--the gaunt, white, silent land beyond the haunts of men--can realize the true significance of _desolation_.
Stand surrounded by range upon towering range of unmapped mountains whose clean-cut peaks show clear and sharp through the keen air--air so dry and thin that the slanting rays of the low-hung midday sun gleam whitely upon the outlines of ice crags a hundred miles away. Stand there alone, enveloped by the solitude of the land where men never lived--nor ever will live--where the silence is a _thing_, pressing closer and closer about you--smothering you--so that, instinctively, you throw out your hands to push it away that you may breathe--then you begin to know desolation--the utter desolation of the frozen wilderness, the cold, dead land of mystery.
The long howl of the great grey wolf as he lopes over the hunger trail is an eerie sound; so is the cackling, insane laughter of a pack of coyotes in the night-time, and the weird scream of the _loup-cervier_; but of all sounds, the most desolate, the sound that to the ears of man spells the last word of utter solitude and desolation, is the short, quick, single bark of the Arctic fox as he pads invisible as a phantom in his haunts among the echoing rim-rocks. Amid these surroundings, brains give way. Not soften into maudlin idiocy, but explode in a frenzy of violence, so that men rush screaming before the relentless solitude; or fight foolishly and to the death against the powers of cold amid the unreal colours of the aurora borealis whose whizzing hiss roars in their ears when, at the last, they pitch forward into the frozen whiteness--bushed!
This was the scene of desolation that confronted Connie Morgan as McDougall"s straining _malamutes_ jerked the sled from the ice-cavern that had served as a shelter through all the days of the great blizzard, when the wind-lashed snow, fine as frozen fog, eddied and whirled across the surface of the glacier which towered above him, and drifted deep in the narrow pa.s.s.
The sled runners squeaked loudly in the flinty snow, and Connie halted the dogs and surveyed the forbidding landscape. Never in his life had he been so utterly alone. For twenty days he had followed the trail of Waseche Bill, and now he stood at the end of the trail--worse than that, for the high piled drifts that buried the trail of Waseche covered his own back trail, completely wiping out the one slender thread that connected him with the land of men. He stood alone in the dreaded Lillimuit! Before him rose a confusion of mountains--tier after tier of naked peaks clear and sharp against the blue sky. Fresh as he was from the great Alaska ranges, the boy was strangely awed by the vastness of it all. It was unreal. He missed the black-green of the timber belt that relieved the long sweep of his own mountains, for here, from rounded foothill to topmost pinnacle, the mountains were as bare of vegetation as floating icebergs. The very silence was unnatural and the boy"s lips pressed tightly together as thoughts of Ten Bow crowded his brain: the windla.s.s-capped shafts, the fresh dumps that showed against the white snow of the valley; the red flash and glow of the fires in the night that thawed out the gravel for the next day"s digging; the rough log cabins ranged up and down the gulch in two straggling rows--he could almost hear the good-natured banter which was daily exchanged across the frozen creek bed between the rival residents of Broadway and "Fiff Avenue," as the two irregular "streets" of the camp were named. He thought of his own cabin and the long evenings with his big partner, Waseche Bill, sitting close to the roaring little "Yukon stove,"
puffing contentedly upon his black pipe, which he removed now and then from between his lips to judiciously comment upon the stories that the boy read from the man-thumbed, coverless magazines of other years, which had been pa.s.sed from hand to hand by the big men of the frozen places.
A lump came in his throat and he swallowed hard, and as he looked, the naked peaks blurred and swam together; and two hot, salty tears stung his eyes. At the sting of the tears the little form stiffened and the boy glanced swiftly about him as, with a mittened hand, he dashed the moisture from his eyes. The small fingers clenched hard about the handle of the long-lashed, walrus hide dog whip, and he stepped quickly to the gee-pole of the sled.
"I"m a _piker_!" he cried, "a _chechako_ and a _kid_ and a _tin-horn_ and a _piker_! Crying like a girl because I"m homesick! _Bah!_ What would Waseche say if he could see me now? And _Dad_? _There_ was a _man_! Sam Morgan!" The little arms extended impulsively toward the great white peaks and the big blue eyes glowed proudly:
"Oh, Dad! _Dad!_ They call you unlucky! But I"d rather have the big men back there think of me like they talk of _you_, than to have all the gold in the world!" He leaped suddenly beyond the sled and shook a tiny clenched fist toward the glittering crags.
"I"m _not_ a piker!" he cried, fiercely. "I couldn"t be a piker, and be Sam Morgan"s boy! I got here in spite of the men of Eagle! And I"ll find Waseche, too! I"m not afraid of you! You cold, white Lillimuit--with your big, bare, frozen mountains, and your glaciers, and your stillness!
You can"t bluff _me_! You may _get_ me--but you can"t _turn_ me! _I"m game!_"
As the voice of the boy thinned into the cold air, Slasher, the gaunt, red-eyed wolf-dog, that no man had ever tamed, ranged himself close at his side and, with bristling hair and bared fangs, added his rumbling, throaty growl to Connie Morgan"s defiance of the North.
With a high-pitched whoop of encouragement and a loud crack of the whip, the boy swung the impatient ten-team to the westward and headed it down the canyon into the very heart of the Lillimuit. High mountains towered above him to the left, and to the right the sheer wall of the glacier formed an insurmountable barrier. The dry, hard-packed snow afforded excellent footing and McDougall"s trained sled dogs made good time as they followed the lead of old Boris who, trotting in advance, unerringly picked the smoothest track between the detached ma.s.ses of ice and granite that in places all but blocked the narrowing gorge, into which the trail of Waseche Bill had led on the first day of the great blizzard.
Mile after mile they covered, and as the walls drew closer together the light dimmed, for the slanting rays of the winter sun even at midday never penetrated to the floor of the narrow canyon. As he rounded a sharp bend, Connie halted the dogs in dismay for, a short distance in front of him, the ice-wall of the glacier slanted suddenly against the granite shoulder of a high b.u.t.te. Wide eyed, he stared at the barrier.
He was in a blind pocket--a _cul-de-sac_ of the mountains! But where was Waseche? Weary and disappointed the boy seated himself on the sled to reason it out.
"There _must_ be a way out," he argued. "I didn"t camp till the snow got so thick I couldn"t see, and he had to camp, too. If he doubled back I would have seen him." He started to his feet in a sudden panic. "I wonder if he did--while I slept?" Then, as his glance fell upon the dogs, he smiled. "You bet, he didn"t!" he cried aloud, "not with thirteen wolf-dogs camped beside the trail. Slasher would growl and bristle up if a man came within half a mile of us, and Waseche could never get past old Boris." He remembered the words of Black Jack Demaree: "Never set up yer own guess agin" a good dog"s nose." Connie Morgan was learning the North--he was trusting his dogs.
"There"s a trail, somewhere," he exclaimed, "and it"s up to me to find it!" He cracked his whip, but instead of leaping to the pull, the dogs crouched quivering in the snow. The ground trembled as in the throes of a mighty earthquake and the boy whirled in his tracks as the canyon reverberated to the crash of a thousand thunders. He dashed to the point where, a few minutes before, he had rounded the sharp angle of the trail and gasped at the sight that met his gaze. The weather-whitened ice of the glacier wall was rent and shivered in a broad, green scar, and in the canyon a ma.s.s of broken ice fifty feet high completely blocked the back trail. He was imprisoned! Not in a man-made jail of iron bars and concrete--but a veritable prison of the wilderness, whose impregnable walls of ice and granite seemed to touch the far-off sky. The boy"s heart sank as he gazed upon the perpendicular wall that barred the trail. For just an instant his lip quivered and then the little shoulders stiffened and the blue eyes narrowed as they had narrowed that evening he faced the men of Eagle.
"You didn"t get me, Lillimuit!" he shouted. "You"ll have to shoot the other barrel!" His voice echoed hollow and thin between the gloomy walls, and he turned to the dogs. Old Boris, always in search of a trail, sniffed industriously about the base of the glacier. Big, lumbering Mutt, who in harness could out-pull any dog in the Northland, rolled about in the snow and barked foolishly in his excitement.
Slasher, more wolf than dog, stood snarling his red-eyed hate in the face of the new-formed ice barrier. And McDougall"s _malamutes_, wise in the ways of the snow trail, stood alert, with eyes on the face of the boy, awaiting his command.
Forty rods ahead, where the _cul-de-sac_ terminated in a great moraine, Connie could discern a tangle of scrub growth and dead timber pushed aside by the glacier. The short, three-hour day was spent, and the gloomy walls of the narrow gorge intensified the mysterious semi-darkness of the long, sub-arctic night. The boy shouted to the dogs, and the crack of his long whiplash echoed in the chasm like a pistol shot. At the foot of the moraine he unharnessed and fed the dogs, spread his robes in the shelter of a bold-faced grey rock, and unrolled his sleeping bag. He built a fire and thawed out some bannock, over which he poured the grease from the pan of sizzling bacon. Connie was hungry and he devoured his solitary meal greedily, washing it down with great gulps of steaming black coffee. After supper, surrounded by the thirteen big dogs, he made a hasty inspection of the walls of his prison. The light was dim and he realized he would have to wait until daylight before making anything like a thorough examination; nevertheless, he was unwilling to sleep until he had made at least one effort to locate the trail to the outer world.
An hour later he crawled into his sleeping bag and lay a long time looking upward at the little stars that winked and glittered in cold, white brilliance where the narrow panel of black-blue showed between the towering walls of the canyon.
"I"ll get out someway," he muttered bravely.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "My dad would have got out, and, you bet, so will I!"]
"If I can"t walk out, I"ll _crawl_ out, or _climb_ out, or _dig_ out! My dad would have got out, and, you bet, so will I! _He_ wasn"t afraid to tackle _big_ things--he was ready for "em. What got him was a _little_ thing--just a little piece of loose ice on a smooth trail--he wasn"t _looking_ for it--that"s all. But, at that, when he pitched head first into Ragged Falls canyon that day, he died like a _man_ dies--in the big outdoors, with the mountains, and the pine trees, and the snow! And that"s the way I"ll die! If I never get out of this hole, when they find me they won"t find me in this sleeping bag--"cause I"ll work to the end of my grub. I"ll dig, and chop, and hack a way out till my grub"s gone, then I"ll--I"ll eat Mac"s dogs--and when they"re gone I"ll--No! By Jimminy! I _won"t_ eat old Boris, nor Slasher, nor Mutt--I"ll--I"ll _starve first_!" He reached for the flap of his sleeping bag, and as he drew it over his head there came, faint and far from the rim-rocks, the short, sharp bark of a starving fox.
CHAPTER VIII
WASECHE BILL TO THE RESCUE
When Waseche Bill sent his dogs flying over the surface of the glacier in answer to the bell-like call of old Boris, he fully expected that the end of a half-hour would find him at the dog"s side. Sound carries far in the keen northern air, and the man urged his team to its utmost. As the sled runners slipped smoothly over the ice and frozen snow, his mind was filled with perplexing questions. How came old Boris into the Lillimuit? Had he deserted the boy and followed the trail of his old master?
"No, no!" muttered the man. "He wouldn"t pull out on the kid, that-a-way--an", what"s mo", if he had, he"d of catched up with me long befo" now."
Was it possible that the boy had taken the trail? The man"s brow puckered. What was it Joe said, that night in Eagle?
"S"pose he follers ye?"
"He couldn"t of!" argued Waseche. "It"s plumb onpossible, with them there three ol" dawgs. An" he"d of neveh got past Eagle--Fiddle Face, an" Joe, an" Jim Sontag, they wouldn"t of let him by--not fo" to go to the Lillimuit, they wouldn"t--not in a hund"ed yea"s."
The dogs swerved, bringing the outfit to an abrupt halt on the brink of a yawning fissure. Waseche Bill scowled at the delay.
"Sho" some creva.s.se," he growled, as he peered into the depths of the great ice crack fifty feet wide, which barred his path. Suddenly his eye lighted and he swung the dogs to the southward where, a quarter of a mile away, a great white snow bridge spanned the chasm in a glittering arch. Seizing his axe, he chopped two parallel trenches in the ice close to the end of the bridge. Into these eight-inch depressions he worked the runners of the heavily loaded sled, taking care that the blunt rear end of the runners rested firmly against the vertical ends of the trenches. Uncoiling a long _babiche_ line, he tied one end to the tail rope of the anch.o.r.ed sled and, after making the other end fast about his waist, ventured cautiously out upon the snow bridge. Foot by foot he advanced, testing its strength. The bridge was wide and thick, and evidently quite old and firm, but Waseche Bill was a man who took no foolish risks.
Men who seek gold learn to face danger bravely--it is part of the day"s work--for death dogs close upon the trail of the men of the North and must be reckoned with upon short notice. Every _tillic.u.m_ in the White Country, if he would, could tell of hairbreadth escapes, and of times when a clear brain and iron nerve alone stood between him and the Great Beyond. But of these things they rarely speak--for they know of the others, like Sam Morgan, whose work is done, and whose names are burned into the little wooden crosses that dot the white snow of Aurora Land; and whose memory remains fresh in the haunts of the sourdoughs, where their deeds are remembered long and respected when the flash bravado of the reckless tin-horn is scorned and forgotten.