The tent heeled over and half flattened before the gale. d.i.c.k refilled his pipe, while Tommy drew the tea and set it aside against Molly"s return.
And she of the flashing eyes and Yankee blood? Blinded, falling, crawling on hand and knee, the wind thrust back in her throat by the wind, she was heading for the tent. On her shoulders a bulky pack caught the full fury of the storm. She plucked feebly at the knotted flaps, but it was Tommy and d.i.c.k who cast them loose. Then she set her soul for the last effort, staggered in, and fell exhausted on the floor.
Tommy unbuckled the straps and took the pack from her. As he lifted it there was a clanging of pots and pans. d.i.c.k, pouring out a mug of whiskey, paused long enough to pa.s.s the wink across her body. Tommy winked back. His lips pursed the monosyllable, "clothes," but d.i.c.k shook his head reprovingly. "Here, little woman," he said, after she had drunk the whiskey and straightened up a bit.
"Here"s some dry togs. Climb into them. We"re going out to extra-peg the tent. After that, give us the call, and we"ll come in and have dinner. Sing out when you"re ready."
"So help me, d.i.c.k, that"s knocked the edge off her for the rest of this trip," Tommy spluttered as they crouched to the lee of the tent.
"But it"s the edge is her saving grace." d.i.c.k replied, ducking his head to a volley of sleet that drove around a corner of the canvas. "The edge that you and I"ve got, Tommy, and the edge of our mothers before us."
THE MAN WITH THE GASH
Jacob Kent had suffered from cupidity all the days of his life. This, in turn, had engendered a chronic distrustfulness, and his mind and character had become so warped that he was a very disagreeable man to deal with. He was also a victim to somnambulic propensities, and very set in his ideas. He had been a weaver of cloth from the cradle, until the fever of Klondike had entered his blood and torn him away from his loom. His cabin stood midway between Sixty Mile Post and the Stuart River; and men who made it a custom to travel the trail to Dawson, likened him to a robber baron, perched in his fortress and exacting toll from the caravans that used his ill-kept roads. Since a certain amount of history was required in the construction of this figure, the less cultured wayfarers from Stuart River were p.r.o.ne to describe him after a still more primordial fashion, in which a command of strong adjectives was to be chiefly noted.
This cabin was not his, by the way, having been built several years previously by a couple of miners who had got out a raft of logs at that point for a grub-stake. They had been most hospitable lads, and, after they abandoned it, travelers who knew the route made it an object to arrive there at nightfall. It was very handy, saving them all the time and toil of pitching camp; and it was an unwritten rule that the last man left a neat pile of firewood for the next comer. Rarely a night pa.s.sed but from half a dozen to a score of men crowded into its shelter. Jacob Kent noted these things, exercised squatter sovereignty, and moved in.
Thenceforth, the weary travelers were mulcted a dollar per head for the privilege of sleeping on the floor, Jacob Kent weighing the dust and never failing to steal the down-weight. Besides, he so contrived that his transient guests chopped his wood for him and carried his water. This was rank piracy, but his victims were an easy-going breed, and while they detested him, they yet permitted him to flourish in his sins.
One afternoon in April he sat by his door,--for all the world like a predatory spider,--marvelling at the heat of the returning sun, and keeping an eye on the trail for prospective flies. The Yukon lay at his feet, a sea of ice, disappearing around two great bends to the north and south, and stretching an honest two miles from bank to bank. Over its rough breast ran the sled-trail, a slender sunken line, eighteen inches wide and two thousand miles in length, with more curses distributed to the linear foot than any other road in or out of all Christendom.
Jacob Kent was feeling particularly good that afternoon. The record had been broken the previous night, and he had sold his hospitality to no less than twenty-eight visitors. True, it had been quite uncomfortable, and four had snored beneath his bunk all night; but then it had added appreciable weight to the sack in which he kept his gold dust. That sack, with its glittering yellow treasure, was at once the chief delight and the chief bane of his existence. Heaven and h.e.l.l lay within its slender mouth. In the nature of things, there being no privacy to his one-roomed dwelling, he was tortured by a constant fear of theft. It would be very easy for these bearded, desperate-looking strangers to make away with it. Often he dreamed that such was the case, and awoke in the grip of nightmare. A select number of these robbers haunted him through his dreams, and he came to know them quite well, especially the bronzed leader with the gash on his right cheek. This fellow was the most persistent of the lot, and, because of him, he had, in his waking moments, constructed several score of hiding-places in and about the cabin. After a concealment he would breathe freely again, perhaps for several nights, only to collar the Man with the Gash in the very act of unearthing the sack. Then, on awakening in the midst of the usual struggle, he would at once get up and transfer the bag to a new and more ingenious crypt. It was not that he was the direct victim of these phantasms; but he believed in omens and thought-transference, and he deemed these dream-robbers to be the astral projection of real personages who happened at those particular moments, no matter where they were in the flesh, to be harboring designs, in the spirit, upon his wealth. So he continued to bleed the unfortunates who crossed his threshold, and at the same time to add to his trouble with every ounce that went into the sack.
As he sat sunning himself, a thought came to Jacob Kent that brought him to his feet with a jerk. The pleasures of life had culminated in the continual weighing and reweighing of his dust; but a shadow had been thrown upon this pleasant avocation, which he had hitherto failed to brush aside. His gold-scales were quite small; in fact, their maximum was a pound and a half,--eighteen ounces,--while his h.o.a.rd mounted up to something like three and a third times that. He had never been able to weigh it all at one operation, and hence considered himself to have been shut out from a new and most edifying coign of contemplation. Being denied this, half the pleasure of possession had been lost; nay, he felt that this miserable obstacle actually minimized the fact, as it did the strength, of possession. It was the solution of this problem flashing across his mind that had just brought him to his feet. He searched the trail carefully in either direction. There was nothing in sight, so he went inside.
In a few seconds he had the table cleared away and the scales set up. On one side he placed the stamped disks to the equivalent of fifteen ounces, and balanced it with dust on the other. Replacing the weights with dust, he then had thirty ounces precisely balanced. These, in turn, he placed together on one side and again balanced with more dust. By this time the gold was exhausted, and he was sweating liberally. He trembled with ecstasy, ravished beyond measure. Nevertheless he dusted the sack thoroughly, to the last least grain, till the balance was overcome and one side of the scales sank to the table. Equilibrium, however, was restored by the addition of a pennyweight and five grains to the opposite side. He stood, head thrown back, transfixed. The sack was empty, but the potentiality of the scales had become immeasurable. Upon them he could weigh any amount, from the tiniest grain to pounds upon pounds.
Mammon laid hot fingers on his heart. The sun swung on its westering way till it flashed through the open doorway, full upon the yellow-burdened scales. The precious heaps, like the golden b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a bronze Cleopatra, flung back the light in a mellow glow. Time and s.p.a.ce were not.
"Gawd blime me! but you "ave the makin" of several quid there, "aven"t you?"
Jacob Kent wheeled about, at the same time reaching for his double-barrelled shotgun, which stood handy. But when his eyes lit on the intruder"s face, he staggered back dizzily. _It was the face of the Man with the Gash_!
The man looked at him curiously.
"Oh, that"s all right," he said, waving his hand deprecatingly. "You needn"t think as I"ll "arm you or your blasted dust.
"You"re a rum "un, you are," he added reflectively, as he watched the sweat pouring from off Kent"s face and the quavering of his knees.
"W"y don"t you pipe up an" say somethin"?" he went on, as the other struggled for breath. "Wot"s gone wrong o" your gaff? Anythink the matter?"
"W--w--where"d you get it?" Kent at last managed to articulate, raising a shaking forefinger to the ghastly scar which seamed the other"s cheek.
"Shipmate stove me down with a marlin-spike from the main-royal. An" now as you "ave your figger"ead in trim, wot I want to know is, wot"s it to you? That"s wot I want to know--wot"s it to you? Gawd blime me! do it "urt you? Ain"t it smug enough for the likes o" you? That"s wot I want to know!"
"No, no," Kent answered, sinking upon a stool with a sickly grin. "I was just wondering."
"Did you ever see the like?" the other went on truculently.
"No."
"Ain"t it a beute?"
"Yes." Kent nodded his head approvingly, intent on humoring this strange visitor, but wholly unprepared for the outburst which was to follow his effort to be agreeable.
"You blasted, bloomin", burgoo-eatin" son-of-a-sea-swab! Wot do you mean, a sayin" the most onsightly thing Gawd Almighty ever put on the face o" man is a beute? Wot do you mean, you--"
And thereat this fiery son of the sea broke off into a string of Oriental profanity, mingling G.o.ds and devils, lineages and men, metaphors and monsters, with so savage a virility that Jacob Kent was paralyzed. He shrank back, his arms lifted as though to ward off physical violence. So utterly unnerved was he that the other paused in the mid-swing of a gorgeous peroration and burst into thunderous laughter.
"The sun"s knocked the bottom out o" the trail," said the Man with the Gash, between departing paroxysms of mirth. "An" I only "ope as you"ll appreciate the hoppertunity of consortin" with a man o" my mug. Get steam up in that fire-box o" your"n. I"m goin" to unrig the dogs an"
grub "em. An" don"t be shy o" the wood, my lad; there"s plenty more where that come from, and it"s you"ve got the time to sling an axe. An"
tote up a bucket o" water while you"re about it. Lively! or I"ll run you down, so "elp me!"
Such a thing was unheard of. Jacob Kent was making the fire, chopping wood, packing water--doing menial tasks for a guest! When Jim Cardegee left Dawson, it was with his head filled with the iniquities of this roadside Shylock; and all along the trail his numerous victims had added to the sum of his crimes. Now, Jim Cardegee, with the sailor"s love for a sailor"s joke, had determined, when he pulled into the cabin, to bring its inmate down a peg or so. That he had succeeded beyond expectation he could not help but remark, though he was in the dark as to the part the gash on his cheek had played in it. But while he could not understand, he saw the terror it created, and resolved to exploit it as remorselessly as would any modern trader a choice bit of merchandise.
"Strike me blind, but you"re a "ustler," he said admiringly, his head c.o.c.ked to one side, as his host bustled about. "You never "ort to "ave gone Klondiking. It"s the keeper of a pub" you was laid out for. An"
it"s often as I "ave "eard the lads up an" down the river speak o" you, but I "adn"t no idea you was so jolly nice."
Jacob Kent experienced a tremendous yearning to try his shotgun on him, but the fascination of the gash was too potent. This was the real Man with the Gash, the man who had so often robbed him in the spirit. This, then, was the embodied ent.i.ty of the being whose astral form had been projected into his dreams, the man who had so frequently harbored designs against his h.o.a.rd; hence--there could be no other conclusion--this Man with the Gash had now come in the flesh to dispossess him. And that gash! He could no more keep his eyes from it than stop the beating of his heart. Try as he would, they wandered back to that one point as inevitably as the needle to the pole.
"Do it "urt you?" Jim Cardegee thundered suddenly, looking up from the spreading of his blankets and encountering the rapt gaze of the other.
"It strikes me as "ow it "ud be the proper thing for you to draw your jib, douse the glim, an" turn in, seein" as "ow it worrits you. Jes" lay to that, you swab, or so "elp me I"ll take a pull on your peak-purchases!"
Kent was so nervous that it took three puffs to blow out the slush-lamp, and he crawled into his blankets without even removing his moccasins. The sailor was soon snoring l.u.s.tily from his hard bed on the floor, but Kent lay staring up into the blackness, one hand on the shotgun, resolved not to close his eyes the whole night. He had not had an opportunity to secrete his five pounds of gold, and it lay in the ammunition box at the head of his bunk. But, try as he would, he at last dozed off with the weight of his dust heavy on his soul. Had he not inadvertently fallen asleep with his mind in such condition, the somnambulic demon would not have been invoked, nor would Jim Cardegee have gone mining next day with a dish-pan.
The fire fought a losing battle, and at last died away, while the frost penetrated the mossy c.h.i.n.ks between the logs and chilled the inner atmosphere. The dogs outside ceased their howling, and, curled up in the snow, dreamed of salmon-stocked heavens where dog-drivers and kindred task-masters were not. Within, the sailor lay like a log, while his host tossed restlessly about, the victim of strange fantasies. As midnight drew near he suddenly threw off the blankets and got up. It was remarkable that he could do what he then did without ever striking a light. Perhaps it was because of the darkness that he kept his eyes shut, and perhaps it was for fear he would see the terrible gash on the cheek of his visitor; but, be this as it may, it is a fact that, unseeing, he opened his ammunition box, put a heavy charge into the muzzle of the shotgun without spilling a particle, rammed it down with double wads, and then put everything away and got back into bed.
Just as daylight laid its steel-gray fingers on the parchment window, Jacob Kent awoke. Turning on his elbow, he raised the lid and peered into the ammunition box. Whatever he saw, or whatever he did not see, exercised a very peculiar effect upon him, considering his neurotic temperament. He glanced at the sleeping man on the floor, let the lid down gently, and rolled over on his back. It was an unwonted calm that rested on his face. Not a muscle quivered. There was not the least sign of excitement or perturbation. He lay there a long while, thinking, and when he got up and began to move about, it was in a cool, collected manner, without noise and without hurry.
It happened that a heavy wooden peg had been driven into the ridge-pole just above Jim Cardegee"s head. Jacob Kent, working softly, ran a piece of half-inch manila over it, bringing both ends to the ground. One end he tied about his waist, and in the other he rove a running noose. Then he c.o.c.ked his shotgun and laid it within reach, by the side of numerous moose-hide thongs. By an effort of will he bore the sight of the scar, slipped the noose over the sleeper"s head, and drew it taut by throwing back on his weight, at the same time seizing the gun and bringing it to bear.
Jim Cardegee awoke, choking, bewildered, staring down the twin wells of steel.
"Where is it?" Kent asked, at the same time slacking on the rope.
"You blasted--ugh--"
Kent merely threw back his weight, shutting off the other"s wind.
"Bloomin"--Bur--ugh--"
"Where is it?" Kent repeated.
"Wot?" Cardegee asked, as soon as he had caught his breath.
"The gold-dust."