"n.o.body at home," laughed Harris Topping, day labourer, husband of Annie Tarwater, and father of her nine children.
The kitchen door opened to admit the old man, returning from feeding his horses. The song had ceased from his lips; but Mary was irritable from a burnt hand and a grandchild whose stomach refused to digest properly diluted cows" milk.
"Now there ain"t no use you carryin" on that way, father," she tackled him. "The time"s past for you to cut and run for a place like the Klondike, and singing won"t buy you nothing."
"Just the same," he answered quietly. "I bet I could go to that Klondike place and pick up enough gold to buy back the Tarwater lands."
"Old fool!" Annie contributed.
"You couldn"t buy them back for less"n three hundred thousand and then some," was William"s effort at squelching him.
"Then I could pick up three hundred thousand, and then some, if I was only there," the old man retorted placidly.
"Thank G.o.d you can"t walk there, or you"d be startin", I know,"
Mary cried. "Ocean travel costs money."
"I used to have money," her father said humbly.
"Well, you ain"t got any now--so forget it," William advised.
"Them times is past, like roping bear with Bill Ping. There ain"t no more bear."
"Just the same--"
But Mary cut him off. Seizing the day"s paper from the kitchen table, she flourished it savagely under her aged progenitor"s nose.
"What do those Klondikers say? There it is in cold print. Only the young and robust can stand the Klondike. It"s worse than the north pole. And they"ve left their dead a-plenty there themselves.
Look at their pictures. You"re forty years older "n the oldest of them."
John Tarwater did look, but his eyes strayed to other photographs on the highly sensational front page.
"And look at the photys of them nuggets they brought down," he said. "I know gold. Didn"t I gopher twenty thousand outa the Merced? And wouldn"t it a-ben a hundred thousand if that cloudburst hadn"t busted my wing-dam? Now if I was only in the Klondike--"
"Crazy as a loon," William sneered in open aside to the rest.
"A nice way to talk to your father," Old Man Tarwater censured mildly. "My father"d have walloped the tar out of me with a single-tree if I"d spoke to him that way."
"But you ARE crazy, father--" William began.
"Reckon you"re right, son. And that"s where my father wasn"t crazy. He"d a-done it."
"The old man"s been reading some of them magazine articles about men who succeeded after forty," Annie jibed.
"And why not, daughter?" he asked. "And why can"t a man succeed after he"s seventy? I was only seventy this year. And mebbe I could succeed if only I could get to the Klondike--"
"Which you ain"t going to get to," Mary shut him off.
"Oh, well, then," he sighed, "seein"s I ain"t, I might just as well go to bed."
He stood up, tall, gaunt, great-boned and gnarled, a splendid ruin of a man. His ragged hair and whiskers were not grey but snowy white, as were the tufts of hair that stood out on the backs of his huge bony fingers. He moved toward the door, opened it, sighed, and paused with a backward look.
"Just the same," he murmured plaintively, "the bottoms of my feet is itching something terrible."
Long before the family stirred next morning, his horses fed and harnessed by lantern light, breakfast cooked and eaten by lamp fight, Old Man Tarwater was off and away down Tarwater Valley on the road to Kelterville. Two things were unusual about this usual trip which he had made a thousand and forty times since taking the mail contract. He did not drive to Kelterville, but turned off on the main road south to Santa Rosa. Even more remarkable than this was the paper-wrapped parcel between his feet. It contained his one decent black suit, which Mary had been long reluctant to see him wear any more, not because it was shabby, but because, as he guessed what was at the back of her mind, it was decent enough to bury him in.
And at Santa Rosa, in a second-hand clothes shop, he sold the suit outright for two dollars and a half. From the same obliging shopman he received four dollars for the wedding ring of his long- dead wife. The span of horses and the wagon he disposed of for seventy-five dollars, although twenty-five was all he received down in cash. Chancing to meet Alton Granger on the street, to whom never before had he mentioned the ten dollars loaned him in "74, he reminded Alton Granger of the little affair, and was promptly paid.
Also, of all unbelievable men to be in funds, he so found the town drunkard for whom he had bought many a drink in the old and palmy days. And from him John Tarwater borrowed a dollar. Finally, he took the afternoon train to San Francisco.
A dozen days later, carrying a half-empty canvas sack of blankets and old clothes, he landed on the beach of Dyea in the thick of the great Klondike Rush. The beach was screaming bedlam. Ten thousand tons of outfit lay heaped and scattered, and twice ten thousand men struggled with it and clamoured about it. Freight, by Indian-back, over Chilcoot to Lake Linderman, had jumped from sixteen to thirty cents a pound, which latter was a rate of six hundred dollars a ton. And the sub-arctic winter gloomed near at hand. All knew it, and all knew that of the twenty thousand of them very few would get across the pa.s.ses, leaving the rest to winter and wait for the late spring thaw.
Such the beach old John Tarwater stepped upon; and straight across the beach and up the trail toward Chilcoot he headed, cackling his ancient chant, a very Grandfather Argus himself, with no outfit worry in the world, for he did not possess any outfit. That night he slept on the flats, five miles above Dyea, at the head of canoe navigation. Here the Dyea River became a rushing mountain torrent, plunging out of a dark canyon from the glaciers that fed it far above.
And here, early next morning, he beheld a little man weighing no more than a hundred, staggering along a foot-log under all of a hundred pounds of flour strapped on his back. Also, he beheld the little man stumble off the log and fall face-downward in a quiet eddy where the water was two feet deep and proceed quietly to drown. It was no desire of his to take death so easily, but the flour on his back weighed as much as he and would not let him up.
"Thank you, old man," he said to Tarwater, when the latter had dragged him up into the air and ash.o.r.e.
While he unlaced his shoes and ran the water out, they had further talk. Next, he fished out a ten-dollar gold-piece and offered it to his rescuer.
Old Tarwater shook his head and shivered, for the ice-water had wet him to his knees.
"But I reckon I wouldn"t object to settin" down to a friendly meal with you."
"Ain"t had breakfast?" the little man, who was past forty and who had said his name was Anson, queried with a glance frankly curious.
"Nary bite," John Tarwater answered.
"Where"s your outfit? Ahead?"
"Nary outfit."
"Expect to buy your grub on the Inside?"
"Nary a dollar to buy it with, friend. Which ain"t so important as a warm bite of breakfast right now."
In Anson"s camp, a quarter of a mile on, Tarwater found a slender, red-whiskered young man of thirty cursing over a fire of wet willow wood. Introduced as Charles, he transferred his scowl and wrath to Tarwater, who, genially oblivious, devoted himself to the fire, took advantage of the chill morning breeze to create a draught which the other had left stupidly blocked by stones, and soon developed less smoke and more flame. The third member of the party, Bill Wilson, or Big Bill as they called him, came in with a hundred-and-forty-pound pack; and what Tarwater esteemed to be a very rotten breakfast was dished out by Charles. The mush was half cooked and mostly burnt, the bacon was charred carbon, and the coffee was unspeakable.
Immediately the meal was wolfed down the three partners took their empty pack-straps and headed down trail to where the remainder of their outfit lay at the last camp a mile away. And old Tarwater became busy. He washed the dishes, foraged dry wood, mended a broken pack-strap, put an edge on the butcher-knife and camp-axe, and repacked the picks and shovels into a more carryable parcel.
What had impressed him during the brief breakfast was the sort of awe in which Anson and Big Bill stood of Charles. Once, during the morning, while Anson took a breathing spell after bringing in another hundred-pound pack, Tarwater delicately hinted his impression.
"You see, it"s this way," Anson said. "We"ve divided our leadership. We"ve got specialities. Now I"m a carpenter. When we get to Lake Linderman, and the trees are chopped and whipsawed into planks, I"ll boss the building of the boat. Big Bill is a logger and miner. So he"ll boss getting out the logs and all mining operations. Most of our outfit"s ahead. We went broke paying the Indians to pack that much of it to the top of Chilcoot. Our last partner is up there with it, moving it along by himself down the other side. His name"s Liverpool, and he"s a sailor. So, when the boat"s built, he"s the boss of the outfit to navigate the lakes and rapids to Klondike.
"And Charles--this Mr. Crayton--what might his speciality be?"
Tarwater asked.
"He"s the business man. When it comes to business and organization he"s boss."
"Hum," Tarwater pondered. "Very lucky to get such a bunch of specialities into one outfit."