"Oh, I"ve had my turn at it. And just by luck I found I could play another--a safer game, and not bad fun either." He sat up straight and shot his hands down deep in the pockets of his mackinaws. "I"ve got a good thing, and I"m willing to stay with it."
The company looked at him coldly.
"Well," drawled Potts, "you can look after the fur trade; give me a modest little claim in the Klond.y.k.e."
"Oh, Klond.y.k.e! Klond.y.k.e!" Benham got up and stepped over Kaviak on his way to the fire. He lit a short briarwood with a flaming stick and turned about. "Shall I tell you fellows a little secret about the Klond.y.k.e?" He held up the burning brand in the dim room with telling emphasis. The smoke and flame blew black and orange across his face as he said:
"_Every dollar that"s taken out of the Klond.y.k.e in gold-dust will cost three dollars in coin_."
A sense of distinct dislike to Benham had spread through the company--a fellow who called American enterprise love of gambling, for whom heroism was foolhardy, and hope insane. Where was a pioneer so bold he could get up now and toast the Klond.y.k.e? Who, now, without grim misgiving, could forecast a rosy future for each man at the board? And that, in brief, had been the programme.
"Oh, help the puddin", Colonel," said the Boy like one who starts up from an evil dream.
But they sat chilled and moody, eating plum-pudding as if it had been so much beans and bacon. Mac felt Robert Bruce"s expensive education slipping out of reach. Potts saw his girl, tired of waiting, taking up with another fellow. The Boy"s Orange Grove was farther off than Florida. Schiff and Hardy wondered, for a moment, who was the gainer for all their killing hardship? Not they, at present, although there was the prospect--the hope--oh, d.a.m.n the Trader!
The Colonel made the punch. O"Flynn drained his cup without waiting for the mockery of that first toast--_To our Enterprise_--although no one had taken more interest in the programme than O"Flynn. Benham talked about the Anvik saw-mill, and the money made in wood camps along the river. n.o.body listened, though everyone else sat silent, smoking and sulkily drinking his punch.
Kaviak"s demand for some of the beverage reminded the Boy of the Christmas-tree. It had been intended as a climax to wind up the entertainment, but to produce it now might save the situation. He got up and pulled on his parki.
"Back "n a minute." But he was gone a long time.
Benham looked down the toast-list and smiled inwardly, for it was Klond.y.k.ed from top to bottom. The others, too, stole uneasy glances at that programme, staring them in the face, unabashed, covertly ironic--nay, openly jeering. They actually hadn"t noticed the fact before, but every blessed speech was aimed straight at the wonderful gold camp across the line--not the Klond.y.k.e of Benham"s croaking, but the Klond.y.k.e of their dreams.
Even the death"s head at the feast regretted the long postponement of so spirited a programme, interspersed, as it promised to be, with songs, dances, and "tricks," and winding up with an original poem, "He won"t be happy till he gets it."
Benham"s Indian had got up and gone out. Kaviak had tried to go too, but the door was slammed in his face. He stood there with his nose to the crack exactly as a dog does. Suddenly he ran back to Mac and tugged at his arm. Even the dull white men could hear an ominous snarling among the Mahlemeuts.
Out of the distance a faint answering howl of derision from some enemy, advancing or at bay. It was often like this when two teams put up at the Big Chimney Camp.
"Reckon our dogs are gettin" into trouble," said Salmon P. anxiously to his deaf and crippled partner.
"It"s nothing," says the Trader. "A Siwash dog of any spirit is always trailing his coat"; and Salmon P. subsided.
Not so Kaviak. Back to the door, head up, he listened. They had observed the oddity before. The melancholy note of the Mahlemeut never yet had failed to stir his sombre little soul. He was standing now looking up at the latch, high, and made for white men, eager, breathing fast, listening to that dismal sound that is like nothing else in nature--listening as might an exiled Scot to the skirl of bagpipes; listening as a Tyrolese who hears yodelling on foreign hills, or as the dweller in a distant land to the sound of the dear home speech.
The noise outside grew louder, the air was rent with howls of rage and defiance.
"Sounds as if there"s "bout a million mad dogs on your front stoop,"
says Schiff, knowing there must be a great deal going on if any of it reached his ears.
"You set still." His pardner pushed him down on his stool. "Mr. Benham and I"ll see what"s up."
The Trader leisurely opened the door, Salmon P. keeping modestly behind, while Kaviak darted forward only to be caught back by Mac. An avalanche of sound swept in--a mighty howling and snarling and cracking of whips, and underneath the higher clamour, human voices--and in dashes the Boy, powdered with snow, laughing and balancing carefully in his mittened hands a little Yukon spruce, every needle diamond-pointed, every st.u.r.dy branch white with frost crystals and soft woolly snow, and bearing its little harvest of curious fruit--sweet-cake rings and stars and two gingerbread men hanging by pack-thread from the white and green branches, the Noah"s Ark lodged in one crotch, the very amateur snow-shoes in another, and the lost toys wrapped up, transfigured in tobacco-foil, dangling merrily before Kaviak"s incredulous eyes.
"There"s your Christmas-tree!" and the bringer, who had carried the tree so that no little puff of snow or delicate crystal should fall off, having made a successful entrance and dazzled the child, gave way to the strong excitement that shot light out of his eyes and brought scarlet into his cheeks. "Here, take it!" He dashed the tree down in front of Kaviak, and a sudden storm agitated its st.u.r.dy branches; it snowed about the floor, and the strange fruit whirled and spun in the blast. Kaviak clutched it, far too dazed to do more than stare. The Boy stamped the snow off his mucklucks on the threshold, and dashed his cap against the lintel, calling out:
"Come in! come in! let the dogs fight it out." Behind him, between the snow-walls at the entrance, had appeared two faces--weather-beaten men, crowding in the narrow s.p.a.ce, craning to see the reception of the Christmas-tree and the inside of the famous Big Chimney Cabin.
"These gentlemen," says the Boy, shaking with excitement as he ushered them in, "are Mr. John Dillon and General Lighter. They"ve just done the six hundred and twenty-five miles from Minook with dogs over the ice! They"ve been forty days on the trail, and they"re as fit as fiddles. An" no yonder, for Little Minook has made big millionaires o"
both o" them!"
Millionaires or not, they"ll never, either of them, create a greater sensation than they did that Christmas Day, in the Big Chimney Cabin, on the bleak hillside, up above the Never-Know-What. Here was Certainty at last! Here was Justification!
Precious symbols of success, they were taken by both hands, they were shaken and wildly welcomed, "peeled," set down by the fire, given punch, asked ten thousand questions all in a breath, rejoiced over, and looked up to as glorious dispellers of doubt, blessed saviours from despair.
Schiff had tottered forward on bandaged feet, hand round ear, mouth open, as if to swallow whole whatever he couldn"t hear. The Colonel kept on bowing magnificently at intervals and pressing refreshment, O"Flynn slapping his thigh and reiterating, "Be the Siven!" Potts not only widened his mouth from ear to ear, but, as O"Flynn said after, "stretched it clane round his head and tyed it up furr jy in a nate knot behind." Benham took a back seat, and when anybody remembered him for the next hour it was openly to gloat over his discomfiture.
John Dillon was one of those frontiersmen rightly called typically American. You see him again and again--as a cowboy in Texas, as a miner or herdsman all through the Far West; you see him cutting lumber along the Columbia, or throwing the diamond hitch as he goes from camp to camp for gold and freedom. He takes risks cheerfully, and he never works for wages when he can go "on his own."
John Dillon was like the majority, tall, lean, muscular, not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, a face almost gaunt in its clearness of cut, a thin straight nose, chin not heavy but well curved out, the eye orbit arched and deep, a frown fixed between thick eyebrows, and few words in his firm, rather grim-looking mouth. He was perhaps thirty-six, had been "in" ten years, and had mined before that in Idaho. Under his striped parki he was dressed in spotted deer-skin, wore white deer-skin mucklucks, Arctic cap, and moose mittens. Pinned on his inner shirt was the badge of the Yukon Order of Pioneers--a footrule bent like the letter A above a scroll of leaves, and in the angle two linked O"s over Y. P.
It was the other man--the western towns are full of General Lighters--who did the talking. An attorney from Seattle, he had come up in the July rush with very little but boundless a.s.surance, fell in with an old miner who had been grubstaked by Captain Rainey out of the _Oklahoma"s_ supplies, and got to Minook before the river went to sleep.
"No, we"re not pardners exactly," he said, glancing good-humouredly at Dillon; "we"ve worked separate, but we"re going home two by two like animals into the Ark. We"ve got this in common. We"ve both "struck ile"--haven"t we, Dillon?"
Dillon nodded.
"Little Minook"s as rich a camp as Dawson, and the gold"s of higher grade--isn"t it, Dillon?"
"That"s right."
"One of the many great advantages of Minook is that it"s the _nearest_ place on the river where they"ve struck pay dirt." says the General.
"And another great advantage is that it"s on the American side of the line."
"What advantage is that?" Mac grated out.
"Just the advantage of not having all your hard earnings taken away by an iniquitous tax."
"Look out! this fella"s a Britisher--"
"Don"t care if he is, and no disrespect to you, sir. The Canadians in the Klond.y.k.e are the first to say the tax is nothing short of highway robbery. You"ll see! The minute they hear of gold across the line there"ll be a stampede out of Dawson. I can put you in the way of getting a claim for eight thousand dollars that you can take eighty thousand out of next August, with no inspector coming round to check your clean-up, and no Government grabbing at your royalties."
"Why aren"t you taking out that eighty thousand yourself?" asked Mac bluntly.
"Got more "n one man can handle," answered the General. "Reckon we"ve earned a holiday."
Dillon backed him up.
"Then it isn"t shortage in provisions that takes you outside," said the Boy.
"Not much."
"Plenty of food at Rampart City; that"s the name o" the town where the Little Minook meets the Yukon."
"Food at gold-craze prices, I suppose."
"No. Just about the same they quote you in Seattle."