The Novels of Jack London: Part 1

The Cruise of the Dazzler

This is London’s first full-length novel, which was published in 1902. Set in old San Francisco Bay, the story concerns a young man who becomes involved with “oyster pirates” making raids on commercial oyster beds.

The first edition

London, shortly after the publication of his first novel

Foreword

Tempting boys to be what they should be — giving them in wholesome form what they want — that is the purpose and power of Scouting. To help parents and leaders of youth secure books boys like best that are also best for boys, the Boy Scouts of America organized EVERY BOY’S LIBRARY. The books included, formerly sold at prices ranging from $1.50 to $2.00 but, by special arrangement with the several publishers interested, are now sold in the EVERY BOY’S LIBRARY Edition at $1.00 per volume.

The books of EVERY BOY’S LIBRARY were selected by the Library Commission of the Boy Scouts of America, consisting of George F. Bowerman, Librarian, Public Library of the District of Columbia; Harrison W. Craver, Director, Engineering Societies Library, New York City; Claude G. Leland, Superintendent, Bureau of Libraries, Board of Education, New York City; Edward F. Stevens, Librarian, Pratt Institute Free Library, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Franklin K. Mathiews, Chief Scout Librarian. Only such books were chosen by the Commission as proved to be, by a nation wide canvas, most in demand by the boys themselves. Their popularity is further attested by the fact that in the EVERY BOY’S LIBRARY Edition, more than a million and a quarter copies of these books have already been sold.

We know so well, are reminded so often of the worth of the good book and great, that too often we fail to observe or understand the influence for good of a boy’s recreational reading. Such books may influence him for good or ill as profoundly as his play activities, of which they are a vital part. The needful thing is to find stories in which the heroes have the characteristics boys so much admire — unquenchable courage, immense resourcefulness, absolute fidelity, conspicuous greatness. We believe the books of EVERY BOY’S LIBRARY measurably well meet this challenge.

BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA,

James E. West

Chief Scout Executive.

Part I

Chapter I. Brother and Sister

They ran across the shining sand, the Pacific thundering its long surge at their backs, and when they gained the roadway leaped upon bicycles and dived at faster pace into the green avenues of the park. There were three of them, three boys, in as many bright-colored sweaters, and they “scorched” along the cycle-path as dangerously near the speed-limit as is the custom of boys in bright-colored sweaters to go. They may have exceeded the speed-limit. A mounted park policeman thought so, but was not sure, and contented himself with cautioning them as they flashed by. They acknowledged the warning promptly, and on the next turn of the path as promptly forgot it, which is also a custom of boys in bright-colored sweaters.

Shooting out through the entrance to Golden Gate Park, they turned into San Francisco, and took the long sweep of the descending hills at a rate that caused pedestrians to turn and watch them anxiously. Through the city streets the bright sweaters flew, turning and twisting to escape climbing the steeper hills, and, when the steep hills were unavoidable, doing stunts to see which would first gain the top.

The boy who more often hit up the pace, led the scorching, and instituted the stunts was called Joe by his companions. It was “follow the leader,” and he led, the merriest and boldest in the bunch. But as they pedaled into the Western Addition, among the large and comfortable residences, his laughter became less loud and frequent, and he unconsciously lagged in the rear. At Laguna and Vallejo streets his companions turned off to the right.

“So long, Fred,” he called as he turned his wheel to the left. “So long, Charley.”

“See you to-night!” they called back.

“No — I can’t come,” he answered.

“Aw, come on,” they begged.

“No, I’ve got to dig. — So long!”

As he went on alone, his face grew grave and a vague worry came into his eyes. He began resolutely to whistle, but this dwindled away till it was a thin and very subdued little sound, which ceased altogether as he rode up the driveway to a large two-storied house.

“Oh, Joe!”

He hesitated before the door to the library. Bessie was there, he knew, studiously working up her lessons. She must be nearly through with them, too, for she was always done before dinner, and dinner could not be many minutes away. As for his lessons, they were as yet untouched. The thought made him angry. It was bad enough to have one’s sister — and two years younger at that — in the same grade, but to have her continually head and shoulders above him in scholarship was a most intolerable thing. Not that he was dull. No one knew better than himself that he was not dull. But somehow — he did not quite know how — his mind was on other things and he was usually unprepared.

“Joe — please come here.” There was the slightest possible plaintive note in her voice this time.

“Well?” he said, thrusting aside the portière with an impetuous movement.

He said it gruffly, but he was half sorry for it the next instant when he saw a slender little girl regarding him with wistful eyes across the big reading-table heaped with books. She was curled up, with pencil and pad, in an easy-chair of such generous dimensions that it made her seem more delicate and fragile than she really was.

“What is it, Sis?” he asked more gently, crossing over to her side.

She took his hand in hers and pressed it against her cheek, and as he stood beside her came closer to him with a nestling movement.

“What is the matter, Joe dear?” she asked softly. “Won’t you tell me?”

He remained silent. It struck him as ridiculous to confess his troubles to a little sister, even if her reports were higher than his. And the little sister struck him as ridiculous to demand his troubles of him. “What a soft cheek she has!” he thought as she pressed her face gently against his hand. If he could but tear himself away — it was all so foolish! Only he might hurt her feelings, and, in his experience, girls’ feelings were very easily hurt.

She opened his fingers and kissed the palm of his hand. It was like a rose-leaf falling; it was also her way of asking her question over again.

“Nothing’s the matter,” he said decisively. And then, quite inconsistently, he blurted out, “Father!”

His worry was now in her eyes. “But father is so good and kind, Joe,” she began. “Why don’t you try to please him? He doesn’t ask much of you, and it’s all for your own good. It’s not as though you were a fool, like some boys. If you would only study a little bit — ”

“That’s it! Lecturing!” he exploded, tearing his hand roughly away. “Even you are beginning to lecture me now. I suppose the cook and the stable-boy will be at it next.”

He shoved his hands into his pockets and looked forward into a melancholy and desolate future filled with interminable lectures and lecturers innumerable.

“Was that what you wanted me for?” he demanded, turning to go.

She caught at his hand again. “No, it wasn’t; only you looked so worried that I thought — I — ” Her voice broke, and she began again freshly. “What I wanted to tell you was that we’re planning a trip across the bay to Oakland, next Saturday, for a tramp in the hills.”

“Who’s going?”

“Myrtle Hayes — ”

“What! That little softy?” he interrupted.

“I don’t think she is a softy,” Bessie answered with spirit. “She’s one of the sweetest girls I know.”

“Which isn’t saying much, considering the girls you know. But go on. Who are the others?”

“Pearl Sayther, and her sister Alice, and Jessie Hilborn, and Sadie French, and Edna Crothers. That’s all the girls.”

Joe sniffed disdainfully. “Who are the fellows, then?”

“Maurice and Felix Clement, Dick Schofield, Burt Layton, and — ”

“That’s enough. Milk-and-water chaps, all of them.”

“I — I wanted to ask you and Fred and Charley,” she said in a quavering voice. “That’s what I called you in for — to ask you to come.”

“And what are you going to do?” he asked.

“Walk, gather wild flowers, — the poppies are all out now, — eat luncheon at some nice place, and — and — ”

“Come home,” he finished for her.

Bessie nodded her head. Joe put his hands in his pockets again, and walked up and down.

“A sissy outfit, that’s what it is,” he said abruptly; “and a sissy program. None of it in mine, please.”

She tightened her trembling lips and struggled on bravely. “What would you rather do?” she asked.

“I’d sooner take Fred and Charley and go off somewhere and do something — well, anything.”

He paused and looked at her. She was waiting patiently for him to proceed. He was aware of his inability to express in words what he felt and wanted, and all his trouble and general dissatisfaction rose up and gripped hold of him.

“Oh, you can’t understand!” he burst out. “You can’t understand. You’re a girl. You like to be prim and neat, and to be good in deportment and ahead in your studies. You don’t care for danger and adventure and such things, and you don’t care for boys who are rough, and have life and go in them, and all that. You like good little boys in white collars, with clothes always clean and hair always combed, who like to stay in at recess and be petted by the teacher and told how they’re always up in their studies; nice little boys who never get into scrapes — who are too busy walking around and picking flowers and eating lunches with girls, to get into scrapes. Oh, I know the kind — afraid of their own shadows, and no more spunk in them than in so many sheep. That’s what they are — sheep. Well, I’m not a sheep, and there’s no more to be said. And I don’t want to go on your picnic, and, what’s more, I’m not going.”

The tears welled up in Bessie’s brown eyes, and her lips were trembling. This angered him unreasonably. What were girls good for, anyway? — always blubbering, and interfering, and carrying on. There was no sense in them.

“A fellow can’t say anything without making you cry,” he began, trying to appease her. “Why, I didn’t mean anything, Sis. I didn’t, sure. I — ”

He paused helplessly and looked down at her. She was sobbing, and at the same time shaking with the effort to control her sobs, while big tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“Oh, you — you girls!” he cried, and strode wrathfully out of the room.

Chapter II. “The Draconian Reforms”

A few minutes later, and still wrathful, Joe went in to dinner. He ate silently, though his father and mother and Bessie kept up a genial flow of conversation. There she was, he communed savagely with his plate, crying one minute, and the next all smiles and laughter. Now that wasn’t his way. If he had anything sufficiently important to cry about, rest assured he wouldn’t get over it for days. Girls were hypocrites, that was all there was to it. They didn’t feel one hundredth part of all that they said when they cried. It stood to reason that they didn’t. It must be that they just carried on because they enjoyed it. It made them feel good to make other people miserable, especially boys. That was why they were always interfering.

Thus reflecting sagely, he kept his eyes on his plate and did justice to the fare; for one cannot scorch from the Cliff House to the Western Addition via the park without being guilty of a healthy appetite.

Now and then his father directed a glance at him in a certain mildly anxious way. Joe did not see these glances, but Bessie saw them, every one. Mr. Bronson was a middle-aged man, well developed and of heavy build, though not fat. His was a rugged face, square-jawed and stern-featured, though his eyes were kindly and there were lines about the mouth that betokened laughter rather than severity. A close examination was not required to discover the resemblance between him and Joe. The same broad forehead and strong jaw characterized them both, and the eyes, taking into consideration the difference of age, were as like as peas from one pod.

“How are you getting on, Joe?” Mr. Bronson asked finally. Dinner was over and they were about to leave the table.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Joe answered carelessly, and then added: “We have examinations to-morrow. I’ll know then.”

“Whither bound?” his mother questioned, as he turned to leave the room. She was a slender, willowy woman, whose brown eyes Bessie’s were, and likewise her tender ways.

“To my room,” Joe answered. “To work,” he supplemented.

She rumpled his hair affectionately, and bent and kissed him. Mr. Bronson smiled approval at him as he went out, and he hurried up the stairs, resolved to dig hard and pass the examinations of the coming day.

Entering his room, he locked the door and sat down at a desk most comfortably arranged for a boy’s study. He ran his eye over his text-books. The history examination came the first thing in the morning, so he would begin on that. He opened the book where a page was turned down, and began to read:

Shortly after the Draconian reforms, a war broke out between Athens and Megara respecting the island of Salamis, to which both cities laid claim.

That was easy; but what were the Draconian reforms? He must look them up. He felt quite studious as he ran over the back pages, till he chanced to raise his eyes above the top of the book and saw on a chair a baseball mask and a catcher’s glove. They shouldn’t have lost that game last Saturday, he thought, and they wouldn’t have, either, if it hadn’t been for Fred. He wished Fred wouldn’t fumble so. He could hold a hundred difficult balls in succession, but when a critical point came, he’d let go of even a dewdrop. He’d have to send him out in the field and bring in Jones to first base. Only Jones was so excitable. He could hold any kind of a ball, no matter how critical the play was, but there was no telling what he would do with the ball after he got it.

Joe came to himself with a start. A pretty way of studying history! He buried his head in his book and began:

Shortly after the Draconian reforms —

He read the sentence through three times, and then recollected that he had not looked up the Draconian reforms.

A knock came at the door. He turned the pages over with a noisy flutter, but made no answer.

The knock was repeated, and Bessie’s “Joe, dear” came to his ears.

“What do you want?” he demanded. But before she could answer he hurried on: “No admittance. I’m busy.”

“I came to see if I could help you,” she pleaded. “I’m all done, and I thought — ”

“Of course you’re all done!” he shouted. “You always are!”

He held his head in both his hands to keep his eyes on the book. But the baseball mask bothered him. The more he attempted to keep his mind on the history the more in his mind’s eye he saw the mask resting on the chair and all the games in which it had played its part.

This would never do. He deliberately placed the book face downward on the desk and walked over to the chair. With a swift sweep he sent both mask and glove hurtling under the bed, and so violently that he heard the mask rebound from the wall.

Shortly after the Draconian reforms, a war broke out between Athens and Megara —

The mask had rolled back from the wall. He wondered if it had rolled back far enough for him to see it. No, he wouldn’t look. What did it matter if it had rolled out? That wasn’t history. He wondered —

He peered over the top of the book, and there was the mask peeping out at him from under the edge of the bed. This was not to be borne. There was no use attempting to study while that mask was around. He went over and fished it out, crossed the room to the closet, and tossed it inside, then locked the door. That was settled, thank goodness! Now he could do some work.

He sat down again.

Shortly after the Draconian reforms, a war broke out between Athens and Megara respecting the island of Salamis, to which, both cities laid claim.

Which was all very well, if he had only found out what the Draconian reforms were. A soft glow pervaded the room, and he suddenly became aware of it. What could cause it? He looked out of the window. The setting sun was slanting its long rays against low-hanging masses of summer clouds, turning them to warm scarlet and rosy red; and it was from them that the red light, mellow and glowing, was flung earthward.

His gaze dropped from the clouds to the bay beneath. The sea-breeze was dying down with the day, and off Fort Point a fishing-boat was creeping into port before the last light breeze. A little beyond, a tug was sending up a twisted pillar of smoke as it towed a three-masted schooner to sea. His eyes wandered over toward the Marin County shore. The line where land and water met was already in darkness, and long shadows were creeping up the hills toward Mount Tamalpais, which was sharply silhouetted against the western sky.

Oh, if he, Joe Bronson, were only on that fishing-boat and sailing in with a deep-sea catch! Or if he were on that schooner, heading out into the sunset, into the world! That was life, that was living, doing something and being something in the world. And, instead, here he was, pent up in a close room, racking his brains about people dead and gone thousands of years before he was born.

He jerked himself away from the window as though held there by some physical force, and resolutely carried his chair and history into the farthest corner of the room, where he sat down with his back to the window.

An instant later, so it seemed to him, he found himself again staring out of the window and dreaming. How he had got there he did not know. His last recollection was the finding of a subheading on a page on the right-hand side of the book which read: “The Laws and Constitution of Draco.” And then, evidently like walking in one’s sleep, he had come to the window. How long had he been there? he wondered. The fishing-boat which he had seen off Fort Point was now crawling into Meiggs’s Wharf. This denoted nearly an hour’s lapse of time. The sun had long since set; a solemn grayness was brooding over the water, and the first faint stars were beginning to twinkle over the crest of Mount Tamalpais.

He turned, with a sigh, to go back into his corner, when a long whistle, shrill and piercing, came to his ears. That was Fred. He sighed again. The whistle repeated itself. Then another whistle joined it. That was Charley. They were waiting on the corner — lucky fellows!

Well, they wouldn’t see him this night. Both whistles arose in duet. He writhed in his chair and groaned. No, they wouldn’t see him this night, he reiterated, at the same time rising to his feet. It was certainly impossible for him to join them when he had not yet learned about the Draconian reforms. The same force which had held him to the window now seemed drawing him across the room to the desk. It made him put the history on top of his school-books, and he had the door unlocked and was half-way into the hall before he realized it. He started to return, but the thought came to him that he could go out for a little while and then come back and do his work.

A very little while, he promised himself, as he went down-stairs. He went down faster and faster, till at the bottom he was going three steps at a time. He popped his cap on his head and went out of the side entrance in a rush; and ere he reached the corner the reforms of Draco were as far away in the past as Draco himself, while the examinations on the morrow were equally far away in the future.

Chapter III. “Brick,” “Sorrel-Top,” and “Reddy”

“What’s up?” Joe asked, as he joined Fred and Charley.

“Kites,” Charley answered. “Come on. We’re tired out waiting for you.”

The three set off down the street to the brow of the hill, where they looked down upon Union Street, far below and almost under their feet. This they called the Pit, and it was well named. Themselves they called the Hill-dwellers, and a descent into the Pit by the Hill-dwellers was looked upon by them as a great adventure.

Scientific kite-flying was one of the keenest pleasures of these three particular Hill-dwellers, and six or eight kites strung out on a mile of twine and soaring into the clouds was an ordinary achievement for them. They were compelled to replenish their kite-supply often; for whenever an accident occurred, and the string broke, or a ducking kite dragged down the rest, or the wind suddenly died out, their kites fell into the Pit, from which place they were unrecoverable. The reason for this was the young people of the Pit were a piratical and robber race with peculiar ideas of ownership and property rights.

On a day following an accident to a kite of one of the Hill-dwellers, the self-same kite could be seen riding the air attached to a string which led down into the Pit to the lairs of the Pit People. So it came about that the Pit People, who were a poor folk and unable to afford scientific kite-flying, developed great proficiency in the art when their neighbors the Hill-dwellers took it up.

There was also an old sailorman who profited by this recreation of the Hill-dwellers; for he was learned in sails and air-currents, and being deft of hand and cunning, he fashioned the best-flying kites that could be obtained. He lived in a rattletrap shanty close to the water, where he could still watch with dim eyes the ebb and flow of the tide, and the ships pass out and in, and where he could revive old memories of the days when he, too, went down to the sea in ships.

To reach his shanty from the Hill one had to pass through the Pit, and thither the three boys were bound. They had often gone for kites in the daytime, but this was their first trip after dark, and they felt it to be, as it indeed was, a hazardous adventure.

In simple words, the Pit was merely the cramped and narrow quarters of the poor, where many nationalities crowded together in cosmopolitan confusion, and lived as best they could, amid much dirt and squalor. It was still early evening when the boys passed through on their way to the sailorman’s shanty, and no mishap befell them, though some of the Pit boys stared at them savagely and hurled a taunting remark after them, now and then.

The sailorman made kites which were not only splendid fliers but which folded up and were very convenient to carry. Each of the boys bought a few, and, with them wrapped in compact bundles and under their arms, started back on the return journey.

“Keep a sharp lookout for the b’ys,” the kite-maker cautioned them. “They’re like to be cruisin’ round after dark.”

“We’re not afraid,” Charley assured him; “and we know how to take care of ourselves.”

Used to the broad and quiet streets of the Hill, the boys were shocked and stunned by the life that teemed in the close-packed quarter. It seemed some thick and monstrous growth of vegetation, and that they were wading through it. They shrank closely together in the tangle of narrow streets as though for protection, conscious of the strangeness of it all, and how unrelated they were to it.

Children and babies sprawled on the sidewalk and under their feet. Bareheaded and unkempt women gossiped in the doorways or passed back and forth with scant marketings in their arms. There was a general odor of decaying fruit and fish, a smell of staleness and putridity. Big hulking men slouched by, and ragged little girls walked gingerly through the confusion with foaming buckets of beer in their hands. There was a clatter and garble of foreign tongues and brogues, shrill cries, quarrels and wrangles, and the Pit pulsed with a great and steady murmur, like the hum of the human hive that it was.

“Phew! I’ll be glad when we’re out of it,” Fred said.

He spoke in a whisper, and Joe and Charley nodded grimly that they agreed with him. They were not inclined to speech, and they walked as rapidly as the crowd permitted, with much the same feelings as those of travelers in a dangerous and hostile jungle.

And danger and hostility stalked in the Pit. The inhabitants seemed to resent the presence of these strangers from the Hill. Dirty little urchins abused them as they passed, snarling with assumed bravery, and prepared to run away at the first sign of attack. And still other little urchins formed a noisy parade at the heels of the boys, and grew bolder with increasing numbers.

“Don’t mind them,” Joe cautioned. “Take no notice, but keep right on. We’ll soon be out of it.”

“No; we’re in for it,” said Fred, in an undertone. “Look there!”

On the corner they were approaching, four or five boys of about their own age were standing. The light from a street-lamp fell upon them and disclosed one with vivid red hair. It could be no other than “Brick” Simpson, the redoubtable leader of a redoubtable gang. Twice within their memory he had led his gang up the Hill and spread panic and terror among the Hill-dwelling young folk, who fled wildly to their homes, while their fathers and mothers hurriedly telephoned for the police.

At sight of the group on the corner, the rabble at the heels of the three boys melted away on the instant with like manifestations of fear. This but increased the anxiety of the boys, though they held boldly on their way.

The red-haired boy detached himself from the group, and stepped before them, blocking their path. They essayed to go around him, but he stretched out his arm.

“Wot yer doin’ here?” he snarled. “Why don’t yer stay where yer b’long?”

“We’re just going home,” Fred said mildly.

Brick looked at Joe. “Wot yer got under yer arm?” he demanded.

Joe contained himself and took no heed of him. “Come on,” he said to Fred and Charley, at the same time starting to brush past the gang-leader.

But with a quick blow Brick Simpson struck him in the face, and with equal quickness snatched the bundle of kites from under his arm.

Joe uttered an inarticulate cry of rage, and, all caution flung to the winds, sprang at his assailant.

This was evidently a surprise to the gang-leader, who expected least of all to be attacked in his own territory. He retreated backward, still clutching the kites, and divided between desire to fight and desire to retain his capture.

The latter desire dominated him, and he turned and fled swiftly down the narrow side-street into a labyrinth of streets and alleys. Joe knew that he was plunging into the wilderness of the enemy’s country, but his sense of both property and pride had been offended, and he took up the pursuit hot-footed.

Fred and Charley followed after, though he outdistanced them, and behind came the three other members of the gang, emitting a whistling call while they ran which was evidently intended for the assembling of the rest of the band. As the chase proceeded, these whistles were answered from many different directions, and soon a score of dark figures were tagging at the heels of Fred and Charley, who, in turn, were straining every muscle to keep the swifter-footed Joe in sight.

Brick Simpson darted into a vacant lot, aiming for a “slip,” as such things are called which are prearranged passages through fences and over sheds and houses and around dark holes and corners, where the unfamiliar pursuer must go more carefully and where the chances are many that he will soon lose the track.

But Joe caught Brick before he could attain his end, and together they rolled over and over in the dirt, locked in each other’s arms. By the time Fred and Charley and the gang had come up, they were on their feet, facing each other.

“Wot d’ ye want, eh?” the red-headed gang-leader was saying in a bullying tone. “Wot d’ ye want? That’s wot I wanter know.”

“I want my kites,” Joe answered.

Brick Simpson’s eyes sparkled at the intelligence. Kites were something he stood in need of himself.

“Then you’ve got to fight fer’em,” he announced.

“Why should I fight for them?” Joe demanded indignantly. “They’re mine.” Which went to show how ignorant he was of the ideas of ownership and property rights which obtained among the People of the Pit.

A chorus of jeers and catcalls went up from the gang, which clustered behind its leader like a pack of wolves.

“Why should I fight for them?” Joe reiterated.

“‘Cos I say so,” Simpson replied. “An’ wot I say goes. Understand?”

But Joe did not understand. He refused to understand that Brick Simpson’s word was law in San Francisco, or any part of San Francisco. His love of honesty and right dealing was offended, and all his fighting blood was up.

“You give those kites to me, right here and now,” he threatened, reaching out his hand for them.

But Simpson jerked them away. “D’ ye know who I am?” he demanded. “I’m Brick Simpson, an’ I don’t’low no one to talk to me in that tone of voice.”

“Better leave him alone,” Charley whispered in Joe’s ear. “What are a few kites? Leave him alone and let’s get out of this.”

“They’re my kites,” Joe said slowly in a dogged manner. “They’re my kites, and I’m going to have them.”

“You can’t fight the crowd,” Fred interfered; “and if you do get the best of him they’ll all pile on you.”

The gang, observing this whispered colloquy, and mistaking it for hesitancy on the part of Joe, set up its wolf-like howling again.

“Afraid! afraid!” the young roughs jeered and taunted. “He’s too high-toned, he is! Mebbe he’ll spoil his nice clean shirt, and then what’ll mama say?”

“Shut up!” their leader snapped authoritatively, and the noise obediently died away.

“Will you give me those kites?” Joe demanded, advancing determinedly.

“Will you fight for’em?” was Simpson’s counter-demand.

“Yes,” Joe answered.

“Fight! fight!” the gang began to howl again.

“And it’s me that’ll see fair play,” said a man’s heavy voice.

All eyes were instantly turned upon the man who had approached unseen and made this announcement. By the electric light, shining brightly on them from the corner, they made him out to be a big, muscular fellow, clad in a working-man’s garments. His feet were incased in heavy brogans, a narrow strap of black leather held his overalls about his waist, and a black and greasy cap was on his head. His face was grimed with coal-dust, and a coarse blue shirt, open at the neck, revealed a wide throat and massive chest.

“An’ who’re you?” Simpson snarled, angry at the interruption.

“None of yer business,” the newcomer retorted tartly. “But, if it’ll do you any good, I’m a fireman on the China steamers, and, as I said, I’m goin’ to see fair play. That’s my business. Your business is to give fair play. So pitch in, and don’t be all night about it.”

The three boys were as pleased by the appearance of the fireman as Simpson and his followers were displeased. They conferred together for several minutes, when Simpson deposited the bundle of kites in the arms of one of his gang and stepped forward.

“Come on, then,” he said, at the same time pulling off his coat.

Joe handed his to Fred, and sprang toward Brick. They put up their fists and faced each other. Almost instantly Simpson drove in a fierce blow and ducked cleverly away and out of reach of the blow which Joe returned. Joe felt a sudden respect for the abilities of his antagonist, but the only effect upon him was to arouse all the doggedness of his nature and make him utterly determined to win.

Awed by the presence of the fireman, Simpson’s followers confined themselves to cheering Brick and jeering Joe. The two boys circled round and round, attacking, feinting, and guarding, and now one and then the other getting in a telling blow. Their positions were in marked contrast. Joe stood erect, planted solidly on his feet, with legs wide apart and head up. On the other hand, Simpson crouched till his head was nearly lost between his shoulders, and all the while he was in constant motion, leaping and springing and manoeuvering in the execution of a score or more of tricks quite new and strange to Joe.

At the end of a quarter of an hour, both were very tired, though Joe was much fresher. Tobacco, ill food, and unhealthy living were telling on the gang-leader, who was panting and sobbing for breath. Though at first (and because of superior skill) he had severely punished Joe, he was now weak and his blows were without force. Growing desperate, he adopted what might be called not an unfair but a mean method of attack: he would manoeuver, leap in and strike swiftly, and then, ducking forward, fall to the ground at Joe’s feet. Joe could not strike him while he was down, and so would step back until he could get on his feet again, when the thing would be repeated.

But Joe grew tired of this, and prepared for him. Timing his blow with Simpson’s attack, he delivered it just as Simpson was ducking forward to fall. Simpson fell, but he fell over on one side, whither he had been driven by the impact of Joe’s fist upon his head. He rolled over and got half-way to his feet, where he remained, crying and gasping. His followers called upon him to get up, and he tried once or twice, but was too exhausted and stunned.

“I give in,” he said. “I’m licked.”

The gang had become silent and depressed at its leader’s defeat.

Joe stepped forward.

“I’ll trouble you for those kites,” he said to the boy who was holding them.

“Oh, I dunno,” said another member of the gang, shoving in between Joe and his property. His hair was also a vivid red. “You’ve got to lick me before you kin have’em.”

“I don’t see that,” Joe said bluntly. “I’ve fought and I’ve won, and there’s nothing more to it.”

“Oh, yes, there is,” said the other. “I’m’Sorrel-top’ Simpson. Brick’s my brother. See?”

And so, in this fashion, Joe learned another custom of the Pit People of which he had been ignorant.

“All right,” he said, his fighting blood more fully aroused than ever by the unjustness of the proceeding. “Come on.”

Sorrel-top Simpson, a year younger than his brother, proved to be a most unfair fighter, and the good-natured fireman was compelled to interfere several times before the second of the Simpson clan lay on the ground and acknowledged defeat.

This time Joe reached for his kites without the slightest doubt that he was to get them. But still another lad stepped in between him and his property. The telltale hair, vividly red, sprouted likewise on this lad’s head, and Joe knew him at once for what he was, another member of the Simpson clan. He was a younger edition of his brothers, somewhat less heavily built, with a face covered with a vast quantity of freckles, which showed plainly under the electric light.

“You don’t git them there kites till you git me,” he challenged in a piping little voice. “I’m’Reddy’ Simpson, an’ you ain’t licked the fambly till you’ve licked me.”

The gang cheered admiringly, and Reddy stripped a tattered jacket preparatory for the fray.

“Git ready,” he said to Joe.

Joe’s knuckles were torn, his nose was bleeding, his lip was cut and swollen, while his shirt had been ripped down from throat to waist. Further, he was tired, and breathing hard.

“How many more are there of you Simpsons?” he asked. “I’ve got to get home, and if your family’s much larger this thing is liable to keep on all night.”

“I’m the last an’ the best,” Reddy replied. “You gits me an’ you gits the kites. Sure.”

“All right,” Joe sighed. “Come on.”

While the youngest of the clan lacked the strength and skill of his elders, he made up for it by a wildcat manner of fighting that taxed Joe severely. Time and again it seemed to him that he must give in to the little whirlwind; but each time he pulled himself together and went doggedly on. For he felt that he was fighting for principle, as his forefathers had fought for principle; also, it seemed to him that the honor of the Hill was at stake, and that he, as its representative, could do nothing less than his very best.

So he held on and managed to endure his opponent’s swift and continuous rushes till that young and less experienced person at last wore himself out with his own exertions, and from the ground confessed that, for the first time in its history, the “Simpson fambly was beat.”

Chapter IV. The Biter Bitten

But life in the Pit at best was a precarious affair, as the three Hill-dwellers were quickly to learn. Before Joe could even possess himself of his kites, his astonished eyes were greeted with the spectacle of all his enemies, the fireman included, taking to their heels in wild flight. As the little girls and urchins had melted away before the Simpson gang, so was melting away the Simpson gang before some new and correspondingly awe-inspiring group of predatory creatures.

Joe heard terrified cries of “Fish gang!” “Fish gang!” from those who fled, and he would have fled himself from this new danger, only he was breathless from his last encounter, and knew the impossibility of escaping whatever threatened. Fred and Charley felt mighty longings to run away from a danger great enough to frighten the redoubtable Simpson gang and the valorous fireman, but they could not desert their comrade.

Dark forms broke into the vacant lot, some surrounding the boys and others dashing after the fugitives. That the laggards were overtaken was evidenced by the cries of distress that went up, and when later the pursuers returned, they brought with them the luckless and snarling Brick, still clinging fast to the bundle of kites.

Joe looked curiously at this latest band of marauders. They were young men of from seventeen and eighteen to twenty-three and-four years of age, and bore the unmistakable stamp of the hoodlum class. There were vicious faces among them — faces so vicious as to make Joe’s flesh creep as he looked at them. A couple grasped him tightly by the arms, and Fred and Charley were similarly held captive.

“Look here, you,” said one who spoke with the authority of leader, “we’ve got to inquire into this. Wot’s be’n goin’ on here? Wot’re you up to, Red-head? Wot you be’n doin’?”

“Ain’t be’n doin’ nothin’,” Simpson whined.

“Looks like it.” The leader turned up Brick’s face to the electric light. “Who’s been paintin’ you up like that?” he demanded.

Brick pointed at Joe, who was forthwith dragged to the front.

“Wot was you scrappin’ about?”

“Kites — my kites,” Joe spoke up boldly. “That fellow tried to take them away from me. He’s got them under his arm now.”

“Oh, he has, has he? Look here, you Brick, we don’t put up with stealin’ in this territory. See? You never rightly owned nothin’. Come, fork over the kites. Last call.”

The leader tightened his grasp threateningly, and Simpson, weeping tears of rage, surrendered the plunder.

“Wot yer got under yer arm?” the leader demanded abruptly of Fred, at the same time jerking out the bundle. “More kites, eh? Reg’lar kite-factory gone and got itself lost,” he remarked finally, when he had appropriated Charley’s bundle. “Now, wot I wants to know is wot we’re goin’ to do to you t’ree chaps?” he continued in a judicial tone.

“What for?” Joe demanded hotly. “For being robbed of our kites?”

“Not at all, not at all,” the leader responded politely; “but for luggin’ kites round these quarters an’ causin’ all this unseemly disturbance. It’s disgraceful; that’s wot it is — disgraceful.”

At this juncture, when the Hill-dwellers were the center of attraction, Brick suddenly wormed out of his jacket, squirmed away from his captors, and dashed across the lot to the slip for which he had been originally headed when overtaken by Joe. Two or three of the gang shot over the fence after him in noisy pursuit. There was much barking and howling of back-yard dogs and clattering of shoes over sheds and boxes. Then there came a splashing of water, as though a barrel of it had been precipitated to the ground. Several minutes later the pursuers returned, very sheepish and very wet from the deluge presented them by the wily Brick, whose voice, high up in the air from some friendly housetop, could be heard defiantly jeering them.

This event apparently disconcerted the leader of the gang, and just as he turned to Joe and Fred and Charley, a long and peculiar whistle came to their ears from the street — the warning signal, evidently, of a scout posted to keep a lookout. The next moment the scout himself came flying back to the main body, which was already beginning to retreat.

“Cops!” he panted.

Joe looked, and he saw two helmeted policemen approaching, with bright stars shining on their breasts.

“Let’s get out of this,” he whispered to Fred and Charley.

The gang had already taken to flight, and they blocked the boys’ retreat in one quarter, and in another they saw the policemen advancing. So they took to their heels in the direction of Brick Simpson’s slip, the policemen hot after them and yelling bravely for them to halt.

But young feet are nimble, and young feet when frightened become something more than nimble, and the boys were first over the fence and plunging wildly through a maze of back yards. They soon found that the policemen were discreet. Evidently they had had experiences in slips, and they were satisfied to give over the chase at the first fence.

No street-lamps shed their light here, and the boys blundered along through the blackness with their hearts in their mouths. In one yard, filled with mountains of crates and fruit-boxes, they were lost for a quarter of an hour. Feel and quest about as they would, they encountered nothing but endless heaps of boxes. From this wilderness they finally emerged by way of a shed roof, only to fall into another yard, cumbered with countless empty chicken-coops.

Farther on they came upon the contrivance which had soaked Brick Simpson’s pursuers with water. It was a cunning arrangement. Where the slip led through a fence with a board missing, a long slat was so arranged that the ignorant wayfarer could not fail to strike against it. This slat was the spring of the trap. A light touch upon it was sufficient to disconnect a heavy stone from a barrel perched overhead and nicely balanced. The disconnecting of the stone permitted the barrel to turn over and spill its contents on the one beneath who touched the slat.

The boys examined the arrangement with keen appreciation. Luckily for them, the barrel was overturned, or they too would have received a ducking, for Joe, who was in advance, had blundered against the slat.

“I wonder if this is Simpson’s back yard?” he queried softly.

“It must be,” Fred concluded, “or else the back yard of some member of his gang.”

Charley put his hands warningly on both their arms.

“Hist! What’s that?” he whispered.

They crouched down on the ground. Not far away was the sound of some one moving about. Then they heard a noise of falling water, as from a faucet into a bucket. This was followed by steps boldly approaching. They crouched lower, breathless with apprehension.

A dark form passed by within arm’s reach and mounted on a box to the fence. It was Brick himself, resetting the trap. They heard him arrange the slat and stone, then right the barrel and empty into it a couple of buckets of water. As he came down from the box to go after more water, Joe sprang upon him, tripped him up, and held him to the ground.

“Don’t make any noise,” he said. “I want you to listen to me.”

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” Simpson replied, with such obvious relief in his voice as to make them feel relieved also. “Wot d’ ye want here?”

“We want to get out of here,” Joe said, “and the shortest way’s the best. There’s three of us, and you’re only one — ”

“That’s all right, that’s all right,” the gang-leader interrupted. “I’d just as soon show you the way out as not. I ain’t got nothin’‘gainst you. Come on an’ follow me, an’ don’t step to the side, an’ I’ll have you out in no time.”

Several minutes later they dropped from the top of a high fence into a dark alley.

“Follow this to the street,” Simpson directed; “turn to the right two blocks, turn to the right again for three, an’ yer on Union. Tra-la-loo.”

They said good-by, and as they started down the alley received the following advice:

“Nex’ time you bring kites along, you’d best leave’em to home.”

Chapter V. Home Again

Following Brick Simpson’s directions, they came into Union Street, and without further mishap gained the Hill. From the brow they looked down into the Pit, whence arose that steady, indefinable hum which comes from crowded human places.

“I’ll never go down there again, not as long as I live,” Fred said with a great deal of savagery in his voice. “I wonder what became of the fireman.”

“We’re lucky to get back with whole skins,” Joe cheered them philosophically.

“I guess we left our share, and you more than yours,” laughed Charley.

“Yes,” Joe answered. “And I’ve got more trouble to face when I get home. Good night, fellows.”

As he expected, the door on the side porch was locked, and he went around to the dining-room and entered like a burglar through a window. As he crossed the wide hall, walking softly toward the stairs, his father came out of the library. The surprise was mutual, and each halted aghast.

Joe felt a hysterical desire to laugh, for he thought that he knew precisely how he looked. In reality he looked far worse than he imagined. What Mr. Bronson saw was a boy with hat and coat covered with dirt, his whole face smeared with the stains of conflict, and, in particular, a badly swollen nose, a bruised eyebrow, a cut and swollen lip, a scratched cheek, knuckles still bleeding, and a shirt torn open from throat to waist.

“What does this mean, sir?” Mr. Bronson finally managed to articulate.

Joe stood speechless. How could he tell, in one brief sentence, all the whole night’s happenings? — for all that must be included in the explanation of what his luckless disarray meant.

“Have you lost your tongue?” Mr. Bronson demanded with an appearance of impatience.

“I’ve — I’ve — ”

“Yes, yes,” his father encouraged.

“I’ve — well, I’ve been down in the Pit,” Joe succeeded in blurting out.

“I must confess that you look like it — very much like it indeed.” Mr. Bronson spoke severely, but if ever by great effort he conquered a smile, that was the time. “I presume,” he went on, “that you do not refer to the abiding-place of sinners, but rather to some definite locality in San Francisco. Am I right?”

Joe swept his arm in a descending gesture toward Union Street, and said: “Down there, sir.”

“And who gave it that name?”

“I did,” Joe answered, as though confessing to a specified crime.

“It’s most appropriate, I’m sure, and denotes imagination. It couldn’t really be bettered. You must do well at school, sir, with your English.”

This did not increase Joe’s happiness, for English was the only study of which he did not have to feel ashamed.

And, while he stood thus a silent picture of misery and disgrace, Mr. Bronson looked upon him through the eyes of his own boyhood with an understanding which Joe could not have believed possible.

“However, what you need just now is not a discourse, but a bath and court-plaster and witch-hazel and cold-water bandages,” Mr. Bronson said; “so to bed with you. You’ll need all the sleep you can get, and you’ll feel stiff and sore to-morrow morning, I promise you.”

The clock struck one as Joe pulled the bedclothes around him; and the next he knew he was being worried by a soft, insistent rapping, which seemed to continue through several centuries, until at last, unable to endure it longer, he opened his eyes and sat up.

The day was streaming in through the window — bright and sunshiny day. He stretched his arms to yawn; but a shooting pain darted through all the muscles, and his arms came down more rapidly than they had gone up. He looked at them with a bewildered stare, till suddenly the events of the night rushed in upon him, and he groaned.

The rapping still persisted, and he cried: “Yes, I hear. What time is it?”

“Eight o’clock,” Bessie’s voice came to him through the door. “Eight o’clock, and you’ll have to hurry if you don’t want to be late for school.”

“Goodness!” He sprang out of bed precipitately, groaned with the pain from all his stiff muscles, and collapsed slowly and carefully on a chair. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?” he growled.

“Father said to let you sleep.”

Joe groaned again, in another fashion Then his history-book caught his eye, and he groaned yet again and in still another fashion.

“All right,” he called. “Go on. I’ll be down in a jiffy.”

He did come down in fairly brief order; but if Bessie had watched him descend the stairs she would have been astounded at the remarkable caution he observed and at the twinges of pain that every now and then contorted his face. As it was, when she came upon him in the dining-room she uttered a frightened cry and ran over to him.

“What’s the matter, Joe?” she asked tremulously. “What has happened?”

“Nothing,” he grunted, putting sugar on his porridge.

“But surely — ” she began.

“Please don’t bother me,” he interrupted. “I’m late, and I want to eat my breakfast.”

And just then Mrs. Bronson caught Bessie’s eye, and that young lady, still mystified, made haste to withdraw herself.

Joe was thankful to his mother for that, and thankful that she refrained from remarking upon his appearance. Father had told her; that was one thing sure. He could trust her not to worry him; it was never her way.

And, meditating in this way, he hurried through with his solitary breakfast, vaguely conscious in an uncomfortable way that his mother was fluttering anxiously about him. Tender as she always was, he noticed that she kissed him with unusual tenderness as he started out with his books swinging at the end of a strap; and he also noticed, as he turned the corner, that she was still looking after him through the window.

But of more vital importance than that, to him, was his stiffness and soreness. As he walked along, each step was an effort and a torment. Severely as the reflected sunlight from the cement sidewalk hurt his bruised eye, and severely as his various wounds pained him, still more severely did he suffer from his muscles and joints. He had never imagined such stiffness. Each individual muscle in his whole body protested when called upon to move. His fingers were badly swollen, and it was agony to clasp and unclasp them; while his arms were sore from wrist to elbow. This, he said to himself, was caused by the many blows which he had warded off from his face and body. He wondered if Brick Simpson was in similar plight, and the thought of their mutual misery made him feel a certain kinship for that redoubtable young ruffian.

When he entered the school-yard he quickly became aware that he was the center of attraction for all eyes. The boys crowded around in an awe-stricken way, and even his classmates and those with whom he was well acquainted looked at him with a certain respect he had never seen before.

Chapter VI. Examination Day

It was plain that Fred and Charley had spread the news of their descent into the Pit, and of their battle with the Simpson clan and the Fishes. He heard the nine-o’clock bell with feelings of relief, and passed into the school, a mark for admiring glances from all the boys. The girls, too, looked at him in a timid and fearful way — as they might have looked at Daniel when he came out of the lions’ den, Joe thought, or at David after his battle with Goliath. It made him uncomfortable and painfully self-conscious, this hero-worshiping, and he wished heartily that they would look in some other direction for a change.

Soon they did look in another direction. While big sheets of foolscap were being distributed to every desk, Miss Wilson, the teacher (an austere-looking young woman who went through the world as though it were a refrigerator, and who, even on the warmest days in the classroom, was to be found with a shawl or cape about her shoulders), arose, and on the blackboard where all could see wrote the Roman numeral “I.” Every eye, and there were fifty pairs of them, hung with expectancy upon her hand, and in the pause that followed the room was quiet as the grave.

Underneath the Roman numeral “I” she wrote: “(a) What were the laws of Draco? (b) Why did an Athenian orator say that they were written’not in ink, but in blood’?”

Forty-nine heads bent down and forty-nine pens scratched lustily across as many sheets of foolscap. Joe’s head alone remained up, and he regarded the blackboard with so blank a stare that Miss Wilson, glancing over her shoulder after having written “II,” stopped to look at him. Then she wrote:

“(a) How did the war between Athens and Megara, respecting the island of Salamis, bring about the reforms of Solon? (b) In what way did they differ from the laws of Draco?”

She turned to look at Joe again. He was staring as blankly as ever.

“What is the matter, Joe?” she asked. “Have you no paper?”

“Yes, I have, thank you,” he answered, and began moodily to sharpen a lead-pencil.

He made a fine point to it. Then he made a very fine point. Then, and with infinite patience, he proceeded to make it very much finer. Several of his classmates raised their heads inquiringly at the noise. But he did not notice. He was too absorbed in his pencil-sharpening and in thinking thoughts far away from both pencil-sharpening and Greek history.

“Of course you all understand that the examination papers are to be written with ink.”

Miss Wilson addressed the class in general, but her eyes rested on Joe.

Just as it was about as fine as it could possibly be the point broke, and Joe began over again.

“I am afraid, Joe, that you annoy the class,” Miss Wilson said in final desperation.

He put the pencil down, closed the knife with a snap, and returned to his blank staring at the blackboard. What did he know about Draco? or Solon? or the rest of the Greeks? It was a flunk, and that was all there was to it. No need for him to look at the rest of the questions, and even if he did know the answers to two or three, there was no use in writing them down. It would not prevent the flunk. Besides, his arm hurt him too much to write. It hurt his eyes to look at the blackboard, and his eyes hurt even when they were closed; and it seemed positively to hurt him to think.

So the forty-nine pens scratched on in a race after Miss Wilson, who was covering the blackboard with question after question; and he listened to the scratching, and watched the questions growing under her chalk, and was very miserable indeed. His head seemed whirling around. It ached inside and was sore outside, and he did not seem to have any control of it at all.

He was beset with memories of the Pit, like scenes from some monstrous nightmare, and, try as he would, he could not dispel them. He would fix his mind and eyes on Miss Wilson’s face, who was now sitting at her desk, and even as he looked at her the face of Brick Simpson, impudent and pugnacious, would arise before him. It was of no use. He felt sick and sore and tired and worthless. There was nothing to be done but flunk. And when, after an age of waiting, the papers were collected, his went in a blank, save for his name, the name of the examination, and the date, which were written across the top.

After a brief interval, more papers were given out, and the examination in arithmetic began. He did not trouble himself to look at the questions. Ordinarily he might have pulled through such an examination, but in his present state of mind and body he knew it was impossible. He contented himself with burying his face in his hands and hoping for the noon hour. Once, lifting his eyes to the clock, he caught Bessie looking anxiously at him across the room from the girls’ side. This but added to his discomfort. Why was she bothering him? No need for her to trouble. She was bound to pass. Then why couldn’t she leave him alone? So he gave her a particularly glowering look and buried his face in his hands again. Nor did he lift it till the twelve-o’clock gong rang, when he handed in a second blank paper and passed out with the boys.

Fred and Charley and he usually ate lunch in a corner of the yard which they had arrogated to themselves; but this day, by some remarkable coincidence, a score of other boys had elected to eat their lunches on the same spot. Joe surveyed them with disgust. In his present condition he did not feel inclined to receive hero-worship. His head ached too much, and he was troubled over his failure in the examinations; and there were more to come in the afternoon.

He was angry with Fred and Charley. They were chattering like magpies over the adventures of the night (in which, however, they did not fail to give him chief credit), and they conducted themselves in quite a patronizing fashion toward their awed and admiring schoolmates. But every attempt to make Joe talk was a failure. He grunted and gave short answers, and said “yes” and “no” to questions asked with the intention of drawing him out.

He was longing to get away somewhere by himself, to throw himself down some place on the green grass and forget his aches and pains and troubles. He got up to go and find such a place, and found half a dozen of his following tagging after him. He wanted to turn around and scream at them to leave him alone, but his pride restrained him. A great wave of disgust and despair swept over him, and then an idea flashed through his mind. Since he was sure to flunk in his examinations, why endure the afternoon’s torture, which could not but be worse than the morning’s? And on the impulse of the moment he made up his mind.

He walked straight on to the schoolyard gate and passed out. Here his worshipers halted in wonderment, but he kept on to the corner and out of sight. For some time he wandered along aimlessly, till he came to the tracks of a cable road. A down-town car happening to stop to let off passengers, he stepped aboard and ensconced himself in an outside corner seat. The next thing he was aware of, the car was swinging around on its turn-table and he was hastily scrambling off. The big ferry building stood before him. Seeing and hearing nothing, he had been carried through the heart of the business section of San Francisco.

He glanced up at the tower clock on top of the ferry building. It was ten minutes after one — time enough to catch the quarter-past-one boat. That decided him, and without the least idea in the world as to where he was going, he paid ten cents for a ticket, passed through the gate, and was soon speeding across the bay to the pretty city of Oakland.

In the same aimless and unwitting fashion, he found himself, an hour later, sitting on the string-piece of the Oakland city wharf and leaning his aching head against a friendly timber. From where he sat he could look down upon the decks of a number of small sailing-craft. Quite a crowd of curious idlers had collected to look at them, and Joe found himself growing interested.

There were four boats, and from where he sat he could make out their names. The one directly beneath him had the name Ghost painted in large green letters on its stern. The other three, which lay beyond, were called respectively La Caprice, the Oyster Queen, and the Flying Dutchman.

Each of these boats had cabins built amidships, with short stovepipes projecting through the roofs, and from the pipe of the Ghost smoke was ascending. The cabin doors were open and the roof-slide pulled back, so that Joe could look inside and observe the inmate, a young fellow of nineteen or twenty who was engaged just then in cooking. He was clad in long sea-boots which reached the hips, blue overalls, and dark woolen shirt. The sleeves, rolled back to the elbows, disclosed sturdy, sun-bronzed arms, and when the young fellow looked up his face proved to be equally bronzed and tanned.

The aroma of coffee arose to Joe’s nose, and from a light iron pot came the unmistakable smell of beans nearly done. The cook placed a frying-pan on the stove, wiped it around with a piece of suet when it had heated, and tossed in a thick chunk of beefsteak. While he worked he talked with a companion on deck, who was busily engaged in filling a bucket overside and flinging the salt water over heaps of oysters that lay on the deck. This completed, he covered the oysters with wet sacks, and went into the cabin, where a place was set for him on a tiny table, and where the cook served the dinner and joined him in eating it.

All the romance of Joe’s nature stirred at the sight. That was life. They were living, and gaining their living, out in the free open, under the sun and sky, with the sea rocking beneath them, and the wind blowing on them, or the rain falling on them, as the chance might be. Each day and every day he sat in a room, pent up with fifty more of his kind, racking his brains and cramming dry husks of knowledge, while they were doing all this, living glad and careless and happy, rowing boats and sailing, and cooking their own food, and certainly meeting with adventures such as one only dreams of in the crowded school-room.

Joe sighed. He felt that he was made for this sort of life and not for the life of a scholar. As a scholar he was undeniably a failure. He had flunked in his examinations, while at that very moment, he knew, Bessie was going triumphantly home, her last examination over and done, and with credit. Oh, it was not to be borne! His father was wrong in sending him to school. That might be well enough for boys who were inclined to study, but it was manifest that he was not so inclined. There were more careers in life than that of the schools. Men had gone down to the sea in the lowest capacity, and risen in greatness, and owned great fleets, and done great deeds, and left their names on the pages of time. And why not he, Joe Bronson?

He closed his eyes and felt immensely sorry for himself; and when he opened his eyes again he found that he had been asleep, and that the sun was sinking fast.

It was after dark when he arrived home, and he went straight to his room and to bed without meeting any one. He sank down between the cool sheets with a sigh of satisfaction at the thought that, come what would, he need no longer worry about his history. Then another and unwelcome thought obtruded itself, and he knew that the next school term would come, and that six months thereafter, another examination in the same history awaited him.

Chapter VII. Father and Son

On the following morning, after breakfast, Joe was summoned to the library by his father, and he went in almost with a feeling of gladness that the suspense of waiting was over. Mr. Bronson was standing by the window. A great chattering of sparrows outside seemed to have attracted his attention. Joe joined him in looking out, and saw a fledgeling sparrow on the grass, tumbling ridiculously about in its efforts to stand on its feeble baby legs. It had fallen from the nest in the rose-bush that climbed over the window, and the two parent sparrows were wild with anxiety over its plight.

“It’s a way young birds have,” Mr. Bronson remarked, turning to Joe with a serious smile; “and I dare say you are on the verge of a somewhat similar predicament, my boy,” he went on. “I am afraid things have reached a crisis, Joe. I have watched it coming on for a year now — your poor scholarship, your carelessness and inattention, your constant desire to be out of the house and away in search of adventures of one sort or another.”

He paused, as though expecting a reply; but Joe remained silent.

“I have given you plenty of liberty. I believe in liberty. The finest souls grow in such soil. So I have not hedged you in with endless rules and irksome restrictions. I have asked little of you, and you have come and gone pretty much as you pleased. In a way, I have put you on your honor, made you largely your own master, trusting to your sense of right to restrain you from going wrong and at least to keep you up in your studies. And you have failed me. What do you want me to do? Set you certain bounds and time-limits? Keep a watch over you? Compel you by main strength to go through your books?

“I have here a note,” Mr. Bronson said after another pause, in which he picked up an envelop from the table and drew forth a written sheet.

Joe recognized the stiff and uncompromising scrawl of Miss Wilson, and his heart sank.

His father began to read:

“Listlessness and carelessness have characterized his term’s work, so that when the examinations came he was wholly unprepared. In neither history nor arithmetic did he attempt to answer a question, passing in his papers perfectly blank. These examinations took place in the morning. In the afternoon he did not take the trouble even to appear for the remainder.”

Mr. Bronson ceased reading and looked up.

“Where were you in the afternoon?” he asked.

“I went across on the ferry to Oakland,” Joe answered, not caring to offer his aching head and body in extenuation.

“That is what is called’playing hooky,’ is it not?”

“Yes, sir,” Joe answered.

“The night before the examinations, instead of studying, you saw fit to wander away and involve yourself in a disgraceful fight with hoodlums. I did not say anything at the time. In my heart I think I might almost have forgiven you that, if you had done well in your school-work.”

Joe had nothing to say. He knew that there was his side to the story, but he felt that his father did not understand, and that there was little use of telling him.

“The trouble with you, Joe, is carelessness and lack of concentration. What you need is what I have not given you, and that is rigid discipline. I have been debating for some time upon the advisability of sending you to some military school, where your tasks will be set for you, and what you do every moment in the twenty-four hours will be determined for you — ”

“Oh, father, you don’t understand, you can’t understand!” Joe broke forth at last. “I try to study — I honestly try to study; but somehow — I don’t know how — I can’t study. Perhaps I am a failure. Perhaps I am not made for study. I want to go out into the world. I want to see life — to live. I don’t want any military academy; I’d sooner go to sea — anywhere where I can do something and be something.”

Mr. Bronson looked at him kindly. “It is only through study that you can hope to do something and be something in the world,” he said.

Joe threw up his hand with a gesture of despair.

“I know how you feel about it,” Mr. Bronson went on; “but you are only a boy, very much like that young sparrow we were watching. If at home you have not sufficient control over yourself to study, then away from home, out in the world which you think is calling to you, you will likewise not have sufficient control over yourself to do the work of that world.

“But I am willing, Joe, I am willing, after you have finished high school and before you go into the university, to let you out into the world for a time.”

“Let me go now?” Joe asked impulsively.

“No; it is too early. You haven’t your wings yet. You are too unformed, and your ideals and standards are not yet thoroughly fixed.”

“But I shall not be able to study,” Joe threatened. “I know I shall not be able to study.”

Mr. Bronson consulted his watch and arose to go. “I have not made up my mind yet,” he said. “I do not know what I shall do — whether I shall give you another trial at the public school or send you to a military academy.”

He stopped a moment at the door and looked back. “But remember this, Joe,” he said. “I am not angry with you; I am more grieved and hurt. Think it over, and tell me this evening what you intend to do.”

His father passed out, and Joe heard the front door close after him. He leaned back in the big easy-chair and closed his eyes. A military school! He feared such an institution as the animal fears a trap. No, he would certainly never go to such a place. And as for public school — He sighed deeply at the thought of it. He was given till evening to make up his mind as to what he intended to do. Well, he knew what he would do, and he did not have to wait till evening to find it out.

He got up with a determined look on his face, put on his hat, and went out the front door. He would show his father that he could do his share of the world’s work, he thought as he walked along — he would show him.

By the time he reached the school he had his whole plan worked out definitely. Nothing remained but to put it through. It was the noon hour, and he passed in to his room and packed up his books unnoticed. Coming out through the yard, he encountered Fred and Charley.

“What’s up?” Charley asked.

“Nothing,” Joe grunted.

“What are you doing there?”

“Taking my books home, of course. What did you suppose I was doing?”

“Come, come,” Fred interposed. “Don’t be so mysterious. I don’t see why you can’t tell us what has happened.”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Joe said significantly — more significantly than he had intended.

And, for fear that he might say more, he turned his back on his astonished chums and hurried away. He went straight home and to his room, where he busied himself at once with putting everything in order. His clothes he hung carefully away, changing the suit he had on for an older one. From his bureau he selected a couple of changes of underclothing, a couple of cotton shirts, and half a dozen pairs of socks. To these he added as many handkerchiefs, a comb, and a tooth-brush.

When he had bound the bundle in stout wrapping-paper he contemplated it with satisfaction. Then he went over to his desk and took from a small inner compartment his savings for some months, which amounted to several dollars. This sum he had been keeping for the Fourth of July, but he thrust it into his pocket with hardly a regret. Then he pulled a writing-pad over to him, sat down and wrote:

Don’t look for me. I am a failure and I am going away to sea. Don’t worry about me. I am all right and able to take care of myself. I shall come back some day, and then you will all be proud of me. Good-by, papa, and mama, and Bessie.

JOE.

This he left lying on his desk where it could easily be seen. He tucked the bundle under his arm, and, with a last farewell look at the room, stole out.

Part II

Chapter VIII — ‘Frisco Kid and the New Boy

‘Frisco Kid was discontented — discontented and disgusted. This would have seemed impossible to the boys who fished from the dock above and envied him greatly. True, they wore cleaner and better clothes, and were blessed with fathers and mothers; but his was the free floating life of the bay, the domain of moving adventure, and the companionship of men — theirs the rigid discipline and dreary sameness of home life. They did not dream that’Frisco Kid ever looked up at them from the cockpit of the Dazzler and in turn envied them just those things which sometimes were the most distasteful to them and from which they suffered to repletion. Just as the romance of adventure sang its siren song in their ears and whispered vague messages of strange lands and lusty deeds, so the delicious mysteries of home enticed’Frisco Kid’s roving fancies, and his brightest day-dreams were of the thing’s he knew not — brothers, sisters, a father’s counsel, a mother’s kiss.

He frowned, got up from where he had been sunning himself on top of the Dazzler’s cabin, and kicked off his heavy rubber boots. Then he stretched himself on the narrow side-deck and dangled his feet in the cool salt water.

“Now that’s freedom,” thought the boys who watched him. Besides, those long sea-boots, reaching to the hips and buckled to the leather strap about the waist, held a strange and wonderful fascination for them. They did not know that’Frisco Kid did not possess such things as shoes — that the boots were an old pair of Pete Le Maire’s and were three sizes too large for him. Nor could they guess how uncomfortable they were to wear on a hot summer day.

The cause of’Frisco Kid’s discontent was those very boys who sat on the string-piece and admired him; but his disgust was the result of quite another event. The Dazzler was short one in its crew, and he had to do more work than was justly his share. He did not mind the cooking, nor the washing down of the decks and the pumping; but when it came to the paint-scrubbing and dishwashing he rebelled. He felt that he had earned the right to be exempt from such scullion work. That was all the green boys were fit for, while he could make or take in sail, lift anchor, steer, and make landings.

“Stan’ from un’er!” Pete Le Maire or “French Pete,” captain of the Dazzler and lord and master of’Frisco Kid, threw a bundle into the cockpit and came aboard by the starboard rigging.

“Come! Queeck!” he shouted to the boy who owned the bundle and who now hesitated on the dock. It was a good fifteen feet to the deck of the sloop, and he could not reach the steel stay by which he must descend.

“Now! One, two, three!” the Frenchman counted good-naturedly, after the manner of captains when their crews are short-handed.

The boy swung his body into space and gripped the rigging. A moment later he struck the deck, his hands tingling warmly from the friction.

“Kid, dis is ze new sailor. I make your acquaintance.” French Pete smirked and bowed, and stood aside. “Mistaire Sho Bronson,” he added as an afterthought.

The two boys regarded each other silently for a moment. They were evidently about the same age, though the stranger looked the heartier and stronger of the two.’Frisco Kid put out his hand, and they shook.

“So you’re thinking of tackling the water, eh?” he said.

Joe Bronson nodded and glanced curiously about him before answering: “Yes; I think the bay life will suit me for a while, and then, when I’ve got used to it, I’m going to sea in the forecastle.”

“In the what?”

“In the forecastle — the place where the sailors live,” he explained, flushing and feeling doubtful of his pronunciation.

“Oh, the fo’c’sle. Know anything about going to sea?”

“Yes — no; that is, except what I’ve read.”

‘Frisco Kid whistled, turned on his heel in a lordly manner, and went into the cabin.

“Going to sea,” he chuckled to himself as he built the fire and set about cooking supper; “in the’forecastle,’ too; and thinks he’ll like it.”

In the meanwhile French Pete was showing the newcomer about the sloop as though he were a guest. Such affability and charm did he display that’Frisco Kid, popping his head up through the scuttle to call them to supper, nearly choked in his effort to suppress a grin.

Joe Bronson enjoyed that supper. The food was rough but good, and the smack of the salt air and the sea-fittings around him gave zest to his appetite. The cabin was clean and snug, and, though not large, the accommodations surprised him. Every bit of space was utilized. The table swung to the centerboard-case on hinges, so that when not in use it actually occupied no room at all. On either side and partly under the deck were two bunks. The blankets were rolled back, and the boys sat on the well-scrubbed bunk boards while they ate. A swinging sea-lamp of brightly polished brass gave them light, which in the daytime could be obtained through the four deadeyes, or small round panes of heavy glass which were fitted into the walls of the cabin. On one side of the door was the stove and wood-box, on the other the cupboard. The front end of the cabin was ornamented with a couple of rifles and a shot-gun, while exposed by the rolled-back blankets of French Pete’s bunk was a cartridge-lined belt carrying a brace of revolvers.

It all seemed like a dream to Joe. Countless times he had imagined scenes somewhat similar to this; but here he was right in the midst of it, and already it seemed as though he had known his two companions for years. French Pete was smiling genially at him across the board. It really was a villainous countenance, but to Joe it seemed only weather-beaten.’Frisco Kid was describing to him, between mouthfuls, the last sou’easter the Dazzler had weathered, and Joe experienced an increasing awe for this boy who had lived so long upon the water and knew so much about it.

The captain, however, drank a glass of wine, and topped it off with a second and a third, and then, a vicious flush lighting his swarthy face, stretched out on top of his blankets, where he soon was snoring loudly.

“Better turn in and get a couple of hours’ sleep,”‘Frisco Kid said kindly, pointing Joe’s bunk out to him. “We’ll most likely be up the rest of the night.”

Joe obeyed, but he could not fall asleep so readily as the others. He lay with his eyes wide open, watching the hands of the alarm-clock that hung in the cabin, and thinking how quickly event had followed event in the last twelve hours. Only that very morning he had been a school-boy, and now he was a sailor, shipped on the Dazzler and bound he knew not whither. His fifteen years increased to twenty at the thought of it, and he felt every inch a man — a sailorman at that. He wished Charley and Fred could see him now. Well, they would hear of it soon enough. He could see them talking it over, and the other boys crowding around. “Who?” “Oh, Joe Bronson; he’s gone to sea. Used to chum with us.”

Joe pictured the scene proudly. Then he softened at the thought of his mother worrying, but hardened again at the recollection of his father. Not that his father was not good and kind; but he did not understand boys, Joe thought. That was where the trouble lay. Only that morning he had said that the world wasn’t a play-ground, and that the boys who thought it was were liable to make sore mistakes and be glad to get home again. Well, he knew that there was plenty of hard work and rough experience in the world; but he also thought boys had some rights. He’d show him he could take care of himself; and, anyway, he could write home after he got settled down to his new life.

Chapter IX — Aboard the Dazzler

A skiff grazed the side of the Dazzler softly and interrupted Joe’s reveries. He wondered why he had not heard the sound of the oars in the rowlocks. Then two men jumped over the cockpit-rail and came into the cabin.

“Bli’ me, if’ere they ain’t snoozin’,” said the first of the newcomers, deftly rolling’Frisco Kid out of his blankets with one hand and reaching for the wine-bottle with the other.

French Pete put his head up on the other side of the centerboard, his eyes heavy with sleep, and made them welcome.

“‘Oo’s this?” asked the Cockney, as he was called, smacking his lips over the wine and rolling Joe out upon the floor. “Passenger?”

“No, no,” French Pete made haste to answer. “Ze new sailorman. Vaire good boy.”

“Good boy or not, he’s got to keep his tongue atween his teeth,” growled the second newcomer, who had not yet spoken, glaring fiercely at Joe.

“I say,” queried the other man, “‘ow does’e whack up on the loot? I’ope as me and Bill’ave a square deal.”

“Ze Dazzler she take one share — what you call — one third; den we split ze rest in five shares. Five men, five shares. Vaire good.”

French Pete insisted in excited gibberish that the Dazzler had the right to have three men in its crew, and appealed to’Frisco Kid to bear him out. But the latter left them to fight it over by themselves, and proceeded to make hot coffee.

It was all Greek to Joe, except he knew that he was in some way the cause of the quarrel. In the end French Pete had his way, and the newcomers gave in after much grumbling. After they had drunk their coffee, all hands went on deck.

“Just stay in the cockpit and keep out of their way,”‘Frisco Kid whispered to Joe. “I’ll teach you about the ropes and everything when we ain’t in a hurry.”

Joe’s heart went out to him in sudden gratitude, for the strange feeling came to him that of those on board, to’Frisco Kid, and to’Frisco Kid only, could he look for help in time of need. Already a dislike for French Pete was growing up within him. Why, he could not say; he just simply felt it.

A creaking of blocks for’ard, and the huge mainsail loomed above him in the night. Bill cast off the bowline, the Cockney followed suit with the stern,’Frisco Kid gave her the jib as French Pete jammed up the tiller, and the Dazzler caught the breeze, heeling over for mid-channel. Joe heard talk of not putting up the side-lights, and of keeping a sharp lookout, though all he could comprehend was that some law of navigation was being violated.

The water-front lights of Oakland began to slip past. Soon the stretches of docks and the shadowy ships began to be broken by dim sweeps of marshland, and Joe knew that they were heading out for San Francisco Bay. The wind was blowing from the north in mild squalls, and the Dazzler cut noiselessly through the landlocked water.

“Where are we going?” Joe asked the Cockney, in an endeavor to be friendly and at the same time satisfy his curiosity.

“Oh, my pardner’ere, Bill, we’re goin’ to take a cargo from’is factory,” that worthy airily replied.

Joe thought he was rather a funny-looking individual to own a factory; but, conscious that even stranger things might be found in this new world he was entering, he said nothing. He had already exposed himself to’Frisco Kid in the matter of his pronunciation of “fo’c’sle,” and he had no desire further to advertise his ignorance.

A little after that he was sent in to blow out the cabin lamp. The Dazzler tacked about and began to work in toward the north shore. Everybody kept silent, save for occasional whispered questions and answers which passed between Bill and the captain. Finally the sloop was run into the wind, and the jib and mainsail lowered cautiously.

“Short hawse,” French Pete whispered to’Frisco Kid, who went for’ard and dropped the anchor, paying out the slightest quantity of slack.

The Dazzler’s skiff was brought alongside, as was also the small boat in which the two strangers had come aboard.

“See that that cub don’t make a fuss,” Bill commanded in an undertone, as he joined his partner in his own boat.

“Can you row?”‘Frisco Kid asked as they got into the other boat.

Joe nodded his head.

“Then take these oars, and don’t make a racket.”

‘Frisco Kid took the second pair, while French Pete steered. Joe noticed that the oars were muffled with sennit, and that even the rowlock sockets were protected with leather. It was impossible to make a noise except by a mis-stroke, and Joe had learned to row on Lake Merrit well enough to avoid that. They followed in the wake of the first boat, and, glancing aside, he saw they were running along the length of a pier which jutted out from the land. A couple of ships, with riding-lanterns burning brightly, were moored to it, but they kept just beyond the edge of the light. He stopped rowing at the whispered command of’Frisco Kid. Then the boats grounded like ghosts on a tiny beach, and they clambered out.

Joe followed the men, who picked their way carefully up a twenty-foot bank. At the top he found himself on a narrow railway track which ran between huge piles of rusty scrap-iron. These piles, separated by tracks, extended in every direction he could not tell how far, though in the distance he could see the vague outlines of some great factory-like building. The men began to carry loads of the iron down to the beach, and French Pete, gripping him by the arm and again warning him not to make any noise, told him to do likewise. At the beach they turned their burdens over to’Frisco Kid, who loaded them, first in the one skiff and then in the other. As the boats settled under the weight, he kept pushing them farther and farther out, in order that they should keep clear of the bottom.

Joe worked away steadily, though he could not help marveling at the queerness of the whole business. Why should there be such a mystery about it? and why such care taken to maintain silence? He had just begun to ask himself these questions, and a horrible suspicion was forming itself in his mind, when he heard the hoot of an owl from the direction of the beach. Wondering at an owl being in so unlikely a place, he stooped to gather a fresh load of iron. But suddenly a man sprang out of the gloom, flashing a dark lantern full upon him. Blinded by the light, he staggered back. Then a revolver in the man’s hand went off like the roar of a cannon. All Joe realized was that he was being shot at, while his legs manifested an overwhelming desire to get away. Even if he had so wished, he could not very well have stayed to explain to the excited man with the smoking revolver. So he took to his heels for the beach, colliding with another man with a dark lantern who came running around the end of one of the piles of iron. This second man quickly regained his feet, and peppered away at Joe as he flew down the bank.

He dashed out into the water for the boat. French Pete at the bow-oars and’Frisco Kid at the stroke had the skiff’s nose pointed seaward and were calmly awaiting his arrival. They had their oars ready for the start, but they held them quietly at rest, for all that both men on the bank had begun to fire at them. The other skiff lay closer inshore, partially aground. Bill was trying to shove it off, and was calling on the Cockney to lend a hand; but that gentleman had lost his head completely, and came floundering through the water hard after Joe. No sooner had Joe climbed in over the stern than he followed him. This extra weight on the stern of the heavily loaded craft nearly swamped them. As it was, a dangerous quantity of water was shipped. In the meantime the men on the bank had reloaded their pistols and opened fire again, this time with better aim. The alarm had spread. Voices and cries could be heard from the ships on the pier, along which men were running. In the distance a police whistle was being frantically blown.

“Get out!”‘Frisco Kid shouted. “You ain’t a-going to sink us if I know it. Go and help your pardner.”

But the Cockney’s teeth were chattering with fright, and he was too unnerved to move or speak.

“T’row ze crazy man out!” French Pete ordered from the bow. At this moment a bullet shattered an oar in his hand, and he coolly proceeded to ship a spare one.

“Give us a hand, Joe,”‘Frisco Kid commanded.

Joe understood, and together they seized the terror-stricken creature and flung him overboard. Two or three bullets splashed about him as he came to the surface, just in time to be picked up by Bill, who had at last succeeded in getting clear.

“Now!” French Pete called, and a few strokes into the darkness quickly took them out of the zone of fire.

So much water had been shipped that the light skiff was in danger of sinking at any moment. While the other two rowed, and by the Frenchman’s orders, Joe began to throw out the iron. This saved them for the time being. But just as they swept alongside the Dazzler the skiff lurched, shoved a side under, and turned turtle, sending the remainder of the iron to bottom. Joe and’Frisco Kid came up side by side, and together they clambered aboard with the skiff’s painter in tow. French Pete had already arrived, and now helped them out.

By the time they had canted the water out of the swamped boat, Bill and his partner appeared on the scene. All hands worked rapidly, and, almost before Joe could realize, the mainsail and jib had been hoisted, the anchor broken out, and the Dazzler was leaping down the channel. Off a bleak piece of marshland Bill and the Cockney said good-by and cast loose in their skiff. French Pete, in the cabin, bewailed their bad luck in various languages, and sought consolation in the wine-bottle.

Chapter X — With the Bay Pirates

The wind freshened as they got clear of the land, and soon the Dazzler was heeling it with her lee deck buried and the water churning by, half-way up the cockpit-rail. Side-lights had been hung out.’Frisco Kid was steering, and by his side sat Joe, pondering over the events of the night.

He could no longer blind himself to the facts. His mind was in a whirl of apprehension. If he had done wrong, he reasoned, he had done it through ignorance; and he did not feel shame for the past so much as he did fear for the future. His companions were thieves and robbers — the bay pirates, of whose wild deeds he had heard vague tales. And here he was, right in the midst of them, already possessing information which could send them to State’s prison. This very fact, he knew, would force them to keep a sharp watch upon him and so lessen his chances of escape. But escape he would, at the very first opportunity.

At this point his thoughts were interrupted by a sharp squall, which hurled the Dazzler over till the sea rushed inboard.’Frisco Kid luffed quickly, at the same time slacking off the main-sheet. Then, single-handed, — for French Pete remained below, — and with Joe looking idly on, he proceeded to reef down.

The squall which had so nearly capsized the Dazzler was of short duration, but it marked the rising of the wind, and soon puff after puff was shrieking down upon them out of the north. The mainsail was spilling the wind, and slapping and thrashing about till it seemed it would tear itself to pieces. The sloop was rolling wildly in the quick sea which had come up. Everything was in confusion; but even Joe’s untrained eye showed him that it was an orderly confusion. He could see that’Frisco Kid knew just what to do and just how to do it. As he watched him he learned a lesson, the lack of which has made failures of the lives of many men — the value of knowledge of one’s own capacities.’Frisco Kid knew what he was able to do, and because of this he had confidence in himself. He was cool and self-possessed, working hurriedly but not carelessly. There was no bungling. Every reef-point was drawn down to stay. Other accidents might occur, but the next squall, or the next forty squalls, would not carry one of those reef-knots away.

He called Joe for’ard to help stretch the mainsail by means of swinging on the peak and throat-halyards. To lay out on the long bowsprit and put a single reef in the jib was a slight task compared with what had been already accomplished; so a few moments later they were again in the cockpit. Under the other lad’s directions, Joe flattened down the jib-sheet, and, going into the cabin, let down a foot or so of centerboard. The excitement of the struggle had chased all unpleasant thoughts from his mind. Patterning after the other boy, he had retained his coolness. He had executed his orders without fumbling, and at the same time without undue slowness. Together they had exerted their puny strength in the face of violent nature, and together they had outwitted her.

He came back to where his companion stood at the tiller steering, and he felt proud of him and of himself; and when he read the unspoken praise in’Frisco Kid’s eyes he blushed like a girl at her first compliment. But the next instant the thought flashed across him that this boy was a thief, a common thief; and he instinctively recoiled. His whole life had been sheltered from the harsher things of the world. His reading, which had been of the best, had laid a premium upon honesty and uprightness, and he had learned to look with abhorrence upon the criminal classes. So he drew a little away from’Frisco Kid and remained silent. But’Frisco Kid, devoting all his energies to the handling of the sloop, had no time in which to remark this sudden change of feeling on the part of his companion.

But there was one thing Joe found in himself that surprised him. While the thought of’Frisco Kid being a thief was repulsive to him,’Frisco Kid himself was not. Instead of feeling an honest desire to shun him, he felt drawn toward him. He could not help liking him, though he knew not why. Had he been a little older he would have understood that it was the lad’s good qualities which appealed to him — his coolness and self-reliance, his manliness and bravery, and a certain kindliness and sympathy in his nature. As it was, he thought it his own natural badness which prevented him from disliking’Frisco Kid; but, while he felt shame at his own weakness, he could not smother the warm regard which he felt growing up for this particular bay pirate.

“Take in two or three feet on the skiff’s painter,” commanded’Frisco Kid, who had an eye for everything.

The skiff was towing with too long a painter, and was behaving very badly. Every once in a while it would hold back till the tow-rope tautened, then come leaping ahead and sheering and dropping slack till it threatened to shove its nose under the huge whitecaps which roared so hungrily on every hand. Joe climbed over the cockpit-rail to the slippery after-deck, and made his way to the bitt to which the skiff was fastened.

“Be careful,”‘Frisco Kid warned, as a heavy puff struck the Dazzler and careened her dangerously over on her side. “Keep one turn round the bitt, and heave in on it when the painter slacks.”

It was ticklish work for a greenhorn. Joe threw off all the turns save the last, which he held with one hand, while with the other he attempted to bring in on the painter. But at that instant it tightened with a tremendous jerk, the boat sheering sharply into the crest of a heavy sea. The rope slipped from his hands and began to fly out over the stern. He clutched it frantically, and was dragged after it over the sloping deck.

“Let her go! Let her go!”‘Frisco Kid shouted.

Joe let go just as he was on the verge of going overboard, and the skiff dropped rapidly astern. He glanced in a shamefaced way at his companion, expecting to be sharply reprimanded for his awkwardness. But’Frisco Kid smiled good-naturedly.

“That’s all right,” he said. “No bones broke and nobody overboard. Better to lose a boat than a man any day; that’s what I say. Besides, I shouldn’t have sent you out there. And there’s no harm done. We can pick it up all right. Go in and drop some more centerboard, — a couple of feet, — and then come out and do what I tell you. But don’t be in a hurry. Take it easy and sure.”

Joe dropped the centerboard and returned, to be stationed at the jib-sheet.

“Hard a-lee!”‘Frisco Kid cried, throwing the tiller down, and following it with his body. “Cast off! That’s right. Now lend a hand on the main-sheet!”

Together, hand over hand, they came in on the reefed mainsail. Joe began to warm up with the work. The Dazzler turned on her heel like a race-horse, and swept into the wind, her canvas snarling and her sheets slatting like hail.

“Draw down the jib-sheet!”

Joe obeyed, and, the head-sail filling, forced her off on the other tack. This manoeuver had turned French Pete’s bunk from the lee to the weather side, and rolled him out on the cabin floor, where he lay in a drunken stupor.

‘Frisco Kid, with his back against the tiller and holding the sloop off that it might cover their previous course, looked at him with an expression of disgust, and muttered: “The dog! We could well go to the bottom, for all he’d care or do!”

Twice they tacked, trying to go over the same ground; and then Joe discovered the skiff bobbing to windward in the star-lit darkness.

“Plenty of time,”‘Frisco Kid cautioned, shooting the Dazzler into the wind toward it and gradually losing headway. “Now!”

Joe leaned over the side, grasped the trailing painter, and made it fast to the bitt. Then they tacked ship again and started on their way. Joe still felt ashamed for the trouble he had caused; but’Frisco Kid quickly put him at ease.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” he said. “Everybody does that when they’re beginning. Now some men forget all about the trouble they had in learning, and get mad when a greeny makes a mistake. I never do. Why, I remember — ”

And then he told Joe of many of the mishaps which fell to him when, as a little lad, he first went on the water, and of some of the severe punishments for the same which were measured out to him. He had passed the running end of a lanyard over the tiller-neck, and as they talked they sat side by side and close against each other in the shelter of the cockpit.

“What place is that?” Joe asked, as they flew by a lighthouse blinking from a rocky headland.

“Goat Island. They’ve got a naval training station for boys over on the other side, and a torpedo-magazine. There’s jolly good fishing, too — rock-cod. We’ll pass to the lee of it, and make across, and anchor in the shelter of Angel Island. There’s a quarantine station there. Then when French Pete gets sober we’ll know where he wants to go. You can turn in now and get some sleep. I can manage all right.”

Joe shook his head. There had been too much excitement for him to feel in the least like sleeping. He could not bear to think of it with the Dazzler leaping and surging along and shattering the seas into clouds of spray on her weather bow. His clothes had half dried already, and he preferred to stay on deck and enjoy it.

The lights of Oakland had dwindled till they made only a hazy flare against the sky; but to the south the San Francisco lights, topping hills and sinking into valleys, stretched miles upon miles. Starting from the great ferry building, and passing on to Telegraph Hill, Joe was soon able to locate the principal places of the city. Somewhere over in that maze of light and shadow was the home of his father, and perhaps even now they were thinking and worrying about him; and over there Bessie was sleeping cozily, to wake up in the morning and wonder why her brother Joe did not come down to breakfast. Joe shivered. It was almost morning. Then slowly his head dropped over on’Frisco Kid’s shoulder and he was fast asleep.

Chapter XI — Captain and Crew

“Come! Wake up! We’re going into anchor.”

Joe roused with a start, bewildered at the unusual scene; for sleep had banished his troubles for the time being, and he knew not where he was. Then he remembered. The wind had dropped with the night. Beyond, the heavy after-sea was still rolling; but the Dazzler was creeping up in the shelter of a rocky island. The sky was clear, and the air had the snap and vigor of early morning about it. The rippling water was laughing in the rays of the sun just shouldering above the eastern sky-line. To the south lay Alcatraz Island, and from its gun-crowned heights a flourish of trumpets saluted the day. In the west the Golden Gate yawned between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. A full-rigged ship, with her lightest canvas, even to the sky-sails, set, was coming slowly in on the flood-tide.

It was a pretty sight. Joe rubbed the sleep from his eyes and drank in the glory of it till’Frisco Kid told him to go for’ard and make ready for dropping the anchor.

“Overhaul about fifty fathoms of chain,” he ordered, “and then stand by.” He eased the sloop gently into the wind, at the same time casting off the jib-sheet. “Let go the jib-halyards and come in on the downhaul!”

Joe had seen the manoeuver performed the previous night, and so was able to carry it out with fair success.

“Now! Over with the mud-hook! Watch out for turns! Lively, now!”

The chain flew out with startling rapidity and brought the Dazzler to rest.’Frisco Kid went for’ard to help, and together they lowered the mainsail, furled it in shipshape manner and made all fast with the gaskets, and put the crutches under the main-boom.

“Here’s a bucket,” said’Frisco Kid, as he passed him the article in question. “Wash down the decks, and don’t be afraid of the water, nor of the dirt either. Here’s a broom. Give it what for, and have everything shining. When you get that done bail out the skiff. She opened her seams a little last night. I’m going below to cook breakfast.”

The water was soon slushing merrily over the deck, while the smoke pouring from the cabin stove carried a promise of good things to come. Time and again Joe lifted his head from his task to take in the scene. It was one to appeal to any healthy boy, and he was no exception. The romance of it stirred him strangely, and his happiness would have been complete could he have escaped remembering who and what his companions were. The thought of this, and of French Pete in his bleary sleep below, marred the beauty of the day. He had been unused to such things and was shocked at the harsh reality of life. But instead of hurting him, as it might a lad of weaker nature, it had the opposite effect. It strengthened his desire to be clean and strong, and to not be ashamed of himself in his own eyes. He glanced about him and sighed. Why could not men be honest and true? It seemed too bad that he must go away and leave all this; but the events of the night were strong upon him, and he knew that in order to be true to himself he must escape.

At this juncture he was called to breakfast. He discovered that’Frisco Kid was as good a cook as he was a sailor, and made haste to do justice to the fare. There were mush and condensed milk, beefsteak and fried potatoes, and all topped off with good French bread, butter, and coffee. French Pete did not join them, though’Frisco Kid attempted a couple of times to rouse him. He mumbled and grunted, half opened his bleared eyes, then fell to snoring again.

“Can’t tell when he’s going to get those spells,”‘Frisco Kid explained, when Joe, having finished washing dishes, came on deck. “Sometimes he won’t get that way for a month, and others he won’t be decent for a week at a stretch. Sometimes he’s good-natured, and sometimes he’s dangerous; so the best thing to do is to let him alone and keep out of his way; and don’t cross him, for if you do there’s liable to be trouble.

“Come on; let’s take a swim,” he added, abruptly changing the subject to one more agreeable. “Can you swim?”

Joe nodded.

“What’s that place?” he asked, as he poised before diving, pointing toward a sheltered beach on the island where there were several buildings and a large number of tents.

“Quarantine station. Lots of smallpox coming in now on the China steamers, and they make them go there till the doctors say they’re safe to land. I tell you, they’re strict about it, too. Why — ”

Splash! Had’Frisco Kid finished his sentence just then, instead of diving overboard, much trouble might have been saved to Joe. But he did not finish it, and Joe dived after him.

“I’ll tell you what,”‘Frisco Kid suggested half an hour later, while they clung to the bobstay preparatory to climbing out. “Let’s catch a mess of fish for dinner, and then turn in and make up for the sleep we lost last night. What d’ you say?”

They made a race to clamber aboard, but Joe was shoved over the side again. When he finally did arrive, the other lad had brought to light a pair of heavily leaded, large-hooked lines and a mackerel-keg of salt sardines.

“Bait,” he said. “Just shove a whole one on. They’re not a bit partic’lar. Swallow the bait, hook and all, and go — that’s their caper. The fellow that doesn’t catch the first fish has to clean’em.”

Both sinkers started on their long descent together, and seventy feet of line whizzed out before they came to rest. But at the instant his sinker touched the bottom Joe felt the struggling jerks of a hooked fish. As he began to haul in he glanced at’Frisco Kid and saw that he too had evidently captured a finny prize. The race between them was exciting. Hand over hand the wet lines flashed inboard. But’Frisco Kid was more expert, and his fish tumbled into the cockpit first. Joe’s followed an instant later — a three-pound rock-cod. He was wild with joy. It was magnificent — the largest fish he had ever landed or ever seen landed. Over went the lines again, and up they came with two mates of the ones already captured. It was sport royal. Joe would certainly have continued till he had fished the bay empty, had not’Frisco Kid persuaded him to stop.

“We’ve got enough for three meals now,” he said, “so there’s no use in having them spoil. Besides, the more you catch the more you clean, and you’d better start in right away. I’m going to bed.”

Chapter XII — Joe Tries to Take French Leave

Joe did not mind. In fact, he was glad he had not caught the first fish, for it helped out a little plan which had come to him while swimming. He threw the last cleaned fish into a bucket of water and glanced about him. The quarantine station was a bare half-mile away, and he could make out a soldier pacing up and down at sentry duty on the beach. Going into the cabin, he listened to the heavy breathing of the sleepers. He had to pass so close to’Frisco Kid to get his bundle of clothes that he decided not to take it. Returning outside, he carefully pulled the skiff alongside, got aboard with a pair of oars, and cast off.

At first he rowed very gently in the direction of the station, fearing the chance of noise if he made undue haste. But gradually he increased the strength of his strokes till he had settled down to the regular stride. When he had covered half the distance he glanced about. Escape was sure now, for he knew, even if he were discovered, that it would be impossible for the Dazzler to get under way and head him off before he made the land and the protection of that man who wore the uniform of Uncle Sam’s soldiers.

The report of a gun came to him from the shore, but his back was in that direction and he did not bother to turn around. A second report followed, and a bullet cut the water within a couple of feet of his oar-blade. This time he did turn around. The soldier on the beach was leveling his rifle at him for a third shot.

Joe was in a predicament, and a very tantalizing one at that. A few minutes of hard rowing would bring him to the beach and to safety; but on that beach, for some unaccountable reason, stood a United States soldier who persisted in firing at him. When Joe saw the gun aimed at him for the third time, he backed water hastily. As a result, the skiff came to a standstill, and the soldier, lowering his rifle, regarded him intently.

“I want to come ashore! Important!” Joe shouted out to him.

The man in uniform shook his head.

“But it’s important, I tell you! Won’t you let me come ashore?”

He took a hurried look in the direction of the Dazzler. The shots had evidently awakened French Pete, for the mainsail had been hoisted, and as he looked he saw the anchor broken out and the jib flung to the breeze.

“Can’t land here!” the soldier shouted back. “Smallpox!”

“But I must!” he cried, choking down a half-sob and preparing to row.

“Then I’ll shoot you,” was the cheering response, and the rifle came to shoulder again.

Joe thought rapidly. The island was large. Perhaps there were no soldiers farther on, and if he only once got ashore he did not care how quickly they captured him. He might catch the smallpox, but even that was better than going back to the bay pirates. He whirled the skiff half about to the right, and threw all his strength against the oars. The cove was quite wide, and the nearest point which he must go around a good distance away. Had he been more of a sailor, he would have gone in the other direction for the opposite point, and thus had the wind on his pursuers. As it was, the Dazzler had a beam wind in which to overtake him.

It was nip and tuck for a while. The breeze was light and not very steady, so sometimes he gained and sometimes they. Once it freshened till the sloop was within a hundred yards of him, and then it dropped suddenly flat, the Dazzler’s big mainsail flapping idly from side to side.

“Ah! you steal ze skiff, eh?” French Pete howled at him, running into the cabin for his rifle. “I fix you! You come back queeck, or I kill you!” But he knew the soldier was watching them from the shore, and did not dare to fire, even over the lad’s head.

Joe did not think of this, for he, who had never been shot at in all his previous life, had been under fire twice in the last twenty-four hours. Once more or less couldn’t amount to much. So he pulled steadily away, while French Pete raved like a wild man, threatening him with all manner of punishments once he laid hands upon him again. To complicate matters,’Frisco Kid waxed mutinous.

“Just you shoot him, and I’ll see you hung for it — see if I don’t,” he threatened. “You’d better let him go. He’s a good boy and all right, and not raised for the dirty life you and I are leading.”

“You too, eh!” the Frenchman shrieked, beside himself with rage. “Den I fix you, you rat!”

He made a rush for the boy, but’Frisco Kid led him a lively chase from cockpit to bowsprit and back again. A sharp capful of wind arriving just then, French Pete abandoned the one chase for the other. Springing to the tiller and slacking away on the main-sheet, — for the wind favored, — he headed the sloop down upon Joe. The latter made one tremendous spurt, then gave up in despair and hauled in his oars. French Pete let go the main-sheet, lost steerageway as he rounded up alongside the motionless skiff, and dragged Joe out.

“Keep mum,”‘Frisco Kid whispered to him while the irate Frenchman was busy fastening the painter. “Don’t talk back. Let him say all he wants to, and keep quiet. It’ll be better for you.”

But Joe’s Anglo-Saxon blood was up, and he did not heed.

“Look here, Mr. French Pete, or whatever your name is,” he commenced; “I give you to understand that I want to quit, and that I’m going to quit. So you’d better put me ashore at once. If you don’t I’ll put you in prison, or my name’s not Joe Bronson.”

‘Frisco Kid waited the outcome fearfully. French Pete was aghast. He was being defied aboard his own vessel — and by a boy! Never had such a thing been heard of. He knew he was committing an unlawful act in detaining him, but at the same time he was afraid to let him go with the information he had gathered concerning the sloop and its occupation. The boy had spoken the unpleasant truth when he said he could send him to prison. The only thing for him to do was to bully him.

“You will, eh?” His shrill voice rose wrathfully. “Den you come too. You row ze boat last-a night — answer me dat! You steal ze iron — answer me dat! You run away — answer me dat! And den you say you put me in jail? Bah!”

“But I didn’t know,” Joe protested.

“Ha, ha! Dat is funny. You tell dat to ze judge; mebbe him laugh, eh?”

“I say I didn’t,” he reiterated manfully. “I didn’t know I’d shipped along with a lot of thieves.”

‘Frisco Kid winced at this epithet, and had Joe been looking at him he would have seen a red flush mount to his face.

“And now that I do know,” he continued, “I wish to be put ashore. I don’t know anything about the law, but I do know something of right and wrong; and I’m willing to take my chance with any judge for whatever wrong I have done — with all the judges in the United States, for that matter. And that’s more than you can say, Mr. Pete.”

“You say dat, eh? Vaire good. But you are one big t’ief — ”

“I’m not — don’t you dare call me that again!” Joe’s face was pale, and he was trembling — but not with fear.

“T’ief!” the Frenchman taunted back.

“You lie!”

Joe had not been a boy among boys for nothing. He knew the penalty which attached itself to the words he had just spoken, and he expected to receive it. So he was not overmuch surprised when he picked himself up from the floor of the cockpit an instant later, his head still ringing from a stiff blow between the eyes.

“Say dat one time more,” French Pete bullied, his fist raised and prepared to strike.

Tears of anger stood in Joe’s eyes, but he was calm and in deadly earnest. “When you say I am a thief, Pete, you lie. You can kill me, but still I will say you lie.”

“No, you don’t!”‘Frisco Kid had darted in like a cat, preventing a second blow, and shoving the Frenchman back across the cockpit.

“You leave the boy alone!” he continued, suddenly unshipping and arming himself with the heavy iron tiller, and standing between them. “This thing’s gone just about as far as it’s going to go. You big fool, can’t you see the stuff the boy’s made of? He speaks true. He’s right, and he knows it, and you could kill him and he wouldn’t give in. There’s my hand on it, Joe.” He turned and extended his hand to Joe, who returned the grip. “You’ve got spunk and you’re not afraid to show it.”

French Pete’s mouth twisted itself in a sickly smile, but the evil gleam in his eyes gave it the lie. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Ah! So? He does not dee-sire dat I call him pet names. Ha, ha! It is only ze sailorman play. Let us — what you call — forgive and forget, eh? Vaire good; forgive and forget.”

He reached out his hand, but Joe refused to take it.’Frisco Kid nodded approval, while French Pete, still shrugging his shoulders and smiling, passed into the cabin.

“Slack off ze main-sheet,” he called out, “and run down for Hunter’s Point. For one time I will cook ze dinner, and den you will say dat it is ze vaire good dinner. Ah! French Pete is ze great cook!”

“That’s the way he always does — gets real good and cooks when he wants to make up,”‘Frisco Kid hazarded, slipping the tiller into the rudder-head and obeying the order. “But even then you can’t trust him.”

Joe nodded his head, but did not speak. He was in no mood for conversation. He was still trembling from the excitement of the last few moments, while deep down he questioned himself on how he had behaved, and found nothing to be ashamed of.

Chapter XIII — Befriending Each Other

The afternoon sea-breeze had sprung up and was now rioting in from the Pacific. Angel Island was fast dropping astern, and the water-front of San Francisco showing up, as the Dazzler plowed along before it. Soon they were in the midst of the shipping, passing in and out among the vessels which had come from the ends of the earth. Later they crossed the fairway, where the ferry steamers, crowded with passengers, passed to and fro between San Francisco and Oakland. One came so close that the passengers crowded to the side to see the gallant little sloop and the two boys in the cockpit. Joe gazed enviously at the row of down-turned faces. They were all going to their homes, while he — he was going he knew not whither, at the will of French Pete. He was half tempted to cry out for help; but the foolishness of such an act struck him, and he held his tongue. Turning his head, his eyes wandered along the smoky heights of the city, and he fell to musing on the strange way of men and ships on the sea.

‘Frisco Kid watched him from the corner of his eye, following his thoughts as accurately as though he spoke them aloud.

“Got a home over there somewheres?” he queried suddenly, waving his hand in the direction of the city.

Joe started, so correctly had his thought been guessed. “Yes,” he said simply.

“Tell us about it.”

Joe rapidly described his home, though forced to go into greater detail because of the curious questions of his companion.’Frisco Kid was interested in everything, especially in Mrs. Bronson and Bessie. Of the latter he could not seem to tire, and poured forth question after question concerning her. So peculiar and artless were some of them that Joe could hardly forbear to smile.

“Now tell me about yours,” he said when he at last had finished.

‘Frisco Kid seemed suddenly to harden, and his face took on a stern look which the other had never seen there before. He swung his foot idly to and fro, and lifted a dull eye aloft to the main-peak blocks, with which, by the way, there was nothing the matter.

“Go ahead,” the other encouraged.

“I haven’t no home.”

The four words left his mouth as though they had been forcibly ejected, and his lips came together after them almost with a snap.

Joe saw he had touched a tender spot, and strove to ease the way out of it again. “Then the home you did have.” He did not dream that there were lads in the world who never had known homes, or that he had only succeeded in probing deeper.

“Never had none.”

“Oh!” His interest was aroused, and he now threw solicitude to the winds. “Any sisters?”

“Nope.”

“Mother?”

“I was so young when she died that I don’t remember her.”

“Father?”

“I never saw much of him. He went to sea — anyhow, he disappeared.”

“Oh!” Joe did not know what to say, and an oppressive silence, broken only by the churn of the Dazzler’s forefoot, fell upon them.

Just then Pete came out to relieve at the tiller while they went in to eat. Both lads hailed his advent with feelings of relief, and the awkwardness vanished over the dinner, which was all their skipper had claimed it to be. Afterward’Frisco Kid relieved Pete, and while he was eating Joe washed up the dishes and put the cabin shipshape. Then they all gathered in the stern, where the captain strove to increase the general cordiality by entertaining them with descriptions of life among the pearl-divers of the South Seas.

In this fashion the afternoon wore away. They had long since left San Francisco behind, rounded Hunter’s Point, and were now skirting the San Mateo shore. Joe caught a glimpse, once, of a party of cyclists rounding a cliff on the San Bruno Road, and remembered the time when he had gone over the same ground on his own wheel. It was only a month or two before, but it seemed an age to him now, so much had there been to come between.

By the time supper had been eaten and the things cleared away, they were well down the bay, off the marshes behind which Redwood City clustered. The wind had gone down with the sun, and the Dazzler was making but little headway, when they sighted a sloop bearing down upon them on the dying wind.’Frisco Kid instantly named it as the Reindeer, to which French Pete, after a deep scrutiny, agreed. He seemed very much pleased at the meeting.

“Red Nelson runs her,”‘Frisco Kid informed Joe. “And he’s a terror and no mistake. I’m always afraid of him when he comes near. They’ve got something big down here, and they’re always after French Pete to tackle it with them. He knows more about it, whatever it is.”

Joe nodded, and looked at the approaching craft curiously. Though somewhat larger, it was built on about the same lines as the Dazzler which meant, above everything else, that it was built for speed. The mainsail was so large that it was more like that of a racing-yacht, and it carried the points for no less than three reefs in case of rough weather. Aloft and on deck everything was in place — nothing was untidy or useless. From running-gear to standing rigging, everything bore evidence of thorough order and smart seamanship.

The Reindeer came up slowly in the gathering twilight and went to anchor a biscuit-toss away. French Pete followed suit with the Dazzler, and then went in the skiff to pay them a visit. The two lads stretched themselves out on top the cabin and awaited his return.

“Do you like the life?” Joe broke silence.

The other turned on his elbow. “Well — I do, and then again I don’t. The fresh air, and the salt water, and all that, and the freedom — that’s all right; but I don’t like the — the — ” He paused a moment, as though his tongue had failed in its duty, and then blurted out: “the stealing.”

“Then why don’t you quit it?” Joe liked the lad more than he dared confess to himself, and he felt a sudden missionary zeal come upon him.

“I will just as soon as I can turn my hand to something else.”

“But why not now?”

Now is the accepted time was ringing in Joe’s ears, and if the other wished to leave, it seemed a pity that he did not, and at once.

“Where can I go? What can I do? There’s nobody in all the world to lend me a hand, just as there never has been. I tried it once, and learned my lesson too well to do it again in a hurry.”

“Well, when I get out of this I’m going home. Guess my father was right, after all. And I don’t see, maybe — what’s the matter with you going with me?” He said this last without thinking, impulsively, and’Frisco Kid knew it.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answered. “Fancy me going off with you! What’d your father say? and — and the rest? How would he think of me? And what’d he do?”

Joe felt sick at heart. He realized that in the spirit of the moment he had given an invitation which, on sober thought, he knew would be impossible to carry out. He tried to imagine his father receiving in his own house a stranger like’Frisco Kid — no, that was not to be thought of. Then, forgetting his own plight, he fell to racking his brains for some other method by which’Frisco Kid could get away from his present surroundings.

“He might turn me over to the police,” the other went on, “and send me to a refuge. I’d die first, before I’d let that happen to me. And besides, Joe, I’m not of your kind, and you know it. Why, I’d be like a fish out of water, what with all the things I didn’t know. Nope; I guess I’ll have to wait a little before I strike out. But there’s only one thing for you to do, and that’s to go straight home. First chance I get I’ll land you, and then I’ll deal with French Pete — ”

“No, you don’t,” Joe interrupted hotly. “When I leave I’m not going to leave you in trouble on my account. So don’t you try anything like that. I’ll get away, never fear, and if I can figure it out I want you to come along too; come along anyway, and figure it out afterward. What d’ you say?”

‘Frisco Kid shook his head, and, gazing up at the starlit heavens, wandered off into dreams of the life he would like to lead but from which he seemed inexorably shut out. The seriousness of life was striking deeper than ever into Joe’s heart, and he lay silent, thinking hard. A mumble of heavy voices came to them from the Reindeer; and from the land the solemn notes of a church bell floated across the water, while the summer night wrapped them slowly in its warm darkness.

Chapter XIV — Among the Oyster-beds

Time and the world slipped away, and both boys were aroused by the harsh voice of French Pete from the sleep into which they had fallen.

“Get under way!” he was bawling. “Here, you Sho! Cast off ze gaskets! Queeck! Lively! You Kid, ze jib!”

Joe was clumsy in the darkness, not knowing the names of things and the places where they were to be found; but he made fair progress, and when he had tossed the gaskets into the cockpit was ordered forward to help hoist the mainsail. After that the anchor was hove in and the jib set. Then they coiled down the halyards and put everything in order before they returned aft.

“Vaire good, vaire good,” the Frenchman praised, as Joe dropped in over the rail. “Splendeed! You make ze good sailorman, I know for sure.”

‘Frisco Kid lifted the cover of one of the cockpit lockers and glanced questioningly at French Pete.

“For sure,” that mariner replied. “Put up ze side-lights.”

‘Frisco Kid took the red and green lanterns into the cabin to light them, and then went forward with Joe to hang them in the rigging.

“They’re not goin’ to tackle it,”‘Frisco Kid said in an undertone.

“What?” Joe asked.

“That big thing I was tellin’ you was down here somewhere. It’s so big, I guess, that French Pete’s’most afraid to go in for it. Red Nelson’d go in quicker’n a wink, but he don’t know enough about it. Can’t go in, you see, till Pete gives the word.”

“Where are we going now?” Joe questioned.

“Don’t know; oyster-beds most likely, from the way we’re heading.”

It was an uneventful trip. A breeze sprang up out of the night behind them, and held steady for an hour or more. Then it dropped and became aimless and erratic, puffing gently first from one quarter and then another. French Pete remained at the tiller, while occasionally Joe or’Frisco Kid took in or slacked off a sheet.

Joe sat and marveled that the Frenchman should know where he was going. To Joe it seemed that they were lost in the impenetrable darkness which shrouded them. A high fog had rolled in from the Pacific, and though they were beneath, it came between them and the stars, depriving them of the little light from that source.

But French Pete seemed to know instinctively the direction he should go, and once, in reply to a query from Joe, bragged of his ability to go by the “feel” of things.

“I feel ze tide, ze wind, ze speed,” he explained. “Even do I feel ze land. Dat I tell you for sure. How? I do not know. Only do I know dat I feel ze land, just like my arm grow long, miles and miles long, and I put my hand upon ze land and feel it, and know dat it is there.”

Joe looked incredulously at’Frisco Kid.

“That’s right,” he affirmed. “After you’ve been on the water a good while you come to feel the land. And if your nose is any account, you can usually smell it.”

An hour or so later, Joe surmised from the Frenchman’s actions that they were approaching their destination. He seemed on the alert, and was constantly peering into the darkness ahead as though he expected to see something at any moment. Joe looked very hard, but saw only the darkness.

“Try ze stick, Kid,” French Pete ordered. “I t’ink it is about ze time.”

‘Frisco Kid unlashed a long and slender pole from the top of the cabin, and, standing on the narrow deck amidships, plunged one end of it into the water and drove it straight down.

“About fifteen feet,” he said.

“What ze bottom?”

“Mud,” was the answer.

“Wait one while, den we try some more.”

Five minutes afterward the pole was plunged overside again.

“Two fathoms,” Joe answered — ”shells.”

French Pete rubbed his hands with satisfaction. “Vaire good, vaire well,” he said. “I hit ze ground every time. You can’t fool-a ze old man; I tell you dat for sure.”

‘Frisco Kid continued operating the pole and announcing the results, to the mystification of Joe, who could not comprehend their intimate knowledge of the bottom of the bay.

“Ten feet — shells,”‘Frisco Kid went on in a monotonous voice. “‘Leven feet — shells. Fourteen feet — soft. Sixteen feet — mud. No bottom.”

“Ah, ze channel,” said French Pete at this.

For a few minutes it was “No bottom”; and then, suddenly, came’Frisco Kid’s cry: “Eight feet — hard!”

“Dat’ll do,” French Pete commanded. “Run for’ard, you Sho, an’ let go ze jib. You, Kid, get all ready ze hook.”

Joe found the jib-halyard and cast it off the pin, and, as the canvas fluttered down, came in hand over hand on the downhaul.

“Let’er go!” came the command, and the anchor dropped into the water, carrying but little chain after it.

‘Frisco Kid threw over plenty of slack and made fast. Then they furled the sails, made things tidy, and went below and to bed.

It was six o’clock when Joe awoke and went out into the cockpit to look about. Wind and sea had sprung up, and the Dazzler was rolling and tossing and now and again fetching up on her anchor-chain with a savage jerk. He was forced to hold on to the boom overhead to steady himself. It was a gray and leaden day, with no signs of the rising sun, while the sky was obscured by great masses of flying clouds.

Joe sought for the land. A mile and a half away it lay — a long, low stretch of sandy beach with a heavy surf thundering upon it. Behind appeared desolate marshlands, while far beyond towered the Contra Costa Hills.

Changing the direction of his gaze, Joe was startled by the sight of a small sloop rolling and plunging at her anchor not a hundred yards away. She was nearly to windward, and as she swung off slightly he read her name on the stern, the Flying Dutchman, one of the boats he had seen lying at the city wharf in Oakland. A little to the left of her he discovered the Ghost, and beyond were half a dozen other sloops at anchor.

“What I tell you?”

Joe looked quickly over his shoulder. French Pete had come out of the cabin and was triumphantly regarding the spectacle.

“What I tell you? Can’t fool-a ze old man, dat’s what. I hit it in ze dark just so well as in ze sunshine. I know — I know.”

“Is she goin’ to howl?”‘Frisco Kid asked from the cabin, where he was starting the fire.

The Frenchman gravely studied sea and sky for a couple of minutes.

“Mebbe blow over — mebbe blow up,” was his doubtful verdict. “Get breakfast queeck, and we try ze dredging.”

Smoke was rising from the cabins of the different sloops, denoting that they were all bent on getting the first meal of the day. So far as the Dazzler was concerned, it was a simple matter, and soon they were putting a single reef in the mainsail and getting ready to weigh anchor.

Joe was curious. These were undoubtedly the oyster-beds; but how under the sun, in that wild sea, were they to get oysters? He was quickly to learn the way. Lifting a section of the cockpit flooring, French Pete brought out two triangular frames of steel. At the apex of one of these triangles; in a ring for the purpose, he made fast a piece of stout rope. From this the sides (inch rods) diverged at almost right angles, and extended down for a distance of four feet or more, where they were connected by the third side of the triangle, which was the bottom of the dredge. This was a flat plate of steel over a yard in length, to which was bolted a row of long, sharp teeth, likewise of steel. Attached to the toothed plate, and to the sides of the frame was a net of very coarse fishing-twine, which Joe correctly surmised was there to catch the oysters raked loose by the teeth from the bottom of the bay.

A rope being made fast to each of the dredges, they were dropped overboard from either side of the Dazzler. When they had reached the bottom, and were dragging with the proper length of line out, they checked her speed quite noticeably. Joe touched one of the lines with his hands, and could feel plainly the shock and jar and grind as it tore over the bottom.

“All in!” French Pete shouted.

The boys laid hold of the line and hove in the dredge. The net was full of mud and slime and small oysters, with here and there a large one. This mess they dumped on the deck and picked over while the dredge was dragging again. The large oysters they threw into the cockpit, and shoveled the rubbish overboard. There was no rest, for by this time the other dredge required emptying. And when this was done and the oysters sorted, both dredges had to be hauled aboard, so that French Pete could put the Dazzler about on the other tack.

The rest of the fleet was under way and dredging back in similar fashion. Sometimes the different sloops came quite close to them, and they hailed them and exchanged snatches of conversation and rough jokes. But in the main it was hard work, and at the end of an hour Joe’s back was aching from the unaccustomed strain, and his fingers were cut and bleeding from his clumsy handling of the sharp-edged oysters.

“Dat’s right,” French Pete said approvingly. “You learn queeck. Vaire soon you know how.”

Joe grinned ruefully and wished it was dinner-time. Now and then, when a light dredge was hauled, the boys managed to catch breath and say a couple of words.

“That’s Asparagus Island,”‘Frisco Kid said, indicating the shore. “At least, that’s what the fishermen and scow-sailors call it. The people who live there call it Bay Farm Island.” He pointed more to the right. “And over there is San Leandro. You can’t see it, but it’s there.”

“Ever been there?” Joe asked.

‘Frisco Kid nodded his head and signed to him to help heave in the starboard dredge.

“These are what they call the deserted beds,” he said again. “Nobody owns them, so the oyster pirates come down and make a bluff at working them.”

“Why a bluff?”

“‘Cause they’re pirates, that’s why, and because there’s more money in raiding the private beds.”

He made a sweeping gesture toward the east and southeast. “The private beds are over yonder, and if it don’t storm the whole fleet’ll be raidin’‘em to-night.”

“And if it does storm?” Joe asked.

“Why, we won’t raid them, and French Pete’ll be mad, that’s all. He always hates being put out by the weather. But it don’t look like lettin’ up, and this is the worst possible shore in a sou’wester. Pete may try to hang on, but it’s best to get out before she howls.”

At first it did seem as though the weather were growing better. The stiff southwest wind dropped perceptibly, and by noon, when they went to anchor for dinner, the sun was breaking fitfully through the clouds.

“That’s all right,”‘Frisco Kid said prophetically. “But I ain’t been on the bay for nothing. She’s just gettin’ ready to let us have it good an’ hard.”

“I t’ink you’re right, Kid,” French Pete agreed; “but ze Dazzler hang on all ze same. Last-a time she run away, an’ fine night come. Dis time she run not away. Eh? Vaire good.”

Chapter XV — Good Sailors in a Wild Anchorage

All afternoon the Dazzler pitched and rolled at her anchorage, and as evening drew on the wind deceitfully eased down. This, and the example set by French Pete, encouraged the rest of the oyster-boats to attempt to ride out the night; but they looked carefully to their moorings and put out spare anchors.

French Pete ordered the two boys into the skiff, and, at the imminent risk of swamping, they carried out a second anchor, at nearly right angles to the first one, and dropped it over. French Pete then ran out a great quantity of chain and rope, so that the Dazzler dropped back a hundred feet or more, where she rode more easily.

It was a wild stretch of water which Joe looked upon from the shelter of the cockpit. The oyster-beds were out in the open bay, utterly unprotected, and the wind, sweeping the water for a clean twelve miles, kicked up so tremendous a sea that at every moment it seemed as though the wallowing sloops would roll their masts overside. Just before twilight a patch of sail sprang up to windward, and grew and grew until it resolved itself into the huge mainsail of the Reindeer.

“Ze beeg fool!” French Pete cried, running out of the cabin to see. “Sometime — ah, sometime, I tell you — he crack on like dat, an’ he go, pouf! just like dat, pouf! — an’ no more Nelson, no more Reindeer, no more nothing.”

Joe looked inquiringly at’Frisco Kid.

“That’s right,” he answered. “Nelson ought to have at least one reef in. Two’d be better. But there he goes, every inch spread, as though some fiend was after’im. He drives too hard; he’s too reckless, when there ain’t the smallest need for it. I’ve sailed with him, and I know his ways.”

Like some huge bird of the air, the Reindeer lifted and soared down on them on the foaming crest of a wave.

“Don’t mind,”‘Frisco Kid warned. “He’s only tryin’ to see how close he can come to us without hittin’ us.”

Joe nodded, and stared with wide eyes at the thrilling sight. The Reindeer leaped up in the air, pointing her nose to the sky till they could see her whole churning forefoot; then she plunged downward till her for’ard deck was flush with the foam, and with a dizzying rush she drove past them, her main-boom missing the Dazzler’s rigging by scarcely a foot.

Nelson, at the wheel, waved his hand to them as he hurtled past, and laughed joyously in French Pete’s face, who was angered by the dangerous trick.

When to leeward, the splendid craft rounded to the wind, rolling once till her brown bottom showed to the centerboard and they thought she was over, then righting and dashing ahead again like a thing possessed. She passed abreast of them on the starboard side. They saw the jib run down with a rush and an anchor go overboard as she shot into the wind; and as she fell off and back and off and back with a spilling mainsail, they saw a second anchor go overboard, wide apart from the first. Then the mainsail came down on the run, and was furled and fastened by the time she had tightened to her double hawsers.

“Ah, ah! Never was there such a man!”

The Frenchman’s eyes were glistening with admiration for such perfect seamanship, and’Frisco Kid’s were likewise moist.

“Just like a yacht,” he said as he went back into the cabin. “Just like a yacht, only better.”

As night came on the wind began to rise again, and by eleven o’clock had reached the stage which’Frisco Kid described as “howlin’.” There was little sleep on the Dazzler. He alone closed his eyes. French Pete was up and down every few minutes. Twice, when he went on deck, he paid out more chain and rope. Joe lay in his blankets and listened, the while vainly courting sleep. He was not frightened, but he was untrained in the art of sleeping in the midst of such turmoil and uproar and violent commotion. Nor had he imagined a boat could play as wild antics as did the Dazzler and still survive. Often she wallowed over on her beam till he thought she would surely capsize. At other times she leaped and plunged in the air and fell upon the seas with thunderous crashes as though her bottom were shattered to fragments. Again, she would fetch up taut on her hawsers so suddenly and so fiercely as to reel from the shock and to groan and protest through every timber.

‘Frisco Kid awoke once, and smiled at him, saying:

“This is what they call hangin’ on. But just you wait till daylight comes, and watch us clawin’ off. If some of the sloops don’t go ashore, I’m not me, that’s all.”

And thereat he rolled over on his side and was off to sleep. Joe envied him. About three in the morning he heard French Pete crawl up for’ard and rummage around in the eyes of the boat. Joe looked on curiously, and by the dim light of the wildly swinging sea-lamp saw him drag out two spare coils of line. These he took up on deck, and Joe knew he was bending them on to the hawsers to make them still longer.

At half-past four French Pete had the fire going, and at five he called the boys for coffee. This over, they crept into the cockpit to gaze on the terrible scene. The dawn was breaking bleak and gray over a wild waste of tumbling water. They could faintly see the beach-line of Asparagus Island, but they could distinctly hear the thunder of the surf upon it; and as the day grew stronger they made out that they had dragged fully half a mile during the night.

The rest of the fleet had likewise dragged. The Reindeer was almost abreast of them; La Caprice lay a few hundred yards away; and to leeward, straggling between them and shore, were five more of the struggling oyster-boats.

“Two missing,”‘Frisco Kid announced, putting the glasses to his eyes and searching the beach.

“And there’s one!” he cried. And after studying it carefully he added: “The Go Ask Her. She’ll be in pieces in no time. I hope they got ashore.”

French Pete looked through the glasses, and then Joe. He could clearly see the unfortunate sloop lifting and pounding in the surf, and on the beach he spied the men who made up her crew.

“Where’s ze Ghost?” French Pete queried.

‘Frisco Kid looked for her in vain along the beach; but when he turned the glass seaward he quickly discovered her riding safely in the growing light, half a mile or more to windward.

“I’ll bet she didn’t drag a hundred feet all night,” he said. “Must’ve struck good holding-ground.”

“Mud,” was French Pete’s verdict. “Just one vaire small patch of mud right there. If she get t’rough it she’s a sure-enough goner, I tell you dat. Her anchors vaire light, only good for mud. I tell ze boys get more heavy anchors, but dey laugh. Some day be sorry, for sure.”

One of the sloops to leeward raised a patch of sail and began the terrible struggle out of the jaws of destruction and death. They watched her for a space, rolling and plunging fearfully, and making very little headway.

French Pete put a stop to their gazing. “Come on!” he shouted. “Put two reef in ze mainsail! We get out queeck!”

While occupied with this a shout aroused them. Looking up, they saw the Ghost dead ahead and right on top of them, and dragging down upon them at a furious rate.

French Pete scrambled forward like a cat, at the same time drawing his knife, with one stroke of which he severed the rope that held them to the spare anchor. This threw the whole weight of the Dazzler on the chain-anchor. In consequence she swung off to the left, and just in time; for the next instant, drifting stern foremost, the Ghost passed over the spot she had vacated.

“Why, she’s got four anchors out!” Joe exclaimed, at sight of four taut ropes entering the water almost horizontally from her bow.

“Two of’em’s dredges,”‘Frisco Kid grinned; “and there goes the stove.”

As he spoke, two young fellows appeared on deck and dropped the cooking-stove overside with a line attached.

“Phew!”‘Frisco Kid cried. “Look at Nelson. He’s got one reef in, and you can just bet that’s a sign she’s howlin’!”

The Reindeer came foaming toward them, breasting the storm like some magnificent sea-animal. Red Nelson waved to them as he passed astern, and fifteen minutes later, when they were breaking out the one anchor that remained to them, he passed well to windward on the other tack.

French Pete followed her admiringly, though he said ominously: “Some day, pouf! he go just like dat, I tell you, sure.”

A moment later the Dazzler’s reefed jib was flung out, and she was straining and struggling in the thick of the fight. It was slow work, and hard and dangerous, clawing off that lee shore, and Joe found himself marveling often that so small a craft could possibly endure a minute in such elemental fury. But little by little she worked off the shore and out of the ground-swell into the deeper waters of the bay, where the main-sheet was slacked away a bit, and she ran for shelter behind the rock wall of the Alameda Mole a few miles away. Here they found the Reindeer calmly at anchor; and here, during the next several hours, straggled in the remainder of the fleet, with the exception of the Ghost, which had evidently gone ashore to keep the Go Ask Her company.

By afternoon the wind had dropped away with surprising suddenness, and the weather had turned almost summer-like.

“It doesn’t look right,”‘Frisco Kid said in the evening, after French Pete had rowed over in the skiff to visit Nelson.

“What doesn’t look right?” Joe asked.

“Why, the weather. It went down too sudden. It didn’t have a chance to blow itself out, and it ain’t going to quit till does blow itself out. It’s likely to puff up and howl at any moment, if I know anything about it.”

“Where will we go from here?” Joe asked. “Back to the oyster-beds?”

‘Frisco Kid shook his head. “I can’t say what French Pete’ll do. He’s been fooled on the iron, and fooled on the oysters, and he’s that disgusted he’s liable to do’most anything desperate. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him go off with Nelson towards Redwood City, where that big thing is that I was tellin’ you about. It’s somewhere over there.”

“Well, I won’t have anything to do with it,” Joe announced decisively.

“Of course not,”‘Frisco Kid answered. “And with Nelson and his two men an’ French Pete, I don’t think there’ll be any need for you anyway.”

Chapter XVI — ‘Frisco Kid’s Ditty-box

After the conversation died away, the two lads lay upon the cabin for perhaps an hour. Then, without saying a word,’Frisco Kid went below and struck a light. Joe could hear him fumbling about, and a little later heard his own name called softly. On going into the cabin, he saw’Frisco Kid sitting on the edge of the bunk, a sailor’s ditty-box on his knees, and in his hand a carefully folded page from a magazine.

“Does she look like this?” he asked, smoothing it out and turning it that the other might see.

It was a half-page illustration of two girls and a boy, grouped, evidently, in an old-fashioned roomy attic, and holding a council of some sort. The girl who was talking faced the onlooker, while the backs of the other two were turned.

“Who?” Joe queried, glancing in perplexity from the picture to’Frisco Kid’s face.

“Your — your sister — Bessie.”

The word seemed reluctant in coming to his lips, and he expressed himself with a certain shy reverence, as though it were something unspeakably sacred.

Joe was nonplussed for the moment. He could see no bearing between the two in point, and, anyway, girls were rather silly creatures to waste one’s time over. “He’s actually blushing,” he thought, regarding the soft glow on the other’s cheeks. He felt an irresistible desire to laugh, and tried to smother it down.

“No, no; don’t!”‘Frisco Kid cried, snatching the paper away and putting it back in the ditty-box with shaking fingers. Then he added more slowly: “I thought — I — I kind o’ thought you would understand, and — and — ”

His lips trembled and his eyes glistened with unwonted moistness as he turned hastily away.

The next instant Joe was by his side on the bunk, his arm around him. Prompted by some instinctive monitor, he had done it before he thought. A week before he could not have imagined himself in such an absurd situation — his arm around a boy; but now it seemed the most natural thing in the world. He did not comprehend, but he knew, whatever it was, that it was of deep importance to his companion.

“Go ahead and tell us,” he urged. “I’ll understand.”

“No, you won’t. You can’t.”

“Yes, sure. Go ahead.”

‘Frisco Kid choked and shook his head. “I don’t think I could, anyway. It’s more the things I feel, and I don’t know how to put them in words.” Joe’s hand patted his shoulder reassuringly, and he went on: “Well, it’s this way. You see, I don’t know much about the land, and people, and things, and I never had any brothers or sisters or playmates. All the time I didn’t know it, but I was lonely — sort of missed them down in here somewheres.” He placed a hand over his breast. “Did you ever feel downright hungry? Well, that’s just the way I used to feel, only a different kind of hunger, and me not knowing what it was. But one day, oh, a long time back, I got a-hold of a magazine and saw a picture — that picture, with the two girls and the boy talking together. I thought it must be fine to be like them, and I got to thinking about the things they said and did, till it came to me all of a sudden like, and I knew it was just loneliness was the matter with me.

“But, more than anything else, I got to wondering about the girl who looks out of the picture right at you. I was thinking about her all the time, and by and by she became real to me. You see, it was making believe, and I knew it all the time, and then again I didn’t. Whenever I’d think of the men, and the work, and the hard life, I’d know it was make-believe; but when I’d think of her, it wasn’t. I don’t know; I can’t explain it.”

Joe remembered all his own adventures which he had imagined on land and sea, and nodded. He at least understood that much.

“Of course it was all foolishness, but to have a girl like that for a comrade or friend seemed more like heaven to me than anything else I knew of. As I said, it was a long while back, and I was only a little kid — that was when Red Nelson gave me my name, and I’ve never been anything but’Frisco Kid ever since. But the girl in the picture: I was always getting that picture out to look at her, and before long, if I wasn’t square — why, I felt ashamed to look at her. Afterwards, when I was older, I came to look at it in another way. I thought,’Suppose, Kid, some day you were to meet a girl like that, what would she think of you? Could she like you? Could she be even the least bit of a friend to you?’ And then I’d make up my mind to be better, to try and do something with myself so that she or any of her kind of people would not be ashamed to know me.

“That’s why I learned to read. That’s why I ran away. Nicky Perrata, a Greek boy, taught me my letters, and it wasn’t till after I learned to read that I found out there was anything really wrong in bay-pirating. I’d been used to it ever since I could remember, and almost all the people I knew made their living that way. But when I did find out, I ran away, thinking to quit it for good. I’ll tell you about it sometime, and how I’m back at it again.

“Of course she seemed a real girl when I was a youngster, and even now she sometimes seems that way, I’ve thought so much about her. But while I’m talking to you it all clears up and she comes to me in this light: she stands just for a plain idea, a better, cleaner life than this, and one I’d like to live; and if I could live it, why, I’d come to know that kind of girls, and their kind of people — your kind, that’s what I mean. So I was wondering about your sister and you, and that’s why — I don’t know; I guess I was just wondering. But I suppose you know lots of girls like that, don’t you?”

Joe nodded his head.

“Then tell me about them — something, anything,” he added as he noted the fleeting expression of doubt in the other’s eyes.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Joe began valiantly. To a certain extent he did understand the lad’s hunger, and it seemed a simple enough task to at least partially satisfy him. “To begin with, they’re like — hem! — why, they’re like — girls, just girls.” He broke off with a miserable sense of failure.

‘Frisco Kid waited patiently, his face a study in expectancy.

Joe struggled valiantly to marshal his forces. To his mind, in quick succession, came the girls with whom he had gone to school — the sisters of the boys he knew, and those who were his sister’s friends: slim girls and plump girls, tall girls and short girls, blue-eyed and brown-eyed, curly-haired, black-haired, golden-haired; in short, a procession of girls of all sorts and descriptions. But, to save himself, he could say nothing about them. Anyway, he’d never been a “sissy,” and why should he be expected to know anything about them? “All girls are alike,” he concluded desperately. “They’re just the same as the ones you know, Kid — sure they are.”

“But I don’t know any.”

Joe whistled. “And never did?”

“Yes, one. Carlotta Gispardi. But she couldn’t speak English, and I couldn’t speak Dago; and she died. I don’t care; though I never knew any, I seem to know as much about them as you do.”

“And I guess I know more about adventures all over the world than you do,” Joe retorted.

Both boys laughed. But a moment later, Joe fell into deep thought. It had come upon him quite swiftly that he had not been duly grateful for the good things of life he did possess. Already home, father, and mother had assumed a greater significance to him; but he now found himself placing a higher personal value upon his sister and his chums and friends. He had never appreciated them properly, he thought, but henceforth — well, there would be a different tale to tell.

The voice of French Pete hailing them put a finish to the conversation, for they both ran on deck.

Chapter XVII — ‘Frisco Kid Tells His Story

“Get up ze mainsail and break out ze hook!” the Frenchman shouted. “And den tail on to ze Reindeer! No side-lights!”

“Come! Cast off those gaskets — lively!”‘Frisco Kid ordered. “Now lay on to the peak-halyards — there, that rope — cast it off the pin. And don’t hoist ahead of me. There! Make fast! We’ll stretch it afterwards. Run aft and come in on the main-sheet! Shove the helm up!”

Under the sudden driving power of the mainsail, the Dazzler strained and tugged at her anchor like an impatient horse till the muddy iron left the bottom with a rush and she was free.

“Let go the sheet! Come for’ard again and lend a hand on the chain! Stand by to give her the jib!”‘Frisco Kid the boy who mooned over girls in pictorial magazines had vanished, and’Frisco Kid the sailor, strong and dominant, was on deck. He ran aft and tacked about as the jib rattled aloft in the hands of Joe, who quickly joined him. Just then the Reindeer, like a monstrous bat, passed to leeward of them in the gloom.

“Ah, dose boys! Dey take all-a night!” they heard French Pete exclaim, and then the gruff voice of Red Nelson, who said: “Never you mind, Frenchy. I taught the Kid his sailorizing, and I ain’t never been ashamed of him yet.”

The Reindeer was the faster boat, but by spilling the wind from her sails they managed so that the boys could keep them in sight. The breeze came steadily in from the west, with a promise of early increase. The stars were being blotted out by masses of driving clouds, which indicated a greater velocity in the upper strata.’Frisco Kid surveyed the sky.

“Going to have it good and stiff before morning,” he said, “just as I told you.”

Several hours later, both boats stood in for the San Mateo shore, and dropped anchor not more than a cable’s-length away. A little wharf ran out, the bare end of which was perceptible to them, though they could discern a small yacht lying moored to a buoy a short distance away.

According to their custom, everything was put in readiness for hasty departure. The anchors could be tripped and the sails flung out on a moment’s notice. Both skiffs came over noiselessly from the Reindeer. Red Nelson had given one of his two men to French Pete, so that each skiff was doubly manned. They were not a very prepossessing group of men, — at least, Joe did not think so, — for their faces bore a savage seriousness which almost made him shiver. The captain of the Dazzler buckled on his pistol-belt, and placed a rifle and a stout double-block tackle in the boat. Then he poured out wine all around, and, standing in the darkness of the little cabin, they pledged success to the expedition. Red Nelson was also armed, while his men wore at their hips the customary sailor’s sheath-knife. They were very slow and careful to avoid noise in getting into the boats, French Pete pausing long enough to warn the boys to remain quietly aboard and not try any tricks.

“Now’d be your chance, Joe, if they hadn’t taken the skiff,”‘Frisco Kid whispered, when the boats had vanished into the loom of the land.

“What’s the matter with the Dazzler?” was the unexpected answer. “We could up sail and away before you could say Jack Robinson.”

‘Frisco Kid hesitated. The spirit of comradeship was strong in the lad, and deserting a companion in a pinch could not but be repulsive to him.

“I don’t think it’d be exactly square to leave them in the lurch ashore,” he said. “Of course,” he went on hurriedly, “I know the whole thing’s wrong; but you remember that first night, when you came running through the water for the skiff, and those fellows on the bank busy popping away? We didn’t leave you in the lurch, did we?”

Joe assented reluctantly, and then a new thought flashed across his mind. “But they’re pirates — and thieves — and criminals. They’re breaking the law, and you and I are not willing to be lawbreakers. Besides, they’ll not be left. There’s the Reindeer. There’s nothing to prevent them from getting away on her, and they’ll never catch us in the dark.”

“Come on, then.” Though he had agreed,’Frisco Kid did not quite like it, for it still seemed to savor of desertion.

They crawled forward and began to hoist the mainsail. The anchor they could slip, if necessary, and save the time of pulling it up. But at the first rattle of the halyards on the sheaves a warning “Hist!” came to them through the darkness, followed by a loudly whispered “Drop that!”

Glancing in the direction from which these sounds proceeded, they made out a white face peering at them from over the rail of the other sloop.

“Aw, it’s only the Reindeer’s boy,”‘Frisco Kid said. “Come on.”

Again they were interrupted at the first rattling of the blocks.

“I say, you fellers, you’d better let go them halyards pretty quick, I’m a-tellin’ you, or I’ll give you what for!”

This threat being dramatically capped by the click of a cocking pistol,’Frisco Kid obeyed and went grumblingly back to the cockpit. “Oh, there’s plenty more chances to come,” he whispered consolingly to Joe. “French Pete was cute, wasn’t he? He thought you might be trying to make a break, and put a guard on us.”

Nothing came from the shore to indicate how the pirates were faring. Not a dog barked, not a light flared. Yet the air seemed quivering with an alarm about to burst forth. The night had taken on a strained feeling of intensity, as though it held in store all kinds of terrible things. The boys felt this keenly as they huddled against each other in the cockpit and waited.

“You were going to tell me about your running away,” Joe ventured finally, “and why you came back again.”

‘Frisco Kid took up the tale at once, speaking in a muffled undertone close to the other’s ear.

“You see, when I made up my mind to quit the life, there wasn’t a soul to lend me a hand; but I knew that the only thing for me to do was to get ashore and find some kind of work, so I could study. Then I figured there’d be more chance in the country than in the city; so I gave Red Nelson the slip — I was on the Reindeer then. One night on the Alameda oyster-beds, I got ashore and headed back from the bay as fast as I could sprint. Nelson didn’t catch me. But they were all Portuguese farmers thereabouts, and none of them had work for me. Besides, it was in the wrong time of the year — winter. That shows how much I knew about the land.

“I’d saved up a couple of dollars, and I kept traveling back, deeper and deeper into the country, looking for work, and buying bread and cheese and such things from the storekeepers. I tell you, it was cold, nights, sleeping out without blankets, and I was always glad when morning came. But worse than that was the way everybody looked on me. They were all suspicious, and not a bit afraid to show it, and sometimes they’d set their dogs on me and tell me to get along. Seemed as though there wasn’t any place for me on the land. Then my money gave out, and just about the time I was good and hungry I got captured.”

“Captured! What for?”

“Nothing. Living, I suppose. I crawled into a haystack to sleep one night, because it was warmer, and along comes a village constable and arrests me for being a tramp. At first they thought I was a runaway, and telegraphed my description all over. I told them I didn’t have any people, but they wouldn’t believe me for a long while. And then, when nobody claimed me, the judge sent me to a boys’‘refuge’ in San Francisco.”

He stopped and peered intently in the direction of the shore. The darkness and the silence in which the men had been swallowed up was profound. Nothing was stirring save the rising wind.

“I thought I’d die in that’refuge.’ It was just like being in jail. We were locked up and guarded like prisoners. Even then, if I could have liked the other boys it might have been all right. But they were mostly street-boys of the worst kind — lying, and sneaking, and cowardly, without one spark of manhood or one idea of square dealing and fair play. There was only one thing I did like, and that was the books. Oh, I did lots of reading, I tell you! But that couldn’t make up for the rest. I wanted the freedom and the sunlight and the salt water. And what had I done to be kept in prison and herded with such a gang? Instead of doing wrong, I had tried to do right, to make myself better, and that’s what I got for it. I wasn’t old enough, you see, to reason anything out.

“Sometimes I’d see the sunshine dancing on the water and showing white on the sails, and the Reindeer cutting through it just as you please, and I’d get that sick I would know hardly what I did. And then the boys would come against me with some of their meannesses, and I’d start in to lick the whole kit of them. Then the men in charge would lock me up and punish me. Well, I couldn’t stand it any longer; I watched my chance and ran for it. Seemed as though there wasn’t any place on the land for me, so I picked up with French Pete and went back on the bay. That’s about all there is to it, though I’m going to try it again when I get a little older — old enough to get a square deal for myself.”

“You’re going to go back on the land with me,” Joe said authoritatively, laying a hand on his shoulder. “That’s what you’re going to do. As for — ”

Bang! a revolver-shot rang out from the shore. Bang! bang! More guns were speaking sharply and hurriedly. A man’s voice rose wildly on the air and died away. Somebody began to cry for help. Both boys were on their feet on the instant, hoisting the mainsail and getting everything ready to run. The Reindeer boy was doing likewise. A man, roused from his sleep on the yacht, thrust an excited head through the skylight, but withdrew it hastily at sight of the two stranger sloops. The intensity of waiting was broken, the time for action come.

Chapter XVIII — A New Responsibility for Joe

Heaving in on the anchor-chain till it was up and down,’Frisco Kid and Joe ceased from their exertions. Everything was in readiness to give the Dazzler the jib, and go. They strained their eyes in the direction of the shore. The clamor had died away, but here and there lights were beginning to flash. The creaking of a block and tackle came to their ears, and they heard Red Nelson’s voice singing out: “Lower away!” and “Cast off!”

“French Pete forgot to oil it,”‘Frisco Kid commented, referring to the tackle.

“Takin’ their time about it, ain’t they?” the boy on the Reindeer called over to them, sitting down on the cabin and mopping his face after the exertion of hoisting the mainsail single-handed.

“Guess they’re all right,”‘Frisco Kid rejoined. “All ready?”

“Yes — all right here.”

“Say, you,” the man on the yacht cried through the skylight, not venturing to show his head. “You’d better go away.”

“And you’d better stay below and keep quiet,” was the response. “We’ll take care of ourselves. You do the same.”

“If I was only out of this, I’d show you!” he threatened.

“Lucky for you you’re not,” responded the boy on the Reindeer; and thereat the man kept quiet.

“Here they come!” said’Frisco Kid suddenly to Joe.

The two skiffs shot out of the darkness and came alongside. Some kind of an altercation was going on, as French Pete’s voice attested.

“No, no!” he cried. “Put it on ze Dazzler. Ze Reindeer she sail too fast-a, and run away, oh, so queeck, and never more I see it. Put it on ze Dazzler. Eh? Wot you say?”

“All right then,” Red Nelson agreed. “We’ll whack up afterwards. But, say, hurry up. Out with you, lads, and heave her up! My arm’s broke.”

The men tumbled out, ropes were cast inboard, and all hands, with the exception of Joe, tailed on. The shouting of men, the sound of oars, and the rattling and slapping of blocks and sails, told that the men on shore were getting under way for the pursuit.

“Now!” Red Nelson commanded. “All together! Don’t let her come back or you’ll smash the skiff. There she takes it! A long pull and a strong pull! Once again! And yet again! Get a turn there, somebody, and take a spell.”

Though the task was but half accomplished, they were exhausted by the strenuous effort, and hailed the rest eagerly. Joe glanced over the side to discover what the heavy object might be, and saw the vague outlines of a small office-safe.

“Now all together!” Red Nelson began again. “Take her on the run and don’t let her stop! Yo, ho! heave, ho! Once again! And another! Over with her!”

Straining and gasping, with tense muscles and heaving chests, they brought the cumbersome weight over the side, rolled it on top of the rail, and lowered it into the cockpit on the run. The cabin doors were thrown apart, and it was moved along, end for end, till it lay on the cabin floor, snug against the end of the centerboard-case. Red Nelson had followed it aboard to superintend. His left arm hung helpless at his side, and from the finger-tips blood dripped with monotonous regularity. He did not seem to mind it, however, nor even the mutterings of the human storm he had raised ashore, and which, to judge by the sounds, was even then threatening to break upon them.

“Lay your course for the Golden Gate,” he said to French Pete, as he turned to go. “I’ll try to stand by you, but if you get lost in the dark I’ll meet you outside, off the Farralones, in the morning.” He sprang into the skiff after the men, and, with a wave of his uninjured arm, cried heartily: “And then it’s for Mexico, my lads — Mexico and summer weather!”

Just as the Dazzler, freed from her anchor, paid off under the jib and filled away, a dark sail loomed under their stern, barely missing the skiff in tow. The cockpit of the stranger was crowded with men, who raised their voices angrily at sight of the pirates. Joe had half a mind to run forward and cut the halyards so that the Dazzler might be captured. As he had told French Pete the day before, he had done nothing to be ashamed of, and was not afraid to go before a court of justice. But the thought of’Frisco Kid restrained him. He wanted to take him ashore with him, but in so doing he did not wish to take him to jail. So he, too, began to experience a keen interest in the escape of the Dazzler.

The pursuing sloop rounded up hurriedly to come about after them, and in the darkness fouled the yacht which lay at anchor. The man aboard of her, thinking that at last his time had come, gave one wild yell, ran on deck, and leaped overboard. In the confusion of the collision, and while they were endeavoring to save him, French Pete and the boys slipped away into the night.

The Reindeer had already disappeared, and by the time Joe and’Frisco Kid had the running-gear coiled down and everything in shape, they were standing out in open water. The wind was freshening constantly, and the Dazzler heeled a lively clip through the comparatively smooth stretch. Before an hour had passed, the lights of Hunter’s Point were well on her starboard beam.’Frisco Kid went below to make coffee, but Joe remained on deck, watching the lights of South San Francisco grow, and speculating on their destination. Mexico! They were going to sea in such a frail craft! Impossible! At least, it seemed so to him, for his conceptions of ocean travel were limited to steamers and full-rigged ships. He was beginning to feel half sorry that he had not cut the halyards, and longed to ask French Pete a thousand questions; but just as the first was on his lips that worthy ordered him to go below and get some coffee and then to turn in. He was followed shortly afterward by’Frisco Kid, French Pete remaining at his lonely task of beating down the bay and out to sea. Twice he heard the waves buffeted back from some flying forefoot, and once he saw a sail to leeward on the opposite tack, which luffed sharply and came about at sight of him. But the darkness favored, and he heard no more of it — perhaps because he worked into the wind closer by a point, and held on his way with a shaking after-leech.

Shortly after dawn, the two boys were called and came sleepily on deck. The day had broken cold and gray, while the wind had attained half a gale. Joe noted with astonishment the white tents of the quarantine station on Angel Island. San Francisco lay a smoky blur on the southern horizon, while the night, still lingering on the western edge of the world, slowly withdrew before their eyes. French Pete was just finishing a long reach into the Raccoon Straits, and at the same time studiously regarding a plunging sloop-yacht half a mile astern.

“Dey t’ink to catch ze Dazzler, eh? Bah!” And he brought the craft in question about, laying a course straight for the Golden Gate.

The pursuing yacht followed suit. Joe watched her a few moments. She held an apparently parallel course to them, and forged ahead much faster.

“Why, at this rate they’ll have us in no time!” he cried.

French Pete laughed. “You t’ink so? Bah! Dey outfoot; we outpoint. Dey are scared of ze wind; we wipe ze eye of ze wind. Ah! you wait, you see.”

“They’re traveling ahead faster,”‘Frisco Kid explained, “but we’re sailing closer to the wind. In the end we’ll beat them, even if they have the nerve to cross the bar — which I don’t think they have. Look! See!”

Ahead could be seen the great ocean surges, flinging themselves skyward and bursting into roaring caps of smother. In the midst of it, now rolling her dripping bottom clear, now sousing her deck-load of lumber far above the guards, a coasting steam-schooner was lumbering drunkenly into port. It was magnificent — this battle between man and the elements. Whatever timidity he had entertained fled away, and Joe’s nostrils began to dilate and his eyes to flash at the nearness of the impending struggle.

French Pete called for his oilskins and sou’wester, and Joe also was equipped with a spare suit. Then he and’Frisco Kid were sent below to lash and cleat the safe in place. In the midst of this task Joe glanced at the firm-name, gilt-lettered on the face of it, and read: “Bronson & Tate.” Why, that was his father and his father’s partner. That was their safe, their money!’Frisco Kid, nailing the last cleat on the floor of the cabin, looked up and followed his fascinated gaze.

“That’s rough, isn’t it,” he whispered. “Your father?”

Joe nodded. He could see it all now. They had run into San Andreas, where his father worked the big quarries, and most probably the safe contained the wages of the thousand men or more whom he employed. “Don’t say anything,” he cautioned.

‘Frisco Kid agreed knowingly. “French Pete can’t read, anyway,” he muttered, “and the chances are that Red Nelson won’t know what your name is. But, just the same, it’s pretty rough. They’ll break it open and divide up as soon as they can, so I don’t see what you’re going to do about it.”

“Wait and see.” Joe had made up his mind that he would do his best to stand by his father’s property. At the worst, it could only be lost; and that would surely be the case were he not along, while, being along, he at least had a fighting chance to save it, or to be in position to recover it. Responsibilities were showering upon him thick and fast. But a few days back he had had but himself to consider; then, in some subtle way, he had felt a certain accountability for’Frisco Kid’s future welfare; and after that, and still more subtly, he had become aware of duties which he owed to his position, to his sister, to his chums and friends; and now, by a most unexpected chain of circumstances, came the pressing need of service for his father’s sake. It was a call upon his deepest strength, and he responded bravely. While the future might be doubtful, he had no doubt of himself; and this very state of mind, this self-confidence, by a generous alchemy, gave him added resolution. Nor did he fail to be vaguely aware of it, and to grasp dimly at the truth that confidence breeds confidence — strength, strength.

Chapter XIX — The Boys Plan an Escape

“Now she takes it!” French Pete cried.

Both lads ran into the cockpit. They were on the edge of the breaking bar. A huge forty-footer reared a foam-crested head far above them, stealing their wind for the moment and threatening to crush the tiny craft like an egg-shell. Joe held his breath. It was the supreme moment. French Pete luffed straight into it, and the Dazzler mounted the steep slope with a rush, poised a moment on the giddy summit, and fell into the yawning valley beyond. Keeping off in the intervals to fill the mainsail, and luffing into the combers, they worked their way across the dangerous stretch. Once they caught the tail-end of a whitecap and were well-nigh smothered in the froth, but otherwise the sloop bobbed and ducked with the happy facility of a cork.

To Joe it seemed as though he had been lifted out of himself — out of the world. Ah, this was life! this was action! Surely it could not be the old, commonplace world he had lived in so long! The sailors, grouped on the streaming deck-load of the steamer, waved their sou’westers, and, on the bridge, even the captain was expressing his admiration for the plucky craft.

“Ah, you see! you see!” French Pete pointed astern.

The sloop-yacht had been afraid to venture it, and was skirting back and forth on the inner edge of the bar. The chase was over. A pilot-boat, running for shelter from the coming storm, flew by them like a frightened bird, passing the steamer as though the latter were standing still.

Half an hour later the Dazzler sped beyond the last smoking sea and was sliding up and down on the long Pacific swell. The wind had increased its velocity and necessitated a reefing down of jib and mainsail. Then they laid off again, full and free on the starboard tack, for the Farralones, thirty miles away. By the time breakfast was cooked and eaten they picked up the Reindeer, which was hove to and working offshore to the south and west. The wheel was lashed down, and there was not a soul on deck.

French Pete complained bitterly against such recklessness. “Dat is ze one fault of Red Nelson. He no care. He is afraid of not’ing. Some day he will die, oh, so vaire queeck! I know he will.”

Three times they circled about the Reindeer, running under her weather quarter and shouting in chorus, before they brought anybody on deck. Sail was then made at once, and together the two cockle-shells plunged away into the vastness of the Pacific. This was necessary, as’Frisco Kid informed Joe, in order to have an offing before the whole fury of the storm broke upon them. Otherwise they would be driven on the lee shore of the California coast. Grub and water, he said, could be obtained by running into the land when fine weather came. He congratulated Joe upon the fact that he was not seasick, which circumstance likewise brought praise from French Pete and put him in better humor with his mutinous young sailor.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,”‘Frisco Kid whispered, while cooking dinner. “To-night we’ll drag French Pete down — ”

“Drag French Pete down!”

“Yes, and tie him up good and snug, as soon as it gets dark; then put out the lights and make a run for land; get to port anyway, anywhere, just so long as we shake loose from Red Nelson.”

“Yes,” Joe deliberated; “that would be all right — if I could do it alone. But as for asking you to help me — why, that would be treason to French Pete.”

“That’s what I’m coming to. I’ll help you if you promise me a few things. French Pete took me aboard when I ran away from the’refuge,’ when I was starving and had no place to go, and I just can’t repay him for that by sending him to jail.’T wouldn’t be square. Your father wouldn’t have you break your word, would he?”

“No; of course not.” Joe knew how sacredly his father held his word of honor.

“Then you must promise, and your father must see it carried out, not to press any charge against French Pete.”

“All right. And now, what about yourself? You can’t very well expect to go away with him again on the Dazzler!”

“Oh, don’t bother about me. There’s nobody to miss me. I’m strong enough, and know enough about it, to ship to sea as ordinary seaman. I’ll go away somewhere over on the other side of the world, and begin all over again.”

“Then we’ll have to call it off, that’s all.”

“Call what off?”

“Tying French Pete up and running for it.”

“No, sir. That’s decided upon.”

“Now listen here: I’ll not have a thing to do with it. I’ll go on to Mexico first, if you don’t make me one promise.”

“And what’s the promise?”

“Just this: you place yourself in my hands from the moment we get ashore, and trust to me. You don’t know anything about the land, anyway — you said so. And I’ll fix it with my father — I know I can — so that you can get to know people of the right sort, and study and get an education, and be something else than a bay pirate or a sailor. That’s what you’d like, isn’t it?”

Though he said nothing,’Frisco Kid showed how well he liked it by the expression of his face.

“And it’ll be no more than your due, either,” Joe continued. “You will have stood by me, and you’ll have recovered my father’s money. He’ll owe it to you.”

“But I don’t do things that way. I don’t think much of a man who does a favor just to be paid for it.”

“Now you keep quiet. How much do you think it would cost my father for detectives and all that to recover that safe? Give me your promise, that’s all, and when I’ve got things arranged, if you don’t like them you can back out. Come on; that’s fair.”

They shook hands on the bargain, and proceeded to map out their line of action for the night.

But the storm, yelling down out of the northwest, had something entirely different in store for the Dazzler and her crew. By the time dinner was over they were forced to put double reefs in mainsail and jib, and still the gale had not reached its height. The sea, also, had been kicked up till it was a continuous succession of water-mountains, frightful and withal grand to look upon from the low deck of the sloop. It was only when the sloops were tossed upon the crests of the waves at the same time that they caught sight of each other. Occasional fragments of seas swashed into the cockpit or dashed aft over the cabin, and Joe was stationed at the small pump to keep the well dry.

At three o’clock, watching his chance, French Pete motioned to the Reindeer that he was going to heave to and get out a sea-anchor. This latter was of the nature of a large shallow canvas bag, with the mouth held open by triangularly lashed spars. To this the towing-ropes were attached, on the kite principle, so that the greatest resisting surface was presented to the water. The sloop, drifting so much faster, would thus be held bow on to both wind and sea — the safest possible position in a storm. Red Nelson waved his hand in response that he understood and to go ahead.

French Pete went forward to launch the sea-anchor himself, leaving it to’Frisco Kid to put the helm down at the proper moment and run into the wind. The Frenchman poised on the slippery fore-deck, waiting an opportunity. But at that moment the Dazzler lifted into an unusually large sea, and, as she cleared the summit, caught a heavy snort of the gale at the very instant she was righting herself to an even keel. Thus there was not the slightest yield to this sudden pressure on her sails and mast-gear.

There was a quick snap, followed by a crash. The steel weather-rigging carried away at the lanyards, and mast, jib, mainsail, blocks, stays, sea-anchor, French Pete — everything — went over the side. Almost by a miracle, the captain clutched at the bobstay and managed to get one hand up and over the bowsprit. The boys ran forward to drag him into safety, and Red Nelson, observing the disaster, put up his helm and ran down to the rescue.

Chapter XX — Perilous Hours

French Pete was uninjured from the fall overboard with the Dazzler’s mast; but the sea-anchor, which had gone with him, had not escaped so easily. The gaff of the mainsail had been driven through it, and it refused to work. The wreckage, thumping alongside, held the sloop in a quartering slant to the seas — not so dangerous a position as it might be, nor so safe, either. “Good-by, old-a Dazzler. Never no more you wipe ze eye of ze wind. Never no more you kick your heels at ze crack gentlemen-yachts.”

So the captain lamented, standing in the cockpit and surveying the ruin with wet eyes. Even Joe, who bore him great dislike, felt sorry for him at this moment. A heavier blast of the wind caught the jagged crest of a wave and hurled it upon the helpless craft.

“Can’t we save her?” Joe spluttered.

‘Frisco Kid shook his head.

“Nor the safe?”

“Impossible,” he answered. “Couldn’t lay another boat alongside for a United States mint. As it is, it’ll keep us guessing to save ourselves.”

Another sea swept over them, and the skiff, which had long since been swamped, dashed itself to pieces against the stern. Then the Reindeer towered above them on a mountain of water. Joe caught himself half shrinking back, for it seemed she would fall down squarely on top of them; but the next instant she dropped into the gaping trough, and they were looking down upon her far below. It was a striking picture — one Joe was destined never to forget. The Reindeer was wallowing in the snow-white smother, her rails flush with the sea, the water scudding across her deck in foaming cataracts. The air was filled with flying spray, which made the scene appear hazy and unreal. One of the men was clinging to the perilous after-deck and striving to cast off the water-logged skiff. The boy, leaning far over the cockpit-rail and holding on for dear life, was passing him a knife. The second man stood at the wheel, putting it up with flying hands and forcing the sloop to pay off. Beside him, his injured arm in a sling, was Red Nelson, his sou’wester gone and his fair hair plastered in wet, wind-blown ringlets about his face. His whole attitude breathed indomitability, courage, strength. It seemed almost as though the divine were blazing forth from him. Joe looked upon him in sudden awe, and, realizing the enormous possibilities of the man, felt sorrow for the way in which they had been wasted. A thief and a robber! In that flashing moment Joe caught a glimpse of human truth, grasped at the mystery of success and failure. Life threw back its curtains that he might read it and understand. Of such stuff as Red Nelson were heroes made; but they possessed wherein he lacked — the power of choice, the careful poise of mind, the sober control of soul: in short, the very things his father had so often “preached” to him about.

These were the thoughts which came to Joe in the flight of a second. Then the Reindeer swept skyward and hurtled across their bow to leeward on the breast of a mighty billow.

“Ze wild man! ze wild man!” French Pete shrieked, watching her in amazement. “He t’inks he can jibe! He will die! We will all die! He must come about. Oh, ze fool, ze fool!”

But time was precious, and Red Nelson ventured the chance. At the right moment he jibed the mainsail over and hauled back on the wind.

“Here she comes! Make ready to jump for it,”‘Frisco Kid cried to Joe.

The Reindeer dashed by their stern, heeling over till the cabin windows were buried, and so close that it appeared she must run them down. But a freak of the waters lurched the two crafts apart. Red Nelson, seeing that the manoeuver had miscarried, instantly instituted another. Throwing the helm hard up, the Reindeer whirled on her heel, thus swinging her overhanging main-boom closer to the Dazzler. French Pete was the nearest, and the opportunity could last no longer than a second. Like a cat he sprang, catching the foot-rope with both hands. Then the Reindeer forged ahead, dipping him into the sea at every plunge. But he clung on, working inboard every time he emerged, till he dropped into the cockpit as Red Nelson squared off to run down to leeward and repeat the manoeuver.

“Your turn next,”‘Frisco Kid said.

“No; yours,” Joe replied.

“But I know more about the water,”‘Frisco Kid insisted.

“And I can swim as well as you,” the other retorted.

It would have been hard to forecast the outcome of this dispute; but, as it was, the swift rush of events made any settlement needless. The Reindeer had jibed over and was plowing back at breakneck speed, careening at such an angle that it seemed she must surely capsize. It was a gallant sight. Just then the storm burst in all its fury, the shouting wind flattening the ragged crests till they boiled. The Reindeer dipped from view behind an immense wave. The wave rolled on, but the next moment, where the sloop had been, the boys noted with startled eyes only the angry waters! Doubting, they looked a second time. There was no Reindeer. They were alone on the torn crest of the ocean!

“God have mercy on their souls!”‘Frisco Kid said solemnly.

Joe was too horrified at the suddenness of the catastrophe to utter a sound.

“Sailed her clean under, and, with the ballast she carried, went straight to bottom,”‘Frisco Kid gasped. Then, turning to their own pressing need, he said: “Now we’ve got to look out for ourselves. The back of the storm broke in that puff, but the sea’ll kick up worse yet as the wind eases down. Lend a hand and hang on with the other. We’ve got to get her head-on.”

Together, knives in hand, they crawled forward to where the pounding wreckage hampered the boat sorely.’Frisco Kid took the lead in the ticklish work, but Joe obeyed orders like a veteran. Every minute or two the bow was swept by the sea, and they were pounded and buffeted about like a pair of shuttlecocks. First the main portion of the wreckage was securely fastened to the forward bitts; then, breathless and gasping, more often under the water than out, they cut and hacked at the tangle of halyards, sheets, stays, and tackles. The cockpit was taking water rapidly, and it was a race between swamping and completing the task. At last, however, everything stood clear save the lee rigging.’Frisco Kid slashed the lanyards. The storm did the rest. The Dazzler drifted swiftly to leeward of the wreckage till the strain on the line fast to the forward bitts jerked her bow into place and she ducked dead into the eye of the wind and sea.

Pausing only for a cheer at the success of their undertaking, the two lads raced aft, where the cockpit was half full and the dunnage of the cabin all afloat. With a couple of buckets procured from the stern lockers, they proceeded to fling the water overboard. It was heartbreaking work, for many a barrelful was flung back upon them again; but they persevered, and when night fell the Dazzler, bobbing merrily at her sea-anchor, could boast that her pumps sucked once more. As’Frisco Kid had said, the backbone of the storm was broken, though the wind had veered to the west, where it still blew stiffly.

“If she holds,”‘Frisco Kid said, referring to the breeze, “we’ll drift to the California coast sometime to-morrow. Nothing to do now but wait.”

They said little, oppressed by the loss of their comrades and overcome with exhaustion, preferring to huddle against each other for the sake of warmth and companionship. It was a miserable night, and they shivered constantly from the cold. Nothing dry was to be obtained aboard, food, blankets, everything being soaked with the salt water. Sometimes they dozed; but these intervals were short and harassing, for it seemed each took turn in waking with such sudden starts as to rouse the other.

At last day broke, and they looked about. Wind and sea had dropped considerably, and there was no question as to the safety of the Dazzler. The coast was nearer than they had expected, its cliffs showing dark and forbidding in the gray of dawn. But with the rising of the sun they could see the yellow beaches, flanked by the white surf, and beyond — it seemed too good to be true — the clustering houses and smoking chimneys of a town.

“Santa Cruz!”‘Frisco Kid cried, “and no chance of being wrecked in the surf!”

“Then the safe is safe?” Joe queried.

“Safe! I should say so. It ain’t much of a sheltered harbor for large vessels, but with this breeze we’ll run right up the mouth of the San Lorenzo River. Then there’s a little lake like, and a boat-house. Water smooth as glass and hardly over your head. You see, I was down here once before, with Red Nelson. Come on. We’ll be in in time for breakfast.”

Bringing to light some spare coils of rope from the lockers, he put a clove-hitch on the standing part of the sea-anchor hawser, and carried the new running-line aft, making it fast to the stern bitts. Then he cast off from the forward bitts. The Dazzler swung off into the trough, completed the evolution, and pointed her nose toward shore. A couple of spare oars from below, and as many water-soaked blankets, sufficed to make a jury-mast and sail. When this was in place, Joe cast loose from the wreckage, which was now towing astern, while’Frisco Kid took the tiller.

Chapter XXI — Joe and His Father

“How’s that?” cried’Frisco Kid, as he finished making the Dazzler fast fore and aft, and sat down on the stringpiece of the tiny wharf. “What’ll we do next, captain?”

Joe looked up in quick surprise. “Why — I — what’s the matter?”

“Well, ain’t you captain now? Haven’t we reached land? I’m crew from now on, ain’t I? What’s your orders?”

Joe caught the spirit of it. “Pipe all hands for breakfast — that is — wait a minute.”

Diving below, he possessed himself of the money he had stowed away in his bundle when he came aboard. Then he locked the cabin door, and they went uptown in search of a restaurant. Over the breakfast Joe planned the next move, and, when they had done, communicated it to’Frisco Kid.

In response to his inquiry, the cashier told him when the morning train started for San Francisco. He glanced at the clock.

“Just time to catch it,” he said to’Frisco Kid. “Keep the cabin doors locked, and don’t let anybody come aboard. Here’s money. Eat at the restaurants. Dry your blankets and sleep in the cockpit. I’ll be back to-morrow. And don’t let anybody into that cabin. Good-by.”

With a hasty hand-grip, he sped down the street to the depot. The conductor looked at him with surprise when he punched his ticket. And well he might, for it was not the custom of his passengers to travel in sea-boots and sou’westers. But Joe did not mind. He did not even notice. He had bought a paper and was absorbed in its contents. Before long his eyes caught an interesting paragraph:

SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN LOST

The tug Sea Queen, chartered by Bronson & Tate, has returned from a fruitless cruise outside the Heads. No news of value could be obtained concerning the pirates who so daringly carried off their safe at San Andreas last Tuesday night. The lighthouse-keeper at the Farralones mentions having sighted the two sloops Wednesday morning, clawing offshore in the teeth of the gale. It is supposed by shipping men that they perished in the storm with, their ill-gotten treasure. Rumor has it that, in addition to the ten thousand dollars in gold, the safe contained papers of great importance.

When Joe had read this he felt a great relief. It was evident no one had been killed at San Andreas the night of the robbery, else there would have been some comment on it in the paper. Nor, if they had had any clue to his own whereabouts, would they have omitted such a striking bit of information.

At the depot in San Francisco the curious onlookers were surprised to see a boy clad conspicuously in sea-boots and sou’wester hail a cab and dash away. But Joe was in a hurry. He knew his father’s hours, and was fearful lest he should not catch him before he went to lunch.

The office-boy scowled at him when he pushed open the door and asked to see Mr. Bronson; nor could the head clerk, when summoned by this disreputable intruder, recognize him.

“Don’t you know me, Mr. Willis?”

Mr. Willis looked a second time. “Why, it’s Joe Bronson! Of all things under the sun, where did you drop from? Go right in. Your father’s in there.”

Mr. Bronson stopped dictating to his stenographer and looked up. “Hello! Where have you been?” he said.

“To sea,” Joe answered demurely, not sure of just what kind of a reception he was to get, and fingering his sou’wester nervously.

“Short trip, eh? How did you make out?”

“Oh, so-so.” He had caught the twinkle in his father’s eye and knew that it was all clear sailing. “Not so bad — er — that is, considering.”

“Considering?”

“Well, not exactly that; rather, it might have been worse, while it couldn’t have been better.”

“That’s interesting. Sit down.” Then, turning to the stenographer: “You may go, Mr. Brown, and — hum! — I won’t need you any more to-day.”

It was all Joe could do to keep from crying, so kindly and naturally had his father received him, making him feel at once as if not the slightest thing uncommon had occurred. It seemed as if he had just returned from a vacation, or, man-grown, had come back from some business trip.

“Now go ahead, Joe. You were speaking to me a moment ago in conundrums, and you have aroused my curiosity to a most uncomfortable degree.”

Whereupon Joe sat down and told what had happened — all that had happened — from Monday night to that very moment. Each little incident he related, — every detail, — not forgetting his conversations with’Frisco Kid nor his plans concerning him. His face flushed and he was carried away with the excitement of the narrative, while Mr. Bronson was almost as eager, urging him on whenever he slackened his pace, but otherwise remaining silent.

“So you see,” Joe concluded, “it couldn’t possibly have turned out any better.”

“Ah, well,” Mr. Bronson deliberated judiciously, “it may be so, and then again it may not.”

“I don’t see it.” Joe felt sharp disappointment at his father’s qualified approval. It seemed to him that the return of the safe merited something stronger.

That Mr. Bronson fully comprehended the way Joe felt about it was clearly in evidence, for he went on: “As to the matter of the safe, all hail to you, Joe! Credit, and plenty of it, is your due. Mr. Tate and myself have already spent five hundred dollars in attempting to recover it. So important was it that we have also offered five thousand dollars reward, and but this morning were considering the advisability of increasing the amount. But, my son,” — Mr. Bronson stood up, resting a hand affectionately on his boy’s shoulder, — ”there are certain things in this world which are of still greater importance than gold, or papers which represent what gold may buy. How about yourself? That’s the point. Will you sell the best possibilities of your life right now for a million dollars?”

Joe shook his head.

“As I said, that’s the point. A human life the money of the world cannot buy; nor can it redeem one which is misspent; nor can it make full and complete and beautiful a life which is dwarfed and warped and ugly. How about yourself? What is to be the effect of all these strange adventures on your life — your life, Joe? Are you going to pick yourself up to-morrow and try it over again? or the next day? or the day after? Do you understand? Why, Joe, do you think for one moment that I would place against the best value of my son’s life the paltry value of a safe? And can I say, until time has told me, whether this trip of yours could not possibly have been better? Such an experience is as potent for evil as for good. One dollar is exactly like another — there are many in the world: but no Joe is like my Joe, nor can there be any others in the world to take his place. Don’t you see, Joe? Don’t you understand?”

Mr. Bronson’s voice broke slightly, and the next instant Joe was sobbing as though his heart would break. He had never understood this father of his before, and he knew now the pain he must have caused him, to say nothing of his mother and sister. But the four stirring days he had lived had given him a clearer view of the world and humanity, and he had always possessed the power of putting his thoughts into speech; so he spoke of these things and the lessons he had learned — the conclusions he had drawn from his conversations with’Frisco Kid, from his intercourse with French Pete, from the graphic picture he retained of the Reindeer and Red Nelson as they wallowed in the trough beneath him. And Mr. Bronson listened and, in turn, understood.

“But what of’Frisco Kid, father?” Joe asked when he had finished.

“Hum! there seems to be a great deal of promise in the boy, from what you say of him.” Mr. Bronson hid the twinkle in his eye this time. “And, I must confess, he seems perfectly capable of shifting for himself.”

“Sir?” Joe could not believe his ears.

“Let us see, then. He is at present entitled to the half of five thousand dollars, the other half of which belongs to you. It was you two who preserved the safe from the bottom of the Pacific, and if you only had waited a little longer, Mr. Tate and myself would have increased the reward.”

“Oh!” Joe caught a glimmering of the light. “Part of that is easily arranged. I simply refuse to take my half. As to the other — that isn’t exactly what’Frisco Kid desires. He wants friends — and — and — though you didn’t say so, they are far higher than money, nor can money buy them. He wants friends and a chance for an education, not twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“Don’t you think it would be better for him to choose for himself?”

“Ah, no. That’s all arranged.”

“Arranged?”

“Yes, sir. He’s captain on sea, and I’m captain on land. So he’s under my charge now.”

“Then you have the power of attorney for him in the present negotiations? Good. I’ll make you a proposition. The twenty-five hundred dollars shall be held in trust by me, on his demand at any time. We’ll settle about yours afterward. Then he shall be put on probation for, say, a year — in our office. You can either coach him in his studies, for I am confident now that you will be up in yours hereafter, or he can attend night-school. And after that, if he comes through his period of probation with flying colors, I’ll give him the same opportunities for an education that you possess. It all depends on himself. And now, Mr. Attorney, what have you to say to my offer in the interests of your client?”

“That I close with it at once.”

Father and son shook hands.

“And what are you going to do now, Joe?”

“Send a telegram to’Frisco Kid first, and then hurry home.”

“Then wait a minute till I call up San Andreas and tell Mr. Tate the good news, and then I’ll go with you.”

“Mr. Willis,” Mr. Bronson said as they left the outer office, “the San Andreas safe is recovered, and we’ll all take a holiday. Kindly tell the clerks that they are free for the rest of the day. And I say,” he called back as they entered the elevator, “don’t forget the office-boy.”

A Daughter of the Snows

Published in 1902, this novel is set in the Yukon, and tells the story of Frona Welse, “a Stanford graduate and physical Valkyrie” who takes to the trail after upsetting her wealthy father’s community by her forthright manner and befriending the town’s prostitute. She is also torn between love for two suitors: Gregory St Vincent, a local man who turns out to be cowardly and treacherous; and Vance Corliss, a Yale-trained mining engineer. The novel is noteworthy for its strong-willed and independent heroine, one of many such characters that would feature in his later works.

The first edition

Chapter I

“All ready, Miss Welse, though I’m sorry we can’t spare one of the steamer’s boats.”

Frona Welse arose with alacrity and came to the first officer’s side.

“We’re so busy,” he explained, “and gold-rushers are such perishable freight, at least — ”

“I understand,” she interrupted, “and I, too, am behaving as though I were perishable. And I am sorry for the trouble I am giving you, but — but — ” She turned quickly and pointed to the shore. “Do you see that big log-house? Between the clump of pines and the river? I was born there.”

“Guess I’d be in a hurry myself,” he muttered, sympathetically, as he piloted her along the crowded deck.

Everybody was in everybody else’s way; nor was there one who failed to proclaim it at the top of his lungs. A thousand gold-seekers were clamoring for the immediate landing of their outfits. Each hatchway gaped wide open, and from the lower depths the shrieking donkey-engines were hurrying the misassorted outfits skyward. On either side of the steamer, rows of scows received the flying cargo, and on each of these scows a sweating mob of men charged the descending slings and heaved bales and boxes about in frantic search. Men waved shipping receipts and shouted over the steamer-rails to them. Sometimes two and three identified the same article, and war arose. The “two-circle” and the “circle-and-dot” brands caused endless jangling, while every whipsaw discovered a dozen claimants.

“The purser insists that he is going mad,” the first officer said, as he helped Frona Welse down the gangway to the landing stage, “and the freight clerks have turned the cargo over to the passengers and quit work. But we’re not so unlucky as the Star of Bethlehem,” he reassured her, pointing to a steamship at anchor a quarter of a mile away. “Half of her passengers have pack-horses for Skaguay and White Pass, and the other half are bound over the Chilcoot. So they’ve mutinied and everything’s at a standstill.”

“Hey, you!” he cried, beckoning to a Whitehall which hovered discreetly on the outer rim of the floating confusion.

A tiny launch, pulling heroically at a huge tow-barge, attempted to pass between; but the boatman shot nervily across her bow, and just as he was clear, unfortunately, caught a crab. This slewed the boat around and brought it to a stop.

“Watch out!” the first officer shouted.

A pair of seventy-foot canoes, loaded with outfits, gold-rushers, and Indians, and under full sail, drove down from the counter direction. One of them veered sharply towards the landing stage, but the other pinched the Whitehall against the barge. The boatman had unshipped his oars in time, but his small craft groaned under the pressure and threatened to collapse. Whereat he came to his feet, and in short, nervous phrases consigned all canoe-men and launch-captains to eternal perdition. A man on the barge leaned over from above and baptized him with crisp and crackling oaths, while the whites and Indians in the canoe laughed derisively.

“Aw, g’wan!” one of them shouted. “Why don’t yeh learn to row?”

The boatman’s fist landed on the point of his critic’s jaw and dropped him stunned upon the heaped merchandise. Not content with this summary act he proceeded to follow his fist into the other craft. The miner nearest him tugged vigorously at a revolver which had jammed in its shiny leather holster, while his brother argonauts, laughing, waited the outcome. But the canoe was under way again, and the Indian helmsman drove the point of his paddle into the boatman’s chest and hurled him backward into the bottom of the Whitehall.

When the flood of oaths and blasphemy was at full tide, and violent assault and quick death seemed most imminent, the first officer had stolen a glance at the girl by his side. He had expected to find a shocked and frightened maiden countenance, and was not at all prepared for the flushed and deeply interested face which met his eyes.

“I am sorry,” he began.

But she broke in, as though annoyed by the interruption, “No, no; not at all. I am enjoying it every bit. Though I am glad that man’s revolver stuck. If it had not — ”

“We might have been delayed in getting ashore.” The first officer laughed, and therein displayed his tact.

“That man is a robber,” he went on, indicating the boatman, who had now shoved his oars into the water and was pulling alongside. “He agreed to charge only twenty dollars for putting you ashore. Said he’d have made it twenty-five had it been a man. He’s a pirate, mark me, and he will surely hang some day. Twenty dollars for a half-hour’s work! Think of it!”

“Easy, sport! Easy!” cautioned the fellow in question, at the same time making an awkward landing and dropping one of his oars over-side. “You’ve no call to be flingin’ names about,” he added, defiantly, wringing out his shirt-sleeve, wet from rescue of the oar.

“You’ve got good ears, my man,” began the first officer.

“And a quick fist,” the other snapped in.

“And a ready tongue.”

“Need it in my business. No gettin’ ‘long without it among you sea-sharks. Pirate, am I? And you with a thousand passengers packed like sardines! Charge ’em double first-class passage, feed ’em steerage grub, and bunk ’em worse ‘n pigs! Pirate, eh! Me?”

A red-faced man thrust his head over the rail above and began to bellow lustily.

“I want my stock landed! Come up here, Mr. Thurston! Now! Right away! Fifty cayuses of | mine eating their heads off in this dirty kennel of yours, and it’ll be a sick time you’ll have if you don’t hustle them ashore as fast as God’ll let you! I’m losing a thousand dollars a day, and I won’t stand it! Do you hear? I won’t stand it! You’ve robbed me right and left from the time you cleared dock in Seattle, and by the hinges of hell I won’t stand it any more! I’ll break this company as sure as my name’s Thad Ferguson! D’ye hear my spiel? I’m Thad Ferguson, and you can’t come and see me any too quick for your health! D’ye hear?”

“Pirate; eh?” the boatman soliloquized. “Who? Me?”

Mr. Thurston waved his hand appeasingly at the red-faced man, and turned to the girl. “I’d like to go ashore with you, and as far as the store, but you see how busy we are. Good-by, and a lucky trip to you. I’ll tell off a couple of men at once and break out your baggage. Have it up at the store to-morrow morning, sharp.”

She took his hand lightly and stepped aboard. Her weight gave the leaky boat a sudden lurch, and the water hurtled across the bottom boards to her shoe-tops: but she took it coolly enough, settling herself in the stern-sheets and tucking her feet under her.

“Hold on!” the officer cried. “This will never do, Miss Welse. Come on back, and I’ll get one of our boats over as soon as I can.”

“I’ll see you in — in heaven first,” retorted the boatman, shoving off.
“Let go!” he threatened.

Mr. Thurston gripped tight hold of the gunwale, and as reward for his chivalry had his knuckles rapped sharply by the oar-blade. Then he forgot himself, and Miss Welse also, and swore, and swore fervently.

“I dare say our farewell might have been more dignified,” she called back to him, her laughter rippling across the water.

“Jove!” he muttered, doffing his cap gallantly. “There is a woman!” And a sudden hunger seized him, and a yearning to see himself mirrored always in the gray eyes of Frona Welse. He was not analytical; he did not know why; but he knew that with her he could travel to the end of the earth. He felt a distaste for his profession, and a temptation to throw it all over and strike out for the Klondike whither she was going; then he glanced up the beetling side of the ship, saw the red face of Thad Ferguson, and forgot the dream he had for an instant dreamed.

Splash! A handful of water from his strenuous oar struck her full in the face. “Hope you don’t mind it, miss,” he apologized. “I’m doin’ the best I know how, which ain’t much.”

“So it seems,” she answered, good-naturedly.

“Not that I love the sea,” bitterly; “but I’ve got to turn a few honest dollars somehow, and this seemed the likeliest way. I oughter ‘a ben in Klondike by now, if I’d had any luck at all. Tell you how it was. I lost my outfit on Windy Arm, half-way in, after packin’ it clean across the Pass — ”

Zip! Splash! She shook the water from her eyes, squirming the while as some of it ran down her warm back.

“You’ll do,” he encouraged her. “You’re the right stuff for this country. Goin’ all the way in?”

She nodded cheerfully.

“Then you’ll do. But as I was sayin’, after I lost my outfit I hit back for the coast, bein’ broke, to hustle up another one. That’s why I’m chargin’ high-pressure rates. And I hope you don’t feel sore at what I made you pay. I’m no worse than the rest, miss, sure. I had to dig up a hundred for this old tub, which ain’t worth ten down in the States. Same kind of prices everywhere. Over on the Skaguay Trail horseshoe nails is just as good as a quarter any day. A man goes up to the bar and calls for a whiskey. Whiskey’s half a dollar. Well, he drinks his whiskey, plunks down two horseshoe nails, and it’s O.K. No kick comin’ on horseshoe nails. They use ’em to make change.”

“You must be a brave man to venture into the country again after such an experience. Won’t you tell me your name? We may meet on the Inside.”

“Who? Me? Oh, I’m Del Bishop, pocket-miner; and if ever we run across each other, remember I’d give you the last shirt — I mean, remember my last bit of grub is yours.”

“Thank you,” she answered with a sweet smile; for she was a woman who loved the things which rose straight from the heart.

He stopped rowing long enough to fish about in the water around his feet for an old cornbeef can.

“You’d better do some bailin’,” he ordered, tossing her the can.
“She’s leakin’ worse since that squeeze.”

Frona smiled mentally, tucked up her skirts, and bent to the work. At every dip, like great billows heaving along the sky-line, the glacier-fretted mountains rose and fell. Sometimes she rested her back and watched the teeming beach towards which they were heading, and again, the land-locked arm of the sea in which a score or so of great steamships lay at anchor. From each of these, to the shore and back again, flowed a steady stream of scows, launches, canoes, and all sorts of smaller craft. Man, the mighty toiler, reacting upon a hostile environment, she thought, going back in memory to the masters whose wisdom she had shared in lecture-room and midnight study. She was a ripened child of the age, and fairly understood the physical world and the workings thereof. And she had a love for the world, and a deep respect.

For some time Del Bishop had only punctuated the silence with splashes from his oars; but a thought struck him.

“You haven’t told me your name,” he suggested, with complacent delicacy.

“My name is Welse,” she answered. “Frona Welse.”

A great awe manifested itself in his face, and grew to a greater and greater awe. “You — are — Frona — Welse?” he enunciated slowly. “Jacob Welse ain’t your old man, is he?”

“Yes; I am Jacob Welse’s daughter, at your service.”

He puckered his lips in a long low whistle of understanding and stopped rowing. “Just you climb back into the stern and take your feet out of that water,” he commanded. “And gimme holt that can.”

“Am I not bailing satisfactorily?” she demanded, indignantly.

“Yep. You’re doin’ all right; but, but, you are — are — ”

“Just what I was before you knew who I was. Now you go on rowing, — that’s your share of the work; and I’ll take care of mine.”

“Oh, you’ll do!” he murmured ecstatically, bending afresh to the oars.
“And Jacob Welse is your old man? I oughter ‘a known it, sure!”

When they reached the sand-spit, crowded with heterogeneous piles of merchandise and buzzing with men, she stopped long enough to shake hands with her ferryman. And though such a proceeding on the part of his feminine patrons was certainly unusual, Del Bishop squared it easily with the fact that she was Jacob Welse’s daughter.

“Remember, my last bit of grub is yours,” he reassured her, still holding her hand.

“And your last shirt, too; don’t forget.”

“Well, you’re a — a — a crackerjack!” he exploded with a final squeeze.
“Sure!”

Her short skirt did not block the free movement of her limbs, and she discovered with pleasurable surprise that the quick tripping step of the city pavement had departed from her, and that she was swinging off in the long easy stride which is born of the trail and which comes only after much travail and endeavor. More than one gold-rusher, shooting keen glances at her ankles and gray-gaitered calves, affirmed Del Bishop’s judgment. And more than one glanced up at her face, and glanced again; for her gaze was frank, with the frankness of comradeship; and in her eyes there was always a smiling light, just trembling on the verge of dawn; and did the onlooker smile, her eyes smiled also. And the smiling light was protean-mooded, — merry, sympathetic, joyous, quizzical, — the complement of whatsoever kindled it. And sometimes the light spread over all her face, till the smile prefigured by it was realized. But it was always in frank and open comradeship.

And there was much to cause her to smile as she hurried through the crowd, across the sand-spit, and over the flat towards the log-building she had pointed out to Mr. Thurston. Time had rolled back, and locomotion and transportation were once again in the most primitive stages. Men who had never carried more than parcels in all their lives had now become bearers of burdens. They no longer walked upright under the sun, but stooped the body forward and bowed the head to the earth. Every back had become a pack-saddle, and the strap-galls were beginning to form. They staggered beneath the unwonted effort, and legs became drunken with weariness and titubated in divers directions till the sunlight darkened and bearer and burden fell by the way. Other men, exulting secretly, piled their goods on two-wheeled go-carts and pulled out blithely enough, only to stall at the first spot where the great round boulders invaded the trail. Whereat they generalized anew upon the principles of Alaskan travel, discarded the go-cart, or trundled it back to the beach and sold it at fabulous price to the last man landed. Tenderfeet, with ten pounds of Colt’s revolvers, cartridges, and hunting-knives belted about them, wandered valiantly up the trail, and crept back softly, shedding revolvers, cartridges, and knives in despairing showers. And so, in gasping and bitter sweat, these sons of Adam suffered for Adam’s sin.

Frona felt vaguely disturbed by this great throbbing rush of gold-mad men, and the old scene with its clustering associations seemed blotted out by these toiling aliens. Even the old landmarks appeared strangely unfamiliar. It was the same, yet not the same. Here, on the grassy flat, where she had played as a child and shrunk back at the sound of her voice echoing from glacier to glacier, ten thousand men tramped ceaselessly up and down, grinding the tender herbage into the soil and mocking the stony silence. And just up the trail were ten thousand men who had passed by, and over the Chilcoot were ten thousand more. And behind, all down the island-studded Alaskan coast, even to the Horn, were yet ten thousand more, harnessers of wind and steam, hasteners from the ends of the earth. The Dyea River as of old roared turbulently down to the sea; but its ancient banks were gored by the feet of many men, and these men labored in surging rows at the dripping tow-lines, and the deep-laden boats followed them as they fought their upward way. And the will of man strove with the will of the water, and the men laughed at the old Dyea River and gored its banks deeper for the men who were to follow.

The doorway of the store, through which she had once run out and in, and where she had looked with awe at the unusual sight of a stray trapper or fur-trader, was now packed with a clamorous throng of men. Where of old one letter waiting a claimant was a thing of wonder, she now saw, by peering through the window, the mail heaped up from floor to ceiling. And it was for this mail the men were clamoring so insistently. Before the store, by the scales, was another crowd. An Indian threw his pack upon the scales, the white owner jotted down the weight in a note-book, and another pack was thrown on. Each pack was in the straps, ready for the packer’s back and the precarious journey over the Chilcoot. Frona edged in closer. She was interested in freights. She remembered in her day when the solitary prospector or trader had his outfit packed over for six cents, — one hundred and twenty dollars a ton.

The tenderfoot who was weighing up consulted his guide-book. “Eight cents,” he said to the Indian. Whereupon the Indians laughed scornfully and chorused, “Forty cents!” A pained expression came into his face, and he looked about him anxiously. The sympathetic light in Frona’s eyes caught him, and he regarded her with intent blankness. In reality he was busy reducing a three-ton outfit to terms of cash at forty dollars per hundred-weight. “Twenty-four hundred dollars for thirty miles!” he cried. “What can I do?”

Frona shrugged her shoulders. “You’d better pay them the forty cents,” she advised, “else they will take off their straps.”

The man thanked her, but instead of taking heed went on with his haggling. One of the Indians stepped up and proceeded to unfasten his pack-straps. The tenderfoot wavered, but just as he was about to give in, the packers jumped the price on him to forty-five cents. He smiled after a sickly fashion, and nodded his head in token of surrender. But another Indian joined the group and began whispering excitedly. A cheer went up, and before the man could realize it they had jerked off their straps and departed, spreading the news as they went that freight to Lake Linderman was fifty cents.

Of a sudden, the crowd before the store was perceptibly agitated. Its members whispered excitedly one to another, and all their eyes were focussed upon three men approaching from up the trail. The trio were ordinary-looking creatures, ill-clad and even ragged. In a more stable community their apprehension by the village constable and arrest for vagrancy would have been immediate. “French Louis,” the tenderfeet whispered and passed the word along. “Owns three Eldorado claims in a block,” the man next to Frona confided to her. “Worth ten millions at the very least.” French Louis, striding a little in advance of his companions, did not look it. He had parted company with his hat somewhere along the route, and a frayed silk kerchief was wrapped carelessly about his head. And for all his ten millions, he carried his own travelling pack on his broad shoulders. “And that one, the one with the beard, that’s Swiftwater Bill, another of the Eldorado kings.”

“How do you know?” Frona asked, doubtingly.

“Know!” the man exclaimed. “Know! Why his picture has been in all the papers for the last six weeks. See!” He unfolded a newspaper. “And a pretty good likeness, too. I’ve looked at it so much I’d know his mug among a thousand.”

“Then who is the third one?” she queried, tacitly accepting him as a fount of authority.

Her informant lifted himself on his toes to see better. “I don’t know,” he confessed sorrowfully, then tapped the shoulder of the man next to him. “Who is the lean, smooth-faced one? The one with the blue shirt and the patch on his knee?”

Just then Frona uttered a glad little cry and darted forward. “Matt!” she cried. “Matt McCarthy!”

The man with the patch shook her hand heartily, though he did not know her and distrust was plain in his eyes.

“Oh, you don’t remember me!” she chattered. “And don’t you dare say you do! If there weren’t so many looking, I’d hug you, you old bear!

“And so Big Bear went home to the Little Bears,” she recited, solemnly.
“And the Little Bears were very hungry. And Big Bear said, ‘Guess what
I have got, my children.’ And one Little Bear guessed berries, and one
Little Bear guessed salmon, and t’other Little Bear guessed porcupine.
Then Big Bear laughed ‘Whoof! Whoof!’ and said, ‘A Nice Big Fat
Man!’“

As he listened, recollection avowed itself in his face, and, when she had finished, his eyes wrinkled up and he laughed a peculiar, laughable silent laugh.

“Sure, an’ it’s well I know ye,” he explained; “but for the life iv me
I can’t put me finger on ye.”

She pointed into the store and watched him anxiously.

“Now I have ye!” He drew back and looked her up and down, and his expression changed to disappointment. “It cuddent be. I mistook ye. Ye cud niver a-lived in that shanty,” thrusting a thumb in the direction of the store.

Frona nodded her head vigorously.

“Thin it’s yer ownself afther all? The little motherless darlin’, with the goold hair I combed the knots out iv many’s the time? The little witch that run barefoot an’ barelegged over all the place?”

“Yes, yes,” she corroborated, gleefully.

“The little divil that stole the dog-team an’ wint over the Pass in the dead o’ winter for to see where the world come to an ind on the ither side, just because old Matt McCarthy was afther tellin’ her fairy stories?”

“O Matt, dear old Matt! Remember the time I went swimming with the
Siwash girls from the Indian camp?”

“An’ I dragged ye out by the hair o’ yer head?”

“And lost one of your new rubber boots?”

“Ah, an’ sure an’ I do. And a most shockin’ an’ immodest affair it was! An’ the boots was worth tin dollars over yer father’s counter.”

“And then you went away, over the Pass, to the Inside, and we never heard a word of you. Everybody thought you dead.”

“Well I recollect the day. An’ ye cried in me arms an’ wuddent kiss yer old Matt good-by. But ye did in the ind,” he exclaimed, triumphantly, “whin ye saw I was goin’ to lave ye for sure. What a wee thing ye were!”

“I was only eight.”

“An’ ’tis twelve year agone. Twelve year I’ve spint on the Inside, with niver a trip out. Ye must be twinty now?”

“And almost as big as you,” Frona affirmed.

“A likely woman ye’ve grown into, tall, an’ shapely, an’ all that.” He looked her over critically. “But ye cud ‘a’ stood a bit more flesh, I’m thinkin’.”

“No, no,” she denied. “Not at twenty, Matt, not at twenty. Feel my arm, you’ll see.” She doubled that member till the biceps knotted.

“’Tis muscle,” he admitted, passing his hand admiringly over the swelling bunch; “just as though ye’d been workin’ hard for yer livin’.”

“Oh, I can swing clubs, and box, and fence,” she cried, successively striking the typical postures; “and swim, and make high dives, chin a bar twenty times, and — and walk on my hands. There!”

“Is that what ye’ve been doin’? I thought ye wint away for book-larnin’,” he commented, dryly.

“But they have new ways of teaching, now, Matt, and they don’t turn you out with your head crammed — ”

“An’ yer legs that spindly they can’t carry it all! Well, an’ I forgive ye yer muscle.”

“But how about yourself, Matt?” Frona asked. “How has the world been to you these twelve years?”

“Behold!” He spread his legs apart, threw his head back, and his chest out. “Ye now behold Mister Matthew McCarthy, a king iv the noble Eldorado Dynasty by the strength iv his own right arm. Me possessions is limitless. I have more dust in wan minute than iver I saw in all me life before. Me intintion for makin’ this trip to the States is to look up me ancestors. I have a firm belafe that they wance existed. Ye may find nuggets in the Klondike, but niver good whiskey. ’Tis likewise me intintion to have wan drink iv the rate stuff before I die. Afther that ’tis me sworn resolve to return to the superveeshion iv me Klondike properties. Indade, and I’m an Eldorado king; an’ if ye’ll be wantin’ the lind iv a tidy bit, it’s meself that’ll loan it ye.”

“The same old, old Matt, who never grows old,” Frona laughed.

“An’ it’s yerself is the thrue Welse, for all yer prize-fighter’s muscles an’ yer philosopher’s brains. But let’s wander inside on the heels of Louis an’ Swiftwater. Andy’s still tindin’ store, I’m told, an’ we’ll see if I still linger in the pages iv his mimory.”

“And I, also.” Frona seized him by the hand. It was a bad habit she had of seizing the hands of those she loved. “It’s ten years since I went away.”

The Irishman forged his way through the crowd like a pile-driver, and Frona followed easily in the lee of his bulk. The tenderfeet watched them reverently, for to them they were as Northland divinities. The buzz of conversation rose again.

“Who’s the girl?” somebody asked. And just as Frona passed inside the door she caught the opening of the answer: “Jacob Welse’s daughter. Never heard of Jacob Welse? Where have you been keeping yourself?”

Chapter II

She came out of the wood of glistening birch, and with the first fires of the sun blazoning her unbound hair raced lightly across the dew-dripping meadow. The earth was fat with excessive moisture and soft to her feet, while the dank vegetation slapped against her knees and cast off flashing sprays of liquid diamonds. The flush of the morning was in her cheek, and its fire in her eyes, and she was aglow with youth and love. For she had nursed at the breast of nature, — in forfeit of a mother, — and she loved the old trees and the creeping green things with a passionate love; and the dim murmur of growing life was a gladness to her ears, and the damp earth-smells were sweet to her nostrils.

Where the upper-reach of the meadow vanished in a dark and narrow forest aisle, amid clean-stemmed dandelions and color-bursting buttercups, she came upon a bunch of great Alaskan violets. Throwing herself at full length, she buried her face in the fragrant coolness, and with her hands drew the purple heads in circling splendor about her own. And she was not ashamed. She had wandered away amid the complexities and smirch and withering heats of the great world, and she had returned, simple, and clean, and wholesome. And she was glad of it, as she lay there, slipping back to the old days, when the universe began and ended at the sky-line, and when she journeyed over the Pass to behold the Abyss.

It was a primitive life, that of her childhood, with few conventions, but such as there were, stern ones. And they might be epitomized, as she had read somewhere in her later years, as “the faith of food and blanket.” This faith had her father kept, she thought, remembering that his name sounded well on the lips of men. And this was the faith she had learned, — the faith she had carried with her across the Abyss and into the world, where men had wandered away from the old truths and made themselves selfish dogmas and casuistries of the subtlest kinds; the faith she had brought back with her, still fresh, and young, and joyous. And it was all so simple, she had contended; why should not their faith be as her faith — the faith of food and blanket? The faith of trail and hunting camp? The faith with which strong clean men faced the quick danger and sudden death by field and flood? Why not? The faith of Jacob Welse? Of Matt McCarthy? Of the Indian boys she had played with? Of the Indian girls she had led to Amazonian war? Of the very wolf-dogs straining in the harnesses and running with her across the snow? It was healthy, it was real, it was good, she thought, and she was glad.

The rich notes of a robin saluted her from the birch wood, and opened her ears to the day. A partridge boomed afar in the forest, and a tree-squirrel launched unerringly into space above her head, and went on, from limb to limb and tree to tree, scolding graciously the while. From the hidden river rose the shouts of the toiling adventurers, already parted from sleep and fighting their way towards the Pole.

Frona arose, shook back her hair, and took instinctively the old path between the trees to the camp of Chief George and the Dyea tribesmen. She came upon a boy, breech-clouted and bare, like a copper god. He was gathering wood, and looked at her keenly over his bronze shoulder. She bade him good-morning, blithely, in the Dyea tongue; but he shook his head, and laughed insultingly, and paused in his work to hurl shameful words after her. She did not understand, for this was not the old way, and when she passed a great and glowering Sitkan buck she kept her tongue between her teeth. At the fringe of the forest, the camp confronted her. And she was startled. It was not the old camp of a score or more of lodges clustering and huddling together in the open as though for company, but a mighty camp. It began at the very forest, and flowed in and out among the scattered tree-clumps on the flat, and spilled over and down to the river bank where the long canoes were lined up ten and twelve deep. It was a gathering of the tribes, like unto none in all the past, and a thousand miles of coast made up the tally. They were all strange Indians, with wives and chattels and dogs. She rubbed shoulders with Juneau and Wrangel men, and was jostled by wild-eyed Sticks from over the Passes, fierce Chilcats, and Queen Charlotte Islanders. And the looks they cast upon her were black and frowning, save — and far worse — where the merrier souls leered patronizingly into her face and chuckled unmentionable things.

She was not frightened by this insolence, but angered; for it hurt her, and embittered the pleasurable home-coming. Yet she quickly grasped the significance of it: the old patriarchal status of her father’s time had passed away, and civilization, in a scorching blast, had swept down upon this people in a day. Glancing under the raised flaps of a tent, she saw haggard-faced bucks squatting in a circle on the floor. By the door a heap of broken bottles advertised the vigils of the night. A white man, low of visage and shrewd, was dealing cards about, and gold and silver coins leaped into heaping bets upon the blanket board. A few steps farther on she heard the cluttering whirl of a wheel of fortune, and saw the Indians, men and women, chancing eagerly their sweat-earned wages for the gaudy prizes of the game. And from tepee and lodge rose the cracked and crazy strains of cheap music-boxes.

An old squaw, peeling a willow pole in the sunshine of an open doorway, raised her head and uttered a shrill cry.

“Hee-Hee! Tenas Hee-Hee!” she muttered as well and as excitedly as her toothless gums would permit.

Frona thrilled at the cry. Tenas Hee-Hee! Little Laughter! Her name of the long gone Indian past! She turned and went over to the old woman.

“And hast thou so soon forgotten, Tenas Hee-Hee?” she mumbled. “And thine eyes so young and sharp! Not so soon does Neepoosa forget.”

“It is thou, Neepoosa?” Frona cried, her tongue halting from the disuse of years.

“Ay, it is Neepoosa,” the old woman replied, drawing her inside the tent, and despatching a boy, hot-footed, on some errand. They sat down together on the floor, and she patted Frona’s hand lovingly, peering, meanwhile, blear-eyed and misty, into her face. “Ay, it is Neepoosa, grown old quickly after the manner of our women. Neepoosa, who dandled thee in her arms when thou wast a child. Neepoosa, who gave thee thy name, Tenas Hee-Hee. Who fought for thee with Death when thou wast ailing; and gathered growing things from the woods and grasses of the earth and made of them tea, and gave thee to drink. But I mark little change, for I knew thee at once. It was thy very shadow on the ground that made me lift my head. A little change, mayhap. Tall thou art, and like a slender willow in thy grace, and the sun has kissed thy cheeks more lightly of the years; but there is the old hair, flying wild and of the color of the brown seaweed floating on the tide, and the mouth, quick to laugh and loth to cry. And the eyes are as clear and true as in the days when Neepoosa chid thee for wrong-doing, and thou wouldst not put false words upon thy tongue. Ai! Ai! Not as thou art the other women who come now into the land!”

“And why is a white woman without honor among you?” Frona demanded. “Your men say evil things to me in the camp, and as I came through the woods, even the boys. Not in the old days, when I played with them, was this shame so.”

“Ai! Ai!” Neepoosa made answer. “It is so. But do not blame them. Pour not thine anger upon their heads. For it is true it is the fault of thy women who come into the land these days. They can point to no man and say, ‘That is my man.’ And it is not good that women should he thus. And they look upon all men, bold-eyed and shameless, and their tongues are unclean, and their hearts bad. Wherefore are thy women without honor among us. As for the boys, they are but boys. And the men; how should they know?”

The tent-flaps were poked aside and an old man came in. He grunted to Frona and sat down. Only a certain eager alertness showed the delight he took in her presence.

“So Tenas Hee-Hee has come back in these bad days,” he vouchsafed in a shrill, quavering voice.

“And why bad days, Muskim?” Frona asked. “Do not the women wear brighter colors? Are not the bellies fuller with flour and bacon and white man’s grub? Do not the young men contrive great wealth what of their pack-straps and paddles? And art thou not remembered with the ancient offerings of meat and fish and blanket? Why bad days, Muskim?”

“True,” he replied in his fine, priestly way, a reminiscent flash of the old fire lighting his eyes. “It is very true. The women wear brighter colors. But they have found favor, in the eyes of thy white men, and they look no more upon the young men of their own blood. Wherefore the tribe does not increase, nor do the little children longer clutter the way of our feet. It is so. The bellies are fuller with the white man’s grub; but also are they fuller with the white man’s bad whiskey. Nor could it be otherwise that the young men contrive great wealth; but they sit by night over the cards, and it passes from them, and they speak harsh words one to another, and in anger blows are struck, and there is bad blood between them. As for old Muskim, there are few offerings of meat and fish and blanket. For the young women have turned aside from the old paths, nor do the young men longer honor the old totems and the old gods. So these are bad days, Tenas Hee-Hee, and they behold old Muskim go down in sorrow to the grave.”

“Ai! Ai! It is so!” wailed Neepoosa.

“Because of the madness of thy people have my people become mad,” Muskim continued. “They come over the salt sea like the waves of the sea, thy people, and they go — ah! who knoweth where?”

“Ai! Who knoweth where?” Neepoosa lamented, rocking slowly back and forth.

“Ever they go towards the frost and cold; and ever do they come, more people, wave upon wave!”

“Ai! Ai! Into the frost and cold! It is a long way, and dark and cold!” She shivered, then laid a sudden hand on Frona’s arm. “And thou goest?”

Frona nodded.

“And Tenas Hee-Hee goest! Ai! Ai! Ai!”

The tent-flap lifted, and Matt McCarthy peered in. “It’s yerself,
Frona, is it? With breakfast waitin’ this half-hour on ye, an’ old
Andy fumin’ an’ frettin’ like the old woman he is. Good-mornin’ to ye,
Neepoosa,” he addressed Frona’s companions, “an’ to ye, Muskim, though,
belike ye’ve little mimory iv me face.”

The old couple grunted salutation and remained stolidly silent.

“But hurry with ye, girl,” turning back to Frona. “Me steamer starts by mid-day, an’ it’s little I’ll see iv ye at the best. An’ likewise there’s Andy an’ the breakfast pipin’ hot, both iv them.”

Chapter III

Frona waved her hand to Andy and swung out on the trail. Fastened tightly to her back were her camera and a small travelling satchel. In addition, she carried for alpenstock the willow pole of Neepoosa. Her dress was of the mountaineering sort, short-skirted and scant, allowing the greatest play with the least material, and withal gray of color and modest.

Her outfit, on the backs of a dozen Indians and in charge of Del Bishop, had got under way hours before. The previous day, on her return with Matt McCarthy from the Siwash camp, she had found Del Bishop at the store waiting her. His business was quickly transacted, for the proposition he made was terse and to the point. She was going into the country. He was intending to go in. She would need somebody. If she had not picked any one yet, why he was just the man. He had forgotten to tell her the day he took her ashore that he had been in the country years before and knew all about it. True, he hated the water, and it was mainly a water journey; but he was not afraid of it. He was afraid of nothing. Further, he would fight for her at the drop of the hat. As for pay, when they got to Dawson, a good word from her to Jacob Welse, and a year’s outfit would be his. No, no; no grub-stake about it, no strings on him! He would pay for the outfit later on when his sack was dusted. What did she think about it, anyway? And Frona did think about it, for ere she had finished breakfast he was out hustling the packers together.

She found herself making better speed than the majority of her fellows, who were heavily laden and had to rest their packs every few hundred yards. Yet she found herself hard put to keep the pace of a bunch of Scandinavians ahead of her. They were huge strapping blond-haired giants, each striding along with a hundred pounds on his back, and all harnessed to a go-cart which carried fully six hundred more. Their faces were as laughing suns, and the joy of life was in them. The toil seemed child’s play and slipped from them lightly. They joked with one another, and with the passers-by, in a meaningless tongue, and their great chests rumbled with cavern-echoing laughs. Men stood aside for them, and looked after them enviously; for they took the rises of the trail on the run, and rattled down the counter slopes, and ground the iron-rimmed wheels harshly over the rocks. Plunging through a dark stretch of woods, they came out upon the river at the ford. A drowned man lay on his back on the sand-bar, staring upward, unblinking, at the sun. A man, in irritated tones, was questioning over and over, “Where’s his pardner? Ain’t he got a pardner?” Two more men had thrown off their packs and were coolly taking an inventory of the dead man’s possessions. One called aloud the various articles, while the other checked them off on a piece of dirty wrapping-paper. Letters and receipts, wet and pulpy, strewed the sand. A few gold coins were heaped carelessly on a white handkerchief. Other men, crossing back and forth in canoes and skiffs, took no notice.

The Scandinavians glanced at the sight, and their faces sobered for a moment. “Where’s his pardner? Ain’t he got a pardner?” the irritated man demanded of them. They shook their heads. They did not understand English. They stepped into the water and splashed onward. Some one called warningly from the opposite bank, whereat they stood still and conferred together. Then they started on again. The two men taking the inventory turned to watch. The current rose nigh to their hips, but it was swift and they staggered, while now and again the cart slipped sideways with the stream. The worst was over, and Frona found herself holding her breath. The water had sunk to the knees of the two foremost men, when a strap snapped on one nearest the cart. His pack swung suddenly to the side, overbalancing him. At the same instant the man next to him slipped, and each jerked the other under. The next two were whipped off their feet, while the cart, turning over, swept from the bottom of the ford into the deep water. The two men who had almost emerged threw themselves backward on the pull-ropes. The effort was heroic, but giants though they were, the task was too great and they were dragged, inch by inch, downward and under.

Their packs held them to the bottom, save him whose strap had broken. This one struck out, not to the shore, but down the stream, striving to keep up with his comrades. A couple of hundred feet below, the rapid dashed over a toothed-reef of rocks, and here, a minute later, they appeared. The cart, still loaded, showed first, smashing a wheel and turning over and over into the next plunge. The men followed in a miserable tangle. They were beaten against the submerged rocks and swept on, all but one. Frona, in a canoe (a dozen canoes were already in pursuit), saw him grip the rock with bleeding fingers. She saw his white face and the agony of the effort; but his hold relaxed and he was jerked away, just as his free comrade, swimming mightily, was reaching for him. Hidden from sight, they took the next plunge, showing for a second, still struggling, at the shallow foot of the rapid.

A canoe picked up the swimming man, but the rest disappeared in a long stretch of swift, deep water. For a quarter of an hour the canoes plied fruitlessly about, then found the dead men gently grounded in an eddy. A tow-rope was requisitioned from an up-coming boat, and a pair of horses from a pack-train on the bank, and the ghastly jetsam hauled ashore. Frona looked at the five young giants lying in the mud, broken-boned, limp, uncaring. They were still harnessed to the cart, and the poor worthless packs still clung to their backs, The sixth sat in the midst, dry-eyed and stunned. A dozen feet away the steady flood of life flowed by and Frona melted into it and went on.

The dark spruce-shrouded mountains drew close together in the Dyea Canyon, and the feet of men churned the wet sunless earth into mire and bog-hole. And when they had done this they sought new paths, till there were many paths. And on such a path Frona came upon a man spread carelessly in the mud. He lay on his side, legs apart and one arm buried beneath him, pinned down by a bulky pack. His cheek was pillowed restfully in the ooze, and on his face there was an expression of content. He brightened when he saw her, and his eyes twinkled cheerily.

“‘Bout time you hove along,” he greeted her. “Been waitin’ an hour on you as it is.”

“That’s it,” as Frona bent over him. “Just unbuckle that strap. The pesky thing! ’Twas just out o’ my reach all the time.”

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

He slipped out of his straps, shook himself, and felt the twisted arm. “Nope. Sound as a dollar, thank you. And no kick to register, either.” He reached over and wiped his muddy hands on a low-bowed spruce. “Just my luck; but I got a good rest, so what’s the good of makin’ a beef about it? You see, I tripped on that little root there, and slip! slump! slam! and slush! — there I was, down and out, and the buckle just out o’ reach. And there I lay for a blasted hour, everybody hitting the lower path.”

“But why didn’t you call out to them?”

“And make ’em climb up the hill to me? Them all tuckered out with their own work? Not on your life! Wasn’t serious enough. If any other man ‘d make me climb up just because he’d slipped down, I’d take him out o’ the mud all right, all right, and punch and punch him back into the mud again. Besides, I knew somebody was bound to come along my way after a while.”

“Oh, you’ll do!” she cried, appropriating Del Bishop’s phrase. “You’ll do for this country!”

“Yep,” he called back, shouldering his pack and starting off at a lively clip. “And, anyway, I got a good rest.”

The trail dipped through a precipitous morass to the river’s brink. A slender pine-tree spanned the screaming foam and bent midway to touch the water. The surge beat upon the taper trunk and gave it a rhythmical swaying motion, while the feet of the packers had worn smooth its wave-washed surface. Eighty feet it stretched in ticklish insecurity. Frona stepped upon it, felt it move beneath her, heard the bellowing of the water, saw the mad rush — and shrank back. She slipped the knot of her shoe-laces and pretended great care in the tying thereof as a bunch of Indians came out of the woods above and down through the mud. Three or four bucks led the way, followed by many squaws, all bending in the head-straps to the heavy packs. Behind came the children burdened according to their years, and in the rear half a dozen dogs, tongues lagging out and dragging forward painfully under their several loads.

The men glanced at her sideways, and one of them said something in an undertone. Frona could not hear, but the snicker which went down the line brought the flush of shame to her brow and told her more forcibly than could the words. Her face was hot, for she sat disgraced in her own sight; but she gave no sign. The leader stood aside, and one by one, and never more than one at a time, they made the perilous passage. At the bend in the middle their weight forced the tree under, and they felt for their footing, up to the ankles in the cold, driving torrent. Even the little children made it without hesitancy, and then the dogs whining and reluctant but urged on by the man. When the last had crossed over, he turned to Frona.

“Um horse trail,” he said, pointing up the mountain side. “Much better you take um horse trail. More far; much better.”

But she shook her head and waited till he reached the farther bank; for she felt the call, not only upon her own pride, but upon the pride of her race; and it was a greater demand than her demand, just as the race was greater than she. So she put foot upon the log, and, with the eyes of the alien people upon her, walked down into the foam-white swirl.

She came upon a man weeping by the side of the trail. His pack, clumsily strapped, sprawled on the ground. He had taken off a shoe, and one naked foot showed swollen and blistered.

“What is the matter?” she asked, halting before him.

He looked up at her, then down into the depths where the Dyea River cut the gloomy darkness with its living silver. The tears still welled in his eyes, and he sniffled.

“What is the matter?” she repeated. “Can I be of any help?”

“No,” he replied. “How can you help? My feet are raw, and my back is nearly broken, and I am all tired out. Can you help any of these things?”

“Well,” judiciously, “I am sure it might be worse. Think of the men who have just landed on the beach. It will take them ten days or two weeks to back-trip their outfits as far as you have already got yours.”

“But my partners have left me and gone on,” he moaned, a sneaking appeal for pity in his voice. “And I am all alone, and I don’t feel able to move another step. And then think of my wife and babies. I left them down in the States. Oh, if they could only see me now! I can’t go back to them, and I can’t go on. It’s too much for me. I can’t stand it, this working like a horse. I was not made to work like a horse. I’ll die, I know I will, if I do. Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?”

“Why did your comrades leave you?”

“Because I was not so strong as they; because I could not pack as much or as long. And they laughed at me and left me.”

“Have you ever roughed it?” Frona asked.

“No.”

“You look well put up and strong. Weigh probably one hundred and sixty-five?”

“One hundred-and seventy,” he corrected.

“You don’t look as though you had ever been troubled with sickness.
Never an invalid?”

“N-no.”

“And your comrades? They are miners?”

“Never mining in their lives. They worked in the same establishment with me. That’s what makes it so hard, don’t you see! We’d known one another for years! And to go off and leave me just because I couldn’t keep up!”

“My friend,” and Frona knew she was speaking for the race, “you are strong as they. You can work just as hard as they; pack as much. But you are weak of heart. This is no place for the weak of heart. You cannot work like a horse because you will not. Therefore the country has no use for you. The north wants strong men, — strong of soul, not body. The body does not count. So go back to the States. We do not want you here. If you come you will die, and what then of| your wife and babies? So sell out your outfit and go back. You will be home in three weeks. Good-by.”

She passed through Sheep Camp. Somewhere above, a mighty glacier, under the pent pressure of a subterranean reservoir, had burst asunder and hurled a hundred thousand tons of ice and water down the rocky gorge. The trail was yet slippery with the slime of the flood, and men were rummaging disconsolately in the rubbish of overthrown tents and caches. But here and there they worked with nervous haste, and the stark corpses by the trail-side attested dumbly to their labor. A few hundred yards beyond, the work of the rush went on uninterrupted. Men rested their packs on jutting stones, swapped escapes whilst they regained their breath, then stumbled on to their toil again.

The mid-day sun beat down upon the stone “Scales.” The forest had given up the struggle, and the dizzying heat recoiled from the unclothed rock. On either hand rose the ice-marred ribs of earth, naked and strenuous in their nakedness. Above towered storm-beaten Chilcoot. Up its gaunt and ragged front crawled a slender string of men. But it was an endless string. It came out of the last fringe of dwarfed shrub below, drew a black line across a dazzling stretch of ice, and filed past Frona where she ate her lunch by the way. And it went on, up the pitch of the steep, growing fainter and smaller, till it squirmed and twisted like a column of ants and vanished over the crest of the pass.

Even as she looked, Chilcoot was wrapped in rolling mist and whirling cloud, and a storm of sleet and wind roared down upon the toiling pigmies. The light was swept out of the day, and a deep gloom prevailed; but Frona knew that somewhere up there, clinging and climbing and immortally striving, the long line of ants still twisted towards the sky. And she thrilled at the thought, strong with man’s ancient love of mastery, and stepped into the line which came out of the storm behind and disappeared into the storm before.

She blew through the gap of the pass in a whirlwind of vapor, with hand and foot clambered down the volcanic ruin of Chilcoot’s mighty father, and stood on the bleak edge of the lake which filled the pit of the crater. The lake was angry and white-capped, and though a hundred caches were waiting ferriage, no boats were plying back and forth. A rickety skeleton of sticks, in a shell of greased canvas, lay upon the rocks. Frona sought out the owner, a bright-faced young fellow, with sharp black eyes and a salient jaw. Yes, he was the ferryman, but he had quit work for the day. Water too rough for freighting. He charged twenty-five dollars for passengers, but he was not taking passengers to-day. Had he not said it was too rough? That was why.

“But you will take me, surely?” she asked.

He shook his head and gazed out over the lake. “At the far end it’s rougher than you see it here. Even the big wooden boats won’t tackle it. The last that tried, with a gang of packers aboard, was blown over on the west shore. We could see them plainly. And as there’s no trail around from there, they’ll have to camp it out till the blow is over.”

“But they’re better off than I am. My camp outfit is at Happy Camp, and I can’t very well stay here,” Frona smiled winsomely, but there was no appeal in the smile; no feminine helplessness throwing itself on the strength and chivalry of the male. “Do reconsider and take me across.”

“No.”

“I’ll give you fifty.”

“No, I say.”

“But I’m not afraid, you know.”

The young fellow’s eyes flashed angrily. He turned upon her suddenly, but on second thought did not utter the words forming on his lips. She realized the unintentional slur she had cast, and was about to explain. But on second thought she, too, remained silent; for she read him, and knew that it was perhaps the only way for her to gain her point. They stood there, bodies inclined to the storm in the manner of seamen on sloped decks, unyieldingly looking into each other’s eyes. His hair was plastered in wet ringlets on his forehead, while hers, in longer wisps, beat furiously about her face.

“Come on, then!” He flung the boat into the water with an angry jerk, and tossed the oars aboard. “Climb in! I’ll take you, but not for your fifty dollars. You pay the regulation price, and that’s all.”

A gust of the gale caught the light shell and swept it broadside for a score of feet. The spray drove inboard in a continuous stinging shower, and Frona at once fell to work with the bailing-can.

“I hope we’re blown ashore,” he shouted, stooping forward to the oars. “It would be embarrassing — for you.” He looked up savagely into her face.

“No,” she modified; “but it would be very miserable for both of us, — a night without tent, blankets, or fire. Besides, we’re not going to blow ashore.”

She stepped out on the slippery rocks and helped him heave up the canvas craft and tilt the water out. On either side uprose bare wet walls of rock. A heavy sleet was falling steadily, through which a few streaming caches showed in the gathering darkness.

“You’d better hurry up,” he advised, thanking her for the assistance
and relaunching the boat. “Two miles of stiff trail from here to Happy
Camp. No wood until you get there, so you’d best hustle along.
Good-by.”

Frona reached out and took his hand, and said, “You are a brave man.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He returned the grip with usury and looked his admiration.

A dozen tents held grimly to their pegs on the extreme edge of the timber line at Happy Camp. Frona, weary with the day, went from tent to tent. Her wet skirts clung heavily to her tired limbs, while the wind buffeted her brutally about. Once, through a canvas wall, she heard a man apostrophizing gorgeously, and felt sure that it was Del Bishop. But a peep into the interior told a different tale; so she wandered fruitlessly on till she reached the last tent in the camp. She untied the flap and looked in. A spluttering candle showed the one occupant, a man, down on his knees and blowing lustily into the fire-box of a smoky Yukon stove.

Chapter IV

She cast off the lower flap-fastenings and entered. The man still blew into the stove, unaware of his company. Frona coughed, and he raised a pair of smoke-reddened eyes to hers.

“Certainly,” he said, casually enough. “Fasten the flaps and make yourself comfortable.” And thereat returned to his borean task.

“Hospitable, to say the least,” she commented to herself, obeying his command and coming up to the stove.

A heap of dwarfed spruce, gnarled and wet and cut to proper stove-length, lay to one side. Frona knew it well, creeping and crawling and twisting itself among the rocks of the shallow alluvial deposit, unlike its arboreal prototype, rarely lifting its head more than a foot from the earth. She looked into the oven, found it empty, and filled it with the wet wood. The man arose to his feet, coughing from the smoke which had been driven into his lungs, and nodding approval.

When he had recovered his breath, “Sit down and dry your skirts. I’ll get supper.”

He put a coffee-pot on the front lid of the stove, emptied the bucket into it, and went out of the tent after more water. As his back disappeared, Frona dived for her satchel, and when he returned a moment later he found her with a dry skirt on and wringing the wet one out. While he fished about in the grub-box for dishes and eating utensils, she stretched a spare bit of rope between the tent-poles and hung the skirt on it to dry. The dishes were dirty, and, as he bent over and washed them, she turned her back and deftly changed her stockings. Her childhood had taught her the value of well-cared feet for the trail. She put her wet shoes on a pile of wood at the back of the stove, substituting for them a pair of soft and dainty house-moccasins of Indian make. The fire had now grown strong, and she was content to let her under-garments dry on her body.

During all this time neither had spoken a word. Not only had the man remained silent, but he went about his work in so preoccupied a way that it seemed to Frona that he turned a deaf ear to the words of explanation she would have liked to utter. His whole bearing conveyed the impression that it was the most ordinary thing under the sun for a young woman to come in out of the storm and night and partake of his hospitality. In one way, she liked this; but in so far as she did not comprehend it, she was troubled. She had a perception of a something being taken for granted which she did not understand. Once or twice she moistened her lips to speak, but he appeared so oblivious of her presence that she withheld.

After opening a can of corned beef with the axe, he fried half a dozen thick slices of bacon, set the frying-pan back, and boiled the coffee. From the grub-box he resurrected the half of a cold heavy flapjack. He looked at it dubiously, and shot a quick glance at her. Then he threw the sodden thing out of doors and dumped the contents of a sea-biscuit bag upon a camp cloth. The sea-biscuit had been crumbled into chips and fragments and generously soaked by the rain till it had become a mushy, pulpy mass of dirty white.

“It’s all I have in the way of bread,” he muttered; “but sit down and we will make the best of it.”

“One moment — ” And before he could protest, Frona had poured the sea-biscuit into the frying-pan on top of the grease and bacon. To this she added a couple of cups of water and stirred briskly over the fire. When it had sobbed and sighed with the heat for some few minutes, she sliced up the corned beef and mixed it in with the rest. And by the time she had seasoned it heavily with salt and black pepper, a savory steam was rising from the concoction.

“Must say it’s pretty good stuff,” he said, balancing his plate on his knee and sampling the mess avidiously. “What do you happen to call it?”

“Slumgullion,” she responded curtly, and thereafter the meal went on in silence.

Frona helped him to the coffee, studying him intently the while. And not only was it not an unpleasant face, she decided, but it was strong. Strong, she amended, potentially rather than actually. A student, she added, for she had seen many students’ eyes and knew the lasting impress of the midnight oil long continued; and his eyes bore the impress. Brown eyes, she concluded, and handsome as the male’s should be handsome; but she noted with surprise, when she refilled his plate with slumgullion, that they were not at all brown in the ordinary sense, but hazel-brown. In the daylight, she felt certain, and in times of best health, they would seem gray, and almost blue-gray. She knew it well; her one girl chum and dearest friend had had such an eye.

His hair was chestnut-brown, glinting in the candle-light to gold, and the hint of waviness in it explained the perceptible droop to his tawny moustache. For the rest, his face was clean-shaven and cut on a good masculine pattern. At first she found fault with the more than slight cheek-hollows under the cheek-bones, but when she measured his well-knit, slenderly muscular figure, with its deep chest and heavy shoulders, she discovered that she preferred the hollows; at least they did not imply lack of nutrition. The body gave the lie to that; while they themselves denied the vice of over-feeding. Height, five feet, nine, she summed up from out of her gymnasium experience; and age anywhere between twenty-five and thirty, though nearer the former most likely.

“Haven’t many blankets,” he said abruptly, pausing to drain his cup and set it over on the grub-box. “I don’t expect my Indians back from Lake Linderman till morning, and the beggars have packed over everything except a few sacks of flour and the bare camp outfit. However, I’ve a couple of heavy ulsters which will serve just as well.”

He turned his back, as though he did not expect a reply, and untied a rubber-covered roll of blankets. Then he drew the two ulsters from a clothes-bag and threw them down on the bedding.

“Vaudeville artist, I suppose?”

He asked the question seemingly without interest, as though to keep the conversation going, and, in fact, as if he knew the stereotyped answer beforehand. But to Frona the question was like a blow in the face. She remembered Neepoosa’s philippic against the white women who were coming into the land, and realized the falseness of her position and the way in which he looked upon her.

But he went on before she could speak. “Last night I had two vaudeville queens, and three the night before. Only there was more bedding then. It’s unfortunate, isn’t it, the aptitude they display in getting lost from their outfits? Yet somehow I have failed to find any lost outfits so far. And they are all queens, it seems. No under-studies or minor turns about them, — no, no. And I presume you are a queen, too?”

The too-ready blood sprayed her cheek, and this made her angrier than did he; for whereas she was sure of the steady grip she had on herself, her flushed face betokened a confusion which did not really possess her.

“No,” she answered, coolly; “I am not a vaudeville artist.”

He tossed several sacks of flour to one side of the stove, without replying, and made of them the foundation of a bed; and with the remaining sacks he duplicated the operation on the opposite side of the stove.

“But you are some kind of an artist, then,” he insisted when he had finished, with an open contempt on the “artist.”

“Unfortunately, I am not any kind of an artist at all.”

He dropped the blanket he was folding and straightened his back. Hitherto he had no more than glanced at her; but now he scrutinized her carefully, every inch of her, from head to heel and back again, the cut of her garments and the very way she did her hair. And he took his time about it.

“Oh! I beg pardon,” was his verdict, followed by another stare. “Then you are a very foolish woman dreaming of fortune and shutting your eyes to the dangers of the pilgrimage. It is only meet that two kinds of women come into this country. Those who by virtue of wifehood and daughterhood are respectable, and those who are not respectable. Vaudeville stars and artists, they call themselves for the sake of decency; and out of courtesy we countenance it. Yes, yes, I know. But remember, the women who come over the trail must be one or the other. There is no middle course, and those who attempt it are bound to fail. So you are a very, very foolish girl, and you had better turn back while there is yet a chance. If you will view it in the light of a loan from a stranger, I will advance your passage back to the States, and start an Indian over the trail with you to-morrow for Dyea.”

Once or twice Frona had attempted to interrupt him, but he had waved her imperatively to silence with his hand.

“I thank you,” she began; but he broke in, —

“Oh, not at all, not at all.”

“I thank you,” she repeated; but it happens that — a — that you are mistaken. I have just come over the trail from Dyea and expect to meet my outfit already in camp here at Happy Camp. They started hours ahead of me, and I can’t understand how I passed them — yes I do, too! A boat was blown over to the west shore of Crater Lake this afternoon, and they must have been in it. That is where I missed them and came on. As for my turning back, I appreciate your motive for suggesting it, but my father is in Dawson, and I have not seen him for three years. Also, I have come through from Dyea this day, and am tired, and I would like to get some rest. So, if you still extend your hospitality, I’ll go to bed.”

“Impossible!” He kicked the blankets to one side, sat down on the flour sacks, and directed a blank look upon her.

“Are — are there any women in the other tents?” she asked, hesitatingly.
“I did not see any, but I may have overlooked.”

“A man and his wife were, but they pulled stakes this morning. No; there are no other women except — except two or three in a tent, which — er — which will not do for you.”

“Do you think I am afraid of their hospitality?” she demanded, hotly.
“As you said, they are women.”

“But I said it would not do,” he answered, absently, staring at the straining canvas and listening to the roar of the storm. “A man would die in the open on a night like this.

“And the other tents are crowded to the walls,” he mused. “I happen to know. They have stored all their caches inside because of the water, and they haven’t room to turn around. Besides, a dozen other strangers are storm-bound with them. Two or three asked to spread their beds in here to-night if they couldn’t pinch room elsewhere. Evidently they have; but that does not argue that there is any surplus space left. And anyway — ”

He broke off helplessly. The inevitableness of the situation was growing.

“Can I make Deep Lake to-night?” Frona asked, forgetting herself to sympathize with him, then becoming conscious of what she was doing and bursting into laughter.

“But you couldn’t ford the river in the dark.” He frowned at her levity. “And there are no camps between.”

“Are you afraid?” she asked with just the shadow of a sneer.

“Not for myself.”

“Well, then, I think I’ll go to bed.”

“I might sit up and keep the fire going,” he suggested after a pause.

“Fiddlesticks!” she cried. “As though your foolish little code were saved in the least! We are not in civilization. This is the trail to the Pole. Go to bed.”

He elevated his shoulders in token of surrender. “Agreed. What shall
I do then?”

“Help me make my bed, of course. Sacks laid crosswise! Thank you, sir, but I have bones and muscles that rebel. Here — Pull them around this way.”

Under her direction he laid the sacks lengthwise in a double row. This left an uncomfortable hollow with lumpy sack-corners down the middle; but she smote them flat with the side of the axe, and in the same manner lessened the slope to the walls of the hollow. Then she made a triple longitudinal fold in a blanket and spread it along the bottom of the long depression.

“Hum!” he soliloquized. “Now I see why I sleep so badly. Here goes!”
And he speedily flung his own sacks into shape.

“It is plain you are unused to the trail,” she informed him, spreading the topmost blanket and sitting down.

“Perhaps so,” he made answer. “But what do you know about this trail life?” he growled a little later.

“Enough to conform,” she rejoined equivocally, pulling out the dried wood from the oven and replacing it with wet.

“Listen to it! How it storms!” he exclaimed. “It’s growing worse, if worse be possible.”

The tent reeled under the blows of the wind, the canvas booming hollowly at every shock, while the sleet and rain rattled overhead like skirmish-fire grown into a battle. In the lulls they could hear the water streaming off at the side-walls with the noise of small cataracts. He reached up curiously and touched the wet roof. A burst of water followed instantly at the point of contact and coursed down upon the grub-box.

“You mustn’t do that!” Frona cried, springing to her feet. She put her finger on the spot, and, pressing tightly against the canvas, ran it down to the side-wall. The leak at once stopped. “You mustn’t do it, you know,” she reproved.

“Jove!” was his reply. “And you came through from Dyea to-day! Aren’t you stiff?”

“Quite a bit,” she confessed, candidly, “and sleepy.”

“Good-night,” she called to him several minutes later, stretching her body luxuriously in the warm blankets. And a quarter of an hour after that, “Oh, I say! Are you awake?”

“Yes,” his voice came muffled across the stove. “What is it?”

“Have you the shavings cut?”

“Shavings?” he queried, sleepily. “What shavings?”

“For the fire in the morning, of course. So get up and cut them.”

He obeyed without a word; but ere he was done she had ceased to hear him.

The ubiquitous bacon was abroad on the air when she opened her eyes. Day had broken, and with it the storm. The wet sun was shining cheerily over the drenched landscape and in at the wide-spread flaps. Already work had begun, and groups of men were filing past under their packs. Frona turned over on her side. Breakfast was cooked. Her host had just put the bacon and fried potatoes in the oven, and was engaged in propping the door ajar with two sticks of firewood.

“Good-morning,” she greeted.

“And good-morning to you,” he responded, rising to his feet and picking up the water-bucket. “I don’t hope that you slept well, for I know you did.”

Frona laughed.

“I’m going out after some water,” he vouchsafed. “And when I return I shall expect you ready for breakfast.”

After breakfast, basking herself in the sun, Frona descried a familiar bunch of men rounding the tail of the glacier in the direction of Crater Lake. She clapped her hands.

“There comes my outfit, and Del Bishop as shame-faced as can be, I’m sure, at his failure to connect.” Turning to the man, and at the same time slinging camera and satchel over her shoulder, “So I must say good-by, not forgetting to thank you for your kindness.”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. Pray don’t mention it. I’d do the same for any — ”

“Vaudeville artist!”

He looked his reproach, but went on. “I don’t know your name, nor do I wish to know it.”

“Well, I shall not be so harsh, for I do know your name, MISTER VANCE
CORLISS! I saw it on the shipping tags, of course,” she explained.
“And I want you to come and see me when you get to Dawson. My name is
Frona Welse. Good-by.”

“Your father is not Jacob Welse?” he called after her as she ran lightly down towards the trail.

She turned her head and nodded.

But Del Bishop was not shamefaced, nor even worried. “Trust a Welse to land on their feet on a soft spot,” he had consoled himself as he dropped off to sleep the night before. But he was angry — ”madder ‘n hops,” in his own vernacular.

“Good-mornin’,” he saluted. “And it’s plain by your face you had a comfortable night of it, and no thanks to me.”

“You weren’t worried, were you?” she asked.

“Worried? About a Welse? Who? Me? Not on your life. I was too busy tellin’ Crater Lake what I thought of it. I don’t like the water. I told you so. And it’s always playin’ me scurvy — not that I’m afraid of it, though.”

“Hey, you Pete!” turning to the Indians. “Hit ‘er up! Got to make
Linderman by noon!”

“Frona Welse?” Vance Corliss was repeating to himself.

The whole thing seemed a dream, and he reassured himself by turning and looking after her retreating form. Del Bishop and the Indians were already out of sight behind a wall of rock. Frona was just rounding the base. The sun was full upon her, and she stood out radiantly against the black shadow of the wall beyond. She waved her alpenstock, and as he doffed his cap, rounded the brink and disappeared.

Chapter V

The position occupied by Jacob Welse was certainly an anomalous one. He was a giant trader in a country without commerce, a ripened product of the nineteenth century flourishing in a society as primitive as that of the Mediterranean vandals. A captain of industry and a splendid monopolist, he dominated the most independent aggregate of men ever drawn together from the ends of the earth. An economic missionary, a commercial St. Paul, he preached the doctrines of expediency and force. Believing in the natural rights of man, a child himself of democracy, he bent all men to his absolutism. Government of Jacob Welse, for Jacob Welse and the people, by Jacob Welse, was his unwritten gospel. Single-handed he had carved out his dominion till he gripped the domain of a dozen Roman provinces. At his ukase the population ebbed and flowed over a hundred thousand miles of territory, and cities sprang up or disappeared at his bidding.

Yet he was a common man. The air of the world first smote his lungs on the open prairie by the River Platte, the blue sky over head, and beneath, the green grass of the earth pressing against his tender nakedness. On the horses his eyes first opened, still saddled and gazing in mild wonder on the miracle; for his trapper father had but turned aside from the trail that the wife might have quiet and the birth be accomplished. An hour or so and the two, which were now three, were in the saddle and overhauling their trapper comrades. The party had not been delayed; no time lost. In the morning his mother cooked the breakfast over the camp-fire, and capped it with a fifty-mile ride into the next sun-down.

The trapper father had come of the sturdy Welsh stock which trickled into early Ohio out of the jostling East, and the mother was a nomadic daughter of the Irish emigrant settlers of Ontario. From both sides came the Wanderlust of the blood, the fever to be moving, to be pushing on to the edge of things. In the first year of his life, ere he had learned the way of his legs, Jacob Welse had wandered a-horse through a thousand miles of wilderness, and wintered in a hunting-lodge on the head-waters of the Red River of the North. His first foot-gear was moccasins, his first taffy the tallow from a moose. His first generalizations were that the world was composed of great wastes and white vastnesses, and populated with Indians and white hunters like his father. A town was a cluster of deer-skin lodges; a trading-post a seat of civilization; and a factor God Almighty Himself. Rivers and lakes existed chiefly for man’s use in travelling. Viewed in this light, the mountains puzzled him; but he placed them away in his classification of the Inexplicable and did not worry. Men died, sometimes. But their meat was not good to eat, and their hides worthless, — perhaps because they did not grow fur. Pelts were valuable, and with a few bales a man might purchase the earth. Animals were made for men to catch and skin. He did not know what men were made for, unless, perhaps, for the factor.

As he grew older he modified these concepts, but the process was a continual source of naive apprehension and wonderment. It was not until he became a man and had wandered through half the cities of the States that this expression of childish wonder passed out of his eyes and left them wholly keen and alert. At his boy’s first contact with the cities, while he revised his synthesis of things, he also generalized afresh. People who lived in cities were effeminate. They did not carry the points of the compass in their heads, and they got lost easily. That was why they elected to stay in the cities. Because they might catch cold and because they were afraid of the dark, they slept under shelter and locked their doors at night. The women were soft and pretty, but they could not lift a snowshoe far in a day’s journey. Everybody talked too much. That was why they lied and were unable to work greatly with their hands. Finally, there was a new human force called “bluff.” A man who made a bluff must be dead sure of it, or else be prepared to back it up. Bluff was a very good thing — when exercised with discretion.

Later, though living his life mainly in the woods and mountains, he came to know that the cities were not all bad; that a man might live in a city and still be a man. Accustomed to do battle with natural forces, he was attracted by the commercial battle with social forces. The masters of marts and exchanges dazzled but did not blind him, and he studied them, and strove to grasp the secrets of their strength. And further, in token that some good did come out of Nazareth, in the full tide of manhood he took to himself a city-bred woman. But he still yearned for the edge of things, and the leaven in his blood worked till they went away, and above the Dyea Beach, on the rim of the forest, built the big log trading-post. And here, in the mellow of time, he got a proper focus on things and unified the phenomena of society precisely as he had already unified the phenomena of nature. There was naught in one which could not be expressed in terms of the other. The same principles underlaid both; the same truths were manifest of both. Competition was the secret of creation. Battle was the law and the way of progress. The world was made for the strong, and only the strong inherited it, and through it all there ran an eternal equity. To be honest was to be strong. To sin was to weaken. To bluff an honest man was to be dishonest. To bluff a bluffer was to smite with the steel of justice. The primitive strength was in the arm; the modern strength in the brain. Though it had shifted ground, the struggle was the same old struggle. As of old time, men still fought for the mastery of the earth and the delights thereof. But the sword had given way to the ledger; the mail-clad baron to the soft-garbed industrial lord, and the centre of imperial political power to the seat of commercial exchanges. The modern will had destroyed the ancient brute. The stubborn earth yielded only to force. Brain was greater than body. The man with the brain could best conquer things primitive.

He did not have much education as education goes. To the three R’s his mother taught him by camp-fire and candle-light, he had added a somewhat miscellaneous book-knowledge; but he was not burdened with what he had gathered. Yet he read the facts of life understandingly, and the sobriety which comes of the soil was his, and the clear earth-vision.

And so it came about that Jacob Welse crossed over the Chilcoot in an early day, and disappeared into the vast unknown. A year later he emerged at the Russian missions clustered about the mouth of the Yukon on Bering Sea. He had journeyed down a river three thousand miles long, he had seen things, and dreamed a great dream. But he held his tongue and went to work, and one day the defiant whistle of a crazy stern-wheel tub saluted the midnight sun on the dank river-stretch by Fort o’ Yukon. It was a magnificent adventure. How he achieved it only Jacob Welse can tell; but with the impossible to begin with, plus the impossible, he added steamer to steamer and heaped enterprise upon enterprise. Along many a thousand miles of river and tributary he built trading-posts and warehouses. He forced the white man’s axe into the hands of the aborigines, and in every village and between the villages rose the cords of four-foot firewood for his boilers. On an island in Bering Sea, where the river and the ocean meet, he established a great distributing station, and on the North Pacific he put big ocean steamships; while in his offices in Seattle and San Francisco it took clerks by the score to keep the order and system of his business.

Men drifted into the land. Hitherto famine had driven them out, but Jacob Welse was there now, and his grub-stores; so they wintered in the frost and groped in the frozen muck for gold. He encouraged them, grub-staked them, carried them on the books of the company. His steamers dragged them up the Koyokuk in the old days of Arctic City. Wherever pay was struck he built a warehouse and a store. The town followed. He explored; he speculated; he developed. Tireless, indomitable, with the steel-glitter in his dark eyes, he was everywhere at once, doing all things. In the opening up of a new river he was in the van; and at the tail-end also, hurrying forward the grub. On the Outside he fought trade-combinations; made alliances with the corporations of the earth, and forced discriminating tariffs from the great carriers. On the Inside he sold flour, and blankets, and tobacco; built saw-mills, staked townsites, and sought properties in copper, iron, and coal; and that the miners should be well-equipped, ransacked the lands of the Arctic even as far as Siberia for native-made snow-shoes, muclucs, and parkas.

He bore the country on his shoulders; saw to its needs; did its work. Every ounce of its dust passed through his hands; every post-card and letter of credit. He did its banking and exchange; carried and distributed its mails. He frowned upon competition; frightened out predatory capital; bluffed militant syndicates, and when they would not, backed his bluff and broke them. And for all, yet found time and place to remember his motherless girl, and to love her, and to fit her for the position he had made.

Chapter VI

“So I think, captain, you will agree that we must exaggerate the seriousness of the situation.” Jacob Welse helped his visitor into his fur great-coat and went on. “Not that it is not serious, but that it may not become more serious. Both you and I have handled famines before. We must frighten them, and frighten them now, before it is too late. Take five thousand men out of Dawson and there will be grub to last. Let those five thousand carry their tale of famine to Dyea and Skaguay, and they will prevent five thousand more coming in over the ice.”

“Quite right! And you may count on the hearty co-operation of the police, Mr. Welse.” The speaker, a strong-faced, grizzled man, heavy-set and of military bearing, pulled up his collar and rested his hand on the door-knob. “I see already, thanks to you, the newcomers are beginning to sell their outfits and buy dogs. Lord! won’t there be a stampede out over the ice as soon as the river closes down! And each that sells a thousand pounds of grub and goes lessens the proposition by one empty stomach and fills another that remains. When does the Laura start?”

“This morning, with three hundred grubless men aboard. Would that they were three thousand!”

Amen to that! And by the way, when does your daughter arrive?”

“‘Most any day, now.” Jacob Welse’s eyes warmed. “And I want you to dinner when she does, and bring along a bunch of your young bucks from the Barracks. I don’t know all their names, but just the same extend the invitation as though from me personally. I haven’t cultivated the social side much, — no time, but see to it that the girl enjoys herself. Fresh from the States and London, and she’s liable to feel lonesome. You understand.”

Jacob Welse closed the door, tilted his chair back, and cocked his feet on the guard-rail of the stove. For one half-minute a girlish vision wavered in the shimmering air above the stove, then merged into a woman of fair Saxon type.

The door opened. “Mr. Welse, Mr. Foster sent me to find out if he is to go on filling signed warehouse orders?”

“Certainly, Mr. Smith. But tell him to scale them down by half. If a man holds an order for a thousand pounds, give him five hundred.”

He lighted a cigar and tilted back again in his chair.

“Captain McGregor wants to see you, sir.”

“Send him in.”

Captain McGregor strode in and remained standing before his employer. The rough hand of the New World had been laid upon the Scotsman from his boyhood; but sterling honesty was written in every line of his bitter-seamed face, while a prognathous jaw proclaimed to the onlooker that honesty was the best policy, — for the onlooker at any rate, should he wish to do business with the owner of the jaw. This warning was backed up by the nose, side-twisted and broken, and by a long scar which ran up the forehead and disappeared in the gray-grizzled hair.

“We throw off the lines in an hour, sir; so I’ve come for the last word.”

“Good.” Jacob Welse whirled his chair about. “Captain McGregor.”

“Ay.”

“I had other work cut out for you this winter; but I have changed my mind and chosen you to go down with the Laura. Can you guess why?”

Captain McGregor swayed his weight from one leg to the other, and a shrewd chuckle of a smile wrinkled the corners of his eyes. “Going to be trouble,” he grunted.

“And I couldn’t have picked a better man. Mr. Bally will give you detailed instructions as you go aboard. But let me say this: If we can’t scare enough men out of the country, there’ll be need for every pound of grub at Fort Yukon. Understand?”

“Ay.”

“So no extravagance. You are taking three hundred men down with you. The chances are that twice as many more will go down as soon as the river freezes. You’ll have a thousand to feed through the winter. Put them on rations, — working rations, — and see that they work. Cordwood, six dollars per cord, and piled on the bank where steamers can make a landing. No work, no rations. Understand?”

“Ay.”

“A thousand men can get ugly, if they are idle. They can get ugly anyway. Watch out they don’t rush the caches. If they do, — do your duty.”

The other nodded grimly. His hands gripped unconsciously, while the scar on his forehead took on a livid hue.

“There are five steamers in the ice. Make them safe against the spring break-up. But first transfer all their cargoes to one big cache. You can defend it better, and make the cache impregnable. Send a messenger down to Fort Burr, asking Mr. Carter for three of his men. He doesn’t need them. Nothing much is doing at Circle City. Stop in on the way down and take half of Mr. Burdwell’s men. You’ll need them. There’ll be gun-fighters in plenty to deal with. Be stiff. Keep things in check from the start. Remember, the man who shoots first comes off with the whole hide. And keep a constant eye on the grub.”

“And on the forty-five-nineties,” Captain McGregor rumbled back as he passed out the door.

“John Melton — Mr. Melton, sir. Can he see you?”

“See here, Welse, what’s this mean?” John Melton followed wrathfully on the heels of the clerk, and he almost walked over him as he flourished a paper before the head of the company. “Read that! What’s it stand for?”

Jacob Welse glanced over it and looked up coolly. “One thousand pounds of grub.”

“That’s what I say, but that fellow you’ve got in the warehouse says no, — five hundred’s all it’s good for.”

“He spoke the truth.”

“But — ”

“It stands for one thousand pounds, but in the warehouse it is only good for five hundred.”

“That your signature?” thrusting the receipt again into the other’s line of vision.

“Yes.”

“Then what are you going to do about it?”

“Give you five hundred. What are you going to do about it?”

“Refuse to take it.”

“Very good. There is no further discussion.”

“Yes there is. I propose to have no further dealings with you. I’m rich enough to freight my own stuff in over the Passes, and I will next year. Our business stops right now and for all time.”

“I cannot object to that. You have three hundred thousand dollars in dust deposited with me. Go to Mr. Atsheler and draw it at once.”

The man fumed impotently up and down. “Can’t I get that other five hundred? Great God, man! I’ve paid for it! You don’t intend me to starve?”

“Look here, Melton.” Jacob Welse paused to knock the ash from his cigar. “At this very moment what are you working for? What are you trying to get?”

“A thousand pounds of grub.”

“For your own stomach?”

The Bonanzo king nodded his head.

“Just so.” The lines showed more sharply on Jacob Welse’s forehead. “You are working for your own stomach. I am working for the stomachs of twenty thousand.”

“But you filled Tim McReady’s thousand pounds yesterday all right.”

“The scale-down did not go into effect until to-day.”

“But why am I the one to get it in the neck hard?”

“Why didn’t you come yesterday, and Tim McReady to-day?”

Melton’s face went blank, and Jacob Welse answered his own question with shrugging shoulders.

“That’s the way it stands, Melton. No favoritism. If you hold me responsible for Tim McReady, I shall hold you responsible for not coming yesterday. Better we both throw it upon Providence. You went through the Forty Mile Famine. You are a white man. A Bonanzo property, or a block of Bonanzo properties, does not entitle you to a pound more than the oldest penniless ‘sour-dough’ or the newest baby born. Trust me. As long as I have a pound of grub you shall not starve. Stiffen up. Shake hands. Get a smile on your face and make the best of it.”

Still savage of spirit, though rapidly toning down, the king shook hands and flung out of the room. Before the door could close on his heels, a loose-jointed Yankee shambled in, thrust a moccasined foot to the side and hooked a chair under him, and sat down.

“Say,” he opened up, confidentially, “people’s gittin’ scairt over the grub proposition, I guess some.”

“Hello, Dave. That you?”

“S’pose so. But ez I was saying there’ll be a lively stampede fer the
Outside soon as the river freezes.”

“Think so?”

“Unh huh.”

“Then I’m glad to hear it. It’s what the country needs. Going to join them?”

“Not in a thousand years.” Dave Harney threw his head back with smug complacency. “Freighted my truck up to the mine yesterday. Wa’n’t a bit too soon about it, either. But say . . . Suthin’ happened to the sugar. Had it all on the last sled, an’ jest where the trail turns off the Klondike into Bonanzo, what does that sled do but break through the ice! I never seen the beat of it — the last sled of all, an’ all the sugar! So I jest thought I’d drop in to-day an’ git a hundred pounds or so. White or brown, I ain’t pertickler.”

Jacob Welse shook his head and smiled, but Harney hitched his chair closer.

“The clerk of yourn said he didn’t know, an’ ez there wa’n’t no call to pester him, I said I’d jest drop round an’ see you. I don’t care what it’s wuth. Make it a hundred even; that’ll do me handy.

“Say,” he went on easily, noting the decidedly negative poise of the other’s head. “I’ve got a tolerable sweet tooth, I have. Recollect the taffy I made over on Preacher Creek that time? I declare! how time does fly! That was all of six years ago if it’s a day. More’n that, surely. Seven, by the Jimcracky! But ez I was sayin’, I’d ruther do without my plug of ‘Star’ than sugar. An’ about that sugar? Got my dogs outside. Better go round to the warehouse an’ git it, eh? Pretty good idea.”

But he saw the “No” shaping on Jacob Welse’s lips, and hurried on before it could be uttered.

“Now, I don’t want to hog it. Wouldn’t do that fer the world. So if yer short, I can put up with seventy-five — ” (he studied the other’s face), “an’ I might do with fifty. I ‘preciate your position, an’ I ain’t low-down critter enough to pester — ”

“What’s the good of spilling words, Dave? We haven’t a pound of sugar to spare — ”

“Ez I was sayin’, I ain’t no hog; an’ seein’ ‘s it’s you, Welse, I’ll make to scrimp along on twenty-five — ”

“Not an ounce!”

“Not the least leetle mite? Well, well, don’t git het up. We’ll jest fergit I ast you fer any, an’ I’ll drop round some likelier time. So long. Say!” He threw his jaw to one side and seemed to stiffen the muscles of his ear as he listened intently. “That’s the Laura’s whistle. She’s startin’ soon. Goin’ to see her off? Come along.”

Jacob Welse pulled on his bearskin coat and mittens, and they passed through the outer offices into the main store. So large was it, that the tenscore purchasers before the counters made no apparent crowd. Many were serious-faced, and more than one looked darkly at the head of the company as he passed. The clerks were selling everything except grub, and it was grub that was in demand. “Holding it for a rise. Famine prices,” a red-whiskered miner sneered. Jacob Welse heard it, but took no notice. He expected to hear it many times and more unpleasantly ere the scare was over.

On the sidewalk he stopped to glance over the public bulletins posted against the side of the building. Dogs lost, found, and for sale occupied some space, but the rest was devoted to notices of sales of outfits. The timid were already growing frightened. Outfits of five hundred pounds were offering at a dollar a pound, without flour; others, with flour, at a dollar and a half. Jacob Welse saw Melton talking with an anxious-faced newcomer, and the satisfaction displayed by the Bonanzo king told that he had succeeded in filling his winter’s cache.

“Why don’t you smell out the sugar, Dave?” Jacob Welse asked, pointing to the bulletins.

Dave Harney looked his reproach. “Mebbe you think I ain’t ben smellin’. I’ve clean wore my dogs out chasin’ round from Klondike City to the Hospital. Can’t git yer fingers on it fer love or money.”

They walked down the block-long sidewalk, past the warehouse doors and the long teams of waiting huskies curled up in wolfish comfort in the snow. It was for this snow, the first permanent one of the fall, that the miners up-creek had waited to begin their freighting.

“Curious, ain’t it?” Dave hazarded suggestively, as they crossed the main street to the river bank. “Mighty curious — me ownin’ two five-hundred-foot Eldorado claims an’ a fraction, wuth five millions if I’m wuth a cent, an’ no sweetenin’ fer my coffee or mush! Why, gosh-dang-it! this country kin go to blazes! I’ll sell out! I’ll quit it cold! I’ll — I’ll — go back to the States!”

“Oh, no, you won’t,” Jacob Welse answered. “I’ve heard you talk before. You put in a year up Stuart River on straight meat, if I haven’t forgotten. And you ate salmon-belly and dogs up the Tanana, to say nothing of going through two famines; and you haven’t turned your back on the country yet. And you never will. And you’ll die here as sure as that’s the Laura’s spring being hauled aboard. And I look forward confidently to the day when I shall ship you out in a lead-lined box and burden the San Francisco end with the trouble of winding up your estate. You are a fixture, and you know it.”

As he talked he constantly acknowledged greetings from the passers-by. Those who knew him were mainly old-timers and he knew them all by name, though there was scarcely a newcomer to whom his face was not familiar.

“I’ll jest bet I’ll be in Paris in 1900,” the Eldorado king protested feebly.

But Jacob Welse did not hear. There was a jangling of gongs as McGregor saluted him from the pilot-house and the Laura slipped out from the bank. The men on the shore filled the air with good-luck farewells and last advice, but the three hundred grubless ones, turning their backs on the golden dream, were moody and dispirited, and made small response. The Laura backed out through a channel cut in the shore-ice, swung about in the current, and with a final blast put on full steam ahead.

The crowd thinned away and went about its business, leaving Jacob Welse the centre of a group of a dozen or so. The talk was of the famine, but it was the talk of men. Even Dave Harney forgot to curse the country for its sugar shortage, and waxed facetious over the newcomers, — chechaquos, he called them, having recourse to the Siwash tongue. In the midst of his remarks his quick eye lighted on a black speck floating down with the mush-ice of the river. “Jest look at that!” he cried. “A Peterborough canoe runnin’ the ice!”

Twisting and turning, now paddling, now shoving clear of the floating cakes, the two men in the canoe worked in to the rim-ice, along the edge of which they drifted, waiting for an opening. Opposite the channel cut out by the steamer, they drove their paddles deep and darted into the calm dead water. The waiting group received them with open arms, helping them up the bank and carrying their shell after them.

In its bottom were two leather mail-pouches, a couple of blankets, coffee-pot and frying-pan, and a scant grub-sack. As for the men, so frosted were they, and so numb with the cold, that they could hardly stand. Dave Harney proposed whiskey, and was for haling them away at once; but one delayed long enough to shake stiff hands with Jacob Welse.

“She’s coming,” he announced. “Passed her boat an hour back. It ought to be round the bend any minute. I’ve got despatches for you, but I’ll see you later. Got to get something into me first.” Turning to go with Harney, he stopped suddenly and pointed up stream. “There she is now. Just coming out past the bluff.”

“Run along, boys, an’ git yer whiskey,” Harney admonished him and his mate. “Tell ‘m it’s on me, double dose, an’ jest excuse me not drinkin’ with you, fer I’m goin’ to stay.”

The Klondike was throwing a thick flow of ice, partly mush and partly solid, and swept the boat out towards the middle of the Yukon. They could see the struggle plainly from the bank, — four men standing up and poling a way through the jarring cakes. A Yukon stove aboard was sending up a trailing pillar of blue smoke, and, as the boat drew closer, they could see a woman in the stern working the long steering-sweep. At sight of this there was a snap and sparkle in Jacob Welse’s eyes. It was the first omen, and it was good, he thought. She was still a Welse; a struggler and a fighter. The years of her culture had not weakened her. Though tasting of the fruits of the first remove from the soil, she was not afraid of the soil; she could return to it gleefully and naturally.

So he mused till the boat drove in, ice-rimed and battered, against the edge of the rim-ice. The one white man aboard sprang: out, painter in hand, to slow it down and work into the channel. But the rim-ice was formed of the night, and the front of it shelved off with him into the current. The nose of the boat sheered out under the pressure of a heavy cake, so that he came up at the stern. The woman’s arm flashed over the side to his collar, and at the same instant, sharp and authoritative, her voice rang out to the Indian oarsmen to back water. Still holding the man’s head above water, she threw her body against the sweep and guided the boat stern-foremost into the opening. A few more strokes and it grounded at the foot of the bank. She passed the collar of the chattering man to Dave Harney, who dragged him out and started him off on the trail of the mail-carriers.

Frona stood up, her cheeks glowing from the quick work. Jacob Welse hesitated. Though he stood within reach of the gunwale, a gulf of three years was between. The womanhood of twenty, added unto the girl of seventeen, made a sum more prodigious than he had imagined. He did not know whether to bear-hug the radiant young creature or to take her hand and help her ashore. But there was no apparent hitch, for she leaped beside him and was into his arms. Those above looked away to a man till the two came up the bank hand in hand.

“Gentlemen, my daughter.” There was a great pride in his face.

Frona embraced them all with a comrade smile, and each man felt that for an instant her eyes had looked straight into his.

Chapter VII

That Vance Corliss wanted to see more of the girl he had divided blankets with, goes with the saying. He had not been wise enough to lug a camera into the country, but none the less, by a yet subtler process, a sun-picture had been recorded somewhere on his cerebral tissues. In the flash of an instant it had been done. A wave message of light and color, a molecular agitation and integration, a certain minute though definite corrugation in a brain recess, — and there it was, a picture complete! The blazing sunlight on the beetling black; a slender gray form, radiant, starting forward to the vision from the marge where light and darkness met; a fresh young morning smile wreathed in a flame of burning gold.

It was a picture he looked at often, and the more he looked the greater was his desire, to see Frona Welse again. This event he anticipated with a thrill, with the exultancy over change which is common of all life. She was something new, a fresh type, a woman unrelated to all women he had met. Out of the fascinating unknown a pair of hazel eyes smiled into his, and a hand, soft of touch and strong of grip, beckoned him. And there was an allurement about it which was as the allurement of sin.

Not that Vance Corliss was anybody’s fool, nor that his had been an anchorite’s existence; but that his upbringing, rather, had given his life a certain puritanical bent. Awakening intelligence and broader knowledge had weakened the early influence of an austere mother, but had not wholly eradicated it. It was there, deep down, very shadowy, but still a part of him. He could not get away from it. It distorted, ever so slightly, his concepts of things. It gave a squint to his perceptions, and very often, when the sex feminine was concerned, determined his classifications. He prided himself on his largeness when he granted that there were three kinds of women. His mother had only admitted two. But he had outgrown her. It was incontestable that there were three kinds, — the good, the bad, and the partly good and partly bad. That the last usually went bad, he believed firmly. In its very nature such a condition could not be permanent. It was the intermediary stage, marking the passage from high to low, from best to worst.

All of which might have been true, even as he saw it; but with definitions for premises, conclusions cannot fail to be dogmatic. What was good and bad? There it was. That was where his mother whispered with dead lips to him. Nor alone his mother, but divers conventional generations, even back to the sturdy ancestor who first uplifted from the soil and looked down. For Vance Corliss was many times removed from the red earth, and, though he did not know it, there was a clamor within him for a return lest he perish.

Not that he pigeon-holed Frona according to his inherited definitions. He refused to classify her at all. He did not dare. He preferred to pass judgment later, when he had gathered more data. And there was the allurement, the gathering of the data; the great critical point where purity reaches dreamy hands towards pitch and refuses to call it pitch — till defiled. No; Vance Corliss was not a cad. And since purity is merely a relative term, he was not pure. That there was no pitch under his nails was not because he had manicured diligently, but because it had not been his luck to run across any pitch. He was not good because he chose to be, because evil was repellant; but because he had not had opportunity to become evil. But from this, on the other hand, it is not to be argued that he would have gone bad had he had a chance.

He was a product of the sheltered life. All his days had been lived in a sanitary dwelling; the plumbing was excellent. The air he had breathed had been mostly ozone artificially manufactured. He had been sun-bathed in balmy weather, and brought in out of the wet when it rained. And when he reached the age of choice he had been too fully occupied to deviate from the straight path, along which his mother had taught him to creep and toddle, and along which he now proceeded to walk upright, without thought of what lay on either side.

Vitality cannot be used over again. If it be expended on one thing, there is none left for the other thing. And so with Vance Corliss. Scholarly lucubrations and healthy exercises during his college days had consumed all the energy his normal digestion extracted from a wholesome omnivorous diet. When he did discover a bit of surplus energy, he worked it off in the society of his mother and of the conventional minds and prim teas she surrounded herself with. Result: A very nice young man, of whom no maid’s mother need ever be in trepidation; a very strong young man, whose substance had not been wasted in riotous living; a very learned young man, with a Freiberg mining engineer’s diploma and a B.A. sheepskin from Yale; and, lastly, a very self-centred, self-possessed young man.

Now his greatest virtue lay in this: he had not become hardened in the mould baked by his several forbears and into which he had been pressed by his mother’s hands. Some atavism had been at work in the making of him, and he had reverted to that ancestor who sturdily uplifted. But so far this portion of his heritage had lain dormant. He had simply remained adjusted to a stable environment. There had been no call upon the adaptability which was his. But whensoever the call came, being so constituted, it was manifest that he should adapt, should adjust himself to the unwonted pressure of new conditions. The maxim of the rolling stone may be all true; but notwithstanding, in the scheme of life, the inability to become fixed is an excellence par excellence. Though he did not know it, this inability was Vance Corliss’s most splendid possession.

But to return. He looked forward with great sober glee to meeting Frona Welse, and in the meanwhile consulted often the sun-picture he carried of her. Though he went over the Pass and down the lakes and river with a push of money behind him (London syndicates are never niggardly in such matters). Frona beat him into Dawson by a fortnight. While on his part money in the end overcame obstacles, on hers the name of Welse was a talisman greater than treasure. After his arrival, a couple of weeks were consumed in buying a cabin, presenting his letters of introduction, and settling down. But all things come in the fulness of time, and so, one night after the river closed, he pointed his moccasins in the direction of Jacob Welse’s house. Mrs. Schoville, the Gold Commissioner’s wife, gave him the honor of her company.

Corliss wanted to rub his eyes. Steam-heating apparatus in the Klondike! But the next instant he had passed out of the hall through the heavy portieres and stood inside the drawing-room. And it was a drawing-room. His moose-hide moccasins sank luxuriantly into the deep carpet, and his eyes were caught by a Turner sunrise on the opposite wall. And there were other paintings and things in bronze. Two Dutch fireplaces were roaring full with huge back-logs of spruce. There was a piano; and somebody was singing. Frona sprang from the stool and came forward, greeting him with both hands. He had thought his sun-picture perfect, but this fire-picture, this young creature with the flush and warmth of ringing life, quite eclipsed it. It was a whirling moment, as he held her two hands in his, one of those moments when an incomprehensible orgasm quickens the blood and dizzies the brain. Though the first syllables came to him faintly, Mrs. Schoville’s voice brought him back to himself.

“Oh!” she cried. “You know him!”

And Frona answered, “Yes, we met on the Dyea Trail; and those who meet on the Dyea Trail can never forget.”

“How romantic!”

The Gold Commissioner’s wife clapped her hands. Though fat and forty, and phlegmatic of temperament, between exclamations and hand-clappings her waking existence was mostly explosive. Her husband secretly averred that did God Himself deign to meet her face to face, she would smite together her chubby hands and cry out, “How romantic!”

“How did it happen?” she continued. “He didn’t rescue you over a cliff, or that sort of thing, did he? Do say that he did! And you never said a word about it, Mr. Corliss. Do tell me. I’m just dying to know!”

“Oh, nothing like that,” he hastened to answer. “Nothing much. I, that is we — ”

He felt a sinking as Frona interrupted. There was no telling what this remarkable girl might say.

“He gave me of his hospitality, that was all,” she said. “And I can vouch for his fried potatoes; while for his coffee, it is excellent — when one is very hungry.”

“Ingrate!” he managed to articulate, and thereby to gain a smile, ere he was introduced to a cleanly built lieutenant of the Mounted Police, who stood by the fireplace discussing the grub proposition with a dapper little man very much out of place in a white shirt and stiff collar.

Thanks to the particular niche in society into which he happened to be born, Corliss drifted about easily from group to group, and was much envied therefore by Del Bishop, who sat stiffly in the first chair he had dropped into, and who was waiting patiently for the first person to take leave that he might know how to compass the manoeuvre. In his mind’s eye he had figured most of it out, knew just how many steps required to carry him to the door, was certain he would have to say good-by to Frona, but did not know whether or not he was supposed to shake hands all around. He had just dropped in to see Frona and say “Howdee,” as he expressed it, and had unwittingly found himself in company.

Corliss, having terminated a buzz with a Miss Mortimer on the decadence of the French symbolists, encountered Del Bishop. But the pocket-miner remembered him at once from the one glimpse he had caught of Corliss standing by his tent-door in Happy Camp. Was almighty obliged to him for his night’s hospitality to Miss Frona, seein’ as he’d ben side-tracked down the line; that any kindness to her was a kindness to him; and that he’d remember it, by God, as long as he had a corner of a blanket to pull over him. Hoped it hadn’t put him out. Miss Frona’d said that bedding was scarce, but it wasn’t a cold night (more blowy than crisp), so he reckoned there couldn’t ‘a’ ben much shiverin’. All of which struck Corliss as perilous, and he broke away at the first opportunity, leaving the pocket-miner yearning for the door.

But Dave Harney, who had not come by mistake, avoided gluing himself to the first chair. Being an Eldorado king, he had felt it incumbent to assume the position in society to which his numerous millions entitled him; and though unused all his days to social amenities other than the out-hanging latch-string and the general pot, he had succeeded to his own satisfaction as a knight of the carpet. Quick to take a cue, he circulated with an aplomb which his striking garments and long shambling gait only heightened, and talked choppy and disconnected fragments with whomsoever he ran up against. The Miss Mortimer, who spoke Parisian French, took him aback with her symbolists; but he evened matters up with a goodly measure of the bastard lingo of the Canadian voyageurs, and left her gasping and meditating over a proposition to sell him twenty-five pounds of sugar, white or brown. But she was not unduly favored, for with everybody he adroitly turned the conversation to grub, and then led up to the eternal proposition. “Sugar or bust,” he would conclude gayly each time and wander on to the next.

But he put the capstone on his social success by asking Frona to sing the touching ditty, “I Left My Happy Home for You.” This was something beyond her, though she had him hum over the opening bars so that she could furnish the accompaniment. His voice was more strenuous than sweet, and Del Bishop, discovering himself at last, joined in raucously on the choruses. This made him feel so much better that he disconnected himself from the chair, and when he finally got home he kicked up his sleepy tent-mate to tell him about the high time he’d had over at the Welse’s. Mrs. Schoville tittered and thought it all so unique, and she thought it so unique several times more when the lieutenant of Mounted Police and a couple of compatriots roared “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the Queen,” and the Americans responded with “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “John Brown.” Then big Alec Beaubien, the Circle City king, demanded the “Marseillaise,” and the company broke up chanting “Die Wacht am Rhein” to the frosty night.

“Don’t come on these nights,” Frona whispered to Corliss at parting.
“We haven’t spoken three words, and I know we shall be good friends.
Did Dave Harney succeed in getting any sugar out of you?”

They mingled their laughter, and Corliss went home under the aurora borealis, striving to reduce his impressions to some kind of order.

Chapter VIII

“And why should I not be proud of my race?”

Frona’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkling. They had both been harking back to childhood, and she had been telling Corliss of her mother, whom she faintly remembered. Fair and flaxen-haired, typically Saxon, was the likeness she had drawn, filled out largely with knowledge gained from her father and from old Andy of the Dyea Post. The discussion had then turned upon the race in general, and Frona had said things in the heat of enthusiasm which affected the more conservative mind of Corliss as dangerous and not solidly based on fact. He deemed himself too large for race egotism and insular prejudice, and had seen fit to laugh at her immature convictions.

“It’s a common characteristic of all peoples,” he proceeded, “to consider themselves superior races, — a naive, natural egoism, very healthy and very good, but none the less manifestly untrue. The Jews conceived themselves to be God’s chosen people, and they still so conceive themselves — ”

“And because of it they have left a deep mark down the page of history,” she interrupted.

“But time has not proved the stability of their conceptions. And you must also view the other side. A superior people must look upon all others as inferior peoples. This comes home to you. To be a Roman were greater than to be a king, and when the Romans rubbed against your savage ancestors in the German forests, they elevated their brows and said, ‘An inferior people, barbarians.’“

“But we are here, now. We are, and the Romans are not. The test is time. So far we have stood the test; the signs are favorable that we shall continue to stand it. We are the best fitted!”

“Egotism.”

“But wait. Put it to the test.”

As she spoke her hand flew out impulsively to his. At the touch his heart pulsed upward, there was a rush Of blood and a tightening across the temples. Ridiculous, but delightful, he thought. At this rate he could argue with her the night through.

“The test,” she repeated, withdrawing her hand without embarrassment. “We are a race of doers and fighters, of globe-encirclers and zone-conquerors. We toil and struggle, and stand by the toil and struggle no matter how hopeless it may be. While we are persistent and resistant, we are so made that we fit ourselves to the most diverse conditions. Will the Indian, the Negro, or the Mongol ever conquer the Teuton? Surely not! The Indian has persistence without variability; if he does not modify he dies, if he does try to modify he dies anyway. The Negro has adaptability, but he is servile and must be led. As for the Chinese, they are permanent. All that the other races are not, the Anglo-Saxon, or Teuton if you please, is. All that the other races have not, the Teuton has. What race is to rise up and overwhelm us?”

“Ah, you forget the Slav,” Corliss suggested slyly.

“The Slav!” Her face fell. “True, the Slav! The only stripling in this world of young men and gray-beards! But he is still in the future, and in the future the decision rests. In the mean time we prepare. If may be we shall have such a start that we shall prevent him growing. You know, because he was better skilled in chemistry, knew how to manufacture gunpowder, that the Spaniard destroyed the Aztec. May not we, who are possessing ourselves of the world and its resources, and gathering to ourselves all its knowledge, may not we nip the Slav ere he grows a thatch to his lip?”

Vance Corliss shook his head non-committally, and laughed.

“Oh! I know I become absurd and grow over-warm!” she exclaimed. “But after all, one reason that we are the salt of the earth is because we have the courage to say so.”

“And I am sure your warmth spreads,” he responded. “See, I’m beginning to glow myself. We are not God’s, but Nature’s chosen people, we Angles, and Saxons, and Normans, and Vikings, and the earth is our heritage. Let us arise and go forth!”

“Now you are laughing at me, and, besides, we have already gone forth. Why have you fared into the north, if not to lay hands on the race legacy?”

She turned her head at the sound of approaching footsteps, and cried for greeting, “I appeal to you, Captain Alexander! I summon you to bear witness!”

The captain of police smiled in his sternly mirthful fashion as he shook hands with Frona and Corliss. “Bear witness?” he questioned. “Ah, yes!

“‘Bear witness, O my comrades, what a hard-bit gang were we, —
The servants of the sweep-head, but the masters of the sea!’“

He quoted the verse with a savage solemnity exulting through his deep voice. This, and the appositeness of it, quite carried Frona away, and she had both his hands in hers on the instant. Corliss was aware of an inward wince at the action. It was uncomfortable. He did not like to see her so promiscuous with those warm, strong hands of hers. Did she so favor all men who delighted her by word or deed? He did not mind her fingers closing round his, but somehow it seemed wanton when shared with the next comer. By the time he had thought thus far, Frona had explained the topic under discussion, and Captain Alexander was testifying.

“I don’t know much about your Slav and other kin, except that they are good workers and strong; but I do know that the white man is the greatest and best breed in the world. Take the Indian, for instance. The white man comes along and beats him at all his games, outworks him, out-roughs him, out-fishes him, out-hunts him. As far back as their myths go, the Alaskan Indians have packed on their backs. But the gold-rushers, as soon as they had learned the tricks of the trade, packed greater loads and packed them farther than did the Indians. Why, last May, the Queen’s birthday, we had sports on the river. In the one, two, three, four, and five men canoe races we beat the Indians right and left. Yet they had been born to the paddle, and most of us had never seen a canoe until man-grown.”

“But why is it?” Corliss queried.

“I do not know why. I only know that it is. I simply bear witness. I do know that we do what they cannot do, and what they can do, we do better.”

Frona nodded her head triumphantly at Corliss. “Come, acknowledge your defeat, so that we may go in to dinner. Defeat for the time being, at least. The concrete facts of paddles and pack-straps quite overcome your dogmatics. Ah, I thought so. More time? All the time in the world. But let us go in. We’ll see what my father thinks of it, — and Mr. Kellar. A symposium on Anglo-Saxon supremacy!”

Frost and enervation are mutually repellant. The Northland gives a keenness and zest to the blood which cannot be obtained in warmer climes. Naturally so, then, the friendship which sprang up between Corliss and Frona was anything but languid. They met often under her father’s roof-tree, and went many places together. Each found a pleasurable attraction in the other, and a satisfaction which the things they were not in accord with could not mar. Frona liked the man because he was a man. In her wildest flights she could never imagine linking herself with any man, no matter how exalted spiritually, who was not a man physically. It was a delight to her and a joy to look upon the strong males of her kind, with bodies comely in the sight of God and muscles swelling with the promise of deeds and work. Man, to her, was preeminently a fighter. She believed in natural selection and in sexual selection, and was certain that if man had thereby become possessed of faculties and functions, they were for him to use and could but tend to his good. And likewise with instincts. If she felt drawn to any person or thing, it was good for her to be so drawn, good for herself. If she felt impelled to joy in a well-built frame and well-shaped muscle, why should she restrain? Why should she not love the body, and without shame? The history of the race, and of all races, sealed her choice with approval. Down all time, the weak and effeminate males had vanished from the world-stage. Only the strong could inherit the earth. She had been born of the strong, and she chose to cast her lot with the strong.

Yet of all creatures, she was the last to be deaf and blind to the things of the spirit. But the things of the spirit she demanded should be likewise strong. No halting, no stuttered utterance, tremulous waiting, minor wailing! The mind and the soul must be as quick and definite and certain as the body. Nor was the spirit made alone for immortal dreaming. Like the flesh, it must strive and toil. It must be workaday as well as idle day. She could understand a weakling singing sweetly and even greatly, and in so far she could love him for his sweetness and greatness; but her love would have fuller measure were he strong of body as well. She believed she was just. She gave the flesh its due and the spirit its due; but she had, over and above, her own choice, her own individual ideal. She liked to see the two go hand in hand. Prophecy and dyspepsia did not affect her as a felicitous admixture. A splendid savage and a weak-kneed poet! She could admire the one for his brawn and the other for his song; but she would prefer that they had been made one in the beginning.

As to Vance Corliss. First, and most necessary of all, there was that physiological affinity between them that made the touch of his hand a pleasure to her. Though souls may rush together, if body cannot endure body, happiness is reared on sand and the structure will be ever unstable and tottery. Next, Corliss had the physical potency of the hero without the grossness of the brute. His muscular development was more qualitative than quantitative, and it is the qualitative development which gives rise to beauty of form. A giant need not be proportioned in the mould; nor a thew be symmetrical to be massive.

And finally, — none the less necessary but still finally, — Vance Corliss was neither spiritually dead nor decadent. He affected her as fresh and wholesome and strong, as reared above the soil but not scorning the soil. Of course, none of this she reasoned out otherwise than by subconscious processes. Her conclusions were feelings, not thoughts.

Though they quarrelled and disagreed on innumerable things, deep down, underlying all, there was a permanent unity. She liked him for a certain stern soberness that was his, and for his saving grace of humor. Seriousness and banter were not incompatible. She liked him for his gallantry, made to work with and not for display. She liked the spirit of his offer at Happy Camp, when he proposed giving her an Indian guide and passage-money back to the United States. He could do as well as talk. She liked him for his outlook, for his innate liberality, which she felt to be there, somehow, no matter that often he was narrow of expression. She liked him for his mind. Though somewhat academic, somewhat tainted with latter-day scholasticism, it was still a mind which permitted him to be classed with the “Intellectuals.” He was capable of divorcing sentiment and emotion from reason. Granted that he included all the factors, he could not go wrong. And here was where she found chief fault with him, — his narrowness which precluded all the factors; his narrowness which gave the lie to the breadth she knew was really his. But she was aware that it was not an irremediable defect, and that the new life he was leading was very apt to rectify it. He was filled with culture; what he needed was a few more of life’s facts.

And she liked him for himself, which is quite different from liking the parts which went to compose him. For it is no miracle for two things, added together, to produce not only the sum of themselves, but a third thing which is not to be found in either of them. So with him. She liked him for himself, for that something which refused to stand out as a part, or a sum of parts; for that something which is the corner-stone of Faith and which has ever baffled Philosophy and Science. And further, to like, with Frona Welse, did not mean to love.

First, and above all, Vance Corliss was drawn to Frona Welse because of the clamor within him for a return to the soil. In him the elements were so mixed that it was impossible for women many times removed to find favor in his eyes. Such he had met constantly, but not one had ever drawn from him a superfluous heart-beat. Though there had been in him a growing instinctive knowledge of lack of unity, — the lack of unity which must precede, always, the love of man and woman, — not one of the daughters of Eve he had met had flashed irresistibly in to fill the void. Elective affinity, sexual affinity, or whatsoever the intangible essence known as love is, had never been manifest. When he met Frona it had at once sprung, full-fledged, into existence. But he quite misunderstood it, took it for a mere attraction towards the new and unaccustomed.

Many men, possessed of birth and breeding, have yielded to this clamor for return. And giving the apparent lie to their own sanity and moral stability, many such men have married peasant girls or barmaids, And those to whom evil apportioned itself have been prone to distrust the impulse they obeyed, forgetting that nature makes or mars the individual for the sake, always, of the type. For in every such case of return, the impulse was sound, — only that time and space interfered, and propinquity determined whether the object of choice should be bar-maid or peasant girl.

Happily for Vance Corliss, time and space were propitious, and in Frona he found the culture he could not do without, and the clean sharp tang of the earth he needed. In so far as her education and culture went, she was an astonishment. He had met the scientifically smattered young woman before, but Frona had something more than smattering. Further, she gave new life to old facts, and her interpretations of common things were coherent and vigorous and new. Though his acquired conservatism was alarmed and cried danger, he could not remain cold to the charm of her philosophizing, while her scholarly attainments were fully redeemed by her enthusiasm. Though he could not agree with much that she passionately held, he yet recognized that the passion of sincerity and enthusiasm was good.

But her chief fault, in his eyes, was her unconventionality. Woman was something so inexpressibly sacred to him, that he could not bear to see any good woman venturing where the footing was precarious. Whatever good woman thus ventured, overstepping the metes and bounds of sex and status, he deemed did so of wantonness. And wantonness of such order was akin to — well, he could not say it when thinking of Frona, though she hurt him often by her unwise acts. However, he only felt such hurts when away from her. When with her, looking into her eyes which always looked back, or at greeting and parting pressing her hand which always pressed honestly, it seemed certain that there was in her nothing but goodness and truth.

And then he liked her in many different ways for many different things. For her impulses, and for her passions which were always elevated. And already, from breathing the Northland air, he had come to like her for that comradeship which at first had shocked him. There were other acquired likings, her lack of prudishness, for instance, which he awoke one day to find that he had previously confounded with lack of modesty. And it was only the day before that day that he drifted, before he thought, into a discussion with her of “Camille.” She had seen Bernhardt, and dwelt lovingly on the recollection. He went home afterwards, a dull pain gnawing at his heart, striving to reconcile Frona with the ideal impressed upon him by his mother that innocence was another term for ignorance. Notwithstanding, by the following day he had worked it out and loosened another finger of the maternal grip.

He liked the flame of her hair in the sunshine, the glint of its gold by the firelight, and the waywardness of it and the glory. He liked her neat-shod feet and the gray-gaitered calves, — alas, now hidden in long-skirted Dawson. He liked her for the strength of her slenderness; and to walk with her, swinging her step and stride to his, or to merely watch her come across a room or down the street, was a delight. Life and the joy of life romped through her blood, abstemiously filling out and rounding off each shapely muscle and soft curve. And he liked it all. Especially he liked the swell of her forearm, which rose firm and strong and tantalizing and sought shelter all too quickly under the loose-flowing sleeve.

The co-ordination of physical with spiritual beauty is very strong in normal men, and so it was with Vance Corliss. That he liked the one was no reason that he failed to appreciate the other. He liked Frona for both, and for herself as well. And to like, with him, though he did not know it, was to love.

Chapter IX

Vance Corliss proceeded at a fair rate to adapt himself to the Northland life, and he found that many adjustments came easy. While his own tongue was alien to the brimstone of the Lord, he became quite used to strong language on the part of other men, even in the most genial conversation. Carthey, a little Texan who went to work for him for a while, opened or closed every second sentence, on an average, with the mild expletive, “By damn!” It was also his invariable way of expressing surprise, disappointment, consternation, or all the rest of the tribe of sudden emotions. By pitch and stress and intonation, the protean oath was made to perform every function of ordinary speech. At first it was a constant source of irritation and disgust to Corliss, but erelong he grew not only to tolerate it, but to like it, and to wait for it eagerly. Once, Carthey’s wheel-dog lost an ear in a hasty contention with a dog of the Hudson Bay, and when the young fellow bent over the animal and discovered the loss, the blended endearment and pathos of the “by damn” which fell from his lips was a relation to Corliss. All was not evil out of Nazareth, he concluded sagely, and, like Jacob Welse of old, revised his philosophy of life accordingly.

Again, there were two sides to the social life of Dawson. Up at the Barracks, at the Welse’s, and a few other places, all men of standing were welcomed and made comfortable by the womenkind of like standing. There were teas, and dinners, and dances, and socials for charity, and the usual run of things; all of which, however, failed to wholly satisfy the men. Down in the town there was a totally different though equally popular other side. As the country was too young for club-life, the masculine portion of the community expressed its masculinity by herding together in the saloons, — the ministers and missionaries being the only exceptions to this mode of expression. Business appointments and deals were made and consummated in the saloons, enterprises projected, shop talked, the latest news discussed, and a general good fellowship maintained. There all life rubbed shoulders, and kings and dog-drivers, old-timers and chechaquos, met on a common level. And it so happened, probably because saw-mills and house-space were scarce, that the saloons accommodated the gambling tables and the polished dance-house floors. And here, because he needs must bend to custom, Corliss’s adaptation went on rapidly. And as Carthey, who appreciated him, soliloquized, “The best of it is he likes it damn well, by damn!”

But any adjustment must have its painful periods, and while Corliss’s general change went on smoothly, in the particular case of Frona it was different. She had a code of her own, quite unlike that of the community, and perhaps believed woman might do things at which even the saloon-inhabiting males would be shocked. And because of this, she and Corliss had their first disagreeable disagreement.

Frona loved to run with the dogs through the biting frost, cheeks tingling, blood bounding, body thrust forward, and limbs rising and falling ceaselessly to the pace. And one November day, with the first cold snap on and the spirit thermometer frigidly marking sixty-five below, she got out the sled, harnessed her team of huskies, and flew down the river trail. As soon as she cleared the town she was off and running. And in such manner, running and riding by turns, she swept through the Indian village below the bluff’s, made an eight-mile circle up Moosehide Creek and back, crossed the river on the ice, and several hours later came flying up the west bank of the Yukon opposite the town. She was aiming to tap and return by the trail for the wood-sleds which crossed thereabout, but a mile away from it she ran into the soft snow and brought the winded dogs to a walk.

Along the rim of the river and under the frown of the overhanging cliffs, she directed the path she was breaking. Here and there she made detours to avoid the out-jutting talus, and at other times followed the ice in against the precipitous walls and hugged them closely around the abrupt bends. And so, at the head of her huskies, she came suddenly upon a woman sitting in the snow and gazing across the river at smoke-canopied Dawson. She had been crying, and this was sufficient to prevent Frona’s scrutiny from wandering farther. A tear, turned to a globule of ice, rested on her cheek, and her eyes were dim and moist; there was an-expression of hopeless, fathomless woe.

“Oh!” Frona cried, stopping the dogs and coming up to her. “You are hurt? Can I help you?” she queried, though the stranger shook her head. “But you mustn’t sit there. It is nearly seventy below, and you’ll freeze in a few minutes. Your cheeks are bitten already.” She rubbed the afflicted parts vigorously with a mitten of snow, and then looked down on the warm returning glow.

“I beg pardon.” The woman rose somewhat stiffly to her feet. “And I thank you, but I am perfectly warm, you see” (settling the fur cape more closely about her with a snuggling movement), “and I had just sat down for the moment.”

Frona noted that she was very beautiful, and her woman’s eye roved over and took in the splendid furs, the make of the gown, and the bead-work of the moccasins which peeped from beneath. And in view of all this, and of the fact that the face was unfamiliar, she felt an instinctive desire to shrink back.

“And I haven’t hurt myself,” the woman went on. “Just a mood, that was all, looking out over the dreary endless white.”

“Yes,” Frona replied, mastering herself; “I can understand. There must be much of sadness in such a landscape, only it never comes that way to me. The sombreness and the sternness of it appeal to me, but not the sadness.”

“And that is because the lines of our lives have been laid in different places,” the other ventured, reflectively. “It is not what the landscape is, but what we are. If we were not, the landscape would remain, but without human significance. That is what we invest it with.

“‘Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.’“

Frona’s eyes brightened, and she went on to complete the passage:

“‘There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fulness; and around.’

“And — and — how does it go? I have forgotten.”

“‘Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in — ’“

The woman ceased abruptly, her voice trilling off into silvery laughter with a certain bitter reckless ring to it which made Frona inwardly shiver. She moved as though to go back to her dogs, but the woman’s hand went out in a familiar gesture, — twin to Frona’s own, — which went at once to Frona’s heart.

“Stay a moment,” she said, with an undertone of pleading in the words, “and talk with me. It is long since I have met a woman” — she paused while her tongue wandered for the word — ”who could quote ‘Paracelsus.’ You are, — I know you, you see, — you are Jacob Welse’s daughter, Frona Welse, I believe.”

Frona nodded her identity, hesitated, and looked at the woman with secret intentness. She was conscious of a great and pardonable curiosity, of a frank out-reaching for fuller knowledge. This creature, so like, so different; old as the oldest race, and young as the last rose-tinted babe; flung far as the farthermost fires of men, and eternal as humanity itself — where were they unlike, this woman and she? Her five senses told her not; by every law of life they were no; only, only by the fast-drawn lines of social caste and social wisdom were they not the same. So she thought, even as for one searching moment she studied the other’s face. And in the situation she found an uplifting awfulness, such as comes when the veil is thrust aside and one gazes on the mysteriousness of Deity. She remembered: “Her feet take hold of hell; her house is the way to the grave, going down to the chamber of death,” and in the same instant strong upon her was the vision of the familiar gesture with which the woman’s hand had gone out in mute appeal, and she looked aside, out over the dreary endless white, and for her, too, the day became filled with sadness.

She gave an involuntary, half-nervous shiver, though she said, naturally enough, “Come, let us walk on and get the blood moving again. I had no idea it was so cold till I stood still.” She turned to the dogs: “Mush-on! King! You Sandy! Mush!” And back again to the woman, “I am quite chilled, and as for you, you must be — ”

“Quite warm, of course. You have been running and your clothes are wet against you, while I have kept up the needful circulation and no more. I saw you when you leaped off the sled below the hospital and vanished down the river like a Diana of the snows. How I envied you! You must enjoy it.”

“Oh, I do,” Frona answered, simply. “I was raised with the dogs.”

“It savors of the Greek.”

Frona did not reply, and they walked on in silence. Yet Frona wished, though she dared not dare, that she could give her tongue free rein, and from out of the other’s bitter knowledge, for her own soul’s sake and sanity, draw the pregnant human generalizations which she must possess. And over her welled a wave of pity and distress; and she felt a discomfort, for she knew not what to say or how to voice her heart. And when the other’s speech broke forth, she hailed it with a great relief.

“Tell me,” the woman demanded, half-eagerly, half-masterly, “tell me about yourself. You are new to the Inside. Where were you before you came in? Tell me.”

So the difficulty was solved, in a way, and Frona talked on about herself, with a successfully feigned girlhood innocence, as though she did not appreciate the other or understand her ill-concealed yearning for that which she might not have, but which was Frona’s.

“There is the trail you are trying to connect with.” They had rounded the last of the cliffs, and Frona’s companion pointed ahead to where the walls receded and wrinkled to a gorge, out of which the sleds drew the firewood across the river to town. “I shall leave you there,” she concluded.

“But are you not going back to Dawson?” Frona queried. “It is growing late, and you had better not linger.”

“No . . . I . . .”

Her painful hesitancy brought Frona to a realization of her own thoughtlessness. But she had made the step, and she knew she could not retrace it.

“We will go back together,” she said, bravely. And in candid all-knowledge of the other, “I do not mind.”

Then it was that the blood surged into the woman’s cold face, and her hand went out to the girl in the old, old way.

“No, no, I beg of you,” she stammered. “I beg of you . . . I . . . I prefer to continue my walk a little farther. See! Some one is coming now!”

By this time they had reached the wood-trail, and Frona’s face was flaming as the other’s had flamed. A light sled, dogs a-lope and swinging down out of the gorge, was just upon them. A man was running with the team, and he waved his hand to the two women.

“Vance!” Frona exclaimed, as he threw his lead-dogs in the snow and brought the sled to a halt. “What are you doing over here? Is the syndicate bent upon cornering the firewood also?”

“No. We’re not so bad as that.” His face was full of smiling happiness at the meeting as he shook hands with her. “But Carthey is leaving me, — going prospecting somewhere around the North Pole, I believe, — and I came across to look up Del Bishop, if he’ll serve.”

He turned his head to glance expectantly at her companion, and she saw the smile go out of his face and anger come in. Frona was helplessly aware that she had no grip over the situation, and, though a rebellion at the cruelty and injustice of it was smouldering somewhere deep down, she could only watch the swift culmination of the little tragedy. The woman met his gaze with a half-shrinking, as from an impending blow, and with a softness of expression which entreated pity. But he regarded her long and coldly, then deliberately turned his back. As he did this, Frona noted her face go tired and gray, and the hardness and recklessness of her laughter were there painted in harsh tones, and a bitter devil rose up and lurked in her eyes. It was evident that the same bitter devil rushed hotly to her tongue. But it chanced just then that she glanced at Frona, and all expression was brushed from her face save the infinite tiredness. She smiled wistfully at the girl, and without a word turned and went down the trail.

And without a word Frona sprang upon her sled and was off. The way was wide, and Corliss swung in his dogs abreast of hers. The smouldering rebellion flared up, and she seemed to gather to herself some of the woman’s recklessness.

“You brute!”

The words left her mouth, sharp, clear-cut, breaking the silence like the lash of a whip. The unexpectedness of it, and the savagery, took Corliss aback. He did not know what to do or say.

“Oh, you coward! You coward!”

“Frona! Listen to me — ”

But she cut him off. “No. Do not speak. You can have nothing to say. You have behaved abominably. I am disappointed in you. It is horrible! horrible!”

“Yes, it was horrible, — horrible that she should walk with you, have speech with you, be seen with you.”

“‘Not until the sun excludes you, do I exclude you,’“ she flung back at him.

“But there is a fitness of things — ”

“Fitness!” She turned upon him and loosed her wrath. “If she is unfit, are you fit? May you cast the first stone with that smugly sanctimonious air of yours?”

“You shall not talk to me in this fashion. I’ll not have it.”

He clutched at her sled, and even in the midst of her anger she noticed it with a little thrill of pleasure.

“Shall not? You coward!”

He reached out as though to lay hands upon her, and she raised her coiled whip to strike. But to his credit he never flinched; his white face calmly waited to receive the blow. Then she deflected the stroke, and the long lash hissed out and fell among the dogs. Swinging the whip briskly, she rose to her knees on the sled and called frantically to the animals. Hers was the better team, and she shot rapidly away from Corliss. She wished to get away, not so much from him as from herself, and she encouraged the huskies into wilder and wilder speed. She took the steep river-bank in full career and dashed like a whirlwind through the town and home. Never in her life had she been in such a condition; never had she experienced such terrible anger. And not only was she already ashamed, but she was frightened and afraid of herself.

Chapter X

The next morning Corliss was knocked out of a late bed by Bash, one of Jacob Welse’s Indians. He was the bearer of a brief little note from Frona, which contained a request for the mining engineer to come and see her at his first opportunity. That was all that was said, and he pondered over it deeply. What did she wish to say to him? She was still such an unknown quantity, — and never so much as now in the light of the day before, — that he could not guess. Did she desire to give him his dismissal on a definite, well-understood basis? To take advantage of her sex and further humiliate him? To tell him what she thought of him in coolly considered, cold-measured terms? Or was she penitently striving to make amends for the unmerited harshness she had dealt him? There was neither contrition nor anger in the note, no clew, nothing save a formally worded desire to see him.

So it was in a rather unsettled and curious frame of mind that he walked in upon her as the last hour of the morning drew to a close. He was neither on his dignity nor off, his attitude being strictly non-committal against the moment she should disclose hers. But without beating about the bush, in that way of hers which he had come already to admire, she at once showed her colors and came frankly forward to him. The first glimpse of her face told him, the first feel of her hand, before she had said a word, told him that all was well.

“I am glad you have come,” she began. “I could not be at peace with myself until I had seen you and told you how sorry I am for yesterday, and how deeply ashamed I — ”

“There, there. It’s not so bad as all that.” They were still standing, and he took a step nearer to her. “I assure you I can appreciate your side of it; and though, looking at it theoretically, it was the highest conduct, demanding the fullest meed of praise, still, in all frankness, there is much to — to — ”

“Yes.”

“Much to deplore in it from the social stand-point. And unhappily, we cannot leave the social stand-point out of our reckoning. But so far as I may speak for myself, you have done nothing to feel sorry for or be ashamed of.”

“It is kind of you,” she cried, graciously. “Only it is not true, and you know it is not true. You know that you acted for the best; you know that I hurt you, insulted you; you know that I behaved like a fish-wife, and you do know that I disgusted you — ”

“No, no!” He raised his hand as though to ward from her the blows she dealt herself.

“But yes, yes. And I have all reason in the world to be ashamed. I can only say this in defence: the woman had affected me deeply — so deeply that I was close to weeping. Then you came on the scene, — you know what you did, — and the sorrow for her bred an indignation against you, and — well, I worked myself into a nervous condition such as I had never experienced in my life. It was hysteria, I suppose. Anyway, I was not myself.”

“We were neither of us ourselves.”

“Now you are untrue. I did wrong, but you were yourself, as much so then as now. But do be seated. Here we stand as though you were ready to run away at first sign of another outbreak.”

“Surely you are not so terrible!” he laughed, adroitly pulling his chair into position so that the light fell upon her face.

“Rather, you are not such a coward. I must have been terrible yesterday. I — I almost struck you. And you were certainly brave when the whip hung over you. Why, you did not even attempt to raise a hand and shield yourself.”

“I notice the dogs your whip falls among come nevertheless to lick your hand and to be petted.”

“Ergo?” she queried, audaciously.

“Ergo, it all depends,” he equivocated.

“And, notwithstanding, I am forgiven?”

“As I hope to be forgiven.”

“Then I am glad — only, you have done nothing to be forgiven for. You acted according to your light, and I to mine, though it must be acknowledged that mine casts the broader flare. Ah! I have it,” clapping her hands in delight, “I was not angry with you yesterday; nor did I behave rudely to you, or even threaten you. It was utterly impersonal, the whole of it. You simply stood for society, for the type which aroused my indignation and anger; and, as its representative, you bore the brunt of it. Don’t you see?”

“I see, and cleverly put; only, while you escape the charge of maltreating me yesterday; you throw yourself open to it to-day. You make me out all that is narrow-minded and mean and despicable, which is very unjust. Only a few minutes past I said that your way of looking at it, theoretically considered, was irreproachable. But not so when we include society.”

“But you misunderstand me, Vance. Listen.” Her hand went out to his, and he was content to listen. “I have always upheld that what is is well. I grant the wisdom of the prevailing social judgment in this matter. Though I deplore it, I grant it; for the human is so made. But I grant it socially only. I, as an individual, choose to regard such things differently. And as between individuals so minded, why should it not be so regarded? Don’t you see? Now I find you guilty. As between you and me, yesterday, on the river, you did not so regard it. You behaved as narrow-mindedly as would have the society you represent.”

“Then you would preach two doctrines?” he retaliated. “One for the elect and one for the herd? You would be a democrat in theory and an aristocrat in practice? In fact, the whole stand you are making is nothing more or less than Jesuitical.”

“I suppose with the next breath you will be contending that all men are born free and equal, with a bundle of natural rights thrown in? You are going to have Del Bishop work for you; by what equal free-born right will he work for you, or you suffer him to work?”

“No,” he denied. “I should have to modify somewhat the questions of equality and rights.”

“And if you modify, you are lost!” she exulted. “For you can only modify in the direction of my position, which is neither so Jesuitical nor so harsh as you have defined it. But don’t let us get lost in dialectics. I want to see what I can see, so tell me about this woman.”

“Not a very tasteful topic,” Corliss objected.

“But I seek knowledge.”

“Nor can it be wholesome knowledge.”

Frona tapped her foot impatiently, and studied him.

“She is beautiful, very beautiful,” she suggested. “Do you not think so?”

“As beautiful as hell.”

“But still beautiful,” she insisted.

“Yes, if you will have it so. And she is as cruel, and hard, and hopeless as she is beautiful.”

“Yet I came upon her, alone, by the trail, her face softened, and tears in her eyes. And I believe, with a woman’s ken, that I saw a side of her to which you are blind. And so strongly did I see it, that when you appeared my mind was blank to all save the solitary wail, Oh, the pity of it! The pity of it! And she is a woman, even as I, and I doubt not that we are very much alike. Why, she even quoted Browning — ”

“And last week,” he cut her short, “in a single sitting, she gambled away thirty thousand of Jack Dorsey’s dust, — Dorsey, with two mortgages already on his dump! They found him in the snow next morning, with one chamber empty in his revolver.”

Frona made no reply, but, walking over to the candle, deliberately thrust her finger into the flame. Then she held it up to Corliss that he might see the outraged skin, red and angry.

“And so I point the parable. The fire is very good, but I misuse it, and I am punished.”

“You forget,” he objected. “The fire works in blind obedience to natural law. Lucile is a free agent. That which she has chosen to do, that she has done.”

“Nay, it is you who forget, for just as surely Dorsey was a free agent.
But you said Lucile. Is that her name? I wish I knew her better.”

Corliss winced. “Don’t! You hurt me when you say such things.”

“And why, pray?”

“Because — because — ”

“Yes?”

“Because I honor woman highly. Frona, you have always made a stand for frankness, and I can now advantage by it. It hurts me because of the honor in which I hold you, because I cannot bear to see taint approach you. Why, when I saw you and that woman together on the trail, I — you cannot understand what I suffered.”

“Taint?” There was a tightening about her lips which he did not notice, and a just perceptible lustre of victory lighted her eyes.

“Yes, taint, — contamination,” he reiterated. “There are some things which it were not well for a good woman to understand. One cannot dabble with mud and remain spotless.”

“That opens the field wide.” She clasped and unclasped her hands gleefully. “You have said that her name was Lucile; you display a knowledge of her; you have given me facts about her; you doubtless retain many which you dare not give; in short, if one cannot dabble and remain spotless, how about you?”

“But I am — ”

“A man, of course. Very good. Because you are a man, you may court contamination. Because I am a woman, I may not. Contamination contaminates, does it not? Then you, what do you here with me? Out upon you!”

Corliss threw up his hands laughingly. “I give in. You are too much for me with your formal logic. I can only fall back on the higher logic, which you will not recognize.”

“Which is — ”

“Strength. What man wills for woman, that will he have.”

“I take you, then, on your own ground,” she rushed on. “What of Lucile? What man has willed that he has had. So you, and all men, have willed since the beginning of time. So poor Dorsey willed. You cannot answer, so let me speak something that occurs to me concerning that higher logic you call strength. I have met it before. I recognized it in you, yesterday, on the sleds.”

“In me?”

“In you, when you reached out and clutched at me. You could not down the primitive passion, and, for that matter, you did not know it was uppermost. But the expression on your face, I imagine, was very like that of a woman-stealing cave-man. Another instant, and I am sure you would have laid violent hands upon me.”

“Then I ask your pardon. I did not dream — ”

“There you go, spoiling it all! I — I quite liked you for it. Don’t you remember, I, too, was a cave-woman, brandishing the whip over your head?

“But I am not done with you yet, Sir Doubleface, even if you have dropped out of the battle.” Her eyes were sparkling mischievously, and the wee laughter-creases were forming on her cheek. “I purpose to unmask you.”

“As clay in the hands of the potter,” he responded, meekly.

“Then you must remember several things. At first, when I was very humble and apologetic, you made it easier for me by saying that you could only condemn my conduct on the ground of being socially unwise. Remember?”

Corliss nodded.

“Then, just after you branded me as Jesuitical, I turned the conversation to Lucile, saying that I wished to see what I could see.”

Again he nodded.

“And just as I expected, I saw. For in only a few minutes you began to talk about taint, and contamination, and dabbling in mud, — and all in relation to me. There are your two propositions, sir. You may only stand on one, and I feel sure that you stand on the last one. Yes, I am right. You do. And you were insincere, confess, when you found my conduct unwise only from the social point of view. I like sincerity.”

“Yes,” he began, “I was unwittingly insincere. But I did not know it until further analysis, with your help, put me straight. Say what you will, Frona, my conception of woman is such that she should not court defilement.”

“But cannot we be as gods, knowing good and evil?”

“But we are not gods,” he shook his head, sadly.

“Only the men are?”

“That is new-womanish talk,” he frowned. “Equal rights, the ballot, and all that.”

“Oh! Don’t!” she protested. “You won’t understand me; you can’t. I am no woman’s rights’ creature; and I stand, not for the new woman, but for the new womanhood. Because I am sincere; because I desire to be natural, and honest, and true; and because I am consistent with myself, you choose to misunderstand it all and to lay wrong strictures upon me. I do try to be consistent, and I think I fairly succeed; but you can see neither rhyme nor reason in my consistency. Perhaps it is because you are unused to consistent, natural women; because, more likely, you are only familiar with the hot-house breeds, — pretty, helpless, well-rounded, stall-fatted little things, blissfully innocent and criminally ignorant. They are not natural or strong; nor can they mother the natural and strong.”

She stopped abruptly. They heard somebody enter the hall, and a heavy, soft-moccasined tread approaching.

“We are friends,” she added hurriedly, and Corliss answered with his eyes.

“Ain’t intrudin’, am I?” Dave Harney grinned broad insinuation and looked about ponderously before coming up to shake hands.

“Not at all,” Corliss answered. “We’ve bored each other till we were pining for some one to come along. If you hadn’t, we would soon have been quarrelling, wouldn’t we, Miss Welse?”

“I don’t think he states the situation fairly,” she smiled back. “In fact, we had already begun to quarrel.”

“You do look a mite flustered,” Harney criticised, dropping his loose-jointed frame all over the pillows of the lounging couch.

“How’s the famine?” Corliss asked. “Any public relief started yet?”

“Won’t need any public relief. Miss Frona’s old man was too forehanded fer ‘em. Scairt the daylights out of the critters, I do b’lieve. Three thousand went out over the ice hittin’ the high places, an’ half ez many again went down to the caches, and the market’s loosened some considerable. Jest what Welse figgered on, everybody speculated on a rise and held all the grub they could lay hand to. That helped scare the shorts, and away they stampeded fer Salt Water, the whole caboodle, a-takin’ all the dogs with ‘em. Say!” he sat up solemnly, “corner dogs! They’ll rise suthin’ unheard on in the spring when freightin’ gits brisk. I’ve corralled a hundred a’ready, an’ I figger to clear a hundred dollars clean on every hide of ‘em.”

“Think so?”

“Think so! I guess yes. Between we three, confidential, I’m startin’ a couple of lads down into the Lower Country next week to buy up five hundred of the best huskies they kin spot. Think so! I’ve limbered my jints too long in the land to git caught nappin’.”

Frona burst out laughing. “But you got pinched on the sugar, Dave.”

“Oh, I dunno,” he responded, complacently. “Which reminds me. I’ve got a noospaper, an’ only four weeks’ old, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.”

“Has the United States and Spain — ”

“Not so fast, not so fast!” The long Yankee waved his arms for silence, cutting off Frona’s question which was following fast on that of Corliss.

“But have you read it?” they both demanded.

“Unh huh, every line, advertisements an’ all.”

“Then do tell me,” Frona began. “Has — ”

“Now you keep quiet, Miss Frona, till I tell you about it reg’lar. That noospaper cost me fifty dollars — caught the man comin’ in round the bend above Klondike City, an’ bought it on the spot. The dummy could a-got a hundred fer it, easy, if he’d held on till he made town — ”

“But what does it say? Has — ”

“Ez I was sayin’, that noospaper cost me fifty dollars. It’s the only one that come in. Everybody’s jest dyin’ to hear the noos. So I invited a select number of ’em to come here to yer parlors to-night, Miss Frona, ez the only likely place, an’ they kin read it out loud, by shifts, ez long ez they want or till they’re tired — that is, if you’ll let ’em have the use of the place.”

“Why, of course, they are welcome. And you are very kind to — ”

He waved her praise away. “Jest ez I kalkilated. Now it so happens, ez you said, that I was pinched on sugar. So every mother’s son and daughter that gits a squint at that paper to-night got to pony up five cups of sugar. Savve? Five cups, — big cups, white, or brown, or cube, — an’ I’ll take their IOU’s, an’ send a boy round to their shacks the day followin’ to collect.”

Frona’s face went blank at the telling, then the laughter came back into it. “Won’t it be jolly? I’ll do it if it raises a scandal. To-night, Dave? Sure to-night?”

“Sure. An’ you git a complimentary, you know, fer the loan of yer parlor.”

“But papa must pay his five cups. You must insist upon it, Dave.”

Dave’s eyes twinkled appreciatively. “I’ll git it back on him, you bet!”

“And I’ll make him come,” she promised, “at the tail of Dave Harney’s chariot.”

“Sugar cart,” Dave suggested. “An’ to-morrow night I’ll take the paper down to the Opery House. Won’t be fresh, then, so they kin git in cheap; a cup’ll be about the right thing, I reckon.” He sat up and cracked his huge knuckles boastfully. “I ain’t ben a-burnin’ daylight sence navigation closed; an’ if they set up all night they won’t be up early enough in the mornin’ to git ahead of Dave Harney — even on a sugar proposition.”

Chapter XI

Over in the corner Vance Corliss leaned against the piano, deep in conversation with Colonel Trethaway. The latter, keen and sharp and wiry, for all his white hair and sixty-odd years, was as young in appearance as a man of thirty. A veteran mining engineer, with a record which put him at the head of his profession, he represented as large American interests as Corliss did British. Not only had a cordial friendship sprung up between them, but in a business way they had already been of large assistance to each other. And it was well that they should stand together, — a pair who held in grip and could direct at will the potent capital which two nations had contributed to the development of the land under the Pole.

The crowded room was thick with tobacco smoke. A hundred men or so, garbed in furs and warm-colored wools, lined the walls and looked on. But the mumble of their general conversation destroyed the spectacular feature of the scene and gave to it the geniality of common comradeship. For all its bizarre appearance, it was very like the living-room of the home when the members of the household come together after the work of the day. Kerosene lamps and tallow candles glimmered feebly in the murky atmosphere, while large stoves roared their red-hot and white-hot cheer.

On the floor a score of couples pulsed rhythmically to the swinging waltz-time music. Starched shirts and frock coats were not. The men wore their wolf-and beaver-skin caps, with the gay-tasselled ear-flaps flying free, while on their feet were the moose-skin moccasins and walrus-hide muclucs of the north. Here and there a woman was in moccasins, though the majority danced in frail ball-room slippers of silk and satin. At one end of the hall a great open doorway gave glimpse of another large room where the crowd was even denser. From this room, in the lulls in the music, came the pop of corks and the clink of glasses, and as an undertone the steady click and clatter of chips and roulette balls.

The small door at the rear opened, and a woman, befurred and muffled, came in on a wave of frost. The cold rushed in with her to the warmth, taking form in a misty cloud which hung close to the floor, hiding the feet of the dancers, and writhing and twisting until vanquished by the heat.

“A veritable frost queen, my Lucile,” Colonel Trethaway addressed her.

She tossed her head and laughed, and, as she removed her capes and street-moccasins, chatted with him gayly. But of Corliss, though he stood within a yard of her, she took no notice. Half a dozen dancing men were waiting patiently at a little distance till she should have done with the colonel. The piano and violin played the opening bars of a schottische, and she turned to go; but a sudden impulse made Corliss step up to her. It was wholly unpremeditated; he had not dreamed of doing it.

“I am very sorry,” he said.

Her eyes flashed angrily as she turned upon him.

“I mean it,” he repeated, holding out his hand. “I am very sorry. I was a brute and a coward. Will you forgive me?”

She hesitated, and, with the wisdom bought of experience, searched him for the ulterior motive. Then, her face softened, and she took his hand. A warm mist dimmed her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

But the waiting men had grown impatient, and she was whirled away in the arms of a handsome young fellow, conspicuous in a cap of yellow Siberian wolf-skin. Corliss came back to his companion, feeling unaccountably good and marvelling at what he had done.

“It’s a damned shame.” The colonel’s eye still followed Lucile, and Vance understood. “Corliss, I’ve lived my threescore, and lived them well, and do you know, woman is a greater mystery than ever. Look at them, look at them all!” He embraced the whole scene with his eyes. “Butterflies, bits of light and song and laughter, dancing, dancing down the last tail-reach of hell. Not only Lucile, but the rest of them. Look at May, there, with the brow of a Madonna and the tongue of a gutter-devil. And Myrtle — for all the world one of Gainsborough’s old English beauties stepped down from the canvas to riot out the century in Dawson’s dance-halls. And Laura, there, wouldn’t she make a mother? Can’t you see the child in the curve of her arm against her breast! They’re the best of the boiling, I know, — a new country always gathers the best, — but there’s something wrong, Corliss, something wrong. The heats of life have passed with me, and my vision is truer, surer. It seems a new Christ must arise and preach a new salvation — economic or sociologic — in these latter days, it matters not, so long as it is preached. The world has need of it.”

The room was wont to be swept by sudden tides, and notably between the dances, when the revellers ebbed through the great doorway to where corks popped and glasses tinkled. Colonel Trethaway and Corliss followed out on the next ebb to the bar, where fifty men and women were lined up. They found themselves next to Lucile and the fellow in the yellow wolf-skin cap. He was undeniably handsome, and his looks were enhanced by a warm overplus of blood in the cheeks and a certain mellow fire in the eyes. He was not technically drunk, for he had himself in perfect physical control; but his was the soul-exhilaration which comes of the juice of the grape. His voice was raised the least bit and joyous, and his tongue made quick and witty — just in the unstable condition when vices and virtues are prone to extravagant expression.

As he raised his glass, the man next to him accidentally jostled his arm. He shook the wine from his sleeve and spoke his mind. It was not a nice word, but one customarily calculated to rouse the fighting blood. And the other man’s blood roused, for his fist landed under the wolf-skin cap with force sufficient to drive its owner back against Corliss. The insulted man followed up his attack swiftly. The women slipped away, leaving a free field for the men, some of whom were for crowding in, and some for giving room and fair play.

The wolf-skin cap did not put up a fight or try to meet the wrath he had invoked, but, with his hands shielding his face, strove to retreat. The crowd called upon him to stand up and fight. He nerved himself to the attempt, but weakened as the man closed in on him, and dodged away.

“Let him alone. He deserves it,” the colonel called to Vance as he showed signs of interfering. “He won’t fight. If he did, I think I could almost forgive him.”

“But I can’t see him pummelled,” Vance objected. “If he would only stand up, it wouldn’t seem so brutal.”

The blood was streaming from his nose and from a slight cut over one eye, when Corliss sprang between. He attempted to hold the two men apart, but pressing too hard against the truculent individual, overbalanced him and threw him to the floor. Every man has friends in a bar-room fight, and before Vance knew what was taking place he was staggered by a blow from a chum of the man he had downed. Del Bishop, who had edged in, let drive promptly at the man who had attacked his employer, and the fight became general. The crowd took sides on the moment and went at it.

Colonel Trethaway forgot that the heats of life had passed, and swinging a three-legged stool, danced nimbly into the fray. A couple of mounted police, on liberty, joined him, and with half a dozen others safeguarded the man with the wolf-skin cap.

Fierce though it was, and noisy, it was purely a local disturbance. At the far end of the bar the barkeepers still dispensed drinks, and in the next room the music was on and the dancers afoot. The gamblers continued their play, and at only the near tables did they evince any interest in the affair.

“Knock’m down an’ drag’m out!” Del Bishop grinned, as he fought for a brief space shoulder to shoulder with Corliss.

Corliss grinned back, met the rush of a stalwart dog-driver with a clinch, and came down on top of him among the stamping feet. He was drawn close, and felt the fellow’s teeth sinking into his ear. Like a flash, he surveyed his whole future and saw himself going one-eared through life, and in the same dash, as though inspired, his thumbs flew to the man’s eyes and pressed heavily on the balls. Men fell over him and trampled upon him, but it all seemed very dim and far away. He only knew, as he pressed with his thumbs, that the man’s teeth wavered reluctantly. He added a little pressure (a little more, and the man would have been eyeless), and the teeth slackened and slipped their grip.

After that, as he crawled out of the fringe of the melee and came to his feet by the side of the bar, all distaste for fighting left him. He had found that he was very much like other men after all, and the imminent loss of part of his anatomy had scraped off twenty years of culture. Gambling without stakes is an insipid amusement, and Corliss discovered, likewise, that the warm blood which rises from hygienic gymnasium work is something quite different from that which pounds hotly along when thew matches thew and flesh impacts on flesh and the stake is life and limb. As he dragged himself to his feet by means of the bar-rail, he saw a man in a squirrel-skin parka lift a beer-mug to hurl at Trethaway, a couple of paces off. And the fingers, which were more used to test-tubes and water colors, doubled into a hard fist which smote the mug-thrower cleanly on the point of the jaw. The man merely dropped the glass and himself on the floor. Vance was dazed for the moment, then he realized that he had knocked the man unconscious, — the first in his life, — and a pang of delight thrilled through him.

Colonel Trethaway thanked him with a look, and shouted, “Get on the outside! Work to the door, Corliss! Work to the door!”

Quite a struggle took place before the storm-doors could be thrown open; but the colonel, still attached to the three-legged stool, effectually dissipated the opposition, and the Opera House disgorged its turbulent contents into the street. This accomplished, hostilities ceased, after the manner of such fights, and the crowd scattered. The two policemen went back to keep order, accompanied by the rest of the allies, while Corliss and the colonel, followed by the Wolf-Skin Cap and Del Bishop, proceeded up the street.

“Blood and sweat! Blood and sweat!” Colonel Trethaway exulted. “Talk about putting the vim into one! Why, I’m twenty years younger if I’m a day! Corliss, your hand. I congratulate you, I do, I heartily do. Candidly, I didn’t think it was in you. You’re a surprise, sir, a surprise!”

“And a surprise to myself,” Corliss answered. The reaction had set in, and he was feeling sick and faint. “And you, also, are a surprise. The way you handled that stool — ”

“Yes, now! I flatter myself I did fairly well with it. Did you see — well, look at that!” He held up the weapon in question, still tightly clutched, and joined in the laugh against himself.

“Whom have I to thank, gentlemen?”

They had come to a pause at the corner, and the man they had rescued was holding out his hand.

“My name is St. Vincent,” he went on, “and — ”

“What name?” Del Bishop queried with sudden interest.

“St. Vincent, Gregory St. Vincent — ”

Bishop’s fist shot out, and Gregory St. Vincent pitched heavily into the snow. The colonel instinctively raised the stool, then helped Corliss to hold the pocket-miner back.

“Are you crazy, man?” Vance demanded.

“The skunk! I wish I’d hit ‘m harder!” was the response. Then, “Oh, that’s all right. Let go o’ me. I won’t hit ‘m again. Let go o’ me, I’m goin’ home. Good-night.”

As they helped St. Vincent to his feet, Vance could have sworn he heard the colonel giggling. And he confessed to it later, as he explained, “It was so curious and unexpected.” But he made amends by taking it upon himself to see St. Vincent home.

“But why did you hit him?” Corliss asked, unavailingly, for the fourth time after he had got into his cabin.

“The mean, crawlin’ skunk!” the pocket-miner gritted in his blankets.
“What’d you stop me for, anyway? I wish I’d hit ‘m twice as hard!”

Chapter XII

“Mr. Harney, pleased to meet you. Dave, I believe, Dave Harney?” Dave
Harney nodded, and Gregory St. Vincent turned to Frona. “You see, Miss
Welse, the world is none so large. Mr. Harney and I are not strangers
after all.”

The Eldorado king studied the other’s face until a glimmering intelligence came to him. “Hold on!” he cried, as St. Vincent started to speak, “I got my finger on you. You were smooth-faced then. Let’s see, — ’86, fall of ‘87, summer of ‘88, — yep, that’s when. Summer of ‘88 I come floatin’ a raft out of Stewart River, loaded down with quarters of moose an’ strainin’ to make the Lower Country ‘fore they went bad. Yep, an’ down the Yukon you come, in a Linderman boat. An’ I was holdin’ strong, ez it was Wednesday, an’ my pardner ez it was Friday, an’ you put us straight — Sunday, I b’lieve it was. Yep, Sunday. I declare! Nine years ago! And we swapped moose-steaks fer flour an’ bakin’ soda, an’ — an’ — an’ sugar! By the Jimcracky! I’m glad to see you!”

He shoved out his hand and they shook again.

“Come an’ see me,” he invited, as he moved away. “I’ve a right tidy little shack up on the hill, and another on Eldorado. Latch-string’s always out. Come an’ see me, an’ stay ez long ez you’ve a mind to. Sorry to quit you cold, but I got to traipse down to the Opery House and collect my taxes, — sugar. Miss Frona’ll tell you.”

“You are a surprise, Mr. St. Vincent.” Frona switched back to the point of interest, after briefly relating Harney’s saccharine difficulties. “The country must indeed have been a wilderness nine years ago, and to think that you went through it at that early day! Do tell me about it.”

Gregory St. Vincent shrugged his shoulders, “There is very little to tell. It was an ugly failure, filled with many things that are not nice, and containing nothing of which to be proud.”

“But do tell me, I enjoy such things. They seem closer and truer to life than the ordinary every-day happenings. A failure, as you call it, implies something attempted. What did you attempt?”

He noted her frank interest with satisfaction. “Well, if you will, I can tell you in few words all there is to tell. I took the mad idea into my head of breaking a new path around the world, and in the interest of science and journalism, particularly journalism, I proposed going through Alaska, crossing the Bering Straits on the ice, and journeying to Europe by way of Northern Siberia. It was a splendid undertaking, most of it being virgin ground, only I failed. I crossed the Straits in good order, but came to grief in Eastern Siberia — all because of Tamerlane is the excuse I have grown accustomed to making.”

“A Ulysses!” Mrs. Schoville clapped her hands and joined them. “A modern Ulysses! How romantic!”

“But not an Othello,” Frona replied. “His tongue is a sluggard. He leaves one at the most interesting point with an enigmatical reference to a man of a bygone age. You take an unfair advantage of us, Mr. St. Vincent, and we shall be unhappy until you show how Tamerlane brought your journey to an untimely end.”

He laughed, and with an effort put aside his reluctance to speak of his travels. “When Tamerlane swept with fire and sword over Eastern Asia, states were disrupted, cities overthrown, and tribes scattered like star-dust. In fact, a vast people was hurled broadcast over the land. Fleeing before the mad lust of the conquerors, these refugees swung far into Siberia, circling to the north and east and fringing the rim of the polar basin with a spray of Mongol tribes — am I not tiring you?”

“No, no!” Mrs. Schoville exclaimed. “It is fascinating! Your method of narration is so vivid! It reminds me of — of — ”

“Of Macaulay,” St. Vincent laughed, good-naturedly. “You know I am a journalist, and he has strongly influenced my style. But I promise you I shall tone down. However, to return, had it not been for these Mongol tribes, I should not have been halted in my travels. Instead of being forced to marry a greasy princess, and to become proficient in interclannish warfare and reindeer-stealing, I should have travelled easily and peaceably to St. Petersburg.”

“Oh, these heroes! Are they not exasperating, Frona? But what about the reindeer-stealing and the greasy princesses?”

The Gold Commissioner’s wife beamed upon him, and glancing for permission to Frona, he went on.

“The coast people were Esquimo stock, merry-natured and happy, and inoffensive. They called themselves the Oukilion, or the Sea Men. I bought dogs and food from them, and they treated me splendidly. But they were subject to the Chow Chuen, or interior people, who were known as the Deer Men. The Chow Chuen were a savage, indomitable breed, with all the fierceness of the untamed Mongol, plus double his viciousness. As soon as I left the coast they fell upon me, confiscated my goods, and made me a slave.”

“But were there no Russians?” Mrs. Schoville asked.

“Russians? Among the Chow Chuen?” He laughed his amusement. “Geographically, they are within the White Tsar’s domain; but politically, no. I doubt if they ever heard of him. Remember, the interior of North-Eastern Siberia is hidden in the polar gloom, a terra incognita, where few men have gone and none has returned.”

“But you — ”

“I chance to be the exception. Why I was spared, I do not know. It just so happened. At first I was vilely treated, beaten by the women and children, clothed in vermin-infested mangy furs, and fed on refuse. They were utterly heartless. How I managed to survive is beyond me; but I know that often and often, at first, I meditated suicide. The only thing that saved me during that period from taking my own life was the fact that I quickly became too stupefied and bestial, what of my suffering and degradation. Half-frozen, half-starved, undergoing untold misery and hardship, beaten many and many a time into insensibility, I became the sheerest animal.

“On looking back much of it seems a dream. There are gaps which my memory cannot fill. I have vague recollections of being lashed to a sled and dragged from camp to camp and tribe to tribe. Carted about for exhibition purposes, I suppose, much as we do lions and elephants and wild men. How far I so journeyed up and down that bleak region I cannot guess, though it must have been several thousand miles. I do know that when consciousness returned to me and I really became myself again, I was fully a thousand miles to the west of the point where I was captured.

“It was springtime, and from out of a forgotten past it seemed I suddenly opened my eyes. A reindeer thong was about my waist and made fast to the tail-end of a sled. This thong I clutched with both hands, like an organ-grinder’s monkey; for the flesh of my body was raw and in great sores from where the thong had cut in.

“A low cunning came to me, and I made myself agreeable and servile. That night I danced and sang, and did my best to amuse them, for I was resolved to incur no more of the maltreatment which had plunged me into darkness. Now the Deer Men traded with the Sea Men, and the Sea Men with the whites, especially the whalers. So later I discovered a deck of cards in the possession of one of the women, and I proceeded to mystify the Chow Chuen with a few commonplace tricks. Likewise, with fitting solemnity, I perpetrated upon them the little I knew of parlor legerdemain. Result: I was appreciated at once, and was better fed and better clothed.

“To make a long story short, I gradually became a man of importance. First the old people and the women came to me for advice, and later the chiefs. My slight but rough and ready knowledge of medicine and surgery stood me in good stead, and I became indispensable. From a slave, I worked myself to a seat among the head men, and in war and peace, so soon as I had learned their ways, was an unchallenged authority. Reindeer was their medium of exchange, their unit of value as it were, and we were almost constantly engaged in cattle forays among the adjacent clans, or in protecting our own herds from their inroads. I improved upon their methods, taught them better strategy and tactics, and put a snap and go into their operations which no neighbor tribe could withstand.

“But still, though I became a power, I was no nearer my freedom. It was laughable, for I had over-reached myself and made myself too valuable. They cherished me with exceeding kindness, but they were jealously careful. I could go and come and command without restraint, but when the trading parties went down to the coast I was not permitted to accompany them. That was the one restriction placed upon my movements.

“Also, it is very tottery in the high places, and when I began altering their political structures I came to grief again. In the process of binding together twenty or more of the neighboring tribes in order to settle rival claims, I was given the over-lordship of the federation. But Old Pi-Une was the greatest of the under-chiefs, — a king in a way, — and in relinquishing his claim to the supreme leadership he refused to forego all the honors. The least that could be done to appease him was for me to marry his daughter Ilswunga. Nay, he demanded it. I offered to abandon the federation, but he would not hear of it. And — ”

“And?” Mrs. Schoville murmured ecstatically.

“And I married Ilswunga, which is the Chow Chuen name for Wild Deer.
Poor Ilswunga! Like Swinburne’s Iseult of Brittany, and I Tristram!
The last I saw of her she was playing solitaire in the Mission of
Irkutsky and stubbornly refusing to take a bath.”

“Oh, mercy! It’s ten o’clock!” Mrs. Schoville suddenly cried, her husband having at last caught her eye from across the room. “I’m so sorry I can’t hear the rest, Mr. St. Vincent, how you escaped and all that. But you must come and see me. I am just dying to hear!”

“And I took you for a tenderfoot, a chechaquo,” Frona said meekly, as St. Vincent tied his ear-flaps and turned up his collar preparatory to leaving.

“I dislike posing,” he answered, matching her meekness. “It smacks of insincerity; it really is untrue. And it is so easy to slip into it. Look at the old-timers, — ’sour-doughs’ as they proudly call themselves. Just because they have been in the country a few years, they let themselves grow wild and woolly and glorify in it. They may not know it, but it is a pose. In so far as they cultivate salient peculiarities, they cultivate falseness to themselves and live lies.”

“I hardly think you are wholly just,” Frona said, in defence of her chosen heroes. “I do like what you say about the matter in general, and I detest posing, but the majority of the old-timers would be peculiar in any country, under any circumstances. That peculiarity is their own; it is their mode of expression. And it is, I am sure, just what makes them go into new countries. The normal man, of course, stays at home.”

“Oh, I quite agree with you, Miss Welse,” he temporized easily. “I did not intend it so sweepingly. I meant to brand that sprinkling among them who are poseurs. In the main, as you say, they are honest, and sincere, and natural.”

“Then we have no quarrel. But Mr. St. Vincent, before you go, would you care to come to-morrow evening? We are getting up theatricals for Christmas. I know you can help us greatly, and I think it will not be altogether unenjoyable to you. All the younger people are interested, — the officials, officers of police, mining engineers, gentlemen rovers, and so forth, to say nothing of the nice women. You are bound to like them.”

“I am sure I shall,” as he took her hand. “Tomorrow, did you say?”

“To-morrow evening. Good-night.”

A brave man, she told herself as she went bade from the door, and a splendid type of the race.

Chapter XIII

Gregory St. Vincent swiftly became an important factor in the social life of Dawson. As a representative of the Amalgamated Press Association, he had brought with him the best credentials a powerful influence could obtain, and over and beyond, he was well qualified socially by his letters of introduction. It developed in a quiet way that he was a wanderer and explorer of no small parts, and that he had seen life and strife pretty well all over the earth’s crust. And withal, he was so mild and modest about it, that nobody, not even among the men, was irritated by his achievements. Incidentally, he ran across numerous old acquaintances. Jacob Welse he had met at St. Michael’s in the fall of ‘88, just prior to his crossing Bering Straits on the ice. A month or so later, Father Barnum (who had come up from the Lower River to take charge of the hospital) had met him a couple of hundred miles on his way north of St. Michael’s. Captain Alexander, of the Police, had rubbed shoulders with him in the British Legation at Peking. And Bettles, another old-timer of standing, had met him at Fort o’ Yukon nine years before.

So Dawson, ever prone to look askance at the casual comer, received him with open arms. Especially was he a favorite with the women. As a promoter of pleasures and an organizer of amusements he took the lead, and it quickly came to pass that no function was complete without him. Not only did he come to help in the theatricals, but insensibly, and as a matter of course, he took charge. Frona, as her friends charged, was suffering from a stroke of Ibsen, so they hit upon the “Doll’s House,” and she was cast for Nora. Corliss, who was responsible, by the way, for the theatricals, having first suggested them, was to take Torvald’s part; but his interest seemed to have died out, or at any rate he begged off on the plea of business rush. So St. Vincent, without friction, took Torvald’s lines. Corliss did manage to attend one rehearsal. It might have been that he had come tired from forty miles with the dogs, and it might have been that Torvald was obliged to put his arm about Nora at divers times and to toy playfully with her ear; but, one way or the other, Corliss never attended again.

Busy he certainly was, and when not away on trail he was closeted almost continually with Jacob Welse and Colonel Trethaway. That it was a deal of magnitude was evidenced by the fact that Welse’s mining interests involved alone mounted to several millions. Corliss was primarily a worker and doer, and on discovering that his thorough theoretical knowledge lacked practical experience, he felt put upon his mettle and worked the harder. He even marvelled at the silliness of the men who had burdened him with such responsibilities, simply because of his pull, and he told Trethaway as much. But the colonel, while recognizing his shortcomings, liked him for his candor, and admired him for his effort and for the quickness with which he came to grasp things actual.

Del Bishop, who had refused to play any hand but his own, had gone to work for Corliss because by so doing he was enabled to play his own hand better. He was practically unfettered, while the opportunities to further himself were greatly increased. Equipped with the best of outfits and a magnificent dog-team, his task was mainly to run the various creeks and keep his eyes and ears open. A pocket-miner, first, last, and always, he was privately on the constant lookout for pockets, which occupation did not interfere in the least with the duty he owed his employer. And as the days went by he stored his mind with miscellaneous data concerning the nature of the various placer deposits and the lay of the land, against the summer when the thawed surface and the running water would permit him to follow a trace from creek-bed to side-slope and source.

Corliss was a good employer, paid well, and considered it his right to work men as he worked himself. Those who took service with him either strengthened their own manhood and remained, or quit and said harsh things about him. Jacob Welse noted this trait with appreciation, and he sounded the mining engineer’s praises continually. Frona heard and was gratified, for she liked the things her father liked; and she was more gratified because the man was Corliss. But in his rush of business she saw less of him than formerly, while St. Vincent came to occupy a greater and growing portion of her time. His healthful, optimistic spirit pleased her, while he corresponded well to her idealized natural man and favorite racial type. Her first doubt — that if what he said was true — had passed away. All the evidence had gone counter. Men who at first questioned the truth of his wonderful adventures gave in after hearing him talk. Those to any extent conversant with the parts of the world he made mention of, could not but acknowledge that he knew what he talked about. Young Soley, representing Bannock’s News Syndicate, and Holmes of the Fairweather, recollected his return to the world in ‘91, and the sensation created thereby. And Sid Winslow, Pacific Coast journalist, had made his acquaintance at the Wanderers’ Club shortly after he landed from the United States revenue cutter which had brought him down from the north. Further, as Frona well saw, he bore the ear-marks of his experiences; they showed their handiwork in his whole outlook on life. Then the primitive was strong in him, and his was a passionate race pride which fully matched hers. In the absence of Corliss they were much together, went out frequently with the dogs, and grew to know each other thoroughly.

All of which was not pleasant to Corliss, especially when the brief intervals he could devote to her were usually intruded upon by the correspondent. Naturally, Corliss was not drawn to him, and other men, who knew or had heard of the Opera House occurrence, only accepted him after a tentative fashion. Trethaway had the indiscretion, once or twice, to speak slightingly of him, but so fiercely was he defended by his admirers that the colonel developed the good taste to thenceforward keep his tongue between his teeth. Once, Corliss, listening to an extravagant panegyric bursting from the lips of Mrs. Schoville, permitted himself the luxury of an incredulous smile; but the quick wave of color in Frona’s face, and the gathering of the brows, warned him.

At another time he was unwise enough and angry enough to refer to the Opera House broil. He was carried away, and what he might have said of that night’s happening would have redounded neither to St. Vincent’s credit nor to his own, had not Frona innocently put a seal upon his lips ere he had properly begun.

“Yes,” she said. “Mr. St. Vincent told me about it. He met you for the first time that night, I believe. You all fought royally on his side, — you and Colonel Trethaway. He spoke his admiration unreservedly and, to tell the truth, with enthusiasm.”

Corliss made a gesture of depreciation.

“No! no! From what he said you must have behaved splendidly. And I was most pleased to hear. It must be great to give the brute the rein now and again, and healthy, too. Great for us who have wandered from the natural and softened to sickly ripeness. Just to shake off artificiality and rage up and down! and yet, the inmost mentor, serene and passionless, viewing all and saying: ‘This is my other self. Behold! I, who am now powerless, am the power behind and ruleth still! This other self, mine ancient, violent, elder self, rages blindly as the beast, but ’tis I, sitting apart, who discern the merit of the cause and bid him rage or bid him cease!’ Oh, to be a man!”

Corliss could not help a humoring smile, which put Frona upon defence at once.

“Tell me, Vance, how did it feel? Have I not described it rightly? Were the symptoms yours? Did you not hold aloof and watch yourself play the brute?”

He remembered the momentary daze which came when he stunned the man with his fist, and nodded.

“And pride?” she demanded, inexorably. “Or shame?”

“A — a little of both, and more of the first than the second,” he confessed. “At the time I suppose I was madly exultant; then afterwards came the shame, and I tossed awake half the night.”

“And finally?”

“Pride, I guess. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t down it. I awoke in the morning feeling as though I had won my spurs. In a subconscious way I was inordinately proud of myself, and time and again, mentally, I caught myself throwing chests. Then came the shame again, and I tried to reason back my self-respect. And last of all, pride. The fight was fair and open. It was none of my seeking. I was forced into it by the best of motives. I am not sorry, and I would repeat it if necessary.”

“And rightly so.” Frona’s eyes were sparkling. “And how did Mr. St.
Vincent acquit himself?”

“He? . . . . Oh, I suppose all right, creditably. I was too busy watching my other self to take notice.”

“But he saw you.”

“Most likely so. I acknowledge my negligence. I should have done better, the chances are, had I thought it would have been of interest to you — pardon me. Just my bungling wit. The truth is, I was too much of a greenhorn to hold my own and spare glances on my neighbors.”

So Corliss went away, glad that he had not spoken, and keenly appreciating St. Vincent’s craft whereby he had so adroitly forestalled adverse comment by telling the story in his own modest, self-effacing way.

Two men and a woman! The most potent trinity of factors in the creating of human pathos and tragedy! As ever in the history of man, since the first father dropped down from his arboreal home and walked upright, so at Dawson. Necessarily, there were minor factors, not least among which was Del Bishop, who, in his aggressive way, stepped in and accelerated things. This came about in a trail-camp on the way to Miller Creek, where Corliss was bent on gathering in a large number of low-grade claims which could only be worked profitably on a large scale.

“I’ll not be wastin’ candles when I make a strike, savve!” the pocket-miner remarked savagely to the coffee, which he was settling with a chunk of ice. “Not on your life, I guess rather not!”

“Kerosene?” Corliss queried, running a piece of bacon-rind round the frying-pan and pouring in the batter.

“Kerosene, hell! You won’t see my trail for smoke when I get a gait on for God’s country, my wad in my poke and the sunshine in my eyes. Say! How’d a good juicy tenderloin strike you just now, green onions, fried potatoes, and fixin’s on the side? S’help me, that’s the first proposition I’ll hump myself up against. Then a general whoop-la! for a week — Seattle or ‘Frisco, I don’t care a rap which, and then — ”

“Out of money and after a job.”

“Not on your family tree!” Bishop roared. “Cache my sack before I go on the tear, sure pop, and then, afterwards, Southern California. Many’s the day I’ve had my eye on a peach of a fruit farm down there — forty thousand’ll buy it. No more workin’ for grub-stakes and the like. Figured it out long; ago, — hired men to work the ranch, a manager to run it, and me ownin’ the game and livin’ off the percentage. A stable with always a couple of bronchos handy; handy to slap the packs and saddles on and be off and away whenever the fever for chasin’ pockets came over me. Great pocket country down there, to the east and along the desert.”

“And no house on the ranch?”

“Cert! With sweet peas growin’ up the sides, and in back a patch for vegetables — string-beans and spinach and radishes, cucumbers and ‘sparagrass, turnips, carrots, cabbage, and such. And a woman inside to draw me back when I get to runnin’ loco after the pockets. Say, you know all about minin’. Did you ever go snoozin’ round after pockets? No? Then just steer clear. They’re worse than whiskey, horses, or cards. Women, when they come afterwards, ain’t in it. Whenever you get a hankerin’ after pockets, go right off and get married. It’s the only thing’ll save you; and even then, mebbe, it won’t. I ought ‘a’ done it years ago. I might ‘a’ made something of myself if I had. Jerusalem! the jobs I’ve jumped and the good things chucked in my time, just because of pockets! Say, Corliss, you want to get married, you do, and right off. I’m tellin’ you straight. Take warnin’ from me and don’t stay single any longer than God’ll let you, sure!”

Corliss laughed.

“Sure, I mean it. I’m older’n you, and know what I’m talkin’. Now there’s a bit of a thing down in Dawson I’d like to see you get your hands on. You was made for each other, both of you.”

Corliss was past the stage when he would have treated Bishop’s meddling as an impertinence. The trail, which turns men into the same blankets and makes them brothers, was the great leveller of distinctions, as he had come to learn. So he flopped a flapjack and held his tongue.

“Why don’t you waltz in and win?” Del demanded, insistently. “Don’t you cotton to her? I know you do, or you wouldn’t come back to cabin, after bein’ with her, a-walkin’-like on air. Better waltz in while you got a chance. Why, there was Emmy, a tidy bit of flesh as women go, and we took to each other on the jump. But I kept a-chasin’ pockets and chasin’ pockets, and delayin’. And then a big black lumberman, a Kanuck, began sidlin’ up to her, and I made up my mind to speak — only I went off after one more pocket, just one more, and when I got back she was Mrs. Somebody Else.

“So take warnin’. There’s that writer-guy, that skunk I poked outside the Opera House. He’s walkin’ right in and gettin’ thick; and here’s you, just like me, a-racin’ round all creation and lettin’ matrimony slide. Mark my words, Corliss! Some fine frost you’ll come slippin’ into camp and find ’em housekeepin’. Sure! With nothin’ left for you in life but pocketing!”

The picture was so unpleasant that Corliss turned surly and ordered him to shut up.

“Who? Me?” Del asked so aggrievedly that Corliss laughed.

“What would you do, then?” he asked.

“Me? In all kindness I’ll tell you. As soon as you get back you go and see her. Make dates with her ahead till you got to put ’em on paper to remember ’em all. Get a cinch on her spare time ahead so as to shut the other fellow out. Don’t get down in the dirt to her, — she’s not that kind, — but don’t be too high and mighty, neither. Just so-so — savve? And then, some time when you see she’s feelin’ good, and smilin’ at you in that way of hers, why up and call her hand. Of course I can’t say what the showdown’ll be. That’s for you to find out. But don’t hold off too long about it. Better married early than never. And if that writer-guy shoves in, poke him in the breadbasket — hard! That’ll settle him plenty. Better still, take him off to one side and talk to him. Tell’m you’re a bad man, and that you staked that claim before he was dry behind the ears, and that if he comes nosin’ around tryin’ to file on it you’ll beat his head off.”

Bishop got up, stretched, and went outside to feed the dogs. “Don’t forget to beat his head off,” he called back. “And if you’re squeamish about it, just call on me. I won’t keep ‘m waitin’ long.”

Chapter XIV

“Ah, the salt water, Miss Welse, the strong salt water and the big waves and the heavy boats for smooth or rough — that I know. But the fresh water, and the little canoes, egg-shells, fairy bubbles; a big breath, a sigh, a heart-pulse too much, and pouf! over you go; not so, that I do not know.” Baron Courbertin smiled self-commiseratingly and went on. “But it is delightful, magnificent. I have watched and envied. Some day I shall learn.”

“It is not so difficult,” St. Vincent interposed. “Is it, Miss Welse?
Just a sure and delicate poise of mind and body — ”

“Like the tight-rope dancer?”

“Oh, you are incorrigible,” Frona laughed. “I feel certain that you know as much about canoes as we.”

“And you know? — a woman?” Cosmopolitan as the Frenchman was, the independence and ability for doing of the Yankee women were a perpetual wonder to him. “How?”

“When I was a very little girl, at Dyea, among the Indians. But next spring, after the river breaks, we’ll give you your first lessons, Mr. St. Vincent and I. So you see, you will return to civilization with accomplishments. And you will surely love it.”

“Under such charming tutorship,” he murmured, gallantly. “But you, Mr. St. Vincent, do you think I shall be so successful that I may come to love it? Do you love it? — you, who stand always in the background, sparing of speech, inscrutable, as though able but unwilling to speak from out the eternal wisdom of a vast experience.” The baron turned quickly to Frona. “We are old friends, did I not tell you? So I may, what you Americans call, josh with him. Is it not so, Mr. St. Vincent?”

Gregory nodded, and Frona said, “I am sure you met at the ends of the earth somewhere.”

“Yokohama,” St. Vincent cut in shortly; “eleven years ago, in cherry-blossom time. But Baron Courbertin does me an injustice, which stings, unhappily, because it is not true. I am afraid, when I get started, that I talk too much about myself.”

“A martyr to your friends,” Frona conciliated. “And such a teller of good tales that your friends cannot forbear imposing upon you.”

“Then tell us a canoe story,” the baron begged. “A good one! A — what you Yankees call — a hair-raiser!”

They drew up to Mrs. Schoville’s fat wood-burning stove, and St. Vincent told of the great whirlpool in the Box Canyon, of the terrible corkscrew in the mane of the White Horse Rapids, and of his cowardly comrade, who, walking around, had left him to go through alone — nine years before when the Yukon was virgin.

Half an hour later Mrs. Schoville bustled in, with Corliss in her wake.

“That hill! The last of my breath!” she gasped, pulling off her mittens. “Never saw such luck!” she declared none the less vehemently the next moment.

“This play will never come off! I never shall be Mrs. Linden! How can I? Krogstad’s gone on a stampede to Indian River, and no one knows when he’ll be back! Krogstad” (to Corliss) “is Mr. Maybrick, you know. And Mrs. Alexander has the neuralgia and can’t stir out. So there’s no rehearsal to-day, that’s flat!” She attitudinized dramatically: “‘Yes, in my first terror! But a day has passed, and in that day I have seen incredible things in this house! Helmer must know everything! There must be an end to this unhappy secret! O Krogstad, you need me, and I — I need you,’ and you are over on the Indian River making sour-dough bread, and I shall never see you more!”

They clapped their applause.

“My only reward for venturing out and keeping you all waiting was my meeting with this ridiculous fellow.” She shoved Corliss forward. “Oh! you have not met! Baron Courbertin, Mr. Corliss. If you strike it rich, baron, I advise you to sell to Mr. Corliss. He has the money-bags of Croesus, and will buy anything so long as the title is good. And if you don’t strike, sell anyway. He’s a professional philanthropist, you know.

“But would you believe it!” (addressing the general group) “this ridiculous fellow kindly offered to see me up the hill and gossip along the way — gossip! though he refused point-blank to come in and watch the rehearsal. But when he found there wasn’t to be any, he changed about like a weather-vane. So here he is, claiming to have been away to Miller Creek; but between ourselves there is no telling what dark deeds — ”

“Dark deeds! Look!” Frona broke in, pointing to the tip of an amber mouth-piece which projected from Vance’s outside breast-pocket. “A pipe! My congratulations.”

She held out her hand and he shook good-humoredly.

“All Del’s fault,” he laughed. “When I go before the great white throne, it is he who shall stand forth and be responsible for that particular sin.”

“An improvement, nevertheless,” she argued. “All that is wanting is a good round swear-word now and again.”

“Oh, I assure you I am not unlearned,” he retorted. “No man can drive dogs else. I can swear from hell to breakfast, by damn, and back again, if you will permit me, to the last link of perdition. By the bones of Pharaoh and the blood of Judas, for instance, are fairly efficacious with a string of huskies; but the best of my dog-driving nomenclature, more’s the pity, women cannot stand. I promise you, however, in spite of hell and high water — ”

“Oh! Oh!” Mrs. Schoville screamed, thrusting her fingers into her ears.

“Madame,” Baron Courbertin spoke up gravely, “it is a fact, a lamentable fact, that the dogs of the north are responsible for more men’s souls than all other causes put together. Is it not so? I leave it to the gentlemen.”

Both Corliss and St. Vincent solemnly agreed, and proceeded to detonate the lady by swapping heart-rending and apposite dog tales.

St. Vincent and the baron remained behind to take lunch with the Gold Commissioner’s wife, leaving Frona and Corliss to go down the hill together. Silently consenting, as though to prolong the descent, they swerved to the right, cutting transversely the myriad foot-paths and sled roads which led down into the town. It was a mid-December day, clear and cold; and the hesitant high-noon sun, having laboriously dragged its pale orb up from behind the southern land-rim, balked at the great climb to the zenith, and began its shamefaced slide back beneath the earth. Its oblique rays refracted from the floating frost particles till the air was filled with glittering jewel-dust — resplendent, blazing, flashing light and fire, but cold as outer space.

They passed down through the scintillant, magical sheen, their moccasins rhythmically crunching the snow and their breaths wreathing mysteriously from their lips in sprayed opalescence. Neither spoke, nor cared to speak, so wonderful was it all. At their feet, under the great vault of heaven, a speck in the midst of the white vastness, huddled the golden city — puny and sordid, feebly protesting against immensity, man’s challenge to the infinite!

Calls of men and cries of encouragement came sharply to them from close at hand, and they halted. There was an eager yelping, a scratching of feet, and a string of ice-rimed wolf-dogs, with hot-lolling tongues and dripping jaws, pulled up the slope and turned into the path ahead of them. On the sled, a long and narrow box of rough-sawed spruce told the nature of the freight. Two dog-drivers, a woman walking blindly, and a black-robed priest, made up the funeral cortege. A few paces farther on the dogs were again put against the steep, and with whine and shout and clatter the unheeding clay was hauled on and upward to its ice-hewn hillside chamber.

“A zone-conqueror,” Frona broke voice.

Corliss found his thought following hers, and answered, “These battlers of frost and fighters of hunger! I can understand how the dominant races have come down out of the north to empire. Strong to venture, strong to endure, with infinite faith and infinite patience, is it to be wondered at?”

Frona glanced at him in eloquent silence.

“‘We smote with our swords,’“ he chanted; “‘to me it was a joy like having my bright bride by me on the couch.’ ‘I have marched with my bloody sword, and the raven has followed me. Furiously we fought; the fire passed over the dwellings of men; we slept in the blood of those who kept the gates.’“

“But do you feel it, Vance?” she cried, her hand flashing out and resting on his arm.

“I begin to feel, I think. The north has taught me, is teaching me. The old thing’s come back with new significance. Yet I do not know. It seems a tremendous egotism, a magnificent dream.”

“But you are not a negro or a Mongol, nor are you descended from the negro or Mongol.”

“Yes,” he considered, “I am my father’s son, and the line goes back to the sea-kings who never slept under the smoky rafters of a roof or drained the ale-horn by inhabited hearth. There must be a reason for the dead-status of the black, a reason for the Teuton spreading over the earth as no other race has ever spread. There must be something in race heredity, else I would not leap at the summons.”

“A great race, Vance. Half of the earth its heritage, and all of the sea! And in threescore generations it has achieved it all — think of it! threescore generations! — and to-day it reaches out wider-armed than ever. The smiter and the destroyer among nations! the builder and the law-giver! Oh, Vance, my love is passionate, but God will forgive, for it is good. A great race, greatly conceived; and if to perish, greatly to perish! Don’t you remember:

“‘Trembles Yggdrasil’s ash yet standing; groans that ancient tree, and the Jotun Loki is loosed. The shadows groan on the ways of Hel, until the fire of Surt has consumed the tree. Hrym steers from the east, the waters rise, the mundane snake is coiled in jotun-rage. The worm heats the water, and the eagle screams; the pale of beak tears carcases; the ship Naglfar is loosed. Surt from the south comes with flickering flame; shines from his sword the Val-god’s sun.’“

Swaying there like a furred Valkyrie above the final carnage of men and gods, she touched his imagination, and the blood surged exultingly along unknown channels, thrilling and uplifting.

“‘The stony hills are dashed together, the giantesses totter; men tread the path of Hel, and heaven is cloven. The sun darkens, earth in ocean sinks, fall from heaven the bright stars, fire’s breath assails the all-nourishing tree, towering fire plays against heaven itself.’“

Outlined against the blazing air, her brows and lashes white with frost, the jewel-dust striking and washing against hair and face, and the south-sun lighting her with a great redness, the man saw her as the genius of the race. The traditions of the blood laid hold of him, and he felt strangely at one with the white-skinned, yellow-haired giants of the younger world. And as he looked upon her the mighty past rose before him, and the caverns of his being resounded with the shock and tumult of forgotten battles. With bellowing of storm-winds and crash of smoking North Sea waves, he saw the sharp-beaked fighting galleys, and the sea-flung Northmen, great-muscled, deep-chested, sprung from the elements, men of sword and sweep, marauders and scourgers of the warm south-lands! The din of twenty centuries of battle was roaring in his ear, and the clamor for return to type strong upon him. He seized her hands passionately.

“Be the bright bride by me, Frona! Be the bright bride by me on the couch!”

She started and looked down at him, questioningly. Then the import of it reached her and she involuntarily drew back. The sun shot a last failing flicker across the earth and vanished. The fire went out of the air, and the day darkened. Far above, the hearse-dogs howled mournfully.

“No,” he interrupted, as words formed on her lips. “Do not speak. I know my answer, your answer . . . now . . . I was a fool . . . Come, let us go down.”

It was not until they had left the mountain behind them, crossed the flat, and come out on the river by the saw-mill, that the bustle and skurry of human life made it seem possible for them to speak. Corliss had walked with his eyes moodily bent to the ground; and Frona, with head erect and looking everywhere, stealing an occasional glance to his face. Where the road rose over the log run-way of the mill the footing was slippery, and catching at her to save her from falling, their eyes met.

“I — I am grieved,” she hesitated. And then, in unconscious self-defence,
“It was so . . . I had not expected it — just then.”

“Else you would have prevented?” he asked, bitterly.

“Yes. I think I should have. I did not wish to give you pain — ”

“Then you expected it, some time?”

“And feared it. But I had hoped . . . I . . . Vance, I did not come into the Klondike to get married. I liked you at the beginning, and I have liked you more and more, — never so much as to-day, — but — ”

“But you had never looked upon me in the light of a possible husband — that is what you are trying to say.”

As he spoke, he looked at her side-wise, and sharply; and when her eyes met his with the same old frankness, the thought of losing her maddened him.

“But I have,” she answered at once. “I have looked upon you in that light, but somehow it was not convincing. Why, I do not know. There was so much I found to like in you, so much — ”

He tried to stop her with a dissenting gesture, but she went on.

“So much to admire. There was all the warmth of friendship, and closer friendship, — a growing camaraderie, in fact; but nothing more. Though I did not wish more, I should have welcomed it had it come.”

“As one welcomes the unwelcome guest.”

“Why won’t you help me, Vance, instead of making it harder? It is hard on you, surely, but do you imagine that I am enjoying it? I feel because of your pain, and, further, I know when I refuse a dear friend for a lover the dear friend goes from me. I do not part with friends lightly.”

“I see; doubly bankrupt; friend and lover both. But they are easily replaced. I fancy I was half lost before I spoke. Had I remained silent, it would have been the same anyway. Time softens; new associations, new thoughts and faces; men with marvellous adventures — ”

She stopped him abruptly.

“It is useless, Vance, no matter what you may say. I shall not quarrel with you. I can understand how you feel — ”

“If I am quarrelsome, then I had better leave you.” He halted suddenly, and she stood beside him. “Here comes Dave Harney. He will see you home. It’s only a step.”

“You are doing neither yourself nor me kindness.” She spoke with final firmness. “I decline to consider this the end. We are too close to it to understand it fairly. You must come and see me when we are both calmer. I refuse to be treated in this fashion. It is childish of you.” She shot a hasty glance at the approaching Eldorado king. “I do not think I deserve it at your hands. I refuse to lose you as a friend. And I insist that you come and see me, that things remain on the old footing.”

He shook his head.

“Hello!” Dave Harney touched his cap and slowed down loose-jointedly.
“Sorry you didn’t take my tip? Dogs gone up a dollar a pound since
yesterday, and still a-whoopin’. Good-afternoon, Miss Frona, and Mr.
Corliss. Goin’ my way?”

“Miss Welse is.” Corliss touched the visor of his cap and half-turned on his heel.

“Where’re you off to?” Dave demanded.

“Got an appointment,” he lied.

“Remember,” Frona called to him, “you must come and see me.”

“Too busy, I’m afraid, just now. Good-by. So long, Dave.”

“Jemimy!” Dave remarked, staring after him; “but he’s a hustler. Always busy — with big things, too. Wonder why he didn’t go in for dogs?”

Chapter XV

But Corliss did go back to see her, and before the day was out. A little bitter self-communion had not taken long to show him his childishness. The sting of loss was hard enough, but the thought, now they could be nothing to each other, that her last impressions of him should be bad, hurt almost as much, and in a way, even more. And further, putting all to the side, he was really ashamed. He had thought that he could have taken such a disappointment more manfully, especially since in advance he had not been at all sure of his footing.

So he called upon her, walked with her up to the Barracks, and on the way, with her help, managed to soften the awkwardness which the morning had left between them. He talked reasonably and meekly, which she countenanced, and would have apologized roundly had she not prevented him.

“Not the slightest bit of blame attaches to you,” she said. “Had I been in your place, I should probably have done the same and behaved much more outrageously. For you were outrageous, you know.”

“But had you been in my place, and I in yours,” he answered, with a weak attempt at humor, “there would have been no need.”

She smiled, glad that he was feeling less strongly about it.

“But, unhappily, our social wisdom does not permit such a reversal,” he added, more with a desire to be saying something.

“Ah!” she laughed. “There’s where my Jesuitism comes in. I can rise above our social wisdom.”

“You don’t mean to say, — that — ?”

“There, shocked as usual! No, I could not be so crude as to speak outright, but I might finesse, as you whist-players say. Accomplish the same end, only with greater delicacy. After all, a distinction without a difference.”

“Could you?” he asked.

“I know I could, — if the occasion demanded. I am not one to let what I might deem life-happiness slip from me without a struggle. That” (judicially) “occurs only in books and among sentimentalists. As my father always says, I belong to the strugglers and fighters. That which appeared to me great and sacred, that would I battle for, though I brought heaven tumbling about my ears.”

“You have made me very happy, Vance,” she said at parting by the Barracks gates. “And things shall go along in the same old way. And mind, not a bit less of you than formerly; but, rather, much more.”

But Corliss, after several perfunctory visits, forgot the way which led to Jacob Welse’s home, and applied himself savagely to his work. He even had the hypocrisy, at times, to felicitate himself upon his escape, and to draw bleak fireside pictures of the dismal future which would have been had he and Frona incompatibly mated. But this was only at times. As a rule, the thought of her made him hungry, in a way akin to physical hunger; and the one thing he found to overcome it was hard work and plenty of it. But even then, what of trail and creek, and camp and survey, he could only get away from her in his waking hours. In his sleep he was ignobly conquered, and Del Bishop, who was with him much, studied his restlessness and gave a ready ear to his mumbled words.

The pocket-miner put two and two together, and made a correct induction from the different little things which came under his notice. But this did not require any great astuteness. The simple fact that he no longer called on Frona was sufficient evidence of an unprospering suit. But Del went a step farther, and drew the corollary that St. Vincent was the cause of it all. Several times he had seen the correspondent with Frona, going one place and another, and was duly incensed thereat.

“I’ll fix ‘m yet!” he muttered in camp one evening, over on Gold Bottom.

“Whom?” Corliss queried.

“Who? That newspaper man, that’s who!”

“What for?”

“Aw — general principles. Why’n’t you let me paste ‘m that night at the
Opera House?”

Corliss laughed at the recollection. “Why did you strike him, Del?”

“General principles,” Del snapped back and shut up.

But Del Bishop, for all his punitive spirit, did not neglect the main chance, and on the return trip, when they came to the forks of Eldorado and Bonanza, he called a halt.

“Say, Corliss,” he began at once, “d’you know what a hunch is?” His employer nodded his comprehension. “Well, I’ve got one. I ain’t never asked favors of you before, but this once I want you to lay over here till to-morrow. Seems to me my fruit ranch is ‘most in sight. I can damn near smell the oranges a-ripenin’.”

“Certainly,” Corliss agreed. “But better still, I’ll run on down to
Dawson, and you can come in when you’ve finished hunching.”

“Say!” Del objected. “I said it was a hunch; and I want to ring you in on it, savve? You’re all right, and you’ve learned a hell of a lot out of books. You’re a regular high-roller when it comes to the laboratory, and all that; but it takes yours truly to get down and read the face of nature without spectacles. Now I’ve got a theory — ”

Corliss threw up his hands in affected dismay, and the pocket-miner began to grow angry.

“That’s right! Laugh! But it’s built right up on your own pet theory of erosion and changed riverbeds. And I didn’t pocket among the Mexicans two years for nothin’. Where d’you s’pose this Eldorado gold came from? — rough, and no signs of washin’? Eh? There’s where you need your spectacles. Books have made you short-sighted. But never mind how. ’Tisn’t exactly pockets, neither, but I know what I’m spelling about. I ain’t been keepin’ tab on traces for my health. I can tell you mining sharps more about the lay of Eldorado Creek in one minute than you could figure out in a month of Sundays. But never mind, no offence. You lay over with me till to-morrow, and you can buy a ranch ‘longside of mine, sure.” “Well, all right. I can rest up and look over my notes while you’re hunting your ancient river-bed.”

“Didn’t I tell you it was a hunch?” Del reproachfully demanded.

“And haven’t I agreed to stop over? What more do you want?”

“To give you a fruit ranch, that’s what! Just to go with me and nose round a bit, that’s all.”

“I do not want any of your impossible fruit ranches. I’m tired and worried; can’t you leave me alone? I think I am more than fair when I humor you to the extent of stopping over. You may waste your time nosing around, but I shall stay in camp. Understand?”

“Burn my body, but you’re grateful! By the Jumpin’ Methuselah, I’ll quit my job in two minutes if you don’t fire me. Me a-layin’ ‘wake nights and workin’ up my theory, and calculatin’ on lettin’ you in, and you a-snorin’ and Frona-this and Frona-that — ”

“That’ll do! Stop it!”

“The hell it will! If I didn’t know more about gold-mining than you do about courtin’ — ”

Corliss sprang at him, but Del dodged to one side and put up his fists. Then he ducked a wild right and left swing and side-stepped his way into firmer footing on the hard trail.

“Hold on a moment,” he cried, as Corliss made to come at him again.
“Just a second. If I lick you, will you come up the hillside with me?”

“Yes.”

“And if I don’t, you can fire me. That’s fair. Come on.”

Vance had no show whatever, as Del well knew, who played with him, feinting, attacking, retreating, dazzling, and disappearing every now and again out of his field of vision in a most exasperating way. As Vance speedily discovered, he possessed very little correlation between mind and body, and the next thing he discovered was that he was lying in the snow and slowly coming back to his senses.

“How — how did you do it?” he stammered to the pocket-miner, who had his head on his knee and was rubbing his forehead with snow.

“Oh, you’ll do!” Del laughed, helping him limply to his feet. “You’re the right stuff. I’ll show you some time. You’ve got lots to learn yet what you won’t find in books. But not now. We’ve got to wade in and make camp, then you’re comin’ up the hill with me.”

“Hee! hee!” he chuckled later, as they fitted the pipe of the Yukon stove. “Slow sighted and short. Couldn’t follow me, eh? But I’ll show you some time, oh, I’ll show you all right, all right!”

“Grab an axe an’ come on,” he commanded when the camp was completed.

He led the way up Eldorado, borrowed a pick, shovel, and pan at a cabin, and headed up among the benches near the mouth of French Creek. Vance, though feeling somewhat sore, was laughing at himself by this time and enjoying the situation. He exaggerated the humility with which he walked at the heel of his conqueror, while the extravagant servility which marked his obedience to his hired man made that individual grin.

“You’ll do. You’ve got the makin’s in you!” Del threw down the tools and scanned the run of the snow-surface carefully. “Here, take the axe, shinny up the hill, and lug me down some skookum dry wood.”

By the time Corliss returned with the last load of wood, the pocket-miner had cleared away the snow and moss in divers spots, and formed, in general design, a rude cross.

“Cuttin’ her both ways,” he explained. “Mebbe I’ll hit her here, or over there, or up above; but if there’s anything in the hunch, this is the place. Bedrock dips in above, and it’s deep there and most likely richer, but too much work. This is the rim of the bench. Can’t be more’n a couple of feet down. All we want is indications; afterwards we can tap in from the side.”

As he talked, he started fires here and there on the uncovered spaces. “But look here, Corliss, I want you to mind this ain’t pocketin’. This is just plain ordinary ‘prentice work; but pocketin’“ — he straightened up his back and spoke reverently — ”but pocketin’ is the deepest science and the finest art. Delicate to a hair’s-breadth, hand and eye true and steady as steel. When you’ve got to burn your pan blue-black twice a day, and out of a shovelful of gravel wash down to the one wee speck of flour gold, — why, that’s washin’, that’s what it is. Tell you what, I’d sooner follow a pocket than eat.”

“And you would sooner fight than do either.” Bishop stopped to consider. He weighed himself with care equal to that of retaining the one wee speck of flour gold. “No, I wouldn’t, neither. I’d take pocketin’ in mine every time. It’s as bad as dope; Corliss, sure. If it once gets a-hold of you, you’re a goner. You’ll never shake it. Look at me! And talk about pipe-dreams; they can’t burn a candle ‘longside of it.”

He walked over and kicked one of the fires apart. Then he lifted the pick, and the steel point drove in and stopped with a metallic clang, as though brought up by solid cement.

“Ain’t thawed two inches,” he muttered, stooping down and groping with his fingers in the wet muck. The blades of last year’s grass had been burned away, but he managed to gather up and tear away a handful of the roots.

“Hell!”

“What’s the matter?” Corliss asked.

“Hell!” he repeated in a passionless way, knocking the dirt-covered roots against the pan.

Corliss went over and stooped to closer inspection. “Hold on!” he cried, picking up two or three grimy bits of dirt and rubbing them with his fingers. A bright yellow flashed forth.

“Hell!” the pocket-miner reiterated tonelessly. “First rattle out the box. Begins at the grass roots and goes all the way down.”

Head turned to the side and up, eyes closed, nostrils distended and quivering, he rose suddenly to his feet and sniffed the air. Corliss looked up wonderingly.

“Huh!” the pocket-miner grunted. Then he drew a deep breath. “Can’t you smell them oranges?”

Chapter XVI

The stampede to French Hill was on by the beginning of Christmas week. Corliss and Bishop had been in no hurry to record for they looked the ground over carefully before blazing their stakes, and let a few close friends into the secret, — Harney, Welse, Trethaway, a Dutch chechaquo who had forfeited both feet to the frost, a couple of the mounted police, an old pal with whom Del had prospected through the Black Hills Country, the washerwoman at the Forks, and last, and notably, Lucile. Corliss was responsible for her getting in on the lay, and he drove and marked her stakes himself, though it fell to the colonel to deliver the invitation to her to come and be rich.

In accordance with the custom of the country, those thus benefited offered to sign over half-interests to the two discoverers. Corliss would not tolerate the proposition. Del was similarly minded, though swayed by no ethical reasons. He had enough as it stood. “Got my fruit ranch paid for, double the size I was calculatin’ on,” he explained; “and if I had any more, I wouldn’t know what to do with it, sure.”

After the strike, Corliss took it upon himself as a matter of course to look about for another man; but when he brought a keen-eyed Californian into camp, Del was duly wroth.

“Not on your life,” he stormed.

“But you are rich now,” Vance answered, “and have no need to work.”

“Rich, hell!” the pocket-miner rejoined. “Accordin’ to covenant, you can’t fire me; and I’m goin’ to hold the job down as long as my sweet will’ll let me. Savve?”

On Friday morning, early, all interested parties appeared before the Gold Commissioner to record their claims. The news went abroad immediately. In five minutes the first stampeders were hitting the trail. At the end of half an hour the town was afoot. To prevent mistakes on their property, — jumping, moving of stakes, and mutilation of notices, — Vance and Del, after promptly recording, started to return. But with the government seal attached to their holdings, they took it leisurely, the stampeders sliding past them in a steady stream. Midway, Del chanced to look behind. St. Vincent was in sight, footing it at a lively pace, the regulation stampeding pack on his shoulders. The trail made a sharp bend at that place, and with the exception of the three of them no one was in sight.

“Don’t speak to me. Don’t recognize me,” Del cautioned sharply, as he spoke, buttoning his nose-strap across his face, which served to quite hide his identity. “There’s a water-hole over there. Get down on your belly and make a blind at gettin’ a drink. Then go on by your lonely to the claims; I’ve business of my own to handle. And for the love of your bother don’t say a word to me or to the skunk. Don’t let ‘m see your face.”

Corliss obeyed wonderingly, stepping aside from the beaten path, lying down in the snow, and dipping into the water-hole with an empty condensed milk-can. Bishop bent on one knee and stooped as though fastening his moccasin. Just as St. Vincent came up with him he finished tying the knot, and started forward with the feverish haste of a man trying to make up for lost time.

“I say, hold on, my man,” the correspondent called out to him.

Bishop shot a hurried glance at him and pressed on. St. Vincent broke into a run till they were side by side again.

“Is this the way — ”

“To the benches of French Hill?” Del snapped him short. “Betcher your life. That’s the way I’m headin’. So long.”

He ploughed forward at a tremendous rate, and the correspondent, half-running, swung in behind with the evident intention of taking the pace. Corliss, still in the dark, lifted his head and watched them go; but when he saw the pocket-miner swerve abruptly to the right and take the trail up Adams Creek, the light dawned upon him and he laughed softly to himself.

Late that night Del arrived in camp on Eldorado exhausted but jubilant.

“Didn’t do a thing to him,” he cried before he was half inside the tent-flaps. “Gimme a bite to eat” (grabbing at the teapot and running a hot flood down his throat), — ”cookin’-fat, slush, old moccasins, candle-ends, anything!”

Then he collapsed upon the blankets and fell to rubbing his stiff leg-muscles while Corliss fried bacon and dished up the beans.

“What about ‘m?” he exulted between mouthfuls. “Well, you can stack your chips that he didn’t get in on the French Hill benches. How far is it, my man?” (in the well-mimicked, patronizing tones of St. Vincent). “How far is it?” with the patronage left out. “How far to French Hill?” weakly. “How far do you think it is?” very weakly, with a tremolo which hinted of repressed tears. “How far — ”

The pocket-miner burst into roars of laughter, which were choked by a misdirected flood of tea, and which left him coughing and speechless.

“Where’d I leave ‘m?” when he had recovered. “Over on the divide to Indian River, winded, plum-beaten, done for. Just about able to crawl into the nearest camp, and that’s about all. I’ve covered fifty stiff miles myself, so here’s for bed. Good-night. Don’t call me in the mornin’.”

He turned into the blankets all-standing, and as he dozed off Vance could hear him muttering, “How far is it, my man? I say, how far is it?”

Regarding Lucile, Corliss was disappointed. “I confess I cannot understand her,” he said to Colonel Trethaway. “I thought her bench claim would make her independent of the Opera House.”

“You can’t get a dump out in a day,” the colonel interposed.

“But you can mortgage the dirt in the ground when it prospects as hers does. Yet I took that into consideration, and offered to advance her a few thousand, non-interest bearing, and she declined. Said she didn’t need it, — in fact, was really grateful; thanked me, and said that any time I was short to come and see her.”

Trethaway smiled and played with his watch-chain. “What would you? Life, even here, certainly means more to you and me than a bit of grub, a piece of blanket, and a Yukon stove. She is as gregarious as the rest of us, and probably a little more so. Suppose you cut her off from the Opera House, — what then? May she go up to the Barracks and consort with the captain’s lady, make social calls on Mrs. Schoville, or chum with Frona? Don’t you see? Will you escort her, in daylight, down the public street?”

“Will you?” Vance demanded.

“Ay,” the colonel replied, unhesitatingly, “and with pleasure.”

“And so will I; but — ” He paused and gazed gloomily into the fire. “But see how she is going on with St. Vincent. As thick as thieves they are, and always together.”

“Puzzles me,” Trethaway admitted. “I can grasp St. Vincent’s side of it. Many irons in the fire, and Lucile owns a bench claim on the second tier of French Hill. Mark me, Corliss, we can tell infallibly the day that Frona consents to go to his bed and board, — if she ever does consent.”

“And that will be?”

“The day St. Vincent breaks with Lucile.”

Corliss pondered, and the colonel went on.

“But I can’t grasp Lucile’s side of it. What she can see in St.
Vincent — ”

“Her taste is no worse than — than that of the rest of the women,” Vance broke in hotly. “I am sure that — ”

“Frona could not display poor taste, eh?” Corliss turned on his heel and walked out, and left Colonel Trethaway smiling grimly.

Vance Corliss never knew how many people, directly and indirectly, had his cause at heart that Christmas week. Two men strove in particular, one for him and one for the sake of Frona. Pete Whipple, an old-timer in the land, possessed an Eldorado claim directly beneath French Hill, also a woman of the country for a wife, — a swarthy breed, not over pretty, whose Indian mother had mated with a Russian fur-trader some thirty years before at Kutlik on the Great Delta. Bishop went down one Sunday morning to yarn away an hour or so with Whipple, but found the wife alone in the cabin. She talked a bastard English gibberish which was an anguish to hear, so the pocket-miner resolved to smoke a pipe and depart without rudeness. But he got her tongue wagging, and to such an extent that he stopped and smoked many pipes, and whenever she lagged, urged her on again. He grunted and chuckled and swore in undertones while he listened, punctuating her narrative regularly with hells! which adequately expressed the many shades of interest he felt.

In the midst of it, the woman fished an ancient leather-bound volume, all scarred and marred, from the bottom of a dilapidated chest, and thereafter it lay on the table between them. Though it remained unopened, she constantly referred to it by look and gesture, and each time she did so a greedy light blazed in Bishop’s eyes. At the end, when she could say no more and had repeated herself from two to half a dozen times, he pulled out his sack. Mrs. Whipple set up the gold scales and placed the weights, which he counterbalanced with a hundred dollars’ worth of dust. Then he departed up the hill to the tent, hugging the purchase closely, and broke in on Corliss, who sat in the blankets mending moccasins.

“I’ll fix ‘m yet,” Del remarked casually, at the same time patting the book and throwing it down on the bed.

Corliss looked up inquiringly and opened it. The paper was yellow with age and rotten from the weather-wear of trail, while the text was printed in Russian. “I didn’t know you were a Russian scholar, Del,” he quizzed. “But I can’t read a line of it.”

“Neither can I, more’s the pity; nor does Whipple’s woman savve the lingo. I got it from her. But her old man — he was full Russian, you know — he used to read it aloud to her. But she knows what she knows and what her old man knew, and so do I.”

“And what do the three of you know?”

“Oh, that’s tellin’,” Bishop answered, coyly. “But you wait and watch my smoke, and when you see it risin’, you’ll know, too.”

Matt McCarthy came in over the ice Christmas week, summed up the situation so far as Frona and St. Vincent were concerned, and did not like it. Dave Harney furnished him with full information, to which he added that obtained from Lucile, with whom he was on good terms. Perhaps it was because he received the full benefit of the sum of their prejudice; but no matter how, he at any rate answered roll-call with those who looked upon the correspondent with disfavor. It was impossible for them to tell why they did not approve of the man, but somehow St. Vincent was never much of a success with men. This, in turn, might have been due to the fact that he shone so resplendently with women as to cast his fellows in eclipse; for otherwise, in his intercourse with men, he was all that a man could wish. There was nothing domineering or over-riding about him, while he manifested a good fellowship at least equal to their own.

Yet, having withheld his judgment after listening to Lucile and Harney, Matt McCarthy speedily reached a verdict upon spending an hour with St. Vincent at Jacob Welse’s, — and this in face of the fact that what Lucile had said had been invalidated by Matt’s learning of her intimacy with the man in question. Strong of friendship, quick of heart and hand, Matt did not let the grass grow under his feet. “’Tis I’ll be takin’ a social fling meself, as befits a mimber iv the noble Eldorado Dynasty,” he explained, and went up the hill to a whist party in Dave Harney’s cabin. To himself he added, “An’ belike, if Satan takes his eye off his own, I’ll put it to that young cub iv his.”

But more than once during the evening he discovered himself challenging his own judgment. Probe as he would with his innocent wit, Matt found himself baffled. St. Vincent certainly rang true. Simple, light-hearted, unaffected, joking and being joked in all good-nature, thoroughly democratic. Matt failed to catch the faintest echo of insincerity.

“May the dogs walk on me grave,” he communed with himself while studying a hand which suffered from a plethora of trumps. “Is it the years are tellin’, puttin’ the frost in me veins and chillin’ the blood? A likely lad, an’ is it for me to misjudge because his is a-takin’ way with the ladies? Just because the swate creatures smile on the lad an’ flutter warm at the sight iv him? Bright eyes and brave men! ’Tis the way they have iv lovin’ valor. They’re shuddered an’ shocked at the cruel an’ bloody dades iv war, yet who so quick do they lose their hearts to as the brave butcher-bye iv a sodger? Why not? The lad’s done brave things, and the girls give him the warm soft smile. Small reason, that, for me to be callin’ him the devil’s own cub. Out upon ye, Matt McCarthy, for a crusty old sour-dough, with vitals frozen an’ summer gone from yer heart! ’Tis an ossification ye’ve become! But bide a wee, Matt, bide a wee,” he supplemented. “Wait till ye’ve felt the fale iv his flesh.”

The opportunity came shortly, when St. Vincent, with Frona opposite, swept in the full thirteen tricks.

“A rampse!” Matt cried. “Vincent, me lad, a rampse! Yer hand on it, me brave!”

It was a stout grip, neither warm nor clammy, but Matt shook his head dubiously. “What’s the good iv botherin’?” he muttered to himself as he shuffled the cards for the next deal. “Ye old fool! Find out first how Frona darlin’ stands, an’ if it’s pat she is, thin ’tis time for doin’.”

“Oh, McCarthy’s all hunky,” Dave Harney assured them later on, coming to the rescue of St. Vincent, who was getting the rough side of the Irishman’s wit. The evening was over and the company was putting on its wraps and mittens. “Didn’t tell you ‘bout his visit to the cathedral, did he, when he was on the Outside? Well, it was suthin’ like this, ez he was explainin’ it to me. He went to the cathedral durin’ service, an’ took in the priests and choir-boys in their surplices, — parkas, he called ‘em, — an’ watched the burnin’ of the holy incense. ‘An’ do ye know, Dave, he sez to me, ‘they got in an’ made a smudge, and there wa’n’t a darned mosquito in sight.’“

“True, ivery word iv it.” Matt unblushingly fathered Harney’s yarn. “An’ did ye niver hear tell iv the time Dave an’ me got drunk on condensed milk?”

“Oh! Horrors!” cried Mrs. Schoville. “But how? Do tell us.”

“’Twas durin’ the time iv the candle famine at Forty Mile. Cold snap on, an’ Dave slides into me shack to pass the time o’ day, and glues his eyes on me case iv condensed milk. ‘How’d ye like a sip iv Moran’s good whiskey?’ he sez, eyin’ the case iv milk the while. I confiss me mouth went wet at the naked thought iv it. ‘But what’s the use iv likin’?’ sez I, with me sack bulgin’ with emptiness.’ ‘Candles worth tin dollars the dozen,’ sez he, ‘a dollar apiece. Will ye give six cans iv milk for a bottle iv the old stuff?’ ‘How’ll ye do it?’ sez I. ‘Trust me,’ sez he. ‘Give me the cans. ’Tis cold out iv doors, an’ I’ve a pair iv candle-moulds.’

“An’ it’s the sacred truth I’m tellin’ ye all, an’ if ye run across Bill Moran he’ll back me word; for what does Dave Harney do but lug off me six cans, freeze the milk into his candle-moulds, an’ trade them in to bill Moran for a bottle iv tanglefoot!”

As soon as he could be heard through the laughter, Harney raised his voice. “It’s true, as McCarthy tells, but he’s only told you the half. Can’t you guess the rest, Matt?”

Matt shook his head.

“Bein’ short on milk myself, an’ not over much sugar, I doctored three of your cans with water, which went to make the candles. An’ by the bye, I had milk in my coffee for a month to come.”

“It’s on me, Dave,” McCarthy admitted. “’Tis only that yer me host, or I’d be shockin’ the ladies with yer nortorious disgraces. But I’ll lave ye live this time, Dave. Come, spade the partin’ guests; we must be movin’.”

“No ye don’t, ye young laddy-buck,” he interposed, as St. Vincent started to take Frona down the hill, “’Tis her foster-daddy sees her home this night.”

McCarthy laughed in his silent way and offered his arm to Frona, while St. Vincent joined in the laugh against himself, dropped back, and joined Miss Mortimer and Baron Courbertin.

“What’s this I’m hearin’ about you an’ Vincent?” Matt bluntly asked as soon as they had drawn apart from the others.

He looked at her with his keen gray eyes, but she returned the look quite as keenly.

“How should I know what you have been hearing?” she countered.

“Whin the talk goes round iv a maid an’ a man, the one pretty an’ the other not unhandsome, both young an’ neither married, does it ‘token aught but the one thing?”

“Yes?”

“An’ the one thing the greatest thing in all the world.”

“Well?” Frona was the least bit angry, and did not feel inclined to help him.

“Marriage, iv course,” he blurted out. “’Tis said it looks that way with the pair of ye.”

“But is it said that it is that way?”

“Isn’t the looks iv it enough ?” he demanded.

“No; and you are old enough to know better. Mr. St. Vincent and I — we enjoy each other as friends, that is all. But suppose it is as you say, what of it?”

“Well,” McCarthy deliberated, “there’s other talk goes round, ’Tis said Vincent is over-thick with a jade down in the town — Lucile, they speak iv her.”

“All of which signifies?”

She waited, and McCarthy watched her dumbly.

“I know Lucile, and I like her,” Frona continued, filling the gap of his silence, and ostentatiously manoeuvring to help him on. “Do you know her? Don’t you like her?”

Matt started to speak, cleared his throat, and halted. At last, in desperation, he blurted out, “For two cents, Frona, I’d lay ye acrost me knee.”

She laughed. “You don’t dare. I’m not running barelegged at Dyea.”

“Now don’t be tasin’,” he blarneyed.

“I’m not teasing. Don’t you like her? — Lucile?”

“An’ what iv it?” he challenged, brazenly.

“Just what I asked, — what of it?”

“Thin I’ll tell ye in plain words from a man old enough to be yer father. ’Tis undacent, damnably undacent, for a man to kape company with a good young girl — ”

“Thank you,” she laughed, dropping a courtesy. Then she added, half in bitterness, “There have been others who — ”

“Name me the man!” he cried hotly.

“There, there, go on. You were saying?”

“That it’s a crying shame for a man to kape company with — with you, an’ at the same time be chake by jowl with a woman iv her stamp.”

“And why?”

“To come drippin’ from the muck to dirty yer claneness! An’ ye can ask why?”

“But wait, Matt, wait a moment. Granting your premises — ”

“Little I know iv primises,” he growled. “’Tis facts I’m dalin’ with.”

Frona bit her lip. “Never mind. Have it as you will; but let me go on and I will deal with facts, too. When did you last see Lucile?”

“An’ why are ye askin’?” he demanded, suspiciously.

“Never mind why. The fact.”

“Well, thin, the fore part iv last night, an’ much good may it do ye.”

“And danced with her?”

“A rollickin’ Virginia reel, an’ not sayin’ a word iv a quadrille or so. Tis at square dances I excel meself.”

Frona walked on in a simulated brown study, no sound going up from the twain save the complaint of the snow from under their moccasins.

“Well, thin?” he questioned, uneasily.

“An’ what iv it?” he insisted after another silence.

“Oh, nothing,” she answered. “I was just wondering which was the muckiest, Mr. St. Vincent or you — or myself, with whom you have both been cheek by jowl.”

Now, McCarthy was unversed in the virtues of social wisdom, and, though he felt somehow the error of her position, he could not put it into definite thought; so he steered wisely, if weakly, out of danger.

“It’s gettin’ mad ye are with yer old Matt,” he insinuated, “who has yer own good at heart, an’ because iv it makes a fool iv himself.”

“No, I’m not.”

“But ye are.”

“There!” leaning swiftly to him and kissing him. “How could I remember the Dyea days and be angry?”

“Ah, Frona darlin’, well may ye say it. I’m the dust iv the dirt under yer feet, an’ ye may walk on me — anything save get mad. I cud die for ye, swing for ye, to make ye happy. I cud kill the man that gave ye sorrow, were it but a thimbleful, an’ go plump into hell with a smile on me face an’ joy in me heart.”

They had halted before her door, and she pressed his arm gratefully. “I am not angry, Matt. But with the exception of my father you are the only person I would have permitted to talk to me about this — this affair in the way you have. And though I like you, Matt, love you better than ever, I shall nevertheless be very angry if you mention it again. You have no right. It is something that concerns me alone. And it is wrong of you — ”

“To prevint ye walkin’ blind into danger?”

“If you wish to put it that way, yes.”

He growled deep down in his throat.

“What is it you are saying?” she asked.

“That ye may shut me mouth, but that ye can’t bind me arm.”

“But you mustn’t, Matt, dear, you mustn’t.”

Again he answered with a subterranean murmur.

“And I want you to promise me, now, that you will not interfere in my life that way, by word or deed.”

“I’ll not promise.”

“But you must.”

“I’ll not. Further, it’s gettin’ cold on the stoop, an’ ye’ll be frostin’ yer toes, the pink little toes I fished splinters out iv at Dyea. So it’s in with ye, Frona girl, an’ good-night.”

He thrust her inside and departed. When he reached the corner he stopped suddenly and regarded his shadow on the snow. “Matt McCarthy, yer a damned fool! Who iver heard iv a Welse not knowin’ their own mind? As though ye’d niver had dalin’s with the stiff-necked breed, ye calamitous son iv misfortune!”

Then he went his way, still growling deeply, and at every growl the curious wolf-dog at his heels bristled and bared its fangs.

Chapter XVII

“Tired?”

Jacob Welse put both hands on Frona’s shoulders, and his eyes spoke the love his stiff tongue could not compass. The tree and the excitement and the pleasure were over with, a score or so of children had gone home frostily happy across the snow, the last guest had departed, and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were blending into one.

She returned his fondness with glad-eyed interest, and they dropped into huge comfortable chairs on either side the fireplace, in which the back-log was falling to ruddy ruin.

“And this time next year?” He put the question seemingly to the glowing log, and, as if in ominous foreshadow, it flared brightly and crumbled away in a burst of sparks.

“It is marvellous,” he went on, dismissing the future in an effort to shake himself into a wholesomer frame of mind. “It has been one long continuous miracle, the last few months, since you have been with me. We have seen very little of each other, you know, since your childhood, and when I think upon it soberly it is hard to realize that you are really mine, sprung from me, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. As the tangle-haired wild young creature of Dyea, — a healthy, little, natural animal and nothing more, — it required no imagination to accept you as one of the breed of Welse. But as Frona, the woman, as you were to-night, as you are now as I look at you, as you have been since you came down the Yukon, it is hard . . . I cannot realize . . . I . . .” He faltered and threw up his hands helplessly. “I almost wish that I had given you no education, that I had kept you with me, faring with me, adventuring with me, achieving with me, and failing with me. I would have known you, now, as we sit by the fire. As it is, I do not. To that which I did know there has been added, somehow (what shall I call it?), a subtlety; complexity, — favorite words of yours, — which is beyond me.

“No.” He waved the speech abruptly from her lips. She came over and knelt at his feet, resting her head on his knee and clasping his hand in firm sympathy. “No, that is not true. Those are not the words. I cannot find them. I fail to say what I feel. Let me try again. Underneath all you do carry the stamp of the breed. I knew I risked the loss of that when I sent you away, but I had faith in the persistence of the blood and I took the chance; doubted and feared when you were gone; waited and prayed dumbly, and hoped oftentimes hopelessly; and then the day dawned, the day of days! When they said your boat was coming, death rose and walked on the one hand of me, and on the other life everlasting. Made or marred; made or marred, — the words rang through my brain till they maddened me. Would the Welse remain the Welse? Would the blood persist? Would the young shoot rise straight and tall and strong, green with sap and fresh and vigorous? Or would it droop limp and lifeless, withered by the heats of the world other than the little simple, natural Dyea world?

“It was the day of days, and yet it was a lingering, watching, waiting tragedy. You know I had lived the years lonely, fought the lone fight, and you, away, the only kin. If it had failed . . . But your boat shot from the bluffs into the open, and I was half-afraid to look. Men have never called me coward, but I was nearer the coward then than ever and all before. Ay, that moment I had faced death easier. And it was foolish, absurd. How could I know whether it was for good or ill when you drifted a distant speck on the river? Still, I looked, and the miracle began, for I did know. You stood at the steering-sweep. You were a Welse. It seems so little; in truth it meant so much. It was not to be expected of a mere woman, but of a Welse, yes. And when Bishop went over the side, and you gripped the situation as imperatively as the sweep, and your voice rang out, and the Siwashes bent their backs to your will, — then was it the day of days.”

“I tried always, and remembered,” Frona whispered. She crept up softly till her arm was about his neck and her head against his breast. He rested one arm lightly on her body, and poured her bright hair again and again from his hand in glistening waves.

“As I said, the stamp of the breed was unmarred, but there was yet a difference. There is a difference. I have watched it, studied it, tried to make it out. I have sat at table, proud by the side of you, but dwarfed. When you talked of little things I was large enough to follow; when of big things, too small. I knew you, had my hand on you, when presto! and you were away, gone — I was lost. He is a fool who knows not his own ignorance; I was wise enough to know mine. Art, poetry, music, — what do I know of them? And they were the great things, are the great things to you, mean more to you than the little things I may comprehend. And I had hoped, blindly, foolishly, that we might be one in the spirit as well as the one flesh. It has been bitter, but I have faced it, and understand. But to see my own red blood get away from me, elude me, rise above me! It stuns. God! I have heard you read from your Browning — no, no; do not speak — and watched the play of your face, the uplift and the passion of it, and all the while the words droning in upon me, meaningless, musical, maddening. And Mrs. Schoville sitting there, nursing an expression of idiotic ecstasy, and understanding no more than I. I could have strangled her.

“Why, I have stolen away, at night, with your Browning, and locked myself in like a thief in fear. The text was senseless, I have beaten my head with my fist like a wild man, to try and knock some comprehension into it. For my life had worked itself out along one set groove, deep and narrow. I was in the rut. I had done those things which came to my hand and done them well; but the time was past; I could not turn my hand anew. I, who am strong and dominant, who have played large with destiny, who could buy body and soul a thousand painters and versifiers, was baffled by a few paltry cents’ worth of printed paper!”

He spilled her hair for a moment’s silence.

“To come back. I had attempted the impossible, gambled against the inevitable. I had sent you from me to get that which I had not, dreaming that we would still be one. As though two could be added to two and still remain two. So, to sum up, the breed still holds, but you have learned an alien tongue. When you speak it I am deaf. And bitterest of all, I know that the new tongue is the greater. I do not know why I have said all this, made my confession of weakness — ”

“Oh, father mine, greatest of men!” She raised her head and laughed into his eyes, the while brushing back the thick iron-gray hair which thatched the dome of his forehead. “You, who have wrestled more mightily, done greater things than these painters and versifiers. You who know so well the law of change. Might not the same plaint fall from your father’s lips were he to sit now beside you and look upon your work and you?”

“Yes, yes. I have said that I understand. Do not let us discuss it . . . a moment’s weakness. My father was a great man.”

“And so mine.”

“A struggler to the end of his days. He fought the great lone fight — ”

“And so mine.”

“And died fighting.”

“And so shall mine. So shall we all, we Welses.”

He shook her playfully, in token of returning spirits. “But I intend to sell out, — mines, Company, everything, — and study Browning.”

“Still the fight. You can’t discount the blood, father.”

“Why were you not a boy?” he demanded, abruptly. “You would have been a splendid one. As it is, a woman, made to be the delight of some man, you must pass from me — to-morrow, next day, this time next year, who knows how soon? Ah? now I know the direction my thought has been trending. Just as I know you do, so do I recognize the inevitableness of it and the justness. But the man, Frona, the man?”

“Don’t,” she demurred. “Tell me of your father’s fight, the last fight, the great lone fight at Treasure City. Ten to one it was, and well fought. Tell me.”

“No, Frona. Do you realize that for the first time in our lives we talk together seriously, as father and daughter, — for the first time? You have had no mother to advise; no father, for I trusted the blood, and wisely, and let you go. But there comes a time when the mother’s counsel is needed, and you, you who never knew one?”

Frona yielded, in instant recognition, and waiting, snuggled more closely to him.

“This man, St. Vincent — how is it between you?”

“I . . . I do not know. How do you mean?”

“Remember always, Frona, that you have free choice, yours is the last word. Still, I would like to understand. I could . . . perhaps . . . I might be able to suggest. But nothing more. Still, a suggestion . . .”

There was something inexpressibly sacred about it, yet she found herself tongue-tied. Instead of the one definite thing to say, a muddle of ideas fluttered in her brain. After all, could he understand? Was there not a difference which prevented him from comprehending the motives which, for her, were impelling? For all her harking back to the primitive and stout defence of its sanity and truth, did his native philosophy give him the same code which she drew from her acquired philosophy? Then she stood aside and regarded herself and the queries she put, and drew apart from them, for they breathed of treason.

“There is nothing between us, father,” she spoke up resolutely. “Mr. St. Vincent has said nothing, nothing. We are good friends, we like each other, we are very good friends. I think that is all.”

“But you like each other; you like him. Is it in the way a woman must like a man before she can honestly share her life with him, lose herself in him? Do you feel with Ruth, so that when the time comes you can say, ‘Thy people are my people, and thy God my God’?”

“N —-o. It may be; but I cannot, dare not face it, say it or not say it, think it or not think it — now. It is the great affirmation. When it comes it must come, no one may know how or why, in a great white flash, like a revelation, hiding nothing, revealing everything in dazzling, blinding truth. At least I so imagine.”

Jacob Welse nodded his head with the slow meditation of one who understands, yet stops to ponder and weigh again.

“But why have you asked, father? Why has Mr. St. Vincent been raised?
I have been friends with other men.”

“But I have not felt about other men as I do of St. Vincent. We may be truthful, you and I, and forgive the pain we give each other. My opinion counts for no more than another’s. Fallibility is the commonest of curses. Nor can I explain why I feel as I do — I oppose much in the way you expect to when your great white flash sears your eyes. But, in a word, I do not like St. Vincent.”

“A very common judgment of him among the men,” Frona interposed, driven irresistibly to the defensive.

“Such consensus of opinion only makes my position stronger,” he returned, but not disputatively. “Yet I must remember that I look upon him as men look. His popularity with women must proceed from the fact that women look differently than men, just as women do differ physically and spiritually from men. It is deep, too deep for me to explain. I but follow my nature and try to be just.”

“But have you nothing more definite?” she asked, groping for better comprehension of his attitude. “Can you not put into some sort of coherence some one certain thing of the things you feel?”

“I hardly dare. Intuitions can rarely be expressed in terms of thought. But let me try. We Welses have never known a coward. And where cowardice is, nothing can endure. It is like building on sand, or like a vile disease which rots and rots and we know not when it may break forth.”

“But it seems to me that Mr. St. Vincent is the last man in the world with whom cowardice may be associated. I cannot conceive of him in that light.”

The distress in her face hurt him. “I know nothing against St. Vincent. There is no evidence to show that he is anything but what he appears. Still, I cannot help feeling it, in my fallible human way. Yet there is one thing I have heard, a sordid pot-house brawl in the Opera House. Mind you, Frona, I say nothing against the brawl or the place, — men are men, but it is said that he did not act as a man ought that night.”

“But as you say, father, men are men. We would like to have them other than they are, for the world surely would be better; but we must take them as they are. Lucile — ”

“No, no; you misunderstand. I did not refer to her, but to the fight.
He did not . . . he was cowardly.”

“But as you say, it is said. He told me about it, not long afterwards, and I do not think he would have dared had there been anything — ”

“But I do not make it as a charge,” Jacob Welse hastily broke in. “Merely hearsay, and the prejudice of the men would be sufficient to account for the tale. And it has no bearing, anyway. I should not have brought it up, for I have known good men funk in my time — buck fever, as it were. And now let us dismiss it all from our minds. I merely wished to suggest, and I suppose I have bungled. But understand this, Frona,” turning her face up to his, “understand above all things and in spite of them, first, last, and always, that you are my daughter, and that I believe your life is sacredly yours, not mine, yours to deal with and to make or mar. Your life is yours to live, and in so far that I influence it you will not have lived your life, nor would your life have been yours. Nor would you have been a Welse, for there was never a Welse yet who suffered dictation. They died first, or went away to pioneer on the edge of things.

“Why, if you thought the dance house the proper or natural medium for self-expression, I might be sad, but to-morrow I would sanction your going down to the Opera House. It would be unwise to stop you, and, further, it is not our way. The Welses have ever stood by, in many a lost cause and forlorn hope, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder. Conventions are worthless for such as we. They are for the swine who without them would wallow deeper. The weak must obey or be crushed; not so with the strong. The mass is nothing; the individual everything; and it is the individual, always, that rules the mass and gives the law. A fig for what the world says! If the Welse should procreate a bastard line this day, it would be the way of the Welse, and you would be a daughter of the Welse, and in the face of hell and heaven, of God himself, we would stand together, we of the one blood, Frona, you and I.”

“You are larger than I,” she whispered, kissing his forehead, and the caress of her lips seemed to him the soft impact of a leaf falling through the still autumn air.

And as the heat of the room ebbed away, he told of her foremother and of his, and of the sturdy Welse who fought the great lone fight, and died, fighting, at Treasure City.

Chapter XVIII

The “Doll’s House” was a success. Mrs. Schoville ecstasized over it in terms so immeasurable, so unqualifiable, that Jacob Welse, standing near, bent a glittering gaze upon her plump white throat and unconsciously clutched and closed his hand on an invisible windpipe. Dave Harney proclaimed its excellence effusively, though he questioned the soundness of Nora’s philosophy and swore by his Puritan gods that Torvald was the longest-eared Jack in two hemispheres. Even Miss Mortimer, antagonistic as she was to the whole school, conceded that the players had redeemed it; while Matt McCarthy announced that he didn’t blame Nora darlin’ the least bit, though he told the Gold Commissioner privately that a song or so and a skirt dance wouldn’t have hurt the performance.

“Iv course the Nora girl was right,” he insisted to Harney, both of whom were walking on the heels of Frona and St. Vincent. “I’d be seein’ — ”

“Rubber — ”

“Rubber yer gran’mother!” Matt wrathfully exclaimed.

“Ez I was sayin’,” Harney continued, imperturbably, “rubber boots is goin’ to go sky-high ‘bout the time of wash-up. Three ounces the pair, an’ you kin put your chips on that for a high card. You kin gather ’em in now for an ounce a pair and clear two on the deal. A cinch, Matt, a dead open an’ shut.”

“The devil take you an’ yer cinches! It’s Nora darlin’ I have in me mind the while.”

They bade good-by to Frona and St. Vincent and went off disputing under the stars in the direction of the Opera House.

Gregory St. Vincent heaved an audible sigh. “At last.”

“At last what?” Frona asked, incuriously.

“At last the first opportunity for me to tell you how well you did. You carried off the final scene wonderfully; so well that it seemed you were really passing out of my life forever.”

“What a misfortune!”

“It was terrible.”

“No.”

“But, yes. I took the whole condition upon myself. You were not Nora, you were Frona; nor I Torvald, but Gregory. When you made your exit, capped and jacketed and travelling-bag in hand, it seemed I could not possibly stay and finish my lines. And when the door slammed and you were gone, the only thing that saved me was the curtain. It brought me to myself, or else I would have rushed after you in the face of the audience.”

“It is strange how a simulated part may react upon one,” Frona speculated.

“Or rather?” St. Vincent suggested.

Frona made no answer, and they walked on without speech. She was still under the spell of the evening, and the exaltation which had come to her as Nora had not yet departed. Besides, she read between the lines of St. Vincent’s conversation, and was oppressed by the timidity which comes over woman when she faces man on the verge of the greater intimacy.

It was a clear, cold night, not over-cold, — not more than forty below, — and the land was bathed in a soft, diffused flood of light which found its source not in the stars, nor yet in the moon, which was somewhere over on the other side of the world. From the south-east to the northwest a pale-greenish glow fringed the rim of the heavens, and it was from this the dim radiance was exhaled.

Suddenly, like the ray of a search-light, a band of white light ploughed overhead. Night turned to ghostly day on the instant, then blacker night descended. But to the southeast a noiseless commotion was apparent. The glowing greenish gauze was in a ferment, bubbling, uprearing, downfalling, and tentatively thrusting huge bodiless hands into the upper ether. Once more a cyclopean rocket twisted its fiery way across the sky, from horizon to zenith, and on, and on, in tremendous flight, to horizon again. But the span could not hold, and in its wake the black night brooded. And yet again, broader, stronger, deeper, lavishly spilling streamers to right and left, it flaunted the midmost zenith with its gorgeous flare, and passed on and down to the further edge of the world. Heaven was bridged at last, and the bridge endured!

At this flaming triumph the silence of earth was broken, and ten thousand wolf-dogs, in long-drawn unisoned howls, sobbed their dismay and grief. Frona shivered, and St. Vincent passed his arm about her waist. The woman in her was aware of the touch of man, and of a slight tingling thrill of vague delight; but she made no resistance. And as the wolf-dogs mourned at her feet and the aurora wantoned overhead, she felt herself drawn against him closely.

“Need I tell my story?” he whispered.

She drooped her head in tired content on his shoulder, and together they watched the burning vault wherein the stars dimmed and vanished. Ebbing, flowing, pulsing to some tremendous rhythm, the prism colors hurled themselves in luminous deluge across the firmament. Then the canopy of heaven became a mighty loom, wherein imperial purple and deep sea-green blended, wove, and interwove, with blazing woof and flashing warp, till the most delicate of tulles, fluorescent and bewildering, was daintily and airily shaken in the face of the astonished night.

Without warning the span was sundered by an arrogant arm of black. The arch dissolved in blushing confusion. Chasms of blackness yawned, grew, and rushed together. Broken masses of strayed color and fading fire stole timidly towards the sky-line. Then the dome of night towered imponderable, immense, and the stars came back one by one, and the wolf-dogs mourned anew.

“I can offer you so little, dear,” the man said with a slightly perceptible bitterness. “The precarious fortunes of a gypsy wanderer.”

And the woman, placing his hand and pressing it against her heart, said, as a great woman had said before her, “A tent and a crust of bread with you, Richard.”

Chapter XIX

How-ha was only an Indian woman, bred of a long line of fish-eating, meat-rending carnivores, and her ethics were as crude and simple as her blood. But long contact with the whites had given her an insight into their way of looking at things, and though she grunted contemptuously in her secret soul, she none the less understood their way perfectly. Ten years previous she had cooked for Jacob Welse, and served him in one fashion or another ever since; and when on a dreary January morning she opened the front door in response to the deep-tongued knocker, even her stolid presence was shaken as she recognized the visitor. Not that the average man or woman would have so recognized. But How-ha’s faculties of observing and remembering details had been developed in a hard school where death dealt his blow to the lax and life saluted the vigilant.

How-ha looked up and down the woman who stood before her. Through the heavy veil she could barely distinguish the flash of the eyes, while the hood of the parka effectually concealed the hair, and the parka proper the particular outlines of the body. But How-ha paused and looked again. There was something familiar in the vague general outline. She quested back to the shrouded head again, and knew the unmistakable poise. Then How-ha’s eyes went blear as she traversed the simple windings of her own brain, inspecting the bare shelves taciturnly stored with the impressions of a meagre life. No disorder; no confused mingling of records; no devious and interminable impress of complex emotions, tangled theories, and bewildering abstractions — nothing but simple facts, neatly classified and conveniently collated. Unerringly from the stores of the past she picked and chose and put together in the instant present, till obscurity dropped from the woman before her, and she knew her, word and deed and look and history.

“Much better you go ‘way quickety-quick,” How-ha informed her.

“Miss Welse. I wish to see her.”

The strange woman spoke in firm, even tones which betokened the will behind, but which failed to move How-ha.

“Much better you go,” she repeated, stolidly.

“Here, take this to Frona Welse, and — ah! would you!” (thrusting her knee between the door and jamb) “and leave the door open.”

How-ha scowled, but took the note; for she could not shake off the grip of the ten years of servitude to the superior race.

May I see you?

LUCILE.

So the note ran. Frona glanced up expectantly at the Indian woman.

“Um kick toes outside,” How-ha explained. “Me tell um go ‘way quickety-quick? Eh? You t’ink yes? Um no good. Um — ”

“No. Take her,” — Frona was thinking quickly, — ”no; bring her up here.”

“Much better — ”

“Go!”

How-ha grunted, and yielded up the obedience she could not withhold; though, as she went down the stairs to the door, in a tenebrous, glimmering way she wondered that the accident of white skin or swart made master or servant as the case might be.

In the one sweep of vision, Lucile took in Frona smiling with extended hand in the foreground, the dainty dressing-table, the simple finery, the thousand girlish evidences; and with the sweet wholesomeness of it pervading her nostrils, her own girlhood rose up and smote her. Then she turned a bleak eye and cold ear on outward things.

“I am glad you came,” Frona was saying. “I have so wanted to see you again, and — but do get that heavy parka off, please. How thick it is, and what splendid fur and workmanship!”

“Yes, from Siberia.” A present from St. Vincent, Lucile felt like adding, but said instead, “The Siberians have not yet learned to scamp their work, you know.”

She sank down into the low-seated rocker with a native grace which could not escape the beauty-loving eye of the girl, and with proud-poised head and silent tongue listened to Frona as the minutes ticked away, and observed with impersonal amusement Frona’s painful toil at making conversation.

“What has she come for?” Frona asked herself, as she talked on furs and weather and indifferent things.

“If you do not say something, Lucile, I shall get nervous, soon,” she ventured at last in desperation. “Has anything happened?”

Lucile went over to the mirror and picked up, from among the trinkets beneath, a tiny open-work miniature of Frona. “This is you? How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“A sylph, but a cold northern one.”

“The blood warms late with us,” Frona reproved; “but is — ”

“None the less warm for that,” Lucile laughed. “And how old are you now?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty,” Lucile repeated, slowly. “Twenty,” and resumed her seat.
“You are twenty. And I am twenty-four.”

“So little difference as that!”

“But our blood warms early.” Lucile voiced her reproach across the unfathomable gulf which four years could not plumb.

Frona could hardly hide her vexation. Lucile went over and looked at the miniature again and returned.

“What do you think of love?” she asked abruptly, her face softening unheralded into a smile.

“Love?” the girl quavered.

“Yes, love. What do you know about it? What do you think of it?”

A flood of definitions, glowing and rosy, sped to her tongue, but
Frona swept them aside and answered, “Love is immolation.”

“Very good — sacrifice. And, now, does it pay?”

“Yes, it pays. Of course it pays. Who can doubt it?”

Lucile’s eyes twinkled amusedly.

“Why do you smile?” Frona asked.

“Look at me, Frona.” Lucile stood up and her face blazed. “I am twenty-four. Not altogether a fright; not altogether a dunce. I have a heart. I have good red blood and warm. And I have loved. I do not remember the pay. I know only that I have paid.”

“And in the paying were paid,” Frona took up warmly. “The price was the reward. If love be fallible, yet you have loved; you have done, you have served. What more would you?”

“The whelpage love,” Lucile sneered.

“Oh! You are unfair.”

“I do you justice,” Lucile insisted firmly. “You would tell me that you know; that you have gone unveiled and seen clear-eyed; that without placing more than lips to the brim you have divined the taste of the dregs, and that the taste is good. Bah! The whelpage love! And, oh, Frona, I know; you are full womanly and broad, and lend no ear to little things, but” — she tapped a slender finger to forehead — ”it is all here. It is a heady brew, and you have smelled the fumes overmuch. But drain the dregs, turn down the glass, and say that it is good. No, God forbid!” she cried, passionately. “There are good loves. You should find no masquerade, but one fair and shining.”

Frona was up to her old trick, — their common one, — and her hand slid down Lucile’s arm till hand clasped in hand. “You say things which I feel are wrong, yet may not answer. I can, but how dare I? I dare not put mere thoughts against your facts. I, who have lived so little, cannot in theory give the lie to you who have lived so much — ”

“‘For he who lives more lives than one, more lives than one must die.’“

From out of her pain, Lucile spoke the words of her pain, and Frona, throwing arms about her, sobbed on her breast in understanding. As for Lucile, the slight nervous ingathering of the brows above her eyes smoothed out, and she pressed the kiss of motherhood, lightly and secretly, on the other’s hair. For a space, — then the brows ingathered, the lips drew firm, and she put Frona from her.

“You are going to marry Gregory St. Vincent?”

Frona was startled. It was only a fortnight old, and not a word had been breathed. “How do you know?”

“You have answered.” Lucile watched Frona’s open face and the bold running advertisement, and felt as the skilled fencer who fronts a tyro, weak of wrist, each opening naked to his hand. “How do I know?” She laughed harshly. “When a man leaves one’s arms suddenly, lips wet with last kisses and mouth areek with last lies!”

“And — ?”

“Forgets the way back to those arms.”

“So?” The blood of the Welse pounded up, and like a hot sun dried the mists from her eyes and left them flashing. “Then that is why you came. I could have guessed it had I given second thought to Dawson’s gossip.”

“It is not too late.” Lucile’s lip curled. “And it is your way.”

“And I am mindful. What is it? Do you intend telling me what he has done, what he has been to you. Let me say that it is useless. He is a man, as you and I are women.”

“No,” Lucile lied, swallowing her astonishment.

“I had not thought that any action of his would affect you. I knew you were too great for that. But — have you considered me?”

Frona caught her breath for a moment. Then she straightened out her arms to hold the man in challenge to the arms of Lucile.

“Your father over again,” Lucile exclaimed. “Oh, you impossible
Welses!”

“But he is not worthy of you, Frona Welse,” she continued; “of me, yes. He is not a nice man, a great man, nor a good. His love cannot match with yours. Bah! He does not possess love; passion, of one sort and another, is the best he may lay claim to. That you do not want. It is all, at the best, he can give you. And you, pray what may you give him? Yourself? A prodigious waste! But your father’s yellow — ”

“Don’t go on, or I shall refuse to listen. It is wrong of you.” So Frona made her cease, and then, with bold inconsistency, “And what may the woman Lucile give him?”

“Some few wild moments,” was the prompt response; “a burning burst of happiness, and the regrets of hell — which latter he deserves, as do I. So the balance is maintained, and all is well.”

“But — but — ”

“For there is a devil in him,” she held on, “a most alluring devil, which delights me, on my soul it does, and which, pray God, Frona, you may never know. For you have no devil; mine matches his and mates. I am free to confess that the whole thing is only an attraction. There is nothing permanent about him, nor about me. And there’s the beauty, the balance is preserved.”

Frona lay back in her chair and lazily regarded her visitor, Lucile waited for her to speak. It was very quiet.

“Well?” Lucile at last demanded, in a low, curious tone, at the same time rising to slip into her parka.

“Nothing. I was only waiting.”

“I am done.”

“Then let me say that I do not understand you,” Frona summed up, coldly. “I cannot somehow just catch your motive. There is a flat ring to what you have said. However, of this I am sure: for some unaccountable reason you have been untrue to yourself to-day. Do not ask me, for, as I said before, I do not know where or how; yet I am none the less convinced. This I do know, you are not the Lucile I met by the wood trail across the river. That was the true Lucile, little though I saw of her. The woman who is here to-day is a strange woman. I do not know her. Sometimes it has seemed she was Lucile, but rarely. This woman has lied, lied to me, and lied to me about herself. As to what she said of the man, at the worst that is merely an opinion. It may be she has lied about him likewise. The chance is large that she has. What do you think about it?”

“That you are a very clever girl, Frona. That you speak sometimes more truly than you know, and that at others you are blinder than you dream.”

“There is something I could love in you, but you have hidden it away so that I cannot find it.”

Lucile’s lips trembled on the verge of speech. But she settled her parka about her and turned to go.

Frona saw her to the door herself, and How-ha pondered over the white who made the law and was greater than the law.

When the door had closed, Lucile spat into the street. “Faugh! St. Vincent! I have defiled my mouth with your name!” And she spat again.

“Come in.”

At the summons Matt McCarthy pulled the latch-string, pushed the door open, and closed it carefully behind him.

“Oh, it is you!” St. Vincent regarded his visitor with dark abstraction, then, recollecting himself, held out his hand. “Why, hello, Matt, old man. My mind was a thousand miles away when you entered. Take a stool and make yourself comfortable. There’s the tobacco by your hand. Take a try at it and give us your verdict.”

“An’ well may his mind be a thousand miles away,” Matt assured himself; for in the dark he had passed a woman on the trail who looked suspiciously like Lucile. But aloud, “Sure, an’ it’s day-dramin’ ye mane. An’ small wondher.”

“How’s that?” the correspondent asked, cheerily.

“By the same token that I met Lucile down the trail a piece, an’ the heels iv her moccasins pointing to yer shack. It’s a bitter tongue the jade slings on occasion,” Matt chuckled.

“That’s the worst of it.” St. Vincent met him frankly. “A man looks sidewise at them for a passing moment, and they demand that the moment be eternal.”

Off with the old love’s a stiff proposition, eh?”

“I should say so. And you understand. It’s easy to see, Matt, you’ve had some experience in your time.”

“In me time? I’ll have ye know I’m not too old to still enjoy a bit iv a fling.”

“Certainly, certainly. One can read it in your eyes. The warm heart and the roving eye, Matt!” He slapped his visitor on the shoulder with a hearty laugh.

“An’ I’ve none the best iv ye, Vincent. ’Tis a wicked lad ye are,
with a takin’ way with the ladies — as plain as the nose on yer face.
Manny’s the idle kiss ye’ve given, an’ manny’s the heart ye’ve broke.
But, Vincent, bye, did ye iver know the rale thing?”

“How do you mean?”

“The rale thing, the rale thing — that is — well, have ye been iver a father?”

St. Vincent shook his head.

“And niver have I. But have ye felt the love iv a father, thin?”

“I hardly know. I don’t think so.”

“Well, I have. An’ it’s the rale thing, I’ll tell ye. If iver a man suckled a child, I did, or the next door to it. A girl child at that, an’ she’s woman grown, now, an’ if the thing is possible, I love her more than her own blood-father. Bad luck, exciptin’ her, there was niver but one woman I loved, an’ that woman had mated beforetime. Not a soul did I brathe a word to, trust me, nor even herself. But she died. God’s love be with her.”

His chin went down upon his chest and he quested back to a flaxen-haired Saxon woman, strayed like a bit of sunshine into the log store by the Dyea River. He looked up suddenly, and caught St. Vincent’s stare bent blankly to the floor as he mused on other things.

“A truce to foolishness, Vincent.”

The correspondent returned to himself with an effort and found the
Irishman’s small blue eyes boring into him.

“Are ye a brave man, Vincent?”

For a second’s space they searched each other’s souls. And in that space Matt could have sworn he saw the faintest possible flicker or flutter in the man’s eyes.

He brought his fist down on the table with a triumphant crash. “By
God, yer not!”

The correspondent pulled the tobacco jug over to him and rolled a cigarette. He rolled it carefully, the delicate rice paper crisping in his hand without a tremor; but all the while a red tide mounting up from beneath the collar of his shirt, deepening in the hollows of the cheeks and thinning against the cheekbones above, creeping, spreading, till all his face was aflame.

“’Tis good. An’ likely it saves me fingers a dirty job. Vincent, man, the girl child which is woman grown slapes in Dawson this night. God help us, you an’ me, but we’ll niver hit again the pillow as clane an’ pure as she! Vincent, a word to the wise: ye’ll niver lay holy hand or otherwise upon her.”

The devil, which Lucile had proclaimed, began to quicken, — a fuming, fretting, irrational devil.

“I do not like ye. I kape me raysons to meself. It is sufficient. But take this to heart, an’ take it well: should ye be mad enough to make her yer wife, iv that damned day ye’ll niver see the inding, nor lay eye upon the bridal bed. Why, man, I cud bate ye to death with me two fists if need be. But it’s to be hoped I’ll do a nater job. Rest aisy. I promise ye.”

“You Irish pig!”

So the devil burst forth, and all unaware, for McCarthy found himself eye-high with the muzzle of a Colt’s revolver.

“Is it loaded?” he asked. “I belave ye. But why are ye lingerin’?
Lift the hammer, will ye?”

The correspondent’s trigger-finger moved and there was a warning click.

“Now pull it. Pull it, I say. As though ye cud, with that flutter to yer eye.”

St. Vincent attempted to turn his head aside.

“Look at me, man!” McCarthy commanded. “Kape yer eyes on me when ye do it.”

Unwillingly the sideward movement was arrested, and his eyes returned and met the Irishman’s.

“Now!”

St. Vincent ground his teeth and pulled the trigger — at least he thought he did, as men think they do things in dreams. He willed the deed, flashed the order forth; but the flutter of his soul stopped it.

“’Tis paralyzed, is it, that shaky little finger?” Matt grinned into the face of the tortured man. “Now turn it aside, so, an’ drop it, gently . . . gently . . . gently.” His voice crooned away in soothing diminuendo.

When the trigger was safely down, St. Vincent let the revolver fall from his hand, and with a slight audible sigh sank nervelessly upon a stool. He tried to straighten himself, but instead dropped down upon the table and buried his face in his palsied hands. Matt drew on his mittens, looking down upon him pityingly the while, and went out, closing the door softly behind him.

Chapter XX

Where nature shows the rough hand, the sons of men are apt to respond with kindred roughness. The amenities of life spring up only in mellow lands, where the sun is warm and the earth fat. The damp and soggy climate of Britain drives men to strong drink; the rosy Orient lures to the dream splendors of the lotus. The big-bodied, white-skinned northern dweller, rude and ferocious, bellows his anger uncouthly and drives a gross fist into the face of his foe. The supple south-sojourner, silken of smile and lazy of gesture, waits, and does his work from behind, when no man looketh, gracefully and without offence. Their ends are one; the difference lies in their ways, and therein the climate, and the cumulative effect thereof, is the determining factor. Both are sinners, as men born of women have ever been; but the one does his sin openly, in the clear sight of God; the other — as though God could not see — veils his iniquity with shimmering fancies, hiding it like it were some splendid mystery.

These be the ways of men, each as the sun shines upon him and the wind blows against him, according to his kind, and the seed of his father, and the milk of his mother. Each is the resultant of many forces which go to make a pressure mightier than he, and which moulds him in the predestined shape. But, with sound legs under him, he may run away, and meet with a new pressure. He may continue running, each new pressure prodding him as he goes, until he dies and his final form will be that predestined of the many pressures. An exchange of cradle-babes, and the base-born slave may wear the purple imperially, and the royal infant begs an alms as wheedlingly or cringe to the lash as abjectly as his meanest subject. A Chesterfield, with an empty belly, chancing upon good fare, will gorge as faithfully as the swine in the next sty. And an Epicurus, in the dirt-igloo of the Eskimos, will wax eloquent over the whale oil and walrus blubber, or die.

Thus, in the young Northland, frosty and grim and menacing, men stripped off the sloth of the south and gave battle greatly. And they stripped likewise much of the veneer of civilization — all of its follies, most of its foibles, and perhaps a few of its virtues. Maybe so; but they reserved the great traditions and at least lived frankly, laughed honestly, and looked one another in the eyes.

And so it is not well for women, born south of fifty-three and reared gently, to knock loosely about the Northland, unless they be great of heart. They may be soft and tender and sensitive, possessed of eyes which have not lost the lustre and the wonder, and of ears used only to sweet sounds; but if their philosophy is sane and stable, large enough to understand and to forgive, they will come to no harm and attain comprehension. If not, they will see things and hear things which hurt, and they will suffer greatly, and lose faith in man — which is the greatest evil that may happen them. Such should be sedulously cherished, and it were well to depute this to their men-folk, the nearer of kin the better. In line, it were good policy to seek out a cabin on the hill overlooking Dawson, or — best of all — across the Yukon on the western bank. Let them not move abroad unheralded and unaccompanied; and the hillside back of the cabin may be recommended as a fit field for stretching muscles and breathing deeply, a place where their ears may remain undefiled by the harsh words of men who strive to the utmost.

Vance Corliss wiped the last tin dish and filed it away on the shelf, lighted his pipe, and rolled over on his back on the bunk to contemplate the moss-chinked roof of his French Hill cabin. This French Hill cabin stood on the last dip of the hill into Eldorado Creek, close to the main-travelled trail; and its one window blinked cheerily of nights at those who journeyed late.

The door was kicked open, and Del Bishop staggered in with a load of fire-wood. His breath had so settled on his face in a white rime that he could not speak. Such a condition was ever a hardship with the man, so he thrust his face forthwith into the quivering heat above the stove. In a trice the frost was started and the thawed streamlets dancing madly on the white-hot surface beneath. Then the ice began to fall from is beard in chunks, rattling on the lid-tops and simmering spitefully till spurted upward in clouds of steam.

“And so you witness an actual phenomenon, illustrative of the three forms of matter,” Vance laughed, mimicking the monotonous tones of the demonstrator; “solid, liquid, and vapor. In another moment you will have the gas.”

“Th — th — that’s all very well,” Bishop spluttered, wrestling with an obstructing piece of ice until it was wrenched from his upper lip and slammed stoveward with a bang.

“How cold do you make it, Del? Fifty?”

“Fifty?” the pocket-miner demanded with unutterable scorn, wiping his face. “Quicksilver’s been solid for hours, and it’s been gittin’ colder an’ colder ever since. Fifty? I’ll bet my new mittens against your old moccasins that it ain’t a notch below seventy.”

“Think so?”

“D’ye want to bet?”

Vance nodded laughingly.

“Centigrade or Fahrenheit?” Bishop asked, suddenly suspicious.

“Oh, well, if you want my old moccasins so badly,” Vance rejoined, feigning to be hurt by the other’s lack of faith, “why, you can have them without betting.”

Del snorted and flung himself down on the opposite bunk. “Think yer funny, don’t you?” No answer forthcoming, he deemed the retort conclusive, rolled over, and fell to studying the moss chinks.

Fifteen minutes of this diversion sufficed. “Play you a rubber of crib before bed,” he challenged across to the other bunk.

“I’ll go you.” Corliss got up, stretched, and moved the kerosene lamp from the shelf to the table, “Think it will hold out?” he asked, surveying the oil-level through the cheap glass.

Bishop threw down the crib-board and cards, and measured the contents of the lamp with his eye. “Forgot to fill it, didn’t I? Too late now. Do it to-morrow. It’ll last the rubber out, sure.”

Corliss took up the cards, but paused in the shuffling. “We’ve a big trip before us, Del, about a month from now, the middle of March as near as I can plan it, — up the Stuart River to McQuestion; up McQuestion and back again down the Mayo; then across country to Mazy May, winding up at Henderson Creek — ”

“On the Indian River?”

“No,” Corliss replied, as he dealt the hands; “just below where the
Stuart taps the Yukon. And then back to Dawson before the ice breaks.”

The pocket-miner’s eyes sparkled. “Keep us hustlin’; but, say, it’s a trip, isn’t it! Hunch?”

“I’ve received word from the Parker outfit on the Mayo, and McPherson isn’t asleep on Henderson — you don’t know him. They’re keeping quiet, and of course one can’t tell, but . . .”

Bishop nodded his head sagely, while Corliss turned the trump he had cut. A sure vision of a “twenty-four” hand was dazzling him, when there was a sound of voices without and the door shook to a heavy knock.

“Come in!” he bawled. “An’ don’t make such a row about it! Look at that” — to Corliss, at the same time facing his hand — ”fifteen-eight, fifteen-sixteen, and eight are twenty-four. Just my luck!”

Corliss started swiftly to his feet. Bishop jerked his head about. Two women and a man had staggered clumsily in through the door, and were standing just inside, momentarily blinded by the light.

“By all the Prophets! Cornell!” The pocket-miner wrung the man’s hand and led him forward. “You recollect Cornell, Corliss? Jake Cornell, Thirty-Seven and a Half Eldorado.”

“How could I forget?” the engineer acknowledged warmly, shaking his hand. “That was a miserable night you put us up last fall, about as miserable as the moose-steak was good that you gave us for breakfast.”

Jake Cornell, hirsute and cadaverous of aspect, nodded his head with emphasis and deposited a corpulent demijohn on the table. Again he nodded his head, and glared wildly about him. The stove caught his eye and he strode over to it, lifted a lid, and spat out a mouthful of amber-colored juice. Another stride and he was back.

“‘Course I recollect the night,” he rumbled, the ice clattering from his hairy jaws. “And I’m danged glad to see you, that’s a fact.” He seemed suddenly to remember himself, and added a little sheepishly, “The fact is, we’re all danged glad to see you, ain’t we, girls?” He twisted his head about and nodded his companions up. “Blanche, my dear, Mr. Corliss — hem — it gives me . . . hem . . . it gives me pleasure to make you acquainted. Cariboo Blanche, sir. Cariboo Blanche.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Cariboo Blanche put out a frank hand and looked him over keenly. She was a fair-featured, blondish woman, originally not unpleasing of appearance, but now with lines all deepened and hardened as on the faces of men who have endured much weather-beat.

Congratulating himself upon his social proficiency, Jake Cornell cleared his throat and marshalled the second woman to the front. “Mr. Corliss, the Virgin; I make you both acquainted. Hem!” in response to the query in Vance’s eyes — ”Yes, the Virgin. That’s all, just the Virgin.”

She smiled and bowed, but did not shake hands. “A toff” was her secret comment upon the engineer; and from her limited experience she had been led to understand that it was not good form among “toffs” to shake hands.

Corliss fumbled his hand, then bowed, and looked at her curiously. She was a pretty, low-browed creature; darkly pretty, with a well-favored body, and for all that the type was mean, he could not escape the charm of her over-brimming vitality. She seemed bursting with it, and every quick, spontaneous movement appeared to spring from very excess of red blood and superabundant energy.

“Pretty healthy proposition, ain’t she?” Jake Cornell demanded, following his host’s gaze with approval.

“None o’ your gammon, Jake,” the Virgin snapped back, with lip curled contemptuously for Vance’s especial benefit. “I fancy it’d be more in keeping if you’d look to pore Blanche, there.”

“Fact is, we’re plum ding dong played out,” Jake said. “An’ Blanche went through the ice just down the trail, and her feet’s like to freezin’.”

Blanche smiled as Corliss piloted her to a stool by the fire, and her stern mouth gave no indication of the pain she was suffering. He turned away when the Virgin addressed herself to removing the wet footgear, while Bishop went rummaging for socks and moccasins.

“Didn’t go in more’n to the ankles,” Cornell explained confidentially; “but that’s plenty a night like this.”

Corliss agreed with a nod of the head.

“Spotted your light, and — hem — and so we come. Don’t mind, do you?”

“Why, certainly not — ”

“No intrudin’?”

Corliss reassured him by laying hand on his shoulder and cordially pressing him to a seat. Blanche sighed luxuriously. Her wet stockings were stretched up and already steaming, and her feet basking in the capacious warmth of Bishop’s Siwash socks. Vance shoved the tobacco canister across, but Cornell pulled out a handful of cigars and passed them around.

“Uncommon bad piece of trail just this side of the turn,” he remarked stentoriously, at the same time flinging an eloquent glance at the demijohn. “Ice rotten from the springs and no sign till you’re into it.” Turning to the woman by the stove, “How’re you feeling, Blanche?”

“Tony,” she responded, stretching her body lazily and redisposing her feet; “though my legs ain’t as limber as when we pulled out.”

Looking to his host for consent, Cornell tilted the demijohn over his arm and partly filled the four tin mugs and an empty jelly glass.

“Wot’s the matter with a toddy?” the Virgin broke in; “or a punch?”

“Got any lime juice?” she demanded of Corliss.

“You ‘ave? Jolly!” She directed her dark eyes towards Del. “‘Ere, you, cookie! Trot out your mixing-pan and sling the kettle for ‘ot water. Come on! All hands! Jake’s treat, and I’ll show you ‘ow! Any sugar, Mr. Corliss? And nutmeg? Cinnamon, then? O.K. It’ll do. Lively now, cookie!”

“Ain’t she a peach?” Cornell confided to Vance, watching her with mellow eyes as she stirred the steaming brew.

But the Virgin directed her attentions to the engineer. “Don’t mind ‘im, sir,” she advised. “‘E’s more’n arf-gorn a’ready, a-‘itting the jug every blessed stop.”

“Now, my dear — ” Jake protested.

“Don’t you my-dear me,” she sniffed. “I don’t like you.”

“Why?”

“Cos . . .” She ladled the punch carefully into the mugs and meditated. “Cos you chew tobacco. Cos you’re whiskery. Wot I take to is smooth-faced young chaps.”

“Don’t take any stock in her nonsense,” the Fraction King warned, “She just does it a-purpose to get me mad.”

“Now then!” she commanded, sharply. “Step up to your licker! ‘Ere’s ‘ow!”

“What’ll it be?” cried Blanche from the stove.

The elevated mugs wavered and halted.

“The Queen, Gawd bless ‘er!” the Virgin toasted promptly.

“And Bill!” Del Bishop interrupted.

Again the mugs wavered.

“Bill ‘oo?” the Virgin asked, suspiciously.

“McKinley.”

She favored him with a smile. “Thank you, cookie, you’re a trump. Now! ‘Ere’s a go, gents! Take it standing. The Queen, Gawd bless ‘er, and Bill McKinley!”

“Bottoms up!” thundered Jake Cornell, and the mugs smote the table with clanging rims.

Vance Corliss discovered himself amused and interested. According to Frona, he mused ironically, — this was learning life, was adding to his sum of human generalizations. The phrase was hers, and he rolled it over a couple of times. Then, again, her engagement with St. Vincent crept into his thought, and he charmed the Virgin by asking her to sing. But she was coy, and only after Bishop had rendered the several score stanzas of “Flying Cloud” did she comply. Her voice, in a weakly way, probably registered an octave and a half; below that point it underwent strange metamorphoses, while on the upper levels it was devious and rickety. Nevertheless she sang “Take Back Your Gold” with touching effect, which brought a fiery moisture into the eyes of the Fraction King, who listened greedily, for the time being experiencing unwonted ethical yearnings.

The applause was generous, followed immediately by Bishop, who toasted the singer as the “Enchantress of Bow Bells,” to the reverberating “bottoms up!” of Jake Cornell.

Two hours later, Frona Welse rapped. It was a sharp, insistent rap, penetrating the din within and bringing Corliss to the door.

She gave a glad little cry when she saw who it was. “Oh; it is you,
Vance! I didn’t know you lived here.”

He shook hands and blocked the doorway with his body. Behind him the
Virgin was laughing and Jake Cornell roaring:

“Oh, cable this message along the track;
The Prod’s out West, but he’s coming back;
Put plenty of veal for one on the rack,
Trolla lala, la la la, la la!”

“What is it?” Vance questioned. “Anything up?”

“I think you might ask me in.” There was a hint of reproach in Frona’s voice, and of haste. “I blundered through the ice, and my feet are freezing.”

“O Gawd!” in the exuberant tones of the Virgin, came whirling over Vance’s shoulder, and the voices of Blanche and Bishop joining in a laugh against Cornell, and that worthy’s vociferous protestations. It seemed to him that all the blood of his body had rushed into his face. “But you can’t come in, Frona. Don’t you hear them?”

“But I must,” she insisted. “My feet are freezing.”

With a gesture of resignation he stepped aside and closed the door after her. Coming suddenly in from the darkness, she hesitated a moment, but in that moment recovered her sight and took in the scene. The air was thick with tobacco smoke, and the odor of it, in the close room, was sickening to one fresh from the pure outside. On the table a column of steam was ascending from the big mixing-pan. The Virgin, fleeing before Cornell, was defending herself with a long mustard spoon. Evading him and watching her chance, she continually daubed his nose and cheeks with the yellow smear. Blanche had twisted about from the stove to see the fun, and Del Bishop, with a mug at rest half-way to his lips, was applauding the successive strokes. The faces of all were flushed.

Vance leaned nervelessly against the door. The whole situation seemed so unthinkably impossible. An insane desire to laugh came over him, which resolved itself into a coughing fit. But Frona, realizing her own pressing need by the growing absence of sensation in her feet, stepped forward.

“Hello, Del!” she called.

The mirth froze on his face at the familiar sound and he slowly and unwilling turned his head to meet her. She had slipped the hood of her parka back, and her face, outlined against the dark fur, rosy with the cold and bright, was like a shaft of the sun shot into the murk of a boozing-ken. They all knew her, for who did not know Jacob Welse’s daughter? The Virgin dropped the mustard-spoon with a startled shriek, while Cornell, passing a dazed hand across his yellow markings and consummating the general smear, collapsed on the nearest stool. Cariboo Blanche alone retained her self-possession, and laughed softly.

Bishop managed to articulate “Hello!” but was unable to stave off the silence which settled down.

Frona waited a second, and then said, “Good-evening, all.”

“This way.” Vance had recovered himself, and seated her by the stove opposite Blanche. “Better get your things off quickly, and be careful of the heat. I’ll see what I can find for you.”

“Some cold water, please,” she asked. “It will take the frost out.
Del will get it.”

“I hope it is not serious?”

“No.” She shook her head and smiled up to him, at the same time working away at her ice-coated moccasins. “There hasn’t been time for more than surface-freezing. At the worst the skin will peel off.”

An unearthly silence brooded in the cabin, broken only by Bishop filling a basin from the water-bucket, and by Corliss seeking out his smallest and daintiest house-moccasins and his warmest socks.

Frona, rubbing her feet vigorously, paused and looked up. “Don’t let me chill the festivities just because I’m cold,” she laughed. “Please go on.”

Jake Cornell straightened up and cleared his throat inanely, and the Virgin looked over-dignified; but Blanche came over and took the towel out of Frona’s hands.

“I wet my feet in the same place,” she said, kneeling down and bringing a glow to the frosted feet.

“I suppose you can manage some sort of a fit with them. Here!” Vance tossed over the house-moccasins and woollen wrappings, which the two women, with low laughs and confidential undertones, proceeded to utilize.

“But what in the world were you doing on trail, alone, at this time of night?” Vance asked. In his heart he was marvelling at the coolness and pluck with which she was carrying off the situation.

“I know beforehand that you will censure me,” she replied, helping Blanche arrange the wet gear over the fire. “I was at Mrs. Stanton’s; but first, you must know, Miss Mortimer and I are staying at the Pently’s for a week. Now, to start fresh again. I intended to leave Mrs. Stanton’s before dark; but her baby got into the kerosene, her husband had gone down to Dawson, and — well, we weren’t sure of the baby up to half an hour ago. She wouldn’t hear of me returning alone; but there was nothing to fear; only I had not expected soft ice in such a snap.”

“How’d you fix the kid?” Del asked, intent on keeping the talk going now that it had started.

“Chewing tobacco.” And when the laughter had subsided, she went on:
“There wasn’t any mustard, and it was the best I could think of.
Besides, Matt McCarthy saved my life with it once, down at Dyea when I
had the croup. But you were singing when I came in,” she suggested.
“Do go on.”

Jake Cornell hawed prodigiously. “And I got done.”

“Then you, Del. Sing ‘Flying Cloud’ as you used to coming down the river.”

“Oh, ‘e ‘as!” said the Virgin.

“Then you sing. I am sure you do.”

She smiled into the Virgin’s eyes, and that lady delivered herself of a coster ballad with more art than she was aware. The chill of Frona’s advent was quickly dissipated, and song and toast and merriment went round again. Nor was Frona above touching lips to the jelly glass in fellowship; and she contributed her quota by singing “Annie Laurie” and “Ben Bolt.” Also, but privily, she watched the drink saturating the besotted souls of Cornell and the Virgin. It was an experience, and she was glad of it, though sorry in a way for Corliss, who played the host lamely.

But he had little need of pity. “Any other woman — ” he said to himself a score of times, looking at Frona and trying to picture numerous women he had known by his mother’s teapot, knocking at the door and coming in as Frona had done. Then, again, it was only yesterday that it would have hurt him, Blanche’s rubbing her feet; but now he gloried in Frona’s permitting it, and his heart went out in a more kindly way to Blanche. Perhaps it was the elevation of the liquor, but he seemed to discover new virtues in her rugged face.

Frona had put on her dried moccasins and risen to her feet, and was listening patiently to Jake Cornell, who hiccoughed a last incoherent toast.

“To the — hic — man,” he rumbled, cavernously, “the man — hic — that made — that made — ”

“The blessed country,” volunteered the Virgin.

“True, my dear — hic. To the man that made the blessed country.
To — hic — to Jacob Welse!”

“And a rider!” Blanche cried. “To Jacob Welse’s daughter!”

“Ay! Standing! And bottoms up!”

“Oh! she’s a jolly good fellow,” Del led off, the drink ruddying his cheek.

“I’d like to shake hands with you, just once,” Blanche said in a low voice, while the rest were chorusing.

Frona slipped her mitten, which she had already put on, and the pressure was firm between them.

“No,” she said to Corliss, who had put on his cap and was tying the ear-flaps; “Blanche tells me the Pently’s are only half a mile from here. The trail is straight. I’ll not hear of any one accompanying me.

“No!” This time she spoke so authoritatively that he tossed his cap into the bunk. “Good-night, all!” she called, sweeping the roisterers with a smile.

But Corliss saw her to the door and stepped outside. She glanced up to him. Her hood was pulled only partly up, and her face shone alluringly under the starlight.

“I — Frona . . . I wish — ”

“Don’t be alarmed,” she whispered. “I’ll not tell on you, Vance.”

He saw the mocking glint in her eyes, but tried to go on. “I wish to explain just how — ”

“No need. I understand. But at the same time I must confess I do not particularly admire your taste — ”

“Frona!” The evident pain in his voice reached her.

“Oh, you big foolish!” she laughed. “Don’t I know? Didn’t Blanche tell me she wet her feet?”

Corliss bowed his head. “Truly, Frona, you are the most consistent woman I ever met. Furthermore,” with a straightening of his form and a dominant assertion in his voice, “this is not the last.”

She tried to stop him, but he continued. “I feel, I know that things will turn out differently. To fling your own words back at you, all the factors have not been taken into consideration. As for St. Vincent . . . I’ll have you yet. For that matter, now could not be too soon!”

He flashed out hungry arms to her, but she read quicker than he moved, and, laughing, eluded him and ran lightly down the trail.

“Come back, Frona! Come back!” he called, “I am sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” came the answer. “And I’d be sorry if you were.
Good-night.”

He watched her merge into the shadows, then entered the cabin. He had utterly forgotten the scene within, and at the first glance it startled him. Cariboo Blanche was crying softly to herself. Her eyes were luminous and moist, and, as he looked, a lone tear stole down her cheek. Bishop’s face had gone serious. The Virgin had sprawled head and shoulders on the table, amid overturned mugs and dripping lees, and Cornell was tittubating over her, hiccoughing, and repeating vacuously, “You’re all right, my dear. You’re all right.”

But the Virgin was inconsolable. “O Gawd! Wen I think on wot is, an’ was . . . an’ no fault of mine. No fault of mine, I tell you!” she shrieked with quick fierceness. “‘Ow was I born, I ask? Wot was my old man? A drunk, a chronic. An’ my old woman? Talk of Whitechapel! ‘Oo guv a cent for me, or ‘ow I was dragged up? ‘Oo cared a rap, I say? ‘Oo cared a rap?”

A sudden revulsion came over Corliss. “Hold your tongue!” he ordered.

The Virgin raised her head, her loosened hair streaming about her like a Fury’s. “Wot is she?” she sneered. “Sweet’eart?”

Corliss whirled upon her savagely, face white and voice shaking with passion.

The Virgin cowered down and instinctively threw up her hands to protect her face. “Don’t ‘it me, sir!” she whined. “Don’t ‘it me!”

He was frightened at himself, and waited till he could gather control.
“Now,” he said, calmly, “get into your things and go. All of you.
Clear out. Vamose.”

“You’re no man, you ain’t,” the Virgin snarled, discovering that physical assault was not imminent.

But Corliss herded her particularly to the door, and gave no heed.

“A-turning ladies out!” she sniffed, with a stumble over the threshold;

“No offence,” Jake Cornell muttered, pacifically; “no offence.”

“Good-night. Sorry,” Corliss said to Blanche, with the shadow of a forgiving smile, as she passed out.

“You’re a toff! That’s wot you are, a bloomin’ toff!” the Virgin howled back as he shut the door.

He looked blankly at Del Bishop and surveyed the sodden confusion on the table. Then he walked over and threw himself down on his bunk. Bishop leaned an elbow on the table and pulled at his wheezy pipe. The lamp smoked, flickered, and went out; but still he remained, filling his pipe again and again and striking endless matches.

“Del! Are you awake?” Corliss called at last.

Del grunted.

“I was a cur to turn them out into the snow. I am ashamed.”

“Sure,” was the affirmation.

A long silence followed. Del knocked the ashes out and raised up.

“‘Sleep?” he called.

There was no reply, and he walked to the bunk softly and pulled the blankets over the engineer.

Chapter XXI

“Yes; what does it all mean?” Corliss stretched lazily, and cocked up his feet on the table. He was not especially interested, but Colonel Trethaway persisted in talking seriously.

“That’s it! The very thing — the old and ever young demand which man slaps into the face of the universe.” The colonel searched among the scraps in his note-book. “See,” holding up a soiled slip of typed paper, “I copied this out years ago. Listen. ‘What a monstrous spectre is this man, this disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown up with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming. Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent; savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives. Infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down to debate of right or wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to battle for an egg or die for an idea!’

“And all to what end?” he demanded, hotly, throwing down the paper, “this disease of the agglutinated dust?”

Corliss yawned in reply. He had been on trail all day and was yearning for between-blankets.

“Here am I, Colonel Trethaway, modestly along in years, fairly well preserved, a place in the community, a comfortable bank account, no need to ever exert myself again, yet enduring life bleakly and working ridiculously with a zest worthy of a man half my years. And to what end? I can only eat so much, smoke so much, sleep so much, and this tail-dump of earth men call Alaska is the worst of all possible places in the matter of grub, tobacco, and blankets.”

“But it is the living strenuously which holds you,” Corliss interjected.

“Frona’s philosophy,” the colonel sneered.

“And my philosophy, and yours.”

“And of the agglutinated dust — ”

“Which is quickened with a passion you do not take into account, — the passion of duty, of race, of God!”

“And the compensation?” Trethaway demanded.

“Each breath you draw. The Mayfly lives an hour.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Blood and sweat! Blood and sweat! You cried that after the rough and tumble in the Opera House, and every word of it was receipt in full.”

“Frona’s philosophy.”

“And yours and mine.”

The colonel threw up his shoulders, and after a pause confessed. “You see, try as I will, I can’t make a pessimist out of myself. We are all compensated, and I more fully than most men. What end? I asked, and the answer forthcame: Since the ultimate end is beyond us, then the immediate. More compensation, here and now!”

“Quite hedonistic.”

“And rational. I shall look to it at once. I can buy grub and blankets for a score; I can eat and sleep for only one; ergo, why not for two?”

Corliss took his feet down and sat up. “In other words?”

“I shall get married, and — give the community a shock. Communities like shocks. That’s one of their compensations for being agglutinative.”

“I can’t think of but one woman,” Corliss essayed tentatively, putting out his hand.

Trethaway shook it slowly. “It is she.”

Corliss let go, and misgiving shot into his face. “But St. Vincent?”

“Is your problem, not mine.”

“Then Lucile — ?”

“Certainly not. She played a quixotic little game of her own and botched it beautifully.”

“I — I do not understand.” Corliss brushed his brows in a dazed sort of way.

Trethaway parted his lips in a superior smile. “It is not necessary that you should. The question is, Will you stand up with me?”

“Surely. But what a confoundedly long way around you took. It is not your usual method.”

“Nor was it with her,” the colonel declared, twisting his moustache proudly.

A captain of the North-West Mounted Police, by virtue of his magisterial office, may perform marriages in time of stress as well as execute exemplary justice. So Captain Alexander received a call from Colonel Trethaway, and after he left jotted down an engagement for the next morning. Then the impending groom went to see Frona. Lucile did not make the request, he hastened to explain, but — well, the fact was she did not know any women, and, furthermore, he (the colonel) knew whom Lucile would like to ask, did she dare. So he did it upon his own responsibility. And coming as a surprise, he knew it would be a great joy to her.

Frona was taken aback by the suddenness of it. Only the other day, it was, that Lucile had made a plea to her for St. Vincent, and now it was Colonel Trethaway! True, there had been a false quantity somewhere, but now it seemed doubly false. Could it be, after all, that Lucile was mercenary? These thoughts crowded upon her swiftly, with the colonel anxiously watching her face the while. She knew she must answer quickly, yet was distracted by an involuntary admiration for his bravery. So she followed, perforce, the lead of her heart, and consented.

Yet the whole thing was rather strained when the four of them came together, next day, in Captain Alexander’s private office. There was a gloomy chill about it. Lucile seemed ready to cry, and showed a repressed perturbation quite unexpected of her; while, try as she would, Frona could not call upon her usual sympathy to drive away the coldness which obtruded intangibly between them. This, in turn, had a consequent effect on Vance, and gave a certain distance to his manner which forced him out of touch even with the colonel.

Colonel Trethaway seemed to have thrown twenty years off his erect shoulders, and the discrepancy in the match which Frona had felt vanished as she looked at him. “He has lived the years well,” she thought, and prompted mysteriously, almost with vague apprehension she turned her eyes to Corliss. But if the groom had thrown off twenty years, Vance was not a whit behind. Since their last meeting he had sacrificed his brown moustache to the frost, and his smooth face, smitten with health and vigor, looked uncommonly boyish; and yet, withal, the naked upper lip advertised a stiffness and resolution hitherto concealed. Furthermore, his features portrayed a growth, and his eyes, which had been softly firm, were now firm with the added harshness or hardness which is bred of coping with things and coping quickly, — the stamp of executiveness which is pressed upon men who do, and upon all men who do, whether they drive dogs, buck the sea, or dictate the policies of empires.

When the simple ceremony was over, Frona kissed Lucile; but Lucile felt that there was a subtle something wanting, and her eyes filled with unshed tears. Trethaway, who had felt the aloofness from the start, caught an opportunity with Frona while Captain Alexander and Corliss were being pleasant to Mrs. Trethaway.

“What’s the matter, Frona?” the colonel demanded, bluntly. “I hope you did not come under protest. I am sorry, not for you, because lack of frankness deserves nothing, but for Lucile. It is not fair to her.”

“There has been a lack of frankness throughout.” Her voice trembled. “I tried my best, — I thought I could do better, — but I cannot feign what I do not feel. I am sorry, but I . . . I am disappointed. No, I cannot explain, and to you least of all.”

“Let’s be above-board, Frona. St. Vincent’s concerned?”

She nodded.

“And I can put my hand right on the spot. First place,” he looked to the side and saw Lucile stealing an anxious glance to him, — ”first place, only the other day she gave you a song about St. Vincent. Second place, and therefore, you think her heart’s not in this present proposition; that she doesn’t care a rap for me; in short, that she’s marrying me for reinstatement and spoils. Isn’t that it?”

“And isn’t it enough? Oh, I am disappointed, Colonel Trethaway, grievously, in her, in you, in myself.”

“Don’t be a fool! I like you too well to see you make yourself one. The play’s been too quick, that is all. Your eye lost it. Listen. We’ve kept it quiet, but she’s in with the elect on French Hill. Her claim’s prospected the richest of the outfit. Present indication half a million at least. In her own name, no strings attached. Couldn’t she take that and go anywhere in the world and reinstate herself? And for that matter, you might presume that I am marrying her for spoils. Frona, she cares for me, and in your ear, she’s too good for me. My hope is that the future will make up. But never mind that — haven’t got the time now.

“You consider her affection sudden, eh? Let me tell you we’ve been growing into each other from the time I came into the country, and with our eyes open. St. Vincent? Pshaw! I knew it all the time. She got it into her head that the whole of him wasn’t worth a little finger of you, and she tried to break things up. You’ll never know how she worked with him. I told her she didn’t know the Welse, and she said so, too, after. So there it is; take it or leave it.”

“But what do you think about St. Vincent?”

“What I think is neither here nor there; but I’ll tell you honestly that I back her judgment. But that’s not the point. What are you going to do about it? about her? now?”

She did not answer, but went back to the waiting group. Lucile saw her coming and watched her face.

“He’s been telling you — ?”

“That I am a fool,” Frona answered. “And I think I am.” And with a smile, “I take it on faith that I am, anyway. I — I can’t reason it out just now, but. . .”

Captain Alexander discovered a prenuptial joke just about then, and led the way over to the stove to crack it upon the colonel, and Vance went along to see fair play.

“It’s the first time,” Lucile was saying, “and it means more to me, so much more, than to . . . most women. I am afraid. It is a terrible thing for me to do. But I do love him, I do!” And when the joke had been duly digested and they came back, she was sobbing, “Dear, dear Frona.”

It was just the moment, better than he could have chosen; and capped and mittened, without knocking, Jacob Welse came in.

“The uninvited guest,” was his greeting. “Is it all over? So?” And he swallowed Lucile up in his huge bearskin. “Colonel, your hand, and your pardon for my intruding, and your regrets for not giving me the word. Come, out with them! Hello, Corliss! Captain Alexander, a good day.”

“What have I done?” Frona wailed, received the bear-hug, and managed to press his hand till it almost hurt.

“Had to back the game,” he whispered; and this time his hand did hurt.

“Now, colonel, I don’t know what your plans are, and I don’t care. Call them off. I’ve got a little spread down to the house, and the only honest case of champagne this side of Circle. Of course, you’re coming, Corliss, and — ” His eye roved past Captain Alexander with hardly a pause.

“Of course,” came the answer like a flash, though the Chief Magistrate of the Northwest had had time to canvass the possible results of such unofficial action. “Got a hack?”

Jacob Welse laughed and held up a moccasined foot. “Walking be — chucked!” The captain started impulsively towards the door. “I’ll have the sleds up before you’re ready. Three of them, and bells galore!”

So Trethaway’s forecast was correct, and Dawson vindicated its agglutinativeness by rubbing its eyes when three sleds, with three scarlet-tuniced policemen swinging the whips, tore down its main street; and it rubbed its eyes again when it saw the occupants thereof.

“We shall live quietly,” Lucile told Frona. “The Klondike is not all the world, and the best is yet to come.”

But Jacob Welse said otherwise. “We’ve got to make this thing go,” he said to Captain Alexander, and Captain Alexander said that he was unaccustomed to backing out.

Mrs. Schoville emitted preliminary thunders, marshalled the other women, and became chronically seismic and unsafe.

Lucile went nowhere save to Frona’s. But Jacob Welse, who rarely went anywhere, was often to be found by Colonel Trethaway’s fireside, and not only was he to be found there, but he usually brought somebody along. “Anything on hand this evening?” he was wont to say on casual meeting. “No? Then come along with me.” Sometimes he said it with lamb-like innocence, sometimes with a challenge brooding under his bushy brows, and rarely did he fail to get his man. These men had wives, and thus were the germs of dissolution sown in the ranks of the opposition.

Then, again, at Colonel Trethaway’s there was something to be found besides weak tea and small talk; and the correspondents, engineers, and gentlemen rovers kept the trail well packed in that direction, though it was the Kings, to a man, who first broke the way. So the Trethaway cabin became the centre of things, and, backed commercially, financially, and officially, it could not fail to succeed socially.

The only bad effect of all this was to make the lives of Mrs. Schoville and divers others of her sex more monotonous, and to cause them to lose faith in certain hoary and inconsequent maxims. Furthermore, Captain Alexander, as highest official, was a power in the land, and Jacob Welse was the Company, and there was a superstition extant concerning the unwisdom of being on indifferent terms with the Company. And the time was not long till probably a bare half-dozen remained in outer cold, and they were considered a warped lot, anyway.

Chapter XXII

Quite an exodus took place in Dawson in the spring. Men, because they had made stakes, and other men, because they had made none, bought up the available dogs and rushed out for Dyea over the last ice. Incidentally, it was discovered that Dave Harney possessed most of these dogs.

“Going out?” Jacob Welse asked him on a day when the meridian sun for the first time felt faintly warm to the naked skin.

“Well, I calkilate not. I’m clearin’ three dollars a pair on the moccasins I cornered, to say nothing but saw wood on the boots. Say, Welse, not that my nose is out of joint, but you jest cinched me everlastin’ on sugar, didn’t you?”

Jacob Welse smiled.

“And by the Jimcracky I’m squared! Got any rubber boots?”

“No; went out of stock early in the winter.” Dave snickered slowly.
“And I’m the pertickler party that hocus-pocused ‘em.”

“Not you. I gave special orders to the clerks. They weren’t sold in lots.”

“No more they wa’n’t. One man to the pair and one pair to the man, and a couple of hundred of them; but it was my dust they chucked into the scales an nobody else’s. Drink? Don’t mind. Easy! Put up your sack. Call it rebate, for I kin afford it. . . Goin’ out? Not this year, I guess. Wash-up’s comin’.”

A strike on Henderson the middle of April, which promised to be sensational, drew St. Vincent to Stewart River. And a little later, Jacob Welse, interested on Gallagher Gulch and with an eye riveted on the copper mines of White River, went up into the same district, and with him went Frona, for it was more vacation than business. In the mean time, Corliss and Bishop, who had been on trail for a month or more running over the Mayo and McQuestion Country, rounded up on the left fork of Henderson, where a block of claims waited to be surveyed.

But by May, spring was so far advanced that travel on the creeks became perilous, and on the last of the thawing ice the miners travelled down to the bunch of islands below the mouth of the Stewart, where they went into temporary quarters or crowded the hospitality of those who possessed cabins. Corliss and Bishop located on Split-up Island (so called through the habit parties from the Outside had of dividing there and going several ways), where Tommy McPherson was comfortably situated. A couple of days later, Jacob Welse and Frona arrived from a hazardous trip out of White River, and pitched tent on the high ground at the upper end of Split-up. A few chechaquos, the first of the spring rush, strung in exhausted and went into camp against the breaking of the river. Also, there were still men going out who, barred by the rotten ice, came ashore to build poling-boats and await the break-up or to negotiate with the residents for canoes. Notably among these was the Baron Courbertin.

“Ah! Excruciating! Magnificent! Is it not?”

So Frona first ran across him on the following day. “What?” she asked, giving him her hand.

“You! You!” doffing his cap. “It is a delight!”

“I am sure — ” she began.

“No! No!” He shook his curly mop warmly. “It is not you. See!” He turned to a Peterborough, for which McPherson had just mulcted him of thrice its value. “The canoe! Is it not — not — what you Yankees call — a bute?”

“Oh, the canoe,” she repeated, with a falling inflection of chagrin.

“No! No! Pardon!” He stamped angrily upon the ground. “It is not so. It is not you. It is not the canoe. It is — ah! I have it now! It is your promise. One day, do you not remember, at Madame Schoville’s, we talked of the canoe, and of my ignorance, which was sad, and you promised, you said — ”

“I would give you your first lesson?”

“And is it not delightful? Listen! Do you not hear? The rippling — ah! the rippling! — deep down at the heart of things! Soon will the water run free. Here is the canoe! Here we meet! The first lesson! Delightful! Delightful!”

The next island below Split-up was known as Roubeau’s Island, and was separated from the former by a narrow back-channel. Here, when the bottom had about dropped out of the trail, and with the dogs swimming as often as not, arrived St. Vincent — the last man to travel the winter trail. He went into the cabin of John Borg, a taciturn, gloomy individual, prone to segregate himself from his kind. It was the mischance of St. Vincent’s life that of all cabins he chose Borg’s for an abiding-place against the break-up.

“All right,” the man said, when questioned by him. “Throw your blankets into the corner. Bella’ll clear the litter out of the spare bunk.”

Not till evening did he speak again, and then, “You’re big enough to do your own cooking. When the woman’s done with the stove you can fire away.”

The woman, or Bella, was a comely Indian girl, young, and the prettiest St. Vincent had run across. Instead of the customary greased swarthiness of the race, her skin was clear and of a light-bronze tone, and her features less harsh, more felicitously curved, than those common to the blood.

After supper, Borg, both elbows on table and huge misshapen hands supporting chin and jaws, sat puffing stinking Siwash tobacco and staring straight before him. It would have seemed ruminative, the stare, had his eyes been softer or had he blinked; as it was, his face was set and trance-like.

“Have you been in the country long?” St. Vincent asked, endeavoring to make conversation.

Borg turned his sullen-black eyes upon him, and seemed to look into him and through him and beyond him, and, still regarding him, to have forgotten all about him. It was as though he pondered some great and weighty matter — probably his sins, the correspondent mused nervously, rolling himself a cigarette. When the yellow cube had dissipated itself in curling fragrance, and he was deliberating about rolling a second, Borg suddenly spoke.

“Fifteen years,” he said, and returned to his tremendous cogitation.

Thereat, and for half an hour thereafter, St. Vincent, fascinated, studied his inscrutable countenance. To begin with, it was a massive head, abnormal and top-heavy, and its only excuse for being was the huge bull-throat which supported it. It had been cast in a mould of elemental generousness, and everything about it partook of the asymmetrical crudeness of the elemental. The hair, rank of growth, thick and unkempt, matted itself here and there into curious splotches of gray; and again, grinning at age, twisted itself into curling locks of lustreless black — locks of unusual thickness, like crooked fingers, heavy and solid. The shaggy whiskers, almost bare in places, and in others massing into bunchgrass-like clumps, were plentifully splashed with gray. They rioted monstrously over his face and fell raggedly to his chest, but failed to hide the great hollowed cheeks or the twisted mouth. The latter was thin-lipped and cruel, but cruel only in a passionless sort of way. But the forehead was the anomaly, — the anomaly required to complete the irregularity of the face. For it was a perfect forehead, full and broad, and rising superbly strong to its high dome. It was as the seat and bulwark of some vast intelligence; omniscience might have brooded there.

Bella, washing the dishes and placing them away on the shelf behind Borg’s back, dropped a heavy tin cup. The cabin was very still, and the sharp rattle came without warning. On the instant, with a brute roar, the chair was overturned and Borg was on his feet, eyes blazing and face convulsed. Bella gave an inarticulate, animal-like cry of fear and cowered at his feet. St. Vincent felt his hair bristling, and an uncanny chill, like a jet of cold air, played up and down his spine. Then Borg righted the chair and sank back into his old position, chin on hands and brooding ponderously. Not a word was spoken, and Bella went on unconcernedly with the dishes, while St. Vincent rolled, a shaky cigarette and wondered if it had been a dream.

Jacob Welse laughed when the correspondent told him. “Just his way,” he said; “for his ways are like his looks, — unusual. He’s an unsociable beast. Been in the country more years than he can number acquaintances. Truth to say, I don’t think he has a friend in all Alaska, not even among the Indians, and he’s chummed thick with them off and on. ‘Johnny Sorehead,’ they call him, but it might as well be ‘Johnny Break-um-head,’ for he’s got a quick temper and a rough hand. Temper! Some little misunderstanding popped up between him and the agent at Arctic City. He was in the right, too, — agent’s mistake, — but he tabooed the Company on the spot and lived on straight meat for a year. Then I happened to run across him at Tanana Station, and after due explanations he consented to buy from us again.”

“Got the girl from up the head-waters of the White,” Bill Brown told St. Vincent. “Welse thinks he’s pioneering in that direction, but Borg could give him cards and spades on it and then win out. He’s been over the ground years ago. Yes, strange sort of a chap. Wouldn’t hanker to be bunk-mates with him.”

But St. Vincent did not mind the eccentricities of the man, for he spent most of his time on Split-up Island with Frona and the Baron. One day, however, and innocently, he ran foul of him. Two Swedes, hunting tree-squirrels from the other end of Roubeau Island, had stopped to ask for matches and to yarn a while in the warm sunshine of the clearing. St. Vincent and Borg were accommodating them, the latter for the most part in meditative monosyllables. Just to the rear, by the cabin-door, Bella was washing clothes. The tub was a cumbersome home-made affair, and half-full of water, was more than a fair match for an ordinary woman. The correspondent noticed her struggling with it, and stepped back quickly to her aid.

With the tub between them, they proceeded to carry it to one side in order to dump it where the ground drained from the cabin. St. Vincent slipped in the thawing snow and the soapy water splashed up. Then Bella slipped, and then they both slipped. Bella giggled and laughed, and St. Vincent laughed back. The spring was in the air and in their blood, and it was very good to be alive. Only a wintry heart could deny a smile on such a day. Bella slipped again, tried to recover, slipped with the other foot, and sat down abruptly. Laughing gleefully, both of them, the correspondent caught her hands to pull her to her feet. With a bound and a bellow, Borg was upon them. Their hands were torn apart and St. Vincent thrust heavily backward. He staggered for a couple of yards and almost fell. Then the scene of the cabin was repeated. Bella cowered and grovelled in the muck, and her lord towered wrathfully over her.

“Look you,” he said in stifled gutturals, turning to St. Vincent. “You sleep in my cabin and you cook. That is enough. Let my woman alone.”

Things went on after that as though nothing had happened; St. Vincent gave Bella a wide berth and seemed to have forgotten her existence. But the Swedes went back to their end of the island, laughing at the trivial happening which was destined to be significant.

Chapter XXIII

Spring, smiting with soft, warm hands, had come like a miracle, and now lingered for a dreamy spell before bursting into full-blown summer. The snow had left the bottoms and valleys and nestled only on the north slopes of the ice-scarred ridges. The glacial drip was already in evidence, and every creek in roaring spate. Each day the sun rose earlier and stayed later. It was now chill day by three o’clock and mellow twilight at nine. Soon a golden circle would be drawn around the sky, and deep midnight become bright as high noon. The willows and aspens had long since budded, and were now decking themselves in liveries of fresh young green, and the sap was rising in the pines.

Mother nature had heaved her waking sigh and gone about her brief business. Crickets sang of nights in the stilly cabins, and in the sunshine mosquitoes crept from out hollow logs and snug crevices among the rocks, — big, noisy, harmless fellows, that had procreated the year gone, lain frozen through the winter, and were now rejuvenated to buzz through swift senility to second death. All sorts of creeping, crawling, fluttering life came forth from the warming earth and hastened to mature, reproduce, and cease. Just a breath of balmy air, and then the long cold frost again — ah! they knew it well and lost no time. Sand martins were driving their ancient tunnels into the soft clay banks, and robins singing on the spruce-garbed islands. Overhead the woodpecker knocked insistently, and in the forest depths the partridge boom-boomed and strutted in virile glory.

But in all this nervous haste the Yukon took no part. For many a thousand miles it lay cold, unsmiling, dead. Wild fowl, driving up from the south in wind-jamming wedges, halted, looked vainly for open water, and quested dauntlessly on into the north. From bank to bank stretched the savage ice. Here and there the water burst through and flooded over, but in the chill nights froze solidly as ever. Tradition has it that of old time the Yukon lay unbroken through three long summers, and on the face of it there be traditions less easy of belief.

So summer waited for open water, and the tardy Yukon took to stretching of days and cracking its stiff joints. Now an air-hole ate into the ice, and ate and ate; or a fissure formed, and grew, and failed to freeze again. Then the ice ripped from the shore and uprose bodily a yard. But still the river was loth to loose its grip. It was a slow travail, and man, used to nursing nature with pigmy skill, able to burst waterspouts and harness waterfalls, could avail nothing against the billions of frigid tons which refused to run down the hill to Bering Sea.

On Split-up Island all were ready for the break-up. Waterways have ever been first highways, and the Yukon was the sole highway in all the land. So those bound up-river pitched their poling-boats and shod their poles with iron, and those bound down caulked their scows and barges and shaped spare sweeps with axe and drawing-knife. Jacob Welse loafed and joyed in the utter cessation from work, and Frona joyed with him in that it was good. But Baron Courbertin was in a fever at the delay. His hot blood grew riotous after the long hibernation, and the warm sunshine dazzled him with warmer fancies.

“Oh! Oh! It will never break! Never!” And he stood gazing at the surly ice and raining politely phrased anathema upon it. “It is a conspiracy, poor La Bijou, a conspiracy!” He caressed La Bijou like it were a horse, for so he had christened the glistening Peterborough canoe.

Frona and St. Vincent laughed and preached him the gospel of patience, which he proceeded to tuck away into the deepest abysses of perdition till interrupted by Jacob Welse.

“Look, Courbertin! Over there, south of the bluff. Do you make out anything? Moving?”

“Yes; a dog.”

“It moves too slowly for a dog. Frona, get the glasses.”

Courbertin and St. Vincent sprang after them, but the latter knew their abiding-place and returned triumphant. Jacob Welse put the binoculars to his eyes and gazed steadily across the river. It was a sheer mile from the island to the farther bank, and the sunglare on the ice was a sore task to the vision.

“It is a man.” He passed the glasses to the Baron and strained absently with his naked eyes. “And something is up.”

“He creeps!” the baron exclaimed. “The man creeps, he crawls, on hand and knee! Look! See!” He thrust the glasses tremblingly into Frona’s hands.

Looking across the void of shimmering white, it was difficult to discern a dark object of such size when dimly outlined against an equally dark background of brush and earth. But Frona could make the man out with fair distinctness; and as she grew accustomed to the strain she could distinguish each movement, and especially so when he came to a wind-thrown pine. Sue watched painfully. Twice, after tortuous effort, squirming and twisting, he failed in breasting the big trunk, and on the third attempt, after infinite exertion, he cleared it only to topple helplessly forward and fall on his face in the tangled undergrowth.

“It is a man.” She turned the glasses over to St. Vincent. “And he is crawling feebly. He fell just then this side of the log.”

“Does he move?” Jacob Welse asked, and, on a shake of St. Vincent’s head, brought his rifle from the tent.

He fired six shots skyward in rapid succession. “He moves!” The correspondent followed him closely. “He is crawling to the bank. Ah! . . . No; one moment . . . Yes! He lies on the ground and raises his hat, or something, on a stick. He is waving it.” (Jacob Welse fired six more shots.) “He waves again. Now he has dropped it and lies quite still.”

All three looked inquiringly to Jacob Welse.

He shrugged his shoulders. “How should I know? A white man or an
Indian; starvation most likely, or else he is injured.”

“But he may be dying,” Frona pleaded, as though her father, who had done most things, could do all things.

“We can do nothing.”

“Ah! Terrible! terrible!” The baron wrung his hands. “Before our very eyes, and we can do nothing! No!” he exclaimed, with swift resolution, “it shall not be! I will cross the ice!”

He would have started precipitately down the bank had not Jacob Welse caught his arm.

“Not such a rush, baron. Keep your head.”

“But — ”

“But nothing. Does the man want food, or medicine, or what? Wait a moment. We will try it together.”

“Count me in,” St. Vincent volunteered promptly, and Frona’s eyes sparkled.

While she made up a bundle of food in the tent, the men provided and rigged themselves with sixty or seventy feet of light rope. Jacob Welse and St. Vincent made themselves fast to it at either end, and the baron in the middle. He claimed the food as his portion, and strapped it to his broad shoulders. Frona watched their progress from the bank. The first hundred yards were easy going, but she noticed at once the change when they had passed the limit of the fairly solid shore-ice. Her father led sturdily, feeling ahead and to the side with his staff and changing direction continually.

St. Vincent, at the rear of the extended line, was the first to go through, but he fell with the pole thrust deftly across the opening and resting on the ice. His head did not go under, though the current sucked powerfully, and the two men dragged him out after a sharp pull. Frona saw them consult together for a minute, with much pointing and gesticulating on the part of the baron, and then St. Vincent detach himself and turn shoreward.

“Br-r-r-r,” he shivered, coming up the bank to her. “It’s impossible.”

“But why didn’t they come in?” she asked, a slight note of displeasure manifest in her voice.

“Said they were going to make one more try, first. That Courbertin is hot-headed, you know.”

“And my father just as bull-headed,” she smiled. “But hadn’t you better change? There are spare things in the tent.”

“Oh, no.” He threw himself down beside her. “It’s warm in the sun.”

For an hour they watched the two men, who had become mere specks of black in the distance; for they had managed to gain the middle of the river and at the same time had worked nearly a mile up-stream. Frona followed them closely with the glasses, though often they were lost to sight behind the ice-ridges.

“It was unfair of them,” she heard St. Vincent complain, “to say they were only going to have one more try. Otherwise I should not have turned back. Yet they can’t make it — absolutely impossible.”

“Yes . . . No . . . Yes! They’re turning back,” she announced. “But listen! What is that?”

A hoarse rumble, like distant thunder, rose from the midst of the ice.
She sprang to her feet. “Gregory, the river can’t be breaking!”

“No, no; surely not. See, it is gone.” The noise which had come from above had died away downstream.

“But there! There!”

Another rumble, hoarser and more ominous than before, lifted itself and hushed the robins and the squirrels. When abreast of them, it sounded like a railroad train on a distant trestle. A third rumble, which approached a roar and was of greater duration, began from above and passed by.

“Oh, why don’t they hurry!”

The two specks had stopped, evidently in conversation. She ran the glasses hastily up and down the river. Though another roar had risen, she could make out no commotion. The ice lay still and motionless. The robins resumed their singing, and the squirrels were chattering with spiteful glee.

“Don’t fear, Frona.” St. Vincent put his arm about her protectingly. “If there is any danger, they know it better than we, and they are taking their time.”

“I never saw a big river break up,” she confessed, and resigned herself to the waiting.

The roars rose and fell sporadically, but there were no other signs of disruption, and gradually the two men, with frequent duckings, worked inshore. The water was streaming from them and they were shivering severely as they came up the bank.

“At last!” Frona had both her father’s hands in hers. “I thought you would never come back.”

“There, there. Run and get dinner,” Jacob Welse laughed. “There was no danger.”

“But what was it?”

“Stewart River’s broken and sending its ice down under the Yukon ice.
We could hear the grinding plainly out there.”

“Ah! And it was terrible! terrible!” cried the baron. “And that poor, poor man, we cannot save him!”

“Yes, we can. We’ll have a try with the dogs after dinner. Hurry,
Frona.”

But the dogs were a failure. Jacob Welse picked out the leaders as the more intelligent, and with grub-packs on them drove them out from the bank. They could not grasp what was demanded of them. Whenever they tried to return they were driven back with sticks and clods and imprecations. This only bewildered them, and they retreated out of range, whence they raised their wet, cold paws and whined pitifully to the shore.

“If they could only make it once, they would understand, and then it would go like clock-work. Ah! Would you? Go on! Chook, Miriam! Chook! The thing is to get the first one across.”

Jacob Welse finally succeeded in getting Miriam, lead-dog to Frona’s team, to take the trail left by him and the baron. The dog went on bravely, scrambling over, floundering through, and sometimes swimming; but when she had gained the farthest point reached by them, she sat down helplessly. Later on, she cut back to the shore at a tangent, landing on the deserted island above; and an hour afterwards trotted into camp minus the grub-pack. Then the two dogs, hovering just out of range, compromised matters by devouring each other’s burdens; after which the attempt was given over and they were called in.

During the afternoon the noise increased in frequency, and by nightfall was continuous, but by morning it had ceased utterly. The river had risen eight feet, and in many places was running over its crust. Much crackling and splitting were going on, and fissures leaping into life and multiplying in all directions.

“The under-tow ice has jammed below among the islands,” Jacob Welse explained. “That’s what caused the rise. Then, again, it has jammed at the mouth of the Stewart and is backing up. When that breaks through, it will go down underneath and stick on the lower jam.”

“And then? and then?” The baron exulted.

“La Bijou will swim again.”

As the light grew stronger, they searched for the man across the river.
He had not moved, but in response to their rifle-shots waved feebly.

“Nothing for it till the river breaks, baron, and then a dash with La
Bijou. St. Vincent, you had better bring your blankets up and sleep
here to-night. We’ll need three paddles, and I think we can get
McPherson.”

“No need,” the correspondent hastened to reply. “The back-channel is like adamant, and I’ll be up by daybreak.”

“But I? Why not?” Baron Courbertin demanded. Frona laughed.
“Remember, we haven’t given you your first lessons yet.”

“And there’ll hardly be time to-morrow,” Jacob Welse added. “When she goes, she goes with a rush. St. Vincent, McPherson, and I will have to make the crew, I’m afraid. Sorry, baron. Stay with us another year and you’ll be fit.”

But Baron Courbertin was inconsolable, and sulked for a full half-hour.

Chapter XXIV

“Awake! You dreamers, wake!”

Frona was out of her sleeping-furs at Del Bishop’s first call; but ere she had slipped a skirt on and bare feet into moccasins, her father, beyond the blanket-curtain, had thrown back the flaps of the tent and stumbled out.

The river was up. In the chill gray light she could see the ice rubbing softly against the very crest of the bank; it even topped it in places, and the huge cakes worked inshore many feet. A hundred yards out the white field merged into the dim dawn and the gray sky. Subdued splits and splutters whispered from out the obscureness, and a gentle grinding could be heard.

“When will it go?” she asked of Del.

“Not a bit too lively for us. See there!” He pointed with his toe to the water lapping out from under the ice and creeping greedily towards them. “A foot rise every ten minutes.”

“Danger?” he scoffed. “Not on your life. It’s got to go. Them islands” — waving his hand indefinitely down river — ”can’t hold up under more pressure. If they don’t let go the ice, the ice’ll scour them clean out of the bed of the Yukon. Sure! But I’ve got to be chasin’ back. Lower ground down our way. Fifteen inches on the cabin floor, and McPherson and Corliss hustlin’ perishables into the bunks.”

“Tell McPherson to be ready for a call,” Jacob Welse shouted after him. And then to Frona, “Now’s the time for St. Vincent to cross the back-channel.”

The baron, shivering barefooted, pulled out his watch. “Ten minutes to three,” he chattered.

“Hadn’t you better go back and get your moccasins?” Frona asked.
“There will be time.”

“And miss the magnificence? Hark!”

From nowhere in particular a brisk crackling arose, then died away. The ice was in motion. Slowly, very slowly, it proceeded down stream. There was no commotion, no ear-splitting thunder, no splendid display of force; simply a silent flood of white, an orderly procession of tight-packed ice — packed so closely that not a drop of water was in evidence. It was there, somewhere, down underneath; but it had to be taken on faith. There was a dull hum or muffled grating, but so low in pitch that the ear strained to catch it.

“Ah! Where is the magnificence? It is a fake!”

The baron shook his fists angrily at the river, and Jacob Welse’s thick brows seemed to draw down in order to hide the grim smile in his eyes.

“Ha! ha! I laugh! I snap my fingers! See! I defy!”

As the challenge left his lips. Baron Courbertin stepped upon a cake which rubbed lightly past at his feet. So unexpected was it, that when Jacob Welse reached after him he was gone.

The ice was picking up in momentum, and the hum growing louder and more threatening. Balancing gracefully, like a circus-rider, the Frenchman whirled away along the rim of the bank. Fifty precarious feet he rode, his mount becoming more unstable every instant, and he leaped neatly to the shore. He came back laughing, and received for his pains two or three of the choicest phrases Jacob Welse could select from the essentially masculine portion of his vocabulary.

“And for why?” Courbertin demanded, stung to the quick.

“For why?” Jacob Welse mimicked wrathfully, pointing into the sleek stream sliding by.

A great cake had driven its nose into the bed of the river thirty feet below and was struggling to up-end. All the frigid flood behind crinkled and bent back like so much paper. Then the stalled cake turned completely over and thrust its muddy nose skyward. But the squeeze caught it, while cake mounted cake at its back, and its fifty feet of muck and gouge were hurled into the air. It crashed upon the moving mass beneath, and flying fragments landed at the feet of those that watched. Caught broadside in a chaos of pressures, it crumbled into scattered pieces and disappeared.

“God!” The baron spoke the word reverently and with awe.

Frona caught his hand on the one side and her father’s on the other. The ice was now leaping past in feverish haste. Somewhere below a heavy cake butted into the bank, and the ground swayed under their feet. Another followed it, nearer the surface, and as they sprang back, upreared mightily, and, with a ton or so of soil on its broad back, bowled insolently onward. And yet another, reaching inshore like a huge hand, ripped three careless pines out by the roots and bore them away.

Day had broken, and the driving white gorged the Yukon from shore to shore. What of the pressure of pent water behind, the speed of the flood had become dizzying. Down all its length the bank was being gashed and gouged, and the island was jarring and shaking to its foundations.

“Oh, great! Great!” Frona sprang up and down between the men. “Where is your fake, baron?”

“Ah!” He shook his head. “Ah! I was wrong. I am miserable. But the magnificence! Look!”

He pointed down to the bunch of islands which obstructed the bend. There the mile-wide stream divided and subdivided again, — which was well for water, but not so well for packed ice. The islands drove their wedged heads into the frozen flood and tossed the cakes high into the air. But cake pressed upon cake and shelved out of the water, out and up, sliding and grinding and climbing, and still more cakes from behind, till hillocks and mountains of ice upreared and crashed among the trees.

“A likely place for a jam,” Jacob Welse said. “Get the glasses, Frona.” He gazed through them long and steadily. “It’s growing, spreading out. A cake at the right time and the right place . . .”

“But the river is falling!” Frona cried.

The ice had dropped six feet below the top of the bank, and the Baron
Courbertin marked it with a stick.

“Our man’s still there, but he doesn’t move.”

It was clear day, and the sun was breaking forth in the north-east.
They took turn about with the glasses in gazing across the river.

“Look! Is it not marvellous?” Courbertin pointed to the mark he had made. The water had dropped another foot. “Ah! Too bad! too bad! The jam; there will be none!”

Jacob Welse regarded him gravely.

“Ah! There will be?” he asked, picking up hope.

Frona looked inquiringly at her father.

“Jams are not always nice,” he said, with a short laugh. “It all depends where they take place and where you happen to be.”

“But the river! Look! It falls; I can see it before my eyes.”

“It is not too late.” He swept the island-studded bend and saw the ice-mountains larger and reaching out one to the other. “Go into the tent, Courbertin, and put on the pair of moccasins you’ll find by the stove. Go on. You won’t miss anything. And you, Frona, start the fire and get the coffee under way.”

Half an hour after, though the river had fallen twenty feet, they found the ice still pounding along.

“Now the fun begins. Here, take a squint, you hot-headed Gaul. The left-hand channel, man. Now she takes it!”

Courbertin saw the left-hand channel close, and then a great white barrier heave up and travel from island to island. The ice before them slowed down and came to rest. Then followed the instant rise of the river. Up it came in a swift rush, as though nothing short of the sky could stop it. As when they were first awakened, the cakes rubbed and slid inshore over the crest of the bank, the muddy water creeping in advance and marking the way.

“Mon Dieu! But this is not nice!”

“But magnificent, baron,” Frona teased. “In the meanwhile you are getting your feet wet.”

He retreated out of the water, and in time, for a small avalanche of cakes rattled down upon the place he had just left. The rising water had forced the ice up till it stood breast-high above the island like a wall.

“But it will go down soon when the jam breaks. See, even now it comes up not so swift. It has broken.”

Frona was watching the barrier. “No, it hasn’t,” she denied.

“But the water no longer rises like a race-horse.”

“Nor does it stop rising.”

He was puzzled for the nonce. Then his face brightened. “Ah! I have it! Above, somewhere, there is another jam. Most excellent, is it not?”

She caught his excited hand in hers and detained him. “But, listen.
Suppose the upper jam breaks and the lower jam holds?”

He looked at her steadily till he grasped the full import. His face flushed, and with a quick intake of the breath he straightened up and threw back his head. He made a sweeping gesture as though to include the island. “Then you, and I, the tent, the boats, cabins, trees, everything, and La Bijou! Pouf! and all are gone, to the devil!”

Frona shook her head. “It is too bad.”

“Bad? Pardon. Magnificent!”

“No, no, baron; not that. But that you are not an Anglo-Saxon. The race could well be proud of you.”

“And you, Frona, would you not glorify the French!”

“At it again, eh? Throwing bouquets at yourselves.” Del Bishop grinned at them, and made to depart as quickly as he had come. “But twist yourselves. Some sick men in a cabin down here. Got to get ’em out. You’re needed. And don’t be all day about it,” he shouted over his shoulder as he disappeared among the trees.

The river was still rising, though more slowly, and as soon as they left the high ground they were splashing along ankle-deep in the water. Winding in and out among the trees, they came upon a boat which had been hauled out the previous fall. And three chechaquos, who had managed to get into the country thus far over the ice, had piled themselves into it, also their tent, sleds, and dogs. But the boat was perilously near the ice-gorge, which growled and wrestled and over-topped it a bare dozen feet away.

“Come! Get out of this, you fools!” Jacob Welse shouted as he went past.

Del Bishop had told them to “get the hell out of there” when he ran by, and they could not understand. One of them turned up an unheeding, terrified face. Another lay prone and listless across the thwarts as though bereft of strength; while the third, with the face of a clerk, rocked back and forth and moaned monotonously, “My God! My God!”

The baron stopped long enough to shake him. “Damn!” he cried. “Your legs, man! — not God, but your legs! Ah! ah! — hump yourself! Yes, hump! Get a move on! Twist! Get back from the bank! The woods, the trees, anywhere!”

He tried to drag him out, but the man struck at him savagely and held back.

“How one collects the vernacular,” he confided proudly to Frona as they hurried on. “Twist! It is a strong word, and suitable.”

“You should travel with Del,” she laughed. “He’d increase your stock in no time.”

“You don’t say so.”

“Yes, but I do.”

“Ah! Your idioms. I shall never learn.” And he shook his head despairingly with both his hands.

They came out in a clearing, where a cabin stood close to the river. On its flat earth-roof two sick men, swathed in blankets, were lying, while Bishop, Corliss, and Jacob Welse were splashing about inside the cabin after the clothes-bags and general outfit. The mean depth of the flood was a couple of feet, but the floor of the cabin had been dug out for purposes of warmth, and there the water was to the waist.

“Keep the tobacco dry,” one of the sick men said feebly from the roof.

“Tobacco, hell!” his companion advised. “Look out for the flour. And the sugar,” he added, as an afterthought.

“That’s ‘cause Bill he don’t smoke, miss,” the first man explained.
“But keep an eye on it, won’t you?” he pleaded.

“Here. Now shut up.” Del tossed the canister beside him, and the man clutched it as though it were a sack of nuggets.

“Can I be of any use?” she asked, looking up at them.

“Nope. Scurvy. Nothing’ll do ’em any good but God’s country and raw potatoes.” The pocket-miner regarded her for a moment. “What are you doing here, anyway? Go on back to high ground.”

But with a groan and a crash, the ice-wall bulged in. A fifty-ton cake ended over, splashing them with muddy water, and settled down before the door. A smaller cake drove against the out-jutting corner-logs and the cabin reeled. Courbertin and Jacob Welse were inside.

“After you,” Frona heard the baron, and then her father’s short amused laugh; and the gallant Frenchman came out last, squeezing his way between the cake and the logs.

“Say, Bill, if that there lower jam holds, we’re goners;” the man with the canister called to his partner.

“Ay, that it will,” came the answer. “Below Nulato I saw Bixbie Island swept clean as my old mother’s kitchen floor.”

The men came hastily together about Frona.

“This won’t do. We’ve got to carry them over to your shack, Corliss.” As he spoke, Jacob Welse clambered nimbly up the cabin and gazed down at the big barrier. “Where’s McPherson?” he asked.

“Petrified astride the ridge-pole this last hour.”

Jacob Welse waved his arm. “It’s breaking! There she goes!”

“No kitchen floor this time. Bill, with my respects to your old woman,” called he of the tobacco.

“Ay,” answered the imperturbable Bill.

The whole river seemed to pick itself up and start down the stream. With the increasing motion the ice-wall broke in a hundred places, and from up and down the shore came the rending and crashing of uprooted trees.

Corliss and Bishop laid hold of Bill and started off to McPherson’s, and Jacob Welse and the baron were just sliding his mate over the eaves, when a huge block of ice rammed in and smote the cabin squarely. Frona saw it, and cried a warning, but the tiered logs were overthrown like a house of cards. She saw Courbertin and the sick man hurled clear of the wreckage, and her father go down with it. She sprang to the spot, but he did not rise. She pulled at him to get his mouth above water, but at full stretch his head, barely showed. Then she let go and felt about with her hands till she found his right arm jammed between the logs. These she could not move, but she thrust between them one of the roof-poles which had underlaid the dirt and moss. It was a rude handspike and hardly equal to the work, for when she threw her weight upon the free end it bent and crackled. Heedful of the warning, she came in a couple of feet and swung upon it tentatively and carefully till something gave and Jacob Welse shoved his muddy face into the air.

He drew half a dozen great breaths, and burst out, “But that tastes good!” And then, throwing a quick glance about him, Frona, Del Bishop is a most veracious man.”

“Why?” she asked, perplexedly.

“Because he said you’d do, you know.”

He kissed her, and they both spat the mud from their lips, laughing.
Courbertin floundered round a corner of the wreckage.

“Never was there such a man!” he cried, gleefully. “He is mad, crazy! There is no appeasement. His skull is cracked by the fall, and his tobacco is gone. It is chiefly the tobacco which is lamentable.”

But his skull was not cracked, for it was merely a slit of the scalp of five inches or so.

“You’ll have to wait till the others come back. I can’t carry.” Jacob Welse pointed to his right arm, which hung dead. “Only wrenched,” he explained. “No bones broken.”

The baron struck an extravagant attitude and pointed down at Frona’s foot. “Ah! the water, it is gone, and there, a jewel of the flood, a pearl of price!”

Her well-worn moccasins had gone rotten from the soaking, and a little white toe peeped out at the world of slime.

“Then I am indeed wealthy, baron; for I have nine others.”

“And who shall deny? who shall deny?” he cried, fervently.

“What a ridiculous, foolish, lovable fellow it is!”

“I kiss your hand.” And he knelt gallantly in the muck.

She jerked her hand away, and, burying it with its mate in his curly mop, shook his head back and forth. “What shall I do with him, father?”

Jacob Welse shrugged his shoulders and laughed; and she turned Courbertin’s face up and kissed him on the lips. And Jacob Welse knew that his was the larger share in that manifest joy.

The river, fallen to its winter level, was pounding its ice-glut steadily along. But in falling it had rimmed the shore with a twenty-foot wall of stranded floes. The great blocks were spilled inland among the thrown and standing trees and the slime-coated flowers and grasses like the titanic vomit of some Northland monster. The sun was not idle, and the steaming thaw washed the mud and foulness from the bergs till they blazed like heaped diamonds in the brightness, or shimmered opalescent-blue. Yet they were reared hazardously one on another, and ever and anon flashing towers and rainbow minarets crumbled thunderously into the flood. By one of the gaps so made lay La Bijou, and about it, saving chechaquos and sick men, were grouped the denizens of Split-up.

“Na, na, lad; twa men’ll be a plenty.” Tommy McPherson sought about him with his eyes for corroboration. “Gin ye gat three i’ the canoe ‘twill be ower comfortable.”

“It must be a dash or nothing,” Corliss spoke up. “We need three men,
Tommy, and you know it.”

“Na, na; twa’s a plenty, I’m tellin’ ye.”

“But I’m afraid we’ll have to do with two.”

The Scotch-Canadian evinced his satisfaction openly. “Mair’d be a bother; an’ I doot not ye’ll mak’ it all richt, lad.”

“And you’ll make one of those two, Tommy,” Corliss went on, inexorably.

“Na; there’s ithers a plenty wi’oot coontin’ me.”

“No, there’s not. Courbertin doesn’t know the first thing. St. Vincent evidently cannot cross the slough. Mr. Welse’s arm puts him out of it. So it’s only you and I, Tommy.”

“I’ll not be inqueesitive, but yon son of Anak’s a likely mon. He maun pit oop a guid stroke.” While the Scot did not lose much love for the truculent pocket-miner, he was well aware of his grit, and seized the chance to save himself by shoving the other into the breach.

Del Bishop stepped into the centre of the little circle, paused, and looked every man in the eyes before he spoke.

“Is there a man here’ll say I’m a coward?” he demanded without preface. Again he looked each one in the eyes. “Or is there a man who’ll even hint that I ever did a curlike act?” And yet again he searched the circle. “Well and good. I hate the water, but I’ve never been afraid of it. I don’t know how to swim, yet I’ve been over the side more times than it’s good to remember. I can’t pull an oar without batting my back on the bottom of the boat. As for steering — well, authorities say there’s thirty-two points to the compass, but there’s at least thirty more when I get started. And as sure as God made little apples, I don’t know my elbow from my knee about a paddle. I’ve capsized damn near every canoe I ever set foot in. I’ve gone right through the bottom of two. I’ve turned turtle in the Canyon and been pulled out below the White Horse. I can only keep stroke with one man, and that man’s yours truly. But, gentlemen, if the call comes, I’ll take my place in La Bijou and take her to hell if she don’t turn over on the way.”

Baron Courbertin threw his arms about him, crying, “As sure as God made little apples, thou art a man!”

Tommy’s face was white, and he sought refuge in speech from the silence which settled down. “I’ll deny I lift a guid paddle, nor that my wind is fair; but gin ye gang a tithe the way the next jam’ll be on us. For my pairt I conseeder it ay rash. Bide a wee till the river’s clear, say I.”

“It’s no go, Tommy,” Jacob Welse admonished. “You can’t cash excuses here.”

“But, mon! It doesna need discreemeenation — ”

“That’ll do!” from Corliss. “You’re coming.”

“I’ll naething o’ the sort. I’ll — ”

“Shut up!” Del had come into the world with lungs of leather and larynx of brass, and when he thus jerked out the stops the Scotsman quailed and shrank down.

“Oyez! Oyez!” In contrast to Del’s siren tones, Frona’s were purest silver as they rippled down-island through the trees. “Oyez! Oyez! Open water! Open water! And wait a minute. I’ll be with you.”

Three miles up-stream, where the Yukon curved grandly in from the west, a bit of water appeared. It seemed too marvellous for belief, after the granite winter; but McPherson, untouched of imagination, began a crafty retreat.

“Bide a wee, bide a wee,” he protested, when collared by the pocket-miner. “A’ve forgot my pipe.”

“Then you’ll bide with us, Tommy,” Del sneered. “And I’d let you have a draw of mine if your own wasn’t sticking out of your pocket.”

“’Twas the baccy I’d in mind.”

“Then dig into this.” He shoved his pouch into McPherson’s shaking hands. “You’d better shed your coat. Here! I’ll help you. And private, Tommy, if you don’t act the man, I won’t do a thing to you. Sure.”

Corliss had stripped his heavy flannel shirt for freedom; and it was plain, when Frona joined them, that she also had been shedding. Jacket and skirt were gone, and her underskirt of dark cloth ceased midway below the knee.

“You’ll do,” Del commended.

Jacob Welse looked at her anxiously, and went over to where she was testing the grips of the several paddles. “You’re not — ?” he began.

She nodded.

“You’re a guid girl,” McPherson broke in. “Now, a’ve a wumman to home, to say naething o’ three bairns — ”

“All ready!” Corliss lifted the bow of La Bijou and looked back.

The turbid water lashed by on the heels of the ice-run. Courbertin took the stern in the steep descent, and Del marshalled Tommy’s reluctant rear. A flat floe, dipping into the water at a slight incline, served as the embarking-stage.

“Into the bow with you, Tommy!”

The Scotsman groaned, felt Bishop breathe heavily at his back, and obeyed; Frona meeting his weight by slipping into the stern.

“I can steer,” she assured Corliss, who for the first time was aware that she was coming.

He glanced up to Jacob Welse, as though for consent, and received it.

“Hit ‘er up! Hit ‘er up!” Del urged impatiently. “You’re burnin’ daylight!”

Chapter XXV

La Bijou was a perfect expression of all that was dainty and delicate in the boat-builder’s soul. Light as an egg-shell, and as fragile, her three-eighths-inch skin offered no protection from a driving chunk of ice as small as a man’s head. Nor, though the water was open, did she find a clear way, for the river was full of scattered floes which had crumbled down from the rim-ice. And here, at once, through skilful handling, Corliss took to himself confidence in Frona.

It was a great picture: the river rushing blackly between its crystalline walls; beyond, the green woods stretching upward to touch the cloud-flecked summer sky; and over all, like a furnace blast, the hot sun beating down. A great picture, but somehow Corliss’s mind turned to his mother and her perennial tea, the soft carpets, the prim New England maid-servants, the canaries singing in the wide windows, and he wondered if she could understand. And when he thought of the woman behind him, and felt the dip and lift, dip and lift, of her paddle, his mother’s women came back to him, one by one, and passed in long review, — pale, glimmering ghosts, he thought, caricatures of the stock which had replenished the earth, and which would continue to replenish the earth.

La Bijou skirted a pivoting floe, darted into a nipping channel, and shot out into the open with the walls grinding together behind. Tommy groaned.

“Well done!” Corliss encouraged.

“The fule wumman!” came the backward snarl. “Why couldna she bide a bit?”

Frona caught his words and flung a laugh defiantly. Vance darted a glance over his shoulder to her, and her smile was witchery. Her cap, perched precariously, was sliding off, while her flying hair, aglint in the sunshine, framed her face as he had seen it framed on the Dyea Trail.

“How I should like to sing, if it weren’t for saving one’s breath. Say the ‘Song of the Sword,’ or the ‘Anchor Chanty.’“

“Or the ‘First Chanty,’“ Corliss answered. “‘Mine was the woman, darkling I found her,’“ he hummed, significantly.

She flashed her paddle into the water on the opposite side in order to go wide of a jagged cake, and seemed not to hear. “I could go on this way forever.”

“And I,” Corliss affirmed, warmly.

But she refused to take notice, saying, instead, “Vance, do you know
I’m glad we’re friends?”

“No fault of mine we’re not more.”

“You’re losing your stroke, sir,” she reprimanded; and he bent silently to the work.

La Bijou was driving against the current at an angle of forty-five degrees, and her resultant course was a line at right angles to the river. Thus, she would tap the western bank directly opposite the starting-point, where she could work up-stream in the slacker flood. But a mile of indented shore, and then a hundred yards of bluffs rising precipitously from out a stiff current would still lie between them and the man to be rescued.

“Now let us ease up,” Corliss advised, as they slipped into an eddy and drifted with the back-tide under the great wall of rim-ice.

“Who would think it mid-May?” She glanced up at the carelessly poised cakes. “Does it seem real to you, Vance?”

He shook his head.

“Nor to me. I know that I, Frona, in the flesh, am here, in a Peterborough, paddling for dear life with two men; year of our Lord eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, Alaska, Yukon River; this is water, that is ice; my arms are tired, my heart up a few beats, and I am sweating, — and yet it seems all a dream. Just think! A year ago I was in Paris!” She drew a deep breath and looked out over the water to the further shore, where Jacob Welse’s tent, like a snowy handkerchief, sprawled against the deep green of the forest. “I do not believe there is such a place,” she added. “There is no Paris.”

“And I was in London a twelvemonth past,” Corliss meditated. “But I have undergone a new incarnation. London? There is no London now. It is impossible. How could there be so many people in the world? This is the world, and we know of fact that there are very few people in it, else there could not be so much ice and sea and sky. Tommy, here, I know, thinks fondly of a place he calls Toronto. He mistakes. It exists only in his mind, — a memory of a former life he knew. Of course, he does not think so. That is but natural; for he is no philosopher, nor does he bother — ”

“Wheest, will ye!” Tommy fiercely whispered. “Your gabble’ll bring it doon aboot oor heads.”

Life is brief in the Northland, and fulfilment ever clutters the heels of prophecy. A premonitory tremor sighed down the air, and the rainbow wall swayed above them. The three paddles gripped the water with common accord. La Bijou leaped out from under. Broadside after broadside flared and crashed, and a thousand frigid tons thundered down behind them. The displaced water surged outward in a foamy, upstanding circle, and La Bijou, striving wildly to rise, ducked through the stiff overhang of the crest and wallowed, half-full, in the trough.

“Dinna I tell ye, ye gabbling fules!”

“Sit still, and bail!” Corliss checked him sharply. “Or you’ll not have the comfort of telling us anything.”

He shook his head at Frona, and she winked back; then they both chuckled, much like children over an escapade which looks disastrous but turns out well.

Creeping timidly under the shadow of the impending avalanches, La Bijou slipped noiselessly up the last eddy. A corner of the bluff rose savagely from the river — a monstrous mass of naked rock, scarred and battered of the centuries; hating the river that gnawed it ever; hating the rain that graved its grim face with unsightly seams; hating the sun that refused to mate with it, whereof green life might come forth and hide its hideousness. The whole force of the river hurled in against it, waged furious war along its battlements, and caromed off into mid-stream again. Down all its length the stiff waves stood in serried rows, and its crevices and water-worn caverns were a-bellow with unseen strife.

“Now! Bend to it! Your best!”

It was the last order Corliss could give, for in the din they were about to enter a man’s voice were like a cricket’s chirp amid the growling of an earthquake. La Bijou sprang forward, cleared the eddy with a bound, and plunged into the thick. Dip and lift, dip and lift, the paddles worked with rhythmic strength. The water rippled and tore, and pulled all ways at once; and the fragile shell, unable to go all ways at once, shook and quivered with the shock of resistance. It veered nervously to the right and left, but Frona held it with a hand of steel. A yard away a fissure in the rock grinned at them. La Bijou leaped and shot ahead, and the water, slipping away underneath, kept her always in one place. Now they surged out from the fissure, now in; ahead for half a yard, then back again; and the fissure mocked their toil.

Five minutes, each of which sounded a separate eternity, and the fissure was past. Ten minutes, and it was a hundred feet astern. Dip and lift, dip and lift, till sky and earth and river were blotted out, and consciousness dwindled to a thin line, — a streak of foam, fringed on the one hand with sneering rock, on the other with snarling water. That thin line summed up all. Somewhere below was the beginning of things; somewhere above, beyond the roar and traffic, was the end of things; and for that end they strove.

And still Frona held the egg-shell with a hand of steel. What they gained they held, and fought for more, inch by inch, dip and lift; and all would have been well but for the flutter of Tommy’s soul. A cake of ice, sucked beneath by the current, rose under his paddle with a flurry of foam, turned over its toothed edge, and was dragged back into the depths. And in that sight he saw himself, hair streaming upward and drowned hands clutching emptiness, going feet first, down and down. He stared, wide-eyed, at the portent, and his poised paddle refused to strike. On the instant the fissure grinned in their faces, and the next they were below the bluffs, drifting gently in the eddy.

Frona lay, head thrown back, sobbing at the sun; amidships Corliss sprawled panting; and forward, choking and gasping and nerveless, the Scotsman drooped his head upon his knees. La Bijou rubbed softly against the rim-ice and came to rest. The rainbow-wall hung above like a fairy pile; the sun, flung backward from innumerable facets, clothed it in jewelled splendor. Silvery streams tinkled down its crystal slopes; and in its clear depths seemed to unfold, veil on veil, the secrets of life and death and mortal striving, — vistas of pale-shimmering azure opening like dream-visions, and promising, down there in the great cool heart, infinite rest, infinite cessation and rest.

The topmost tower, delicately massive, a score of feet above them, swayed to and fro, gently, like the ripple of wheat in light summer airs. But Corliss gazed at it unheeding. Just to lie there, on the marge of the mystery, just to lie there and drink the air in great gulps, and do nothing! — he asked no more. A dervish, whirling on heel till all things blur, may grasp the essence of the universe and prove the Godhead indivisible; and so a man, plying a paddle, and plying and plying, may shake off his limitations and rise above time and space. And so Corliss.

But gradually his blood ceased its mad pounding, and the air was no longer nectar-sweet, and a sense of things real and pressing came back to him.

“We’ve got to get out of this,” he said. His voice sounded like a man’s whose throat has been scorched by many and long potations. It frightened him, but he limply lifted a shaking paddle and shoved off.

“Yes; let us start, by all means,” Frona said in a dim voice, which seemed to come to him from a far distance.

Tommy lifted his head and gazed about. “A doot we’ll juist hae to gie it oop.”

“Bend to it!”

“Ye’ll no try it anither?”

“Bend to it!” Corliss repeated.

“Till your heart bursts, Tommy,” Frona added.

Once again they fought up the thin line, and all the world vanished, save the streak of foam, and the snarling water, and the grinning fissure. But they passed it, inch by inch, and the broad bend welcomed them from above, and only a rocky buttress of implacable hate, around whose base howled the tides of an equal hate, stood between. Then La Bijou leaped and throbbed and shook again, and the current slid out from under, and they remained ever in one place. Dip and lift, dip and lift, through an infinity of time and torture and travail, till even the line dimmed and faded and the struggle lost its meaning. Their souls became merged in the rhythm of the toil. Ever lifting, ever falling, they seemed to have become great pendulums of time. And before and behind glimmered the eternities, and between the eternities, ever lifting, ever falling, they pulsed in vast rhythmical movement. They were no longer humans, but rhythms. They surged in till their paddles touched the bitter rock, but they did not know; surged out, where chance piloted them unscathed through the lashing ice, but they did not see. Nor did they feel the shock of the smitten waves, nor the driving spray that cooled their faces. . .

La Bijou veered out into the stream, and their paddles, flashing mechanically in the sunshine, held her to the return angle across the river. As time and matter came back to them, and Split-up Island dawned upon their eyes like the foreshore of a new world, they settled down to the long easy stroke wherein breath and strength may be recovered.

“A third attempt would have been useless,” Corliss said, in a dry, cracked whisper.

And Frona answered, “Yes; our hearts would have surely broken.”

Life, and the pleasant camp-fire, and the quiet rest in the noonday shade, came back to Tommy as the shore drew near, and more than all, blessed Toronto, its houses that never moved, and its jostling streets. Each time his head sank forward and he reached out and clutched the water with his paddle, the streets enlarged, as though gazing through a telescope and adjusting to a nearer focus. And each time the paddle drove clear and his head was raised, the island bounded forward. His head sank, and the streets were of the size of life; it raised, and Jacob Welse and the two men stood on the bank three lengths away.

“Dinna I tell ye!” he shouted to them, triumphantly.

But Frona jerked the canoe parallel with the bank, and he found himself gazing at the long up-stream stretch. He arrested a stroke midway, and his paddle clattered in the bottom.

“Pick it up!” Corliss’s voice was sharp and relentless.

“I’ll do naething o’ the kind.” He turned a rebellious face on his tormentor, and ground his teeth in anger and disappointment.

The canoe was drifting down with the current, and Frona merely held it in place. Corliss crawled forward on his knees.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Tommy,” he said in a low, tense voice, “so . . . well, just pick it up, that’s a good fellow.”

“I’ll no.”

“Then I shall kill you,” Corliss went on, in the same calm, passionless way, at the same time drawing his hunting-knife from its sheath.

“And if I dinna?” the Scotsman queried stoutly, though cowering away.

Corliss pressed gently with the knife. The point of the steel entered Tommy’s back just where the heart should be, passed slowly through the shirt, and bit into the skin. Nor did it stop there; neither did it quicken, but just as slowly held on its way. He shrank back, quivering.

“There! there! man! Pit it oop!” he shrieked. “I maun gie in!”

Frona’s face was quite pale, but her eyes were hard, brilliantly hard, and she nodded approval.

“We’re going to try this side, and shoot across from above,” she called to her father. “What? I can’t hear. Tommy? Oh, his heart’s weak. Nothing serious.” She saluted with her paddle. “We’ll be back in no time, father mine. In no time.”

Stewart River was wide open, and they ascended it a quarter of a mile before they shot its mouth and continued up the Yukon. But when they were well abreast of the man on the opposite bank a new obstacle faced them. A mile above, a wreck of an island clung desperately to the river bed. Its tail dwindled to a sand-spit which bisected the river as far down as the impassable bluffs. Further, a few hundred thousand tons of ice had grounded upon the spit and upreared a glittering ridge.

“We’ll have to portage,” Corliss said, as Frona turned the canoe from the bank.

La Bijou darted across the narrower channel to the sand-spit and slipped up a little ice ravine, where the walls were less precipitous. They landed on an out-jutting cake, which, without support, overhung the water for sheer thirty feet. How far its other end could be buried in the mass was matter for conjecture. They climbed to the summit, dragging the canoe after them, and looked out over the dazzle. Floe was piled on floe in titanic confusion. Huge blocks topped and overtopped one another, only to serve as pedestals for great white masses, which blazed and scintillated in the sun like monstrous jewels.

“A bonny place for a bit walk,” Tommy sneered, “wi’ the next jam fair to come ony time.” He sat down resolutely. “No, thank ye kindly, I’ll no try it.”

Frona and Corliss clambered on, the canoe between them.

“The Persians lashed their slaves into battle,” she remarked, looking back. “I never understood before. Hadn’t you better go back after him?”

Corliss kicked him up, whimpering, and forced him to go on in advance. The canoe was an affair of little weight, but its bulk, on the steep rises and sharp turns, taxed their strength. The sun burned down upon them. Its white glare hurt their eyes, the sweat oozed out from every pore, and they panted for breath.

“Oh, Vance, do you know . . .”

“What?” He swept the perspiration from his forehead and flung it from him with a quick flirt of the hand.

“I wish I had eaten more breakfast.”

He grunted sympathetically. They had reached the midmost ridge and could see the open river, and beyond, quite clearly, the man and his signal of distress. Below, pastoral in its green quiet, lay Split-up Island. They looked up to the broad bend of the Yukon, smiling lazily, as though it were not capable at any moment of spewing forth a flood of death. At their feet the ice sloped down into a miniature gorge, across which the sun cast a broad shadow.

“Go on, Tommy,” Frona bade. “We’re half-way over, and there’s water down there.”

“It’s water ye’d be thinkin’ on, is it?” he snarled, “and you a-leadin’ a buddie to his death!”

“I fear you have done some great sin, Tommy,” she said, with a reproving shake of the head, “or else you would not be so afraid of death.” She sighed and picked up her end of the canoe. “Well, I suppose it is natural. You do not know how to die — ”

“No more do I want to die,” he broke in fiercely.

“But there come times for all men to die, — times when to die is the only thing to do. Perhaps this is such a time.”

Tommy slid carefully over a glistening ledge and dropped his height to a broad foothold. “It’s a’ vera guid,” he grinned up; “but dinna ye think a’ve suffeecient discreemeenation to judge for mysel’? Why should I no sing my ain sang?”

“Because you do not know how. The strong have ever pitched the key for such as you. It is they that have taught your kind when and how to die, and led you to die, and lashed you to die.”

“Ye pit it fair,” he rejoined. “And ye do it weel. It doesna behoove me to complain, sic a michty fine job ye’re makin’ on it.”

“You are doing well,” Corliss chuckled, as Tommy dropped out of sight and landed into the bed of the gorge. “The cantankerous brute! he’d argue on the trail to Judgment.”

“Where did you learn to paddle?” she asked.

“College — exercise,” he answered, shortly. “But isn’t that fine?
Look!”

The melting ice had formed a pool in the bottom of the gorge. Frona stretched out full length, and dipped her hot mouth in its coolness. And lying as she did, the soles of her dilapidated moccasins, or rather the soles of her feet (for moccasins and stockings had gone in shreds), were turned upward. They were very white, and from contact with the ice were bruised and cut. Here and there the blood oozed out, and from one of the toes it streamed steadily.

“So wee, and pretty, and salt-like,” Tommy gibed. “One wouldna think they could lead a strong man to hell.”

“By the way you grumble, they’re leading you fast enough,” Corliss answered angrily.

“Forty mile an hour,” Tommy retorted, as he walked away, gloating over having the last word.

“One moment. You’ve two shirts. Lend me one.”

The Scotsman’s face lighted inquisitively, till he comprehended. Then he shook his head and started on again.

Frona scrambled to her feet. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Sit down.”

“But what is the matter?”

Corliss put his hands on her shoulders and pressed her back. “Your feet. You can’t go on in such shape. They’re in ribbons. See!” He brushed the sole of one of them and held up a blood-dripping palm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Oh, they didn’t bother — much.”

“Give me one of your skirts,” he demanded.

“I . . .” She faltered. “I only have one.”

He looked about him. Tommy had disappeared among the ice-floes.

“We must be getting on,” Frona said, attempting to rise.

But he held her back. “Not another step till I fix you. Here goes, so shut your eyes.”

She obeyed, and when she opened them he was naked to the waist, and his undershirt, torn in strips, was being bound about her feet.

“You were in the rear, and I did not know — ”

“Don’t apologize, pray,” she interrupted. “I could have spoken.”

“I’m not; I’m reproaching you. Now, the other one. Put it up!”

The nearness to her bred a madness, and he touched his lips lightly to the same white little toe that had won the Baron Courbertin a kiss.

Though she did not draw back, her face flushed, and she thrilled as she had thrilled once before in her life. “You take advantage of your own goodness,” she rebuked him.

“Then I will doubly advantage myself.”

“Please don’t,” she begged.

“And why not? It is a custom of the sea to broach the spirits as the ship prepares to sink. And since this is a sort of a forlorn hope, you know, why not?”

“But . . .”

“But what, Miss Prim?”

“Oh! Of all things, you know I do not deserve that! If there were nobody else to be considered, why, under the circumstances . . .”

He drew the last knot tight and dropped her foot. “Damn St. Vincent, anyway! Come on!”

“So would I, were I you,” she laughed, taking up her end of the canoe. “But how you have changed, Vance. You are not the same man I met on the Dyea Trail. You hadn’t learned to swear, then, among other things.”

“No, I’m not the same; for which I thank God and you. Only I think I am honester than you. I always live up to my philosophy.”

“Now confess that’s unfair. You ask too much under the circumstances — ”

“Only a little toe.”

“Or else, I suppose, you just care for me in a kind, big-brotherly way.
In which case, if you really wish it, you may — ”

“Do keep quiet,” he broke in, roughly, “or I’ll be making a gorgeous fool of myself.”

“Kiss all my toes,” she finished.

He grunted, but did not deign a reply. The work quickly took their breath, and they went on in silence till they descended the last steep to where McPherson waited by the open river.

“Del hates St. Vincent,” she said boldly. “Why?”

“Yes, it seems that way.” He glanced back at her curiously. “And wherever he goes, Del lugs an old Russian book, which he can’t read but which he nevertheless regards, in some sort of way, as St. Vincent’s Nemesis. And do you know, Frona, he has such faith in it that I can’t help catching a little myself. I don’t know whether you’ll come to me, or whether I’ll go to you, but — ”

She dropped her end of the canoe and broke out in laughter. He was annoyed, and a hurt spread of blood ruddied his face.

“If I have — ” he began.

“Stupid!” she laughed. “Don’t be silly! And above all don’t be dignified. It doesn’t exactly become you at the present moment, — your hair all tangled, a murderous knife in your belt, and naked to the waist like a pirate stripped for battle. Be fierce, frown, swear, anything, but please don’t be dignified. I do wish I had my camera. In after years I could say: ‘This, my friends, is Corliss, the great Arctic explorer, just as he looked at the conclusion of his world-famous trip Through Darkest Alaska.’“

He pointed an ominous finger at her and said sternly, “Where is your skirt?”

She involuntarily looked down. But its tatterdemalion presence relieved her, and her face jerked up scarlet.

“You should be ashamed!”

“Please, please do not be dignified,” he laughed. “Very true, it doesn’t exactly become you at the present moment. Now, if I had my camera — ”

“Do be quiet and go on,” she said. “Tommy is waiting. I hope the sun takes the skin all off your back,” she panted vindictively, as they slid the canoe down the last shelf and dropped it into the water.

Ten minutes later they climbed the ice-wall, and on and up the bank, which was partly a hillside, to where the signal of distress still fluttered. Beneath it, on the ground, lay stretched the man. He lay very quietly, and the fear that they were too late was upon them, when he moved his head slightly and moaned. His rough clothes were in rags, and the black, bruised flesh of his feet showed through the remnants of his moccasins. His body was thin and gaunt, without flesh-pads or muscles, while the bones seemed ready to break through the tight-stretched skin. As Corliss felt his pulse, his eyes fluttered open and stared glassily. Frona shuddered.

“Man, it’s fair gruesome,” McPherson muttered, running his hand up a shrunken arm.

“You go on to the canoe, Frona,” Corliss said. “Tommy and I will carry him down.”

But her lips set firmly. Though the descent was made easier by her aid, the man was well shaken by the time they laid him in the bottom of the canoe, — so well shaken that some last shreds of consciousness were aroused. He opened his eyes and whispered hoarsely, “Jacob Welse . . . despatches . . . from the Outside.” He plucked feebly at his open shirt, and across his emaciated chest they saw the leather strap, to which, doubtless, the despatch-pouch was slung.

At either end of the canoe there was room to spare, but amidships Corliss was forced to paddle with the man between his knees. La Bijou swung out blithely from the bank. It was down-stream at last, and there was little need for exertion.

Vance’s arms and shoulders and back, a bright scarlet, caught Frona’s attention. “My hopes are realized,” she exulted, reaching out and softly stroking a burning arm. “We shall have to put cold cream on it when we get back.”

“Go ahead,” he encouraged. “That feels awfully good.”

She splashed his hot back with a handful of the ice-cold water from over-side. He caught his breath with a gasp, and shivered. Tommy turned about to look at them.

“It’s a guid deed we’ll ‘a doon this day,” he remarked, pleasantly.
“To gie a hand in distress is guid i’ the sight of God.”

“Who’s afeared ?” Frona laughed.

“Weel,” he deliberated, “I was a bit fashed, no doot, but — ”

His utterance ceased, and he seemed suddenly to petrify. His eyes fixed themselves in a terrible stare over Frona’s shoulder. And then, slowly and dreamily, with the solemnity fitting an invocation of Deity, murmured, “Guid Gawd Almichty!”

They whirled their heads about. A wall of ice was sweeping round the bend, and even as they looked the right-hand flank, unable to compass the curve, struck the further shore and flung up a ridge of heaving mountains.

“Guid Gawd! Guid Gawd! Like rats i’ the trap!” Tommy jabbed his paddle futilely in the water.

“Get the stroke!” Corliss hissed in his ear, and La Bijou sprang away.

Frona steered straight across the current, at almost right angles, for Split-up; but when the sandspit, over which they had portaged, crashed at the impact of a million tons, Corliss glanced at her anxiously. She smiled and shook her head, at the same time slacking off the course.

“We can’t make it,” she whispered, looking back at the ice a couple of hundred feet away. “Our only chance is to run before it and work in slowly.”

She cherished every inward inch jealously, holding the canoe up as sharply as she dared and at the same time maintaining a constant distance ahead of the ice-rim.

“I canna stand the pace,” Tommy whimpered once; but the silence of
Corliss and Frona seemed ominous, and he kept his paddle going.

At the very fore of the ice was a floe five or six feet thick and a couple of acres in extent. Reaching out in advance of the pack, it clove through the water till on either side there formed a bore like that of a quick flood-tide in an inland passage. Tommy caught sight of it, and would have collapsed had not Corliss prodded him, between strokes, with the point of his paddle.

“We can keep ahead,” Frona panted; “but we must get time to make the landing?”

“When the chance comes, drive her in, bow on,” Corliss counselled; “and when she strikes, jump and run for it.”

“Climb, rather. I’m glad my skirt is short.”

Repulsed by the bluffs of the left bank, the ice was forced towards the right. The big floe, in advance, drove in upon the precise point of Split-up Island.

“If you look back, I’ll brain you with the paddle,” Corliss threatened.

“Ay,” Tommy groaned.

But Corliss looked back, and so did Frona. The great berg struck the land with an earthquake shock. For fifty feet the soft island was demolished. A score of pines swayed frantically and went down, and where they went down rose up a mountain of ice, which rose, and fell, and rose again. Below, and but a few feet away, Del Bishop ran out to the bank, and above the roar they could hear faintly his “Hit ‘er up! Hit ‘er up!” Then the ice-rim wrinkled up and he sprang back to escape it.

“The first opening,” Corliss gasped.

Frona’s lips spread apart; she tried to speak but failed, then nodded her head that she had heard. They swung along in rapid rhythm under the rainbow-wall, looking for a place where it might be quickly cleared. And down all the length of Split-up Island they raced vainly, the shore crashing behind them as they fled.

As they darted across the mouth of the back-channel to Roubeau Island they found themselves heading directly for an opening in the rim-ice. La Bijou drove into it full tilt, and went half her length out of water on a shelving cake. The three leaped together, but while the two of them gripped the canoe to run it up, Tommy, in the lead, strove only to save himself. And he would have succeeded had he not slipped and fallen midway in the climb. He half arose, slipped, and fell again. Corliss, hauling on the bow of the canoe, trampled over him. He reached up and clutched the gunwale. They did not have the strength, and this clog brought them at once to a standstill. Corliss looked back and yelled for him to leave go, but he only turned upward a piteous face, like that of a drowning man, and clutched more tightly. Behind them the ice was thundering. The first flurry of coming destruction was upon them. They endeavored desperately to drag up the canoe, but the added burden was too much, and they fell on their knees. The sick man sat up suddenly and laughed wildly. “Blood of my soul!” he ejaculated, and laughed again.

Roubeau Island swayed to the first shock, and the ice was rocking under their feet. Frona seized a paddle and smashed the Scotsman’s knuckles; and the instant he loosed his grip, Corliss carried the canoe up in a mad rush, Frona clinging on and helping from behind. The rainbow-wall curled up like a scroll, and in the convolutions of the scroll, like a bee in the many folds of a magnificent orchid, Tommy disappeared.

They fell, breathless, on the earth. But a monstrous cake shoved up from the jam and balanced above them. Frona tried to struggle to her feet, but sank on her knees; and it remained for Corliss to snatch her and the canoe out from underneath. Again they fell, this time under the trees, the sun sifting down upon them through the green pine needles, the robins singing overhead, and a colony of crickets chirping in the warmth.

Chapter XXVI

Frona woke, slowly, as though from a long dream. She was lying where she had fallen, across Corliss’s legs, while he, on his back, faced the hot sun without concern. She crawled up to him. He was breathing regularly, with closed eyes, which opened to meet hers. He smiled, and she sank down again. Then he rolled over on his side, and they looked at each other.

“Vance.”

“Yes.”

She reached out her hand; his closed upon it, and their eyelids fluttered and drooped down. The river still rumbled en, somewhere in the infinite distance, but it came to them like the murmur of a world forgotten. A soft languor encompassed them. The golden sunshine dripped down upon them through the living green, and all the life of the warm earth seemed singing. And quiet was very good. Fifteen long minutes they drowsed, and woke again.

Frona sat up. “I — I was afraid,” she said.

“Not you.”

“Afraid that I might be afraid,” she amended, fumbling with her hair.

“Leave it down. The day merits it.”

She complied, with a toss of the head which circled it with a nimbus of rippling yellow.

“Tommy’s gone,” Corliss mused, the race with the ice coming slowly back.

“Yes,” she answered. “I rapped him on the knuckles. It was terrible. But the chance is we’ve a better man in the canoe, and we must care for him at once. Hello! Look there!” Through the trees, not a score of feet away, she saw the wall of a large cabin. “Nobody in sight. It must be deserted, or else they’re visiting, whoever they are. You look to our man, Vance, — I’m more presentable, — and I’ll go and see.”

She skirted the cabin, which was a large one for the Yukon country, and came around to where it fronted on the river. The door stood open, and, as she paused to knock, the whole interior flashed upon her in an astounding picture, — a cumulative picture, or series of pictures, as it were. For first she was aware of a crowd of men, and of some great common purpose upon which all were seriously bent. At her knock they instinctively divided, so that a lane opened up, flanked by their pressed bodies, to the far end of the room. And there, in the long bunks on either side, sat two grave rows of men. And midway between, against the wall, was a table. This table seemed the centre of interest. Fresh from the sun-dazzle, the light within was dim and murky, but she managed to make out a bearded American sitting by the table and hammering it with a heavy caulking-mallet. And on the opposite side sat St. Vincent. She had time to note his worn and haggard face, before a man of Scandinavian appearance slouched up to the table.

The man with the mallet raised his right hand and said glibly, “You do most solemnly swear that what you are about to give before the court — ” He abruptly stopped and glowered at the man before him. “Take off your hat!” he roared, and a snicker went up from the crowd as the man obeyed.

Then he of the mallet began again. “You do most solemnly swear that what you are about to give before the court shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

The Scandinavian nodded and dropped his hand.

“One moment, gentlemen.” Frona advanced up the lane, which closed behind her.

St. Vincent sprang to his feet and stretched out his arms to her.
“Frona,” he cried, “oh, Frona, I am innocent!”

It struck her like a blow, the unexpectedness of it, and for the instant, in the sickly light, she was conscious only of the ring of white faces, each face set with eyes that burned. Innocent of what? she thought, and as she looked at St. Vincent, arms still extended, she was aware, in a vague, troubled way, of something distasteful. Innocent of what? He might have had more reserve. He might have waited till he was charged. She did not know that he was charged with anything.

“Friend of the prisoner,” the man with the mallet said authoritatively.
“Bring a stool for’ard, some of you.”

“One moment . . .” She staggered against the table and rested a hand on it. “I do not understand. This is all new . . .” But her eyes happened to come to rest on her feet, wrapped in dirty rags, and she knew that she was clad in a short and tattered skirt, that her arm peeped forth through a rent in her sleeve, and that her hair was down and flying. Her cheek and neck on one side seemed coated with some curious substance. She brushed it with her hand, and caked mud rattled to the floor.

“That will do,” the man said, not unkindly. “Sit down. We’re in the same box. We do not understand. But take my word for it, we’re here to find out. So sit down.”

She raised her hand. “One moment — ”

“Sit down!” he thundered. “The court cannot be disturbed.”

A hum went up from the crowd, words of dissent, and the man pounded the table for silence. But Frona resolutely kept her feet.

When the noise had subsided, she addressed the man in the chair. “Mr.
Chairman: I take it that this is a miners’ meeting.” (The man nodded.)
“Then, having an equal voice in the managing of this community’s
affairs, I demand to be heard. It is important that I should be heard.”

“But you are out of order. Miss — er — ”

“Welse!” half a dozen voices prompted.

“Miss Welse,” he went on, an added respect marking his demeanor, “it grieves me to inform you that you are out of order. You had best sit down.”

“I will not,” she answered. “I rise to a question of privilege, and if
I am not heard, I shall appeal to the meeting.”

She swept the crowd with her eyes, and cries went up that she be given a fair show. The chairman yielded and motioned her to go on.

“Mr. Chairman and men: I do not know the business you have at present before you, but I do know that I have more important business to place before you. Just outside this cabin is a man probably dying from starvation. We have brought him from across the river. We should not have bothered you, but we were unable to make our own island. This man I speak of needs immediate attention.”

“A couple of you nearest the door go out and look after him,” the chairman ordered. “And you, Doc Holiday, go along and see what you can do.”

“Ask for a recess,” St. Vincent whispered.

Frona nodded her head. “And, Mr. Chairman, I make a motion for a recess until the man is cared for.”

Cries of “No recess!” and “Go on with the business!” greeted the putting of it, and the motion was lost.

“Now, Gregory,” with a smile and salutation as she took the stool beside him, “what is it?”

He gripped her hand tightly. “Don’t believe them, Frona. They are trying to” — with a gulping swallow — ”to kill me.”

“Why? Do be calm. Tell me.”

“Why, last night,” he began hurriedly, but broke off to listen to the
Scandinavian previously sworn, who was speaking with ponderous slowness.

“I wake wide open quick,” he was saying. “I coom to the door. I there hear one shot more.”

He was interrupted by a warm-complexioned man, clad in faded mackinaws.
“What did you think?” he asked.

“Eh?” the witness queried, his face dark and troubled with perplexity.

“When you came to the door, what was your first thought?”

“A-w-w,” the man sighed, his face clearing and infinite comprehension sounding in his voice. “I have no moccasins. I t’ink pretty damn cold.” His satisfied expression changed to naive surprise when an outburst of laughter greeted his statement, but he went on stolidly. “One more shot I hear, and I run down the trail.”

Then Corliss pressed in through the crowd to Frona, and she lost what the man was saying.

“What’s up?” the engineer was asking. “Anything serious? Can I be of any use?”

“Yes, yes.” She caught his hand gratefully. “Get over the back-channel somehow and tell my father to come. Tell him that Gregory St. Vincent is in trouble; that he is charged with — What are you charged with, Gregory?” she asked, turning to him.

“Murder.”

“Murder?” from Corliss.

“Yes, yes. Say that he is charged with murder; that I am here; and that I need him. And tell him to bring me some clothes. And, Vance,” — with a pressure of the hand and swift upward look, — ”don’t take any . . . any big chances, but do try to make it.”

“Oh, I’ll make it all right.” He tossed his head confidently and proceeded to elbow his way towards the door.

“Who is helping you in your defence?” she asked St. Vincent.

He shook his head. “No. They wanted to appoint some one, — a renegade lawyer from the States, Bill Brown, — but I declined him. He’s taken the other side, now. It’s lynch law, you know, and their minds are made up. They’re bound to get me.”

“I wish there were time to hear your side.”

“But, Frona, I am innocent. I — ”

“S-sh!” She laid her hand on his arm to hush him, and turned her attention to the witness.

“So the noospaper feller, he fight like anything; but Pierre and me, we pull him into the shack. He cry and stand in one place — ”

“Who cried?” interrupted the prosecuting lawyer.

“Him. That feller there.” The Scandinavian pointed directly at St. Vincent. “And I make a light. The slush-lamp I find spilt over most everything, but I have a candle in my pocket. It is good practice to carry a candle in the pocket,” he affirmed gravely. “And Borg he lay on the floor dead. And the squaw say he did it, and then she die, too.”

“Said who did it?”

Again his accusing finger singled out St. Vincent. “Him. That feller there.”

“Did she?” Frona whispered.

“Yes,” St. Vincent whispered back, “she did. But I cannot imagine what prompted her. She must have been out of her head.”

The warm-faced man in the faded mackinaws then put the witness through a searching examination, which Frona followed closely, but which elicited little new.

“You have the right to cross-examine the witness,” the chairman informed St. Vincent. “Any questions you want to ask?”

The correspondent shook his head.

“Go on,” Frona urged.

“What’s the use?” he asked, hopelessly. “I’m fore-doomed. The verdict was reached before the trial began.”

“One moment, please.” Frona’s sharp command arrested the retiring witness. “You do not know of your own knowledge who committed this murder?”

The Scandinavian gazed at her with a bovine expression on his leaden features, as though waiting for her question to percolate to his understanding.

“You did not see who did it?” she asked again.

“Aw, yes. That feller there,” accusative finger to the fore. “She say he did.”

There was a general smile at this.

“But you did not see it?”

“I hear some shooting.”

“But you did not see who did the shooting?”

“Aw, no; but she said — ”

“That will do, thank you,” she said sweetly, and the man retired.

The prosecution consulted its notes. “Pierre La Flitche!” was called out.

A slender, swart-skinned man, lithe of figure and graceful, stepped forward to the open space before the table. He was darkly handsome, with a quick, eloquent eye which roved frankly everywhere. It rested for a moment on Frona, open and honest in its admiration, and she smiled and half-nodded, for she liked him at first glance, and it seemed as though they had met of old time. He smiled pleasantly back, the smooth upper lip curling brightly and showing beautiful teeth, immaculately white.

In answer to the stereotyped preliminaries he stated that his name was that of his father’s, a descendant of the coureurs du bois. His mother — with a shrug of the shoulders and flash of teeth — was a breed. He was born somewhere in the Barrens, on a hunting trip, he did not know where. Ah, oui, men called him an old-timer. He had come into the country in the days of Jack McQuestion, across the Rockies from the Great Slave.

On being told to go ahead with what he knew of the matter in hand, he deliberated a moment, as though casting about for the best departure.

“In the spring it is good to sleep with the open door,” he began, his words sounding clear and flute-like and marked by haunting memories of the accents his forbears put into the tongue. “And so I sleep last night. But I sleep like the cat. The fall of the leaf, the breath of the wind, and my ears whisper to me, whisper, whisper, all the night long. So, the first shot,” with a quick snap of the fingers, “and I am awake, just like that, and I am at the door.”

St. Vincent leaned forward to Frona. “It was not the first shot.”

She nodded, with her eyes still bent on La Flitche, who gallantly waited.

“Then two more shot,” he went on, “quick, together, boom-boom, just like that. ‘Borg’s shack,’ I say to myself, and run down the trail. I think Borg kill Bella, which was bad. Bella very fine girl,” he confided with one of his irresistible smiles. “I like Bella. So I run. And John he run from his cabin like a fat cow, with great noise. ‘What the matter?’ he say; and I say, ‘I don’t know.’ And then something come, wheugh! out of the dark, just like that, and knock John down, and knock me down. We grab everywhere all at once. It is a man. He is in undress. He fight. He cry, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ just like that. We hold him tight, and bime-by pretty quick, he stop. Then we get up, and I say, ‘Come along back.’“

“Who was the man?”

La Flitche turned partly, and rested his eyes on St. Vincent.

“Go on.”

“So? The man he will not go back; but John and I say yes, and he go.”

“Did he say anything?”

“I ask him what the matter; but he cry, he . . . he sob, huh-tsch, huh-tsch, just like that.”

“Did you see anything peculiar about him?”

La Flitche’s brows drew up interrogatively.

^Anything uncommon, out of the ordinary?”

“Ah, oui; blood on the hands.” Disregarding the murmur in the room, he went on, his facile play of feature and gesture giving dramatic value to the recital. “John make a light, and Bella groan, like the hair-seal when you shoot him in the body, just like that when you shoot him in the body under the flipper. And Borg lay over in the corner. I look. He no breathe ‘tall.

“Then Bella open her eyes, and I look in her eyes, and I know she know me, La Flitche. ‘Who did it, Bella?’ I ask. And she roll her head on the floor and whisper, so low, so slow, ‘Him dead?’ I know she mean Borg, and I say yes. Then she lift up on one elbow, and look about quick, in big hurry, and when she see Vincent she look no more, only she look at Vincent all the time. Then she point at him, just like that.” Suiting the action to the word, La Flitche turned and thrust a wavering finger at the prisoner. “And she say, ‘Him, him, him.’ And I say, ‘Bella, who did it?’ And she say, ‘Him, him, him. St. Vincha, him do it.’ And then” — La Flitche’s head felt limply forward on his chest, and came back naturally erect, as he finished, with a flash of teeth, “Dead.”

The warm-faced man, Bill Brown, put the quarter-breed through the customary direct examination, which served to strengthen his testimony and to bring out the fact that a terrible struggle must have taken place in the killing of Borg. The heavy table was smashed, the stool and the bunk-board splintered, and the stove over-thrown. “Never did I see anything like it,” La Flitche concluded his description of the wreck. “No, never.”

Brown turned him over to Frona with a bow, which a smile of hers paid for in full. She did not deem it unwise to cultivate cordiality with the lawyer. What she was working for was time — time for her father to come, time to be closeted with St. Vincent and learn all the details of what really had occurred. So she put questions, questions, interminable questions, to La Flitche. Twice only did anything of moment crop up.

“You spoke of the first shot, Mr. La Flitche. Now, the walls of a log cabin are quite thick. Had your door been closed, do you think you could have heard that first shot?”

He shook his head, though his dark eyes told her he divined the point she was endeavoring to establish.

“And had the door of Borg’s cabin been closed, would you have heard?”

Again he shook his head.

“Then, Mr. La Flitche, when you say the first shot, you do not mean necessarily the first shot fired, but rather the first shot you heard fired?”

He nodded, and though she had scored her point she could not see that it had any material bearing after all.

Again she worked up craftily to another and stronger climax, though she felt all the time that La Flitche fathomed her.

“You say it was very dark, Mr. La Flitche?”

“Ah, oui; quite dark.”

“How dark? How did you know it was John you met?”

“John make much noise when he run. I know that kind of noise.”

“Could you see him so as to know that it was he?”

“Ah, no.”

“Then, Mr. La Flitche,” she demanded, triumphantly, “will you please state how you knew there was blood on the hands of Mr. St. Vincent?”

His lip lifted in a dazzling smile, and he paused a moment. “How? I feel it warm on his hands. And my nose — ah, the smoke of the hunter camp long way off, the hole where the rabbit hide, the track of the moose which has gone before, does not my nose tell me?” He flung his head back, and with tense face, eyes closed, nostrils quivering and dilated, he simulated the quiescence of all the senses save one and the concentration of his whole being upon that one. Then his eyes fluttered partly open and he regarded her dreamily. “I smell the blood on his hands, the warm blood, the hot blood on his hands.”

“And by gad he can do it!” some man exclaimed.

And so convinced was Frona that she glanced involuntarily at St. Vincent’s hands, and saw there the rusty-brown stains on the cuffs of his flannel shirt.

As La Flitche left the stand, Bill Brown came over to her and shook hands. “No more than proper I should know the lawyer for the defence,” he said, good-naturedly, running over his notes for the next witness.

“But don’t you think it is rather unfair to me?” she asked, brightly. “I have not had time to prepare my case. I know nothing about it except what I have gleaned from your two witnesses. Don’t you think, Mr. Brown,” her voice rippling along in persuasive little notes, “don’t you think it would be advisable to adjourn the meeting until to-morrow?”

“Hum,” he deliberated, looking at his watch.

“Wouldn’t be a bad idea. It’s five o’clock, anyway, and the men ought to be cooking their suppers.”

She thanked him, as some women can, without speech; yet, as he looked down into her face and eyes, he experienced a subtler and greater satisfaction than if she had spoken.

He stepped to his old position and addressed the room. “On consultation of the defence and the prosecution, and upon consideration of the lateness of the hour and the impossibility of finishing the trial within a reasonable limit, I — hum — I take the liberty of moving an adjournment until eight o’clock to-morrow morning.”

“The ayes have it,” the chairman proclaimed, coming down from his place and proceeding to build the fire, for he was a part-owner of the cabin and cook for his crowd.

Chapter XXVII

Frona turned to St. Vincent as the last of the crowd filed out. He clutched her hands spasmodically, like a drowning man.

“Do believe me, Frona. Promise me.”

Her face flushed. “You are excited,” she said, “or you would not say such things. Not that I blame you,” she relented. “I hardly imagine the situation can be anything else but exciting.”

“Yes, and well I know it,” he answered, bitterly. “I am acting like a fool, and I can’t help it. The strain has been terrible. And as though the horror of Borg’s end were not enough, to be considered the murderer, and haled up for mob justice! Forgive me, Frona. I am beside myself. Of course, I know that you will believe me.”

“Then tell me, Gregory.”

“In the first place, the woman, Bella, lied. She must have been crazed to make that dying statement when I fought as I did for her and Borg. That is the only explanation — ”

“Begin at the beginning,” she interrupted. “Remember, I know nothing.”

He settled himself more comfortably on the stool, and rolled a cigarette as he took up the history of the previous night.

“It must have been about one in the morning when I was awakened by the lighting of the slush-lamp. I thought it was Borg; wondered what he was prowling about for, and was on the verge of dropping off to sleep, when, though I do not know what prompted me, I opened my eyes. Two strange men were in the cabin. Both wore masks and fur caps with the flaps pulled down, so that I could see nothing of their faces save the glistening of the eyes through the eye-slits.

“I had no first thought, unless it was that danger threatened. I lay quietly for a second and deliberated. Borg had borrowed my pistol, and I was actually unarmed. My rifle was by the door. I decided to make a rush for it. But no sooner had I struck the floor than one of the men turned on me, at the same time firing his revolver. That was the first shot, and the one La Flitche did not hear. It was in the struggle afterwards that the door was burst open, which enabled him to hear the last three.

“Well; I was so close to the man, and my leap out of the bunk was so unexpected, that he missed me. The next moment we grappled and rolled on the floor. Of course, Borg was aroused, and the second man turned his attention to him and Bella. It was this second man who did the killing, for my man, naturally, had his hands full. You heard the testimony. From the way the cabin was wrecked, you can picture the struggle. We rolled and tossed about and fought till stools, table, shelves — everything was smashed.

“Oh, Frona, it was terrible! Borg fighting for life, Bella helping him, though wounded and groaning, and I unable to aid. But finally, in a very short while, I began to conquer the man with whom I was struggling. I had got him down on his back, pinioned his arms with my knees, and was slowly throttling him, when the other man finished his work and turned on me also. What could I do? Two to one, and winded! So I was thrown into the corner, and they made their escape. I confess that I must have been badly rattled by that time, for as soon as I caught my breath I took out after them, and without a weapon. Then I collided with La Flitche and John, and — and you know the rest. Only,” he knit his brows in puzzlement, “only, I cannot understand why Bella should accuse me.”

He looked at her appealingly, and, though she pressed his hand sympathetically, she remained silent, weighing pro and con what she had heard.

She shook her head slowly. “It’s a bad case, and the thing is to convince them — ”

“But, my God, Frona, I am innocent! I have not been a saint, perhaps, but my hands are clean from blood.”

“But remember, Gregory,” she said, gently, “I am not to judge you. Unhappily, it rests with the men of this miners’ meeting, and the problem is: how are they to be convinced of your innocence? The two main points are against you, — Bella’s dying words and the blood on your sleeve.”

“The place was areek with blood,” St. Vincent cried passionately, springing to his feet. “I tell you it was areek! How could I avoid floundering in it, fighting as I was for life? Can you not take my word — ”

“There, there, Gregory. Sit down. You are truly beside yourself. If your case rested with me, you know you would go free and clean. But these men, — you know what mob rule is, — how are we to persuade them to let you go? Don’t you see? You have no witnesses. A dying woman’s words are more sacred than a living man’s. Can you show cause for the woman to die with a lie on her lips? Had she any reason to hate you? Had you done her or her husband an injury?”

He shook his head.

“Certainly, to us the thing is inexplicable; but the miners need no explanation. To them it is obvious. It rests with us to disprove the obvious. Can we do it?”

The correspondent sank down despondently, with a collapsing of the chest and a drooping forward of the shoulders. “Then am I indeed lost.”

“No, it’s not so bad as that. You shall not be hanged. Trust me for that.”

“But what can you do?” he asked, despairingly. “They have usurped the law, have made themselves the law.”

“In the first place, the river has broken. That means everything. The Governor and the territorial judges may be expected in at any moment with a detachment of police at their backs. And they’re certain to stop here. And, furthermore, we may be able to do something ourselves. The river is open, and if it comes to the worst, escape would be another way out; and escape is the last thing they would dream of.”

“No, no; impossible. What are you and I against the many?”

“But there’s my father and Baron Courbertin. Four determined people, acting together, may perform miracles, Gregory, dear. Trust me, it shall come out well.”

She kissed him and ran her hand through his hair, but the worried look did not depart.

Jacob Welse crossed over the back-channel long before dark, and with him came Del, the baron, and Corliss. While Frona retired to change her clothes in one of the smaller cabins, which the masculine owners readily turned over to her, her father saw to the welfare of the mail-carrier. The despatches were of serious import, so serious that long after Jacob Welse had read and re-read them his face was dark and clouded; but he put the anxiety from him when he returned to Frona. St. Vincent, who was confined in an adjoining cabin, was permitted to see them.

“It looks bad,” Jacob Welse said, on parting for the night. “But rest assured, St. Vincent, bad or not, you’ll not be stretched up so long as I’ve a hand to play in the rumpus. I am certain you did not kill Borg, and there’s my fist on it.”

“A long day,” Corliss remarked, as he walked back with Frona to her cabin.

“And a longer to-morrow,” she answered, wearily. “And I’m so sleepy.”

“You’re a brave little woman, and I’m proud of you.” It was ten o’clock, and he looked out through the dim twilight to the ghostly ice drifting steadily by. “And in this trouble,” he went on, “depend upon me in any way.”

“In any way?” she queried, with a catch in her voice.

“If I were a hero of the melodrama I’d say; ‘To the death!’ but as I’m not; I’ll just repeat, in any way.”

“You are good to me, Vance. I can never repay — ”

“Tut! tut! I do not put myself on sale. Love is service, I believe.”

She looked at him for a long time, but while her face betrayed soft wonder, at heart she was troubled, she knew not why, and the events of the day, and of all the days since she had known him, came fluttering through her mind.

“Do you believe in a white friendship?” she asked at last. “For I do hope that such a bond may hold us always. A bright, white friendship, a comradeship, as it were?” And as she asked, she was aware that the phrase did not quite express what she felt and would desire. And when he shook his head, she experienced a glad little inexplicable thrill.

“A comradeship?” he questioned. “When you know I love you?”

“Yes,” she affirmed in a low voice.

“I am afraid, after all, that your knowledge of man is very limited. Believe me, we are not made of such clay. A comradeship? A coming in out of the cold to sit by your fire? Good. But a coming in when another man sits with you by your fire? No. Comradeship would demand that I delight in your delights, and yet, do you think for a moment that I could see you with another man’s child in your arms, a child which might have been mine; with that other man looking out at me through the child’s eyes, laughing at me through its mouth? I say, do you think I could delight in your delights? No, no; love cannot shackle itself with white friendships.”

She put her hand on his arm.

“Do you think I am wrong?” he asked, bewildered by the strange look in her face.

She was sobbing quietly.

“You are tired and overwrought. So there, good-night. You must get to bed.”

“No, don’t go, not yet.” And she arrested him. “No, no; I am foolish.
As you say, I am tired. But listen, Vance. There is much to be done.
We must plan to-morrow’s work. Come inside. Father and Baron
Courbertin are together, and if the worst comes, we four must do big
things.”

“Spectacular,” Jacob Welse commented, when Frona had briefly outlined the course of action and assigned them their parts. “But its very unexpectedness ought to carry it through.”

“A coup d’etat!” was the Baron’s verdict. “Magnificent! Ah! I feel warm all over at the thought. ‘Hands up!’ I cry, thus, and very fierce.

“And if they do not hold up their hands?” he appealed to Jacob Welse.

“Then shoot. Never bluff when you’re behind a gun, Courbertin. It’s held by good authorities to be unhealthy.”

“And you are to take charge of La Bijou, Vance,” Frona said. “Father thinks there will be little ice to-morrow if it doesn’t jam to-night. All you’ve to do is to have the canoe by the bank just before the door. Of course, you won’t know what is happening until St. Vincent comes running. Then in with him, and away you go — Dawson! So I’ll say good-night and good-by now, for I may not have the opportunity in the morning.”

“And keep the left-hand channel till you’re past the bend,” Jacob Welse counselled him; “then take the cut-offs to the right and follow the swiftest water. Now off with you and into your blankets. It’s seventy miles to Dawson, and you’ll have to make it at one clip.”

Chapter XXVIII

Jacob Welse was given due respect when he arose at the convening of the miners’ meeting and denounced the proceedings. While such meetings had performed a legitimate function in the past, he contended, when there was no law in the land, that time was now beyond recall; for law was now established, and it was just law. The Queen’s government had shown itself fit to cope with the situation, and for them to usurp its powers was to step backward into the night out of which they had come. Further, no lighter word than “criminal” could characterize such conduct. And yet further, he promised them, in set, sober terms, if anything serious were the outcome, to take an active part in the prosecution of every one of them. At the conclusion of his speech he made a motion to hold the prisoner for the territorial court and to adjourn, but was voted down without discussion.

“Don’t you see,” St. Vincent said to Frona, “there is no hope?”

“But there is. Listen!” And she swiftly outlined the plot of the night before.

He followed her in a half-hearted way, too crushed to partake of her enthusiasm. “It’s madness to attempt it,” he objected, when she had done.

“And it looks very much like hanging not to attempt it,” she answered a little spiritedly. “Surely you will make a fight?”

“Surely,” he replied, hollowly.

The first witnesses were two Swedes, who told of the wash-tub incident, when Borg had given way to one of his fits of anger. Trivial as the incident was, in the light of subsequent events it at once became serious. It opened the way for the imagination into a vast familiar field. It was not so much what was said as what was left unsaid. Men born of women, the rudest of them, knew life well enough to be aware of its significance, — a vulgar common happening, capable of but one interpretation. Heads were wagged knowingly in the course of the testimony, and whispered comments went the rounds.

Half a dozen witnesses followed in rapid succession, all of whom had closely examined the scene of the crime and gone over the island carefully, and all of whom were agreed that there was not the slightest trace to be found of the two men mentioned by the prisoner in his preliminary statement.

To Frona’s surprise, Del Bishop went upon the stand. She knew he disliked St. Vincent, but could not imagine any evidence he could possess which would bear upon the case.

Being sworn, and age and nationality ascertained, Bill Brown asked him his business.

“Pocket-miner,” he challenged back, sweeping the assemblage with an aggressive glance.

Now, it happens that a very small class of men follow pocketing, and that a very large class of men, miners, too, disbelieve utterly in any such method or obtaining gold.

“Pocket-miner!” sneered a red-shirted, patriarchal-looking man, a man who had washed his first pan in the Californian diggings in the early fifties.

“Yep,” Del affirmed.

“Now, look here, young feller,” his interlocutor continued, “d’ye mean to tell me you ever struck it in such-fangled way?”

“Yep.”

“Don’t believe it,” with a contemptuous shrug.

Del swallowed fast and raised his head with a jerk. “Mr. Chairman, I rise to make a statement. I won’t interfere with the dignity of the court, but I just wish to simply and distinctly state that after the meeting’s over I’m going to punch the head of every man that gets gay. Understand?”

“You’re out of order,” the chairman replied, rapping the table with the caulking-mallet.

“And your head, too,” Del cried, turning upon him. “Damn poor order you preserve. Pocketing’s got nothing to do with this here trial, and why don’t you shut such fool questions out? I’ll take care of you afterwards, you potwolloper!”

“You will, will you?” The chairman grew red in the face, dropped the mallet, and sprang to his feet.

Del stepped forward to meet him, but Bill Brown sprang in between and held them apart.

“Order, gentlemen, order,” he begged. “This is no time for unseemly exhibitions. And remember there are ladies present.”

The two men grunted and subsided, and Bill Brown asked, “Mr. Bishop, we understand that you are well acquainted with the prisoner. Will you please tell the court what you know of his general character?”

Del broadened into a smile. “Well, in the first place, he’s an extremely quarrelsome disposition — ”

“Hold! I won’t have it!” The prisoner was on his feet, trembling with anger. “You shall not swear my life away in such fashion! To bring a madman, whom I have only met once in my life, to testify as to my character!”

The pocket-miner turned to him. “So you don’t know me, eh, Gregory St.
Vincent?”

“No,” St. Vincent replied, coldly, “I do not know you, my man.”

“Don’t you man me!” Del shouted, hotly.

But St. Vincent ignored him, turning to the crowd.

“I never saw the fellow but once before, and then for a few brief moments in Dawson.”

“You’ll remember before I’m done,” Del sneered; “so hold your hush and let me say my little say. I come into the country with him way back in ‘84.”

St. Vincent regarded him with sudden interest.

“Yep, Mr. Gregory St. Vincent. I see you begin to recollect. I sported whiskers and my name was Brown, Joe Brown, in them days.”

He grinned vindictively, and the correspondent seemed to lose all interest.

“Is it true, Gregory?” Frona whispered.

“I begin to recognize,” he muttered, slowly. “I don’t know . . . no, folly! The man must have died.”

“You say in ‘84, Mr. Bishop?” Bill Brown prompted.

“Yep, in ‘84. He was a newspaper-man, bound round the world by way of
Alaska and Siberia. I’d run away from a whaler at Sitka, — that squares
it with Brown, — and I engaged with him for forty a month and found.
Well, he quarrelled with me — ”

A snicker, beginning from nowhere in particular, but passing on from man to man and swelling in volume, greeted this statement. Even Frona and Del himself were forced to smile, and the only sober face was the prisoner’s.

“But he quarrelled with Old Andy at Dyea, and with Chief George of the Chilcoots, and the Factor at Pelly, and so on down the line. He got us into no end of trouble, and ‘specially woman-trouble. He was always monkeying around — ”

“Mr. Chairman, I object.” Frona stood up, her face quite calm and blood under control. “There is no necessity for bringing in the amours of Mr. St. Vincent. They have no bearing whatsoever upon the case; and, further, none of the men of this meeting are clean enough to be prompted by the right motive in conducting such an inquiry. So I demand that the prosecution at least confine itself to relevant testimony.”

Bill Brown came up smugly complacent and smiling. “Mr. Chairman, we willingly accede to the request made by the defence. Whatever we have brought out has been relevant and material. Whatever we intend to bring out shall be relevant and material. Mr. Bishop is our star witness, and his testimony is to the point. It must be taken into consideration that we nave no direct evidence as to the murder of John Borg. We can bring no eye-witnesses into court. Whatever we have is circumstantial. It is incumbent upon us to show cause. To show cause it is necessary to go into the character of the accused. This we intend to do. We intend to show his adulterous and lustful nature, which has culminated in a dastardly deed and jeopardized his neck. We intend to show that the truth is not in him; that he is a liar beyond price; that no word he may speak upon the stand need be accepted by a jury of his peers. We intend to show all this, and to weave it together, thread by thread, till we have a rope long enough and strong enough to hang him with before the day is done. So I respectfully submit, Mr. Chairman, that the witness be allowed to proceed.”

The chairman decided against Frona, and her appeal to the meeting was voted down. Bill Brown nodded to Del to resume.

“As I was saying, he got us into no end of trouble. Now, I’ve been mixed up with water all my life, — never can get away from it, it seems, — and the more I’m mixed the less I know about it. St. Vincent knew this, too, and him a clever hand at the paddle; yet he left me to run the Box Canyon alone while he walked around. Result: I was turned over, lost half the outfit and all the tobacco, and then he put the blame on me besides. Right after that he got tangled up with the Lake Le Barge Sticks, and both of us came near croaking.”

“And why was that?” Bill Brown interjected.

“All along of a pretty squaw that looked too kindly at him. After we got clear, I lectured him on women in general and squaws in particular, and he promised to behave. Then we had a hot time with the Little Salmons. He was cuter this time, and I didn’t know for keeps, but I guessed. He said it was the medicine man who got horstile; but nothing’ll stir up a medicine man quicker’n women, and the facts pointed that way. When I talked it over with him in a fatherly way he got wrathy, and I had to take him out on the bank and give him a threshing. Then he got sulky, and didn’t brighten up till we ran into the mouth of the Reindeer River, where a camp of Siwashes were fishing salmon. But he had it in for me all the time, only I didn’t know it, — was ready any time to give me the double cross.

“Now, there’s no denying he’s got a taking way with women. All he has to do is to whistle ’em up like dogs. Most remarkable faculty, that. There was the wickedest, prettiest squaw among the Reindeers. Never saw her beat, excepting Bella. Well, I guess he whistled her up, for he delayed in the camp longer than was necessary. Being partial to women — ”

“That will do, Mr. Bishop,” interrupted the chairman, who, from profitless watching of Frona’s immobile face, had turned to her hand, the nervous twitching and clinching of which revealed what her face had hidden. “That will do, Mr. Bishop. I think we have had enough of squaws.”

“Pray do not temper the testimony,” Frona chirruped, sweetly. “It seems very important.”

“Do you know what I am going to say next?” Del demanded hotly of the chairman. “You don’t, eh? Then shut up. I’m running this particular sideshow.”

Bill Brown sprang in to avert hostilities, but the chairman restrained himself, and Bishop went on.

“I’d been done with the whole shooting-match, squaws and all, if you hadn’t broke me off. Well, as I said, he had it in for me, and the first thing I didn’t know, he’d hit me on the head with a rifle-stock, bundled the squaw into the canoe, and pulled out. You all know what the Yukon country was in ‘84. And there I was, without an outfit, left alone, a thousand miles from anywhere. I got out all right, though there’s no need of telling how, and so did he. You’ve all heard of his adventures in Siberia. Well,” with an impressive pause, “I happen to know a thing or two myself.”

He shoved a hand into the big pocket of his mackinaw jacket and pulled out a dingy leather-bound volume of venerable appearance.

“I got this from Pete Whipple’s old woman, — Whipple of Eldorado. It concerns her grand-uncle or great-grand-uncle, I don’t know which; and if there’s anybody here can read Russian, why, it’ll go into the details of that Siberian trip. But as there’s no one here that can — ”

“Courbertin! He can read it!” some one called in the crowd.

A way was made for the Frenchman forthwith, and he was pushed and shoved, protestingly, to the front.

“Savve the lingo?” Del demanded.

“Yes; but so poorly, so miserable,” Courbertin demurred. “It is a long time. I forget.”

“Go ahead. We won’t criticise.”

“No, but — ”

“Go ahead!” the chairman commanded.

Del thrust the book into his hands, opened at the yellow title-page. “I’ve been itching to get my paws on some buck like you for months and months,” he assured him, gleefully. “And now I’ve got you, you can’t shake me, Charley. So fire away.”

Courbertin began hesitatingly: “‘The Journal of Father Yakontsk, Comprising an Account in Brief of his Life in the Benedictine Monastery at Obidorsky, and in Full of his Marvellous Adventures in East Siberia among the Deer Men.’“

The baron looked up for instructions.

“Tell us when it was printed,” Del ordered him.

“In Warsaw, 1807.”

The pocket-miner turned triumphantly to the room. “Did you hear that?
Just keep track of it. 1807, remember!”

The baron took up the opening paragraph. “‘It was because of Tamerlane,’“ he commenced, unconsciously putting his translation into a construction with which he was already familiar.

At his first words Frona turned white, and she remained white throughout the reading. Once she stole a glance at her father, and was glad that he was looking straight before him, for she did not feel able to meet his gaze just them. On the other hand, though she knew St. Vincent was eying her narrowly, she took no notice of him, and all he could see was a white face devoid of expression.

“‘When Tamerlane swept with fire and sword over Eastern Asia,’“ Courbertin read slowly, “‘states were disrupted, cities overthrown, and tribes scattered like — like star-dust. A vast people was hurled broadcast over the land. Fleeing before the conquerors,’ — no, no, — ’before the mad lust of the conquerors, these refugees swung far into Siberia, circling, circling to the north and east and fringing the rim of the polar basin with a spray of Mongol tribes.’“

“Skip a few pages,” Bill Brown advised, “and read here and there. We haven’t got all night.”

Courbertin complied. “‘The coast people are Eskimo stock, merry of nature and not offensive. They call themselves the Oukilion, or the Sea Men. From them I bought dogs and food. But they are subject to the Chow Chuen, who live in the interior and are known as the Deer Men. The Chow Chuen are a fierce and savage race. When I left the coast they fell upon me, took from me my goods, and made me a slave.’“ He ran over a few pages. “‘I worked my way to a seat among the head men, but I was no nearer my freedom. My wisdom was of too great value to them for me to depart. . . Old Pi-Une was a great chief, and it was decreed that I should marry his daughter Ilswunga. Ilswunga was a filthy creature. She would not bathe, and her ways were not good . . . I did marry Ilswunga, but she was a wife to me only in name. Then did she complain to her father, the old Pi-Une, and he was very wroth. And dissension was sown among the tribes; but in the end I became mightier than ever, what of my cunning and resource; and Ilswunga made no more complaint, for I taught her games with cards which she might play by herself, and other things.’“

“Is that enough?” Courbertin asked.

“Yes, that will do,” Bill Brown answered. “But one moment. Please state again the date of publication.”

“1807, in Warsaw.”

“Hold on, baron,” Del Bishop spoke up. “Now that you’re on the stand, I’ve got a question or so to slap into you.” He turned to the court-room. “Gentlemen, you’ve all heard somewhat of the prisoner’s experiences in Siberia. You’ve caught on to the remarkable sameness between them and those published by Father Yakontsk nearly a hundred years ago. And you have concluded that there’s been some wholesale cribbing somewhere. I propose to show you that it’s more than cribbing. The prisoner gave me the shake on the Reindeer River in ‘88. Fall of ‘88 he was at St. Michael’s on his way to Siberia. ‘89 and ‘90 he was, by his talk, cutting up antics in Siberia. ‘91 he come back to the world, working the conquering-hero graft in ‘Frisco. Now let’s see if the Frenchman can make us wise.

“You were in Japan?” he asked.

Courbertin, who had followed the dates, made a quick calculation, and could but illy conceal his surprise. He looked appealingly to Frona, but she did not help him. “Yes,” he said, finally.

“And you met the prisoner there?”

“Yes.”

“What year was it?”

There was a general craning forward to catch the answer.

“1889,” and it came unwillingly.

“Now, how can that be, baron?” Del asked in a wheedling tone. “The prisoner was in Siberia at that time.”

Courbertin shrugged his shoulders that it was no concern of his, and came off the stand. An impromptu recess was taken by the court-room for several minutes, wherein there was much whispering and shaking of heads.

“It is all a lie.” St. Vincent leaned close to Frona’s ear, but she did not hear.

“Appearances are against me, but I can explain it all.”

But she did not move a muscle, and he was called to the stand by the chairman. She turned to her father, and the tears rushed up into her eyes when he rested his hand on hers.

“Do you care to pull out?” he asked after a momentary hesitation.

She shook her head, and St. Vincent began to speak. It was the same story he had told her, though told now a little more fully, and in nowise did it conflict with the evidence of La Flitche and John. He acknowledged the wash-tub incident, caused, he explained, by an act of simple courtesy on his part and by John Borg’s unreasoning anger. He acknowledged that Bella had been killed by his own pistol, but stated that the pistol had been borrowed by Borg several days previously and not returned. Concerning Bella’s accusation he could say nothing. He could not see why she should die with a lie on her lips. He had never in the slightest way incurred her displeasure, so even revenge could not be advanced. It was inexplicable. As for the testimony of Bishop, he did not care to discuss it. It was a tissue of falsehood cunningly interwoven with truth. It was true the man had gone into Alaska with him in 1888, but his version of the things which happened there was maliciously untrue. Regarding the baron, there was a slight mistake in the dates, that was all.

In questioning him. Bill Brown brought out one little surprise. From the prisoner’s story, he had made a hard fight against the two mysterious men. “If,” Brown asked, “such were the case, how can you explain away the fact that you came out of the struggle unmarked? On examination of the body of John Borg, many bruises and contusions were noticeable. How is it, if you put up such a stiff fight, that you escaped being battered?”

St. Vincent did not know, though he confessed to feeling stiff and sore all over. And it did not matter, anyway. He had killed neither Borg nor his wife, that much he did know.

Frona prefaced her argument to the meeting with a pithy discourse on the sacredness of human life, the weaknesses and dangers of circumstantial evidence, and the rights of the accused wherever doubt arose. Then she plunged into the evidence, stripping off the superfluous and striving to confine herself to facts. In the first place, she denied that a motive for the deed had been shown. As it was, the introduction of such evidence was an insult to their intelligence, and she had sufficient faith in their manhood and perspicacity to know that such puerility would not sway them in the verdict they were to give.

And, on the other hand, in dealing with the particular points at issue, she denied that any intimacy had been shown to have existed between Bella and St. Vincent; and she denied, further, that it had been shown that any intimacy had been attempted on the part of St. Vincent. Viewed honestly, the wash-tub incident — the only evidence brought forward — was a laughable little affair, portraying how the simple courtesy of a gentleman might be misunderstood by a mad boor of a husband. She left it to their common sense; they were not fools.

They had striven to prove the prisoner bad-tempered. She did not need to prove anything of the sort concerning John Borg. They all knew his terrible fits of anger; they all knew that his temper was proverbial in the community; that it had prevented him having friends and had made him many enemies. Was it not very probable, therefore, that the masked men were two such enemies? As to what particular motive actuated these two men, she could not say; but it rested with them, the judges, to know whether in all Alaska there were or were not two men whom John Borg could have given cause sufficient for them to take his life.

Witness had testified that no traces had been found of these two men; but the witness had not testified that no traces had been found of St. Vincent, Pierre La Flitche, or John the Swede. And there was no need for them so to testify. Everybody knew that no foot-marks were left when St. Vincent ran up the trail, and when he came back with La Flitche and the other man. Everybody knew the condition of the trail, that it was a hard-packed groove in the ground, on which a soft moccasin could leave no impression; and that had the ice not gone down the river, no traces would have been left by the murderers in passing from and to the mainland.

At this juncture La Flitche nodded his head in approbation, and she went on.

Capital had been made out of the blood on St. Vincent’s hands. If they
chose to examine the moccasins at that moment on the feet of Mr. La
Flitche, they would also find blood. That did not argue that Mr. La
Flitche had been a party to the shedding of the blood.

Mr. Brown had drawn attention to the fact that the prisoner had not been bruised or marked in the savage encounter which had taken place. She thanked him for having done so. John Borg’s body showed that it had been roughly used. He was a larger, stronger, heavier man than St. Vincent. If, as charged, St. Vincent had committed the murder, and necessarily, therefore, engaged in a struggle severe enough to bruise John Borg, how was it that he had come out unharmed? That was a point worthy of consideration.

Another one was, why did he run down the trail? It was inconceivable, if he had committed the murder, that he should, without dressing or preparation for escape, run towards the other cabins. It was, however, easily conceivable that he should take up the pursuit of the real murderers, and in the darkness — exhausted, breathless, and certainly somewhat excited — run blindly down the trail.

Her summing up was a strong piece of synthesis; and when she had done, the meeting applauded her roundly. But she was angry and hurt, for she knew the demonstration was for her sex rather than for her cause and the work she had done.

Bill Brown, somewhat of a shyster, and his ear ever cocked to the crowd, was not above taking advantage when opportunity offered, and when it did not offer, to dogmatize artfully. In this his native humor was a strong factor, and when he had finished with the mysterious masked men they were as exploded sun-myths, — which phrase he promptly applied to them.

They could not have got off the island. The condition of the ice for the three or four hours preceding the break-up would not have permitted it. The prisoner had implicated none of the residents of the island, while every one of them, with the exception of the prisoner, had been accounted for elsewhere. Possibly the prisoner was excited when he ran down the trail into the arms of La Flitche and John the Swede. One should have thought, however, that he had grown used to such things in Siberia. But that was immaterial; the facts were that he was undoubtedly in an abnormal state of excitement, that he was hysterically excited, and that a murderer under such circumstances would take little account of where he ran. Such things had happened before. Many a man had butted into his own retribution.

In the matter of the relations of Borg, Bella, and St. Vincent, he made a strong appeal to the instinctive prejudices of his listeners, and for the time being abandoned matter-of-fact reasoning for all-potent sentimental platitudes. He granted that circumstantial evidence never proved anything absolutely. It was not necessary it should. Beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt was all that was required. That this had been done, he went on to review the testimony.

“And, finally,” he said, “you can’t get around Bella’s last words. We know nothing of our own direct knowledge. We’ve been feeling around in the dark, clutching at little things, and trying to figure it all out. But, gentlemen,” he paused to search the faces of his listeners, “Bella knew the truth. Hers is no circumstantial evidence. With quick, anguished breath, and life-blood ebbing from her, and eyeballs glazing, she spoke the truth. With dark night coming on, and the death-rattle in her throat, she raised herself weakly and pointed a shaking finger at the accused, thus, and she said, ‘Him, him, him. St. Vincha, him do it.’“

With Bill Brown’s finger still boring into him, St. Vincent struggled to his feet. His face looked old and gray, and he looked about him speechlessly. “Funk! Funk!” was whispered back and forth, and not so softly but what he heard. He moistened his lips repeatedly, and his tongue fought for articulation. “It is as I have said,” he succeeded, finally. “I did not do it. Before God, I did not do it!” He stared fixedly at John the Swede, waiting the while on his laggard thought. “I . . . I did not do it . . . I did not . . . I . . . I did not.”

He seemed to have become lost in some supreme meditation wherein John the Swede figured largely, and as Frona caught him by the hand and pulled him gently down, some man cried out, “Secret ballot!”

But Bill Brown was on his feet at once. “No! I say no! An open ballot! We are men, and as men are not afraid to put ourselves on record.”

A chorus of approval greeted him, and the open ballot began. Man after man, called upon by name, spoke the one word, “Guilty.”

Baron Courbertin came forward and whispered to Frona. She nodded her head and smiled, and he edged his way back, taking up a position by the door. He voted “Not guilty” when his turn came, as did Frona and Jacob Welse. Pierre La Flitche wavered a moment, looking keenly at Frona and St. Vincent, then spoke up, clear and flute-like, “Guilty.”

As the chairman arose, Jacob Welse casually walked over to the opposite side of the table and stood with his back to the stove. Courbertin, who had missed nothing, pulled a pickle-keg out from the wall and stepped upon it.

The chairman cleared his throat and rapped for order. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “the prisoner — ”

“Hands up!” Jacob Welse commanded peremptorily, and a fraction of a second after him came the shrill “Hands up, gentlemen!” of Courbertin.

Front and rear they commanded the crowd with their revolvers. Every hand was in the air, the chairman’s having gone up still grasping the mallet. There was no disturbance. Each stood or sat in the same posture as when the command went forth. Their eyes, playing here and there among the central figures, always returned to Jacob Welse.

St. Vincent sat as one dumfounded. Frona thrust a revolver into his hand, but his limp fingers refused to close on it.

“Come, Gregory,” she entreated. “Quick! Corliss is waiting with the canoe. Come!”

She shook him, and he managed to grip the weapon. Then she pulled and tugged, as when awakening a heavy sleeper, till he was on his feet. But his face was livid, his eyes like a somnambulist’s, and he was afflicted as with a palsy. Still holding him, she took a step backward for him to come on. He ventured it with a shaking knee. There was no sound save the heavy breathing of many men. A man coughed slightly and cleared his throat. It was disquieting, and all eyes centred upon him rebukingly. The man became embarrassed, and shifted his weight uneasily to the other leg. Then the heavy breathing settled down again.

St. Vincent took another step, but his fingers relaxed and the revolver fell with a loud noise to the floor. He made no effort to recover it. Frona stooped hurriedly, but Pierre La Flitche had set his foot upon it. She looked up and saw his hands above his head and his eyes fixed absently on Jacob Welse. She pushed at his leg, and the muscles were tense and hard, giving the lie to the indifference on his face. St. Vincent looked down helplessly, as though he could not understand.

But this delay drew the attention of Jacob Welse, and, as he tried to make out the cause, the chairman found his chance. Without crooking, his right arm swept out and down, the heavy caulking-mallet leaping from his hand. It spanned the short distance and smote Jacob Welse below the ear. His revolver went off as he fell, and John the Swede grunted and clapped a hand to his thigh.

Simultaneous with this the baron was overcome. Del Bishop, with hands still above his head and eyes fixed innocently before him, had simply kicked the pickle-keg out from under the Frenchman and brought him to the floor. His bullet, however, sped harmlessly through the roof. La Flitche seized Frona in his arms. St. Vincent, suddenly awakening, sprang for the door, but was tripped up by the breed’s ready foot.

The chairman pounded the table with his fist and concluded his broken sentence, “Gentlemen, the prisoner is found guilty as charged.”

Chapter XXIX

Frona had gone at once to her father’s side, but he was already recovering. Courbertin was brought forward with a scratched face, sprained wrist, and an insubordinate tongue. To prevent discussion and to save time, Bill Brown claimed the floor.

“Mr. Chairman, while we condemn the attempt on the part of Jacob Welse, Frona Welse, and Baron Courbertin to rescue the prisoner and thwart justice, we cannot, under the circumstances, but sympathize with them. There is no need that I should go further into this matter. You all know, and doubtless, under a like situation, would have done the same. And so, in order that we may expeditiously finish the business, I make a motion to disarm the three prisoners and let them go.”

The motion was carried, and the two men searched for weapons. Frona was saved this by giving her word that she was no longer armed. The meeting then resolved itself into a hanging committee, and began to file out of the cabin.

“Sorry I had to do it,” the chairman said, half-apologetically, half-defiantly.

Jacob Welse smiled. “You took your chance,” he answered, “and I can’t blame you. I only wish I’d got you, though.”

Excited voices arose from across the cabin. “Here, you! Leggo!” “Step on his fingers, Tim!” “Break that grip!” “Ouch! Ow!” “Pry his mouth open!”

Frona saw a knot of struggling men about St. Vincent, and ran over. He had thrown himself down on the floor and, tooth and nail, was fighting like a madman. Tim Dugan, a stalwart Celt, had come to close quarters with him, and St. Vincent’s teeth were sunk in the man’s arm.

“Smash ‘m, Tim! Smash ‘m!”

“How can I, ye fule? Get a pry on his mouth, will ye?”

“One moment, please.” The men made way for her, drawing back and leaving St. Vincent and Tim.

Frona knelt down by him. “Leave go, Gregory. Do leave go.”

He looked up at her, and his eyes did not seem human. He breathed stertorously, and in his throat were the queer little gasping noises of one overwrought.

“It is I, Gregory.” She brushed her hand soothingly across his brow.
“Don’t you understand? It is I, Frona. Do leave go.”

His whole body slowly relaxed, and a peaceful expression grew upon his face. His jaw dropped, and the man’s arm was withdrawn.

“Now listen, Gregory. Though you are to die — ”

“But I cannot! I cannot!” he groaned. “You said that I could trust to you, that all would come well.”

She thought of the chance which had been given, but said nothing.

“Oh, Frona! Frona!” He sobbed and buried his face in her lap.

“At least you can be a man. It is all that remains.”

“Come on!” Tim Dugan commanded. “Sorry to bother ye, miss, but we’ve got to fetch ‘m along. Drag ‘m out, you fellys! Catch ‘m by the legs, Blackey, and you, too, Johnson.”

St. Vincent’s body stiffened at the words, the rational gleam went out of his eyes, and his fingers closed spasmodically on Frona’s. She looked entreaty at the men, and they hesitated.

“Give me a minute with him,” she begged, “just a minute.”

“He ain’t worth it,” Dugan sneered, after they had drawn apart. “Look at ‘m.”

“It’s a damned shame,” corroborated Blackey, squinting sidewise at Frona whispering in St. Vincent’s ear, the while her hand wandered caressingly through his hair.

What she said they did not hear, but she got him on his feet and led him forward. He walked as a dead man might walk, and when he entered the open air gazed forth wonderingly upon the muddy sweep of the Yukon. The crowd had formed by the bank, about a pine tree. A boy, engaged in running a rope over one of the branches, finished his task and slid down the trunk to the ground. He looked quickly at the palms of his hands and blew upon them, and a laugh went up. A couple of wolf-dogs, on the outskirts, bristled up to each other and bared their fangs. Men encouraged them. They closed in and rolled over, but were kicked aside to make room for St. Vincent.

Corliss came up the bank to Frona. “What’s up?” he whispered. “Is it off?”

She tried to speak, but swallowed and nodded her head.

“This way, Gregory.” She touched his arm and guided him to the box beneath the rope.

Corliss, keeping step with them, looked over the crowd speculatively and felt into his jacket-pocket. “Can I do anything?” he asked, gnawing his under lip impatiently. “Whatever you say goes, Frona. I can stand them off.”

She looked at him, aware of pleasure in the sight. She knew he would dare it, but she knew also that it would be unfair. St. Vincent had had his chance, and it was not right that further sacrifice should be made. “No, Vance. It is too late. Nothing can be done.”

“At least let me try,” he persisted.

“No; it is not our fault that our plan failed, and . . . and . . .” Her eyes filled. “Please do not ask it of me.”

“Then let me take you away. You cannot remain here.”

“I must,” she answered, simply, and turned to St. Vincent, who seemed dreaming.

Blackey was tying the hangman’s knot in the rope’s end, preparatory to slipping the noose over St. Vincent’s head.

“Kiss me, Gregory,” she said, her hand on his arm.

He started at the touch, and saw all eager eyes centred upon him, and the yellow noose, just shaped, in the hands of the hangman. He threw up his arms, as though to ward it off, and cried loudly, “No! no! Let me confess! Let me tell the truth, then you’ll believe me!”

Bill Brown and the chairman shoved Blackey back, and the crowd gathered in. Cries and protestations rose from its midst. “No, you don’t,” a boy’s shrill voice made itself heard. “I’m not going to go. I climbed the tree and made the rope fast, and I’ve got a right to stay.” “You’re only a kid,” replied a man’s voice, “and it ain’t good for you.” “I don’t care, and I’m not a kid. I’m — I’m used to such things. And, anyway, I climbed the tree. Look at my hands.” “Of course he can stay,” other voices took up the trouble. “Leave him alone, Curley.” “You ain’t the whole thing.” A laugh greeted this, and things quieted down.

“Silence!” the chairman called, and then to St. Vincent, “Go ahead, you, and don’t take all day about it.”

“Give us a chance to hear!” the crowd broke out again. “Put ‘m on the box! Put ‘m on the box!”

St. Vincent was helped up, and began with eager volubility.

“I didn’t do it, but I saw it done. There weren’t two men — only one.
He did it, and Bella helped him.”

A wave of laughter drowned him out.

“Not so fast,” Bill Brown cautioned him. “Kindly explain how Bella helped this man kill herself. Begin at the beginning.”

“That night, before he turned in, Borg set his burglar alarm — ”

“Burglar alarm?”

“That’s what I called it, — a tin bread-pan attached to the latch so the door couldn’t open without tumbling it down. He set it every night, as though he were afraid of what might happen, — the very thing which did happen, for that matter. On the night of the murder I awoke with the feeling that some one was moving around. The slush-lamp was burning low, and I saw Bella at the door. Borg was snoring; I could hear him plainly. Bella was taking down the bread-pan, and she exercised great care about it. Then she opened the door, and an Indian came in softly. He had no mask, and I should know him if ever I see him again, for a scar ran along the forehead and down over one eye.”

“I suppose you sprang out of bed and gave the alarm?”

“No, I didn’t,” St. Vincent answered, with a defiant toss of the head, as though he might as well get the worst over with. “I just lay there and waited.”

“What did you think?”

“That Bella was in collusion with the Indian, and that Borg was to be murdered. It came to me at once.”

“And you did nothing?”

“Nothing.” His voice sank, and his eyes dropped to Frona, leaning against the box beneath him and steadying it. She did not seem to be affected. “Bella came over to me, but I closed my eyes and breathed regularly. She held the slush-lamp to me, but I played sleep naturally enough to fool her. Then I heard a snort of sudden awakening and alarm, and a cry, and I looked out. The Indian was hacking at Borg with a knife, and Borg was warding off with his arms and trying to grapple him. When they did grapple, Bella crept up from behind and threw her arm in a strangle-hold about her husband’s neck. She put her knee into the small of his back, and bent him backward and, with the Indian helping, threw him to the floor.”

“And what did you do?”

“I watched.”

“Had you a revolver?”

“Yes.”

“The one you previously said John Borg had borrowed?”

“Yes; but I watched.”

“Did John Borg call for help?”

“Yes.”

“Can you give his words?”

“He called, ‘St. Vincent! Oh, St. Vincent! Oh, my God! Oh, St. Vincent, help me!’“ He shuddered at the recollection, and added, “It was terrible.”

“I should say so,” Brown grunted. “And you?”

“I watched,” was the dogged reply, while a groan went up from the crowd. “Borg shook clear of them, however, and got on his legs. He hurled Bella across the cabin with a back-sweep of the arm and turned upon the Indian. Then they fought. The Indian had dropped the knife, and the sound of Borg’s blows was sickening. I thought he would surely beat the Indian to death. That was when the furniture was smashed. They rolled and snarled and struggled like wild beasts. I wondered the Indian’s chest did not cave in under some of Borg’s blows. But Bella got the knife and stabbed her husband repeatedly about the body. The Indian had clinched with him, and his arms were not free; so he kicked out at her sideways. He must have broken her legs, for she cried out and fell down, and though she tried, she never stood up again. Then he went down, with the Indian under him, across the stove.”

“Did he call any more for help?”

“He begged me to come to him.”

“And?”

“I watched. He managed to get clear of the Indian and staggered over to me. He was streaming blood, and I could see he was very weak. ‘Give me your gun,’ he said; ‘quick, give me it.’ He felt around blindly. Then his mind seemed to clear a bit, and he reached across me to the holster hanging on the wall and took the pistol. The Indian came at him with the knife again, but he did not try to defend himself. Instead, he went on towards Bella, with the Indian still hanging to him and hacking at him. The Indian seemed to bother and irritate him, and he shoved him away. He knelt down and turned Bella’s face up to the light; but his own face was covered with blood and he could not see. So he stopped long enough to brush the blood from his eyes. He appeared to look in order to make sure. Then he put the revolver to her breast and fired.

“The Indian went wild at this, and rushed at him with the knife, at the same time knocking the pistol out of his hand. It was then the shelf with the slush-lamp was knocked down. They continued to fight in the darkness, and there were more shots fired, though I do not know by whom. I crawled out of the bunk, but they struck against me in their struggles, and I fell over Bella. That’s when the blood got on my hands. As I ran out the door, more shots were fired. Then I met La Flitche and John, and . . . and you know the rest. This is the truth I have told you, I swear it!”

He looked down at Frona. She was steadying the box, and her face was composed. He looked out over the crowd and saw unbelief. Many were laughing.

“Why did you not tell this story at first?” Bill Brown demanded.

“Because . . . because . . .”

“Well?”

“Because I might have helped.”

There was more laughter at this, and Bill Brown turned away from him. “Gentlemen, you have heard this pipe dream. It is a wilder fairy story than his first. At the beginning of the trial we promised to show that the truth was not in him. That we succeeded, your verdict is ample testimony. But that he should likewise succeed, and more brilliantly, we did not expect. That he has, you cannot doubt. What do you think of him? Lie upon lie he has given us; he has been proven a chronic liar; are you to believe this last and fearfully impossible lie? Gentlemen, I can only ask that you reaffirm your judgment. And to those who may doubt his mendacity, — surely there are but few, — let me state, that if his story is true; if he broke salt with this man, John Borg, and lay in his blankets while murder was done; if he did hear, unmoved, the voice of the man calling to him for help; if he did lie there and watch that carnival of butchery without his manhood prompting him, — let me state, gentlemen, I say, let me state that he is none the less deserveful of hanging. We cannot make a mistake. What shall it be?”

“Death!” “String him up!” “Stretch ‘m!” were the cries.

But the crowd suddenly turned its attention to the river, and even Blackey refrained from his official task. A large raft, worked by a sweep at either end, was slipping past the tail of Split-up Island, close to the shore. When it was at their feet, its nose was slewed into the bank, and while its free end swung into the stream to make the consequent circle, a snubbing-rope was flung ashore and several turns taken about the tree under which St. Vincent stood. A cargo of moose-meat, red and raw, cut into quarters, peeped from beneath a cool covering of spruce boughs. And because of this, the two men on the raft looked up to those on the bank with pride in their eyes.

“Tryin’ to make Dawson with it,” one of them explained, “and the sun’s all-fired hot.”

“Nope,” said his comrade, in reply to a query, “don’t care to stop and trade. It’s worth a dollar and a half a pound down below, and we’re hustlin’ to get there. But we’ve got some pieces of a man we want to leave with you.” He turned and pointed to a loose heap of blankets which slightly disclosed the form of a man beneath. “We gathered him in this mornin’, ‘bout thirty mile up the Stewart, I should judge.”

“Stands in need of doctorin’,” the other man spoke up, “and the meat’s spoilin’, and we ain’t got time for nothin’.” “Beggar don’t have anythin’ to say. Don’t savve the burro.” “Looks as he might have been mixin’ things with a grizzly or somethin’, — all battered and gouged. Injured internally, from the looks of it. Where’ll you have him?”

Frona, standing by St. Vincent, saw the injured man borne over the crest of the bank and through the crowd. A bronzed hand drooped down and a bronzed face showed from out the blankets. The bearers halted near them while a decision could be reached as to where he should be carried. Frona felt a sudden fierce grip on her arm.

“Look! look!” St. Vincent was leaning forward and pointing wildly at the injured man. “Look! That scar!”

The Indian opened his eyes and a grin of recognition distorted his face.

“It is he! It is he!” St. Vincent, trembling with eagerness, turned upon the crowd. “I call you all to witness! That is the man who killed John Borg!”

No laughter greeted this, for there was a terrible earnestness in his manner. Bill Brown and the chairman tried to make the Indian talk, but could not. A miner from British Columbia was pressed into service, but his Chinook made no impression. Then La Flitche was called. The handsome breed bent over the man and talked in gutturals which only his mother’s heredity made possible. It sounded all one, yet it was apparent that he was trying many tongues. But no response did he draw, and he paused disheartened. As though with sudden recollection, he made another attempt. At once a gleam of intelligence shot across the Indian’s face, and his larynx vibrated to similar sounds.

“It is the Stick talk of the Upper White,” La Flitche stopped long enough to explain.

Then, with knit brows and stumbling moments when he sought dim-remembered words, he plied the man with questions. To the rest it was like a pantomime, — the meaningless grunts and waving arms and facial expressions of puzzlement, surprise, and understanding. At times a passion wrote itself on the face of the Indian, and a sympathy on the face of La Flitche. Again, by look and gesture, St. Vincent was referred to, and once a sober, mirthless laugh shaped the mouths of them.

“So? It is good,” La Flitche said, when the Indian’s head dropped back. “This man make true talk. He come from White River, way up. He cannot understand. He surprised very much, so many white men. He never think so many white men in the world. He die soon. His name Gow.

“Long time ago, three year, this man John Borg go to this man Gow’s country. He hunt, he bring plenty meat to the camp, wherefore White River Sticks like him. Gow have one squaw, Pisk-ku. Bime-by John Borg make preparation to go ‘way. He go to Gow, and he say, ‘Give me your squaw. We trade. For her I give you many things.’ But Gow say no. Pisk-ku good squaw. No woman sew moccasin like she. She tan moose-skin the best, and make the softest leather. He like Pisk-ku. Then John Borg say he don’t care; he want Pisk-ku. Then they have a skookum big fight, and Pisk-ku go ‘way with John Borg. She no want to go ‘way, but she go anyway. Borg call her ‘Bella,’ and give her plenty good things, but she like Gow all the time.” La Flitche pointed to the scar which ran down the forehead and past the eye of the Indian. “John Borg he do that.”

“Long time Gow pretty near die. Then he get well, but his head sick. He don’t know nobody. Don’t know his father, his mother, or anything. Just like a little baby. Just like that. Then one day, quick, click! something snap, and his head get well all at once. He know his father and mother, he remember Pisk-ku, he remember everything. His father say John Borg go down river. Then Gow go down river. Spring-time, ice very bad. He very much afraid, so many white men, and when he come to this place he travel by night. Nobody see him ‘tall, but he see everybody. He like a cat, see in the dark. Somehow, he come straight to John Borg’s cabin. He do not know how this was, except that the work he had to do was good work.”

St. Vincent pressed Frona’s hand, but she shook her fingers clear and withdrew a step.

“He see Pisk-ku feed the dogs, and he have talk with her. That night he come and she open the door. Then you know that which was done. St. Vincent do nothing, Borg kill Bella. Gow kill Borg. Borg kill Gow, for Gow die pretty quick. Borg have strong arm. Gow sick inside, all smashed up. Gow no care; Pisk-ku dead.

“After that he go ‘cross ice to the land. I tell him all you people say it cannot be; no man can cross the ice at that time. He laugh, and say that it is, and what is, must be. Anyway, he have very hard time, but he get ‘cross all right. He very sick inside. Bime-by he cannot walk; he crawl. Long time he come to Stewart River. Can go no more, so he lay down to die. Two white men find him and bring him to this place. He don’t care. He die anyway.”

La Flitche finished abruptly, but nobody spoke. Then he added, “I think Gow damn good man.”

Frona came up to Jacob Welse. “Take me away, father,” she said. “I am so tired.”

Chapter XXX

Next morning, Jacob Welse, for all of the Company and his millions in mines, chopped up the day’s supply of firewood, lighted a cigar, and went down the island in search of Baron Courbertin. Frona finished the breakfast dishes, hung out the robes to air, and fed the dogs. Then she took a worn Wordsworth from her clothes-bag, and, out by the bank, settled herself comfortably in a seat formed by two uprooted pines. But she did no more than open the book; for her eyes strayed out and over the Yukon to the eddy below the bluffs, and the bend above, and the tail of the spit which lay in the midst of the river. The rescue and the race were still fresh with her, though there were strange lapses, here and there, of which she remembered little. The struggle by the fissure was immeasurable; she knew not how long it lasted; and the race down Split-up to Roubeau Island was a thing of which her reason convinced her, but of which she recollected nothing.

The whim seized her, and she followed Corliss through the three days’ events, but she tacitly avoided the figure of another man whom she would not name. Something terrible was connected therewith, she knew, which must be faced sooner or later; but she preferred to put that moment away from her. She was stiff and sore of mind as well as of body, and will and action were for the time being distasteful. It was more pleasant, even, to dwell on Tommy, on Tommy of the bitter tongue and craven heart; and she made a note that the wife and children in Toronto should not be forgotten when the Northland paid its dividends to the Welse.

The crackle of a foot on a dead willow-twig roused her, and her eyes met St. Vincent’s.

“You have not congratulated me upon my escape,” he began, breezily. “But you must have been dead-tired last night. I know I was. And you had that hard pull on the river besides.”

He watched her furtively, trying to catch some cue as to her attitude and mood.

“You’re a heroine, that’s what you are, Frona,” he began again, with exuberance. “And not only did you save the mail-man, but by the delay you wrought in the trial you saved me. If one more witness had gone on the stand that first day, I should have been duly hanged before Gow put in an appearance. Fine chap, Gow. Too bad he’s going to die.”

“I am glad that I could be of help,” she replied, wondering the while what she could say.

“And of course I am to be congratulated — ”

“Your trial is hardly a thing for congratulation,” she spoke up quickly, looking him straight in the eyes for the moment. “I am glad that it came out as it did, but surely you cannot expect me to congratulate you.”

“O-o-o,” with long-drawn inflection. “So that’s where it pinches.” He smiled good-humoredly, and moved as though to sit down, but she made no room for him, and he remained standing. “I can certainly explain. If there have been women — ”

Frona had been clinching her hand nervously, but at the word burst out in laughter.

“Women?” she queried. “Women?” she repeated. “Do not be ridiculous,
Gregory.”

“After the way you stood by me through the trial,” he began, reproachfully, “I thought — ”

“Oh, you do not understand,” she said, hopelessly. “You do not understand. Look at me, Gregory, and see if I can make you understand. Your presence is painful to me. Your kisses hurt me. The memory of them still burns my cheek, and my lips feel unclean. And why? Because of women, which you may explain away? How little do you understand! But shall I tell you?”

Voices of men came to her from down the river-bank, and the splashing of water. She glanced quickly and saw Del Bishop guiding a poling-boat against the current, and Corliss on the bank, bending to the tow-rope.

“Shall I tell you why, Gregory St. Vincent?” she said again. “Tell you why your kisses have cheapened me? Because you broke the faith of food and blanket. Because you broke salt with a man, and then watched that man fight unequally for life without lifting your hand. Why, I had rather you had died in defending him; the memory of you would have been good. Yes, I had rather you had killed him yourself. At least, it would have shown there was blood in your body.”

“So this is what you would call love?” he began, scornfully, his fretting, fuming devil beginning to rouse. “A fair-weather love, truly. But, Lord, how we men learn!”

“I had thought you were well lessoned,” she retorted; “what of the other women?”

“But what do you intend to do?” he demanded, taking no notice. “I am not an easy man to cross. You cannot throw me over with impunity. I shall not stand for it, I warn you. You have dared do things in this country which would blacken you were they known. I have ears. I have not been asleep. You will find it no child’s play to explain away things which you may declare most innocent.”

She looked at him with a smile which carried pity in its cold mirth, and it goaded him.

“I am down, a thing to make a jest upon, a thing to pity, but I promise you that I can drag you with me. My kisses have cheapened you, eh? Then how must you have felt at Happy Camp on the Dyea Trail?”

As though in answer, Corliss swung down upon them with the tow-rope.

Frona beckoned a greeting to him. “Vance,” she said, “the mail-carrier has brought important news to father, so important that he must go outside. He starts this afternoon with Baron Courbertin in La Bijou. Will you take me down to Dawson? I should like to go at once, to-day.

“He . . . he suggested you,” she added shyly, indicating St. Vincent.

The Call of the Wild

This famous novel was first published in 1903 and is London’s most-read book. It is remarkable for being told from the first person perspective of a dog. The plot concerns the previously domesticated Buck, whose primordial instincts return after tragic events lead to his serving as a sled dog in the Yukon during the 19th-century Klondike Gold Rush.

The rare first edition

London studying at his schoolwork, aged 10

Chapter I. Into the Primitive

“Old longings nomadic leap,

Chafing at custom’s chain;

Again from its brumal sleep

Wakens the ferine strain.”

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.

Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. Judge Miller’s place, it was called. It stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around its four sides. The house was approached by gravelled driveways which wound about through wide-spreading lawns and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars. At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front. There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants’ cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miller’s boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon.

And over this great demesne Buck ruled. Here he was born, and here he had lived the four years of his life. It was true, there were other dogs, There could not but be other dogs on so vast a place, but they did not count. They came and went, resided in the populous kennels, or lived obscurely in the recesses of the house after the fashion of Toots, the Japanese pug, or Ysabel, the Mexican hairless, — strange creatures that rarely put nose out of doors or set foot to ground. On the other hand, there were the fox terriers, a score of them at least, who yelped fearful promises at Toots and Ysabel looking out of the windows at them and protected by a legion of housemaids armed with brooms and mops.

But Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel-dog. The whole realm was his. He plunged into the swimming tank or went hunting with the Judge’s sons; he escorted Mollie and Alice, the Judge’s daughters, on long twilight or early morning rambles; on wintry nights he lay at the Judge’s feet before the roaring library fire; he carried the Judge’s grandsons on his back, or rolled them in the grass, and guarded their footsteps through wild adventures down to the fountain in the stable yard, and even beyond, where the paddocks were, and the berry patches. Among the terriers he stalked imperiously, and Toots and Ysabel he utterly ignored, for he was king, — king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller’s place, humans included.

His father, Elmo, a huge St. Bernard, had been the Judge’s inseparable companion, and Buck bid fair to follow in the way of his father. He was not so large, — he weighed only one hundred and forty pounds, — for his mother, Shep, had been a Scotch shepherd dog. Nevertheless, one hundred and forty pounds, to which was added the dignity that comes of good living and universal respect, enabled him to carry himself in right royal fashion. During the four years since his puppyhood he had lived the life of a sated aristocrat; he had a fine pride in himself, was even a trifle egotistical, as country gentlemen sometimes become because of their insular situation. But he had saved himself by not becoming a mere pampered house-dog. Hunting and kindred outdoor delights had kept down the fat and hardened his muscles; and to him, as to the cold-tubbing races, the love of water had been a tonic and a health preserver.

And this was the manner of dog Buck was in the fall of 1897, when the Klondike strike dragged men from all the world into the frozen North. But Buck did not read the newspapers, and he did not know that Manuel, one of the gardener’s helpers, was an undesirable acquaintance. Manuel had one besetting sin. He loved to play Chinese lottery. Also, in his gambling, he had one besetting weakness — faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain. For to play a system requires money, while the wages of a gardener’s helper do not lap over the needs of a wife and numerous progeny.

The Judge was at a meeting of the Raisin Growers’ Association, and the boys were busy organizing an athletic club, on the memorable night of Manuel’s treachery. No one saw him and Buck go off through the orchard on what Buck imagined was merely a stroll. And with the exception of a solitary man, no one saw them arrive at the little flag station known as College Park. This man talked with Manuel, and money chinked between them.

“You might wrap up the goods before you deliver ‘m,” the stranger said gruffly, and Manuel doubled a piece of stout rope around Buck’s neck under the collar.

“Twist it, an’ you’ll choke ‘m plentee,” said Manuel, and the stranger grunted a ready affirmative.

Buck had accepted the rope with quiet dignity. To be sure, it was an unwonted performance: but he had learned to trust in men he knew, and to give them credit for a wisdom that outreached his own. But when the ends of the rope were placed in the stranger’s hands, he growled menacingly. He had merely intimated his displeasure, in his pride believing that to intimate was to command. But to his surprise the rope tightened around his neck, shutting off his breath. In quick rage he sprang at the man, who met him halfway, grappled him close by the throat, and with a deft twist threw him over on his back. Then the rope tightened mercilessly, while Buck struggled in a fury, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and his great chest panting futilely. Never in all his life had he been so vilely treated, and never in all his life had he been so angry. But his strength ebbed, his eyes glazed, and he knew nothing when the train was flagged and the two men threw him into the baggage car.

The next he knew, he was dimly aware that his tongue was hurting and that he was being jolted along in some kind of a conveyance. The hoarse shriek of a locomotive whistling a crossing told him where he was. He had travelled too often with the Judge not to know the sensation of riding in a baggage car. He opened his eyes, and into them came the unbridled anger of a kidnapped king. The man sprang for his throat, but Buck was too quick for him. His jaws closed on the hand, nor did they relax till his senses were choked out of him once more.

“Yep, has fits,” the man said, hiding his mangled hand from the baggageman, who had been attracted by the sounds of struggle. “I’m takin’ ‘m up for the boss to ‘Frisco. A crack dog-doctor there thinks that he can cure ‘m.”

Concerning that night’s ride, the man spoke most eloquently for himself, in a little shed back of a saloon on the San Francisco water front.

“All I get is fifty for it,” he grumbled; “an’ I wouldn’t do it over for a thousand, cold cash.”

His hand was wrapped in a bloody handkerchief, and the right trouser leg was ripped from knee to ankle.

“How much did the other mug get?” the saloon-keeper demanded.

“A hundred,” was the reply. “Wouldn’t take a sou less, so help me.”

“That makes a hundred and fifty,” the saloon-keeper calculated; “and he’s worth it, or I’m a squarehead.”

The kidnapper undid the bloody wrappings and looked at his lacerated hand. “If I don’t get the hydrophoby — ”

“It’ll be because you was born to hang,” laughed the saloon-keeper. “Here, lend me a hand before you pull your freight,” he added.

Dazed, suffering intolerable pain from throat and tongue, with the life half throttled out of him, Buck attempted to face his tormentors. But he was thrown down and choked repeatedly, till they succeeded in filing the heavy brass collar from off his neck. Then the rope was removed, and he was flung into a cagelike crate.

There he lay for the remainder of the weary night, nursing his wrath and wounded pride. He could not understand what it all meant. What did they want with him, these strange men? Why were they keeping him pent up in this narrow crate? He did not know why, but he felt oppressed by the vague sense of impending calamity. Several times during the night he sprang to his feet when the shed door rattled open, expecting to see the Judge, or the boys at least. But each time it was the bulging face of the saloon-keeper that peered in at him by the sickly light of a tallow candle. And each time the joyful bark that trembled in Buck’s throat was twisted into a savage growl.

But the saloon-keeper let him alone, and in the morning four men entered and picked up the crate. More tormentors, Buck decided, for they were evil-looking creatures, ragged and unkempt; and he stormed and raged at them through the bars. They only laughed and poked sticks at him, which he promptly assailed with his teeth till he realized that that was what they wanted. Whereupon he lay down sullenly and allowed the crate to be lifted into a wagon. Then he, and the crate in which he was imprisoned, began a passage through many hands. Clerks in the express office took charge of him; he was carted about in another wagon; a truck carried him, with an assortment of boxes and parcels, upon a ferry steamer; he was trucked off the steamer into a great railway depot, and finally he was deposited in an express car.

For two days and nights this express car was dragged along at the tail of shrieking locomotives; and for two days and nights Buck neither ate nor drank. In his anger he had met the first advances of the express messengers with growls, and they had retaliated by teasing him. When he flung himself against the bars, quivering and frothing, they laughed at him and taunted him. They growled and barked like detestable dogs, mewed, and flapped their arms and crowed. It was all very silly, he knew; but therefore the more outrage to his dignity, and his anger waxed and waxed. He did not mind the hunger so much, but the lack of water caused him severe suffering and fanned his wrath to fever-pitch. For that matter, high-strung and finely sensitive, the ill treatment had flung him into a fever, which was fed by the inflammation of his parched and swollen throat and tongue.

He was glad for one thing: the rope was off his neck. That had given them an unfair advantage; but now that it was off, he would show them. They would never get another rope around his neck. Upon that he was resolved. For two days and nights he neither ate nor drank, and during those two days and nights of torment, he accumulated a fund of wrath that boded ill for whoever first fell foul of him. His eyes turned blood-shot, and he was metamorphosed into a raging fiend. So changed was he that the Judge himself would not have recognized him; and the express messengers breathed with relief when they bundled him off the train at Seattle.

Four men gingerly carried the crate from the wagon into a small, high-walled back yard. A stout man, with a red sweater that sagged generously at the neck, came out and signed the book for the driver. That was the man, Buck divined, the next tormentor, and he hurled himself savagely against the bars. The man smiled grimly, and brought a hatchet and a club.

“You ain’t going to take him out now?” the driver asked.

“Sure,” the man replied, driving the hatchet into the crate for a pry.

There was an instantaneous scattering of the four men who had carried it in, and from safe perches on top the wall they prepared to watch the performance.

Buck rushed at the splintering wood, sinking his teeth into it, surging and wrestling with it. Wherever the hatchet fell on the outside, he was there on the inside, snarling and growling, as furiously anxious to get out as the man in the red sweater was calmly intent on getting him out.

“Now, you red-eyed devil,” he said, when he had made an opening sufficient for the passage of Buck’s body. At the same time he dropped the hatchet and shifted the club to his right hand.

And Buck was truly a red-eyed devil, as he drew himself together for the spring, hair bristling, mouth foaming, a mad glitter in his blood-shot eyes. Straight at the man he launched his one hundred and forty pounds of fury, surcharged with the pent passion of two days and nights. In mid air, just as his jaws were about to close on the man, he received a shock that checked his body and brought his teeth together with an agonizing clip. He whirled over, fetching the ground on his back and side. He had never been struck by a club in his life, and did not understand. With a snarl that was part bark and more scream he was again on his feet and launched into the air. And again the shock came and he was brought crushingly to the ground. This time he was aware that it was the club, but his madness knew no caution. A dozen times he charged, and as often the club broke the charge and smashed him down.

After a particularly fierce blow, he crawled to his feet, too dazed to rush. He staggered limply about, the blood flowing from nose and mouth and ears, his beautiful coat sprayed and flecked with bloody slaver. Then the man advanced and deliberately dealt him a frightful blow on the nose. All the pain he had endured was as nothing compared with the exquisite agony of this. With a roar that was almost lionlike in its ferocity, he again hurled himself at the man. But the man, shifting the club from right to left, coolly caught him by the under jaw, at the same time wrenching downward and backward. Buck described a complete circle in the air, and half of another, then crashed to the ground on his head and chest.

For the last time he rushed. The man struck the shrewd blow he had purposely withheld for so long, and Buck crumpled up and went down, knocked utterly senseless.

“He’s no slouch at dog-breakin’, that’s wot I say,” one of the men on the wall cried enthusiastically.

“Druther break cayuses any day, and twice on Sundays,” was the reply of the driver, as he climbed on the wagon and started the horses.

Buck’s senses came back to him, but not his strength. He lay where he had fallen, and from there he watched the man in the red sweater.

“‘Answers to the name of Buck,’“ the man soliloquized, quoting from the saloon-keeper’s letter which had announced the consignment of the crate and contents. “Well, Buck, my boy,” he went on in a genial voice, “we’ve had our little ruction, and the best thing we can do is to let it go at that. You’ve learned your place, and I know mine. Be a good dog and all ‘ll go well and the goose hang high. Be a bad dog, and I’ll whale the stuffin’ outa you. Understand?”

As he spoke he fearlessly patted the head he had so mercilessly pounded, and though Buck’s hair involuntarily bristled at touch of the hand, he endured it without protest. When the man brought him water he drank eagerly, and later bolted a generous meal of raw meat, chunk by chunk, from the man’s hand.

He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway. The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused. As the days went by, other dogs came, in crates and at the ends of ropes, some docilely, and some raging and roaring as he had come; and, one and all, he watched them pass under the dominion of the man in the red sweater. Again and again, as he looked at each brutal performance, the lesson was driven home to Buck: a man with a club was a lawgiver, a master to be obeyed, though not necessarily conciliated. Of this last Buck was never guilty, though he did see beaten dogs that fawned upon the man, and wagged their tails, and licked his hand. Also he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, finally killed in the struggle for mastery.

Now and again men came, strangers, who talked excitedly, wheedlingly, and in all kinds of fashions to the man in the red sweater. And at such times that money passed between them the strangers took one or more of the dogs away with them. Buck wondered where they went, for they never came back; but the fear of the future was strong upon him, and he was glad each time when he was not selected.

Yet his time came, in the end, in the form of a little weazened man who spat broken English and many strange and uncouth exclamations which Buck could not understand.

“Sacredam!” he cried, when his eyes lit upon Buck. “Dat one dam bully dog! Eh? How moch?”

“Three hundred, and a present at that,” was the prompt reply of the man in the red sweater. “And seem’ it’s government money, you ain’t got no kick coming, eh, Perrault?”

Perrault grinned. Considering that the price of dogs had been boomed skyward by the unwonted demand, it was not an unfair sum for so fine an animal. The Canadian Government would be no loser, nor would its despatches travel the slower. Perrault knew dogs, and when he looked at Buck he knew that he was one in a thousand — ”One in ten t’ousand,” he commented mentally.

Buck saw money pass between them, and was not surprised when Curly, a good-natured Newfoundland, and he were led away by the little weazened man. That was the last he saw of the man in the red sweater, and as Curly and he looked at receding Seattle from the deck of the Narwhal, it was the last he saw of the warm Southland. Curly and he were taken below by Perrault and turned over to a black-faced giant called Francois. Perrault was a French-Canadian, and swarthy; but Francois was a French-Canadian half-breed, and twice as swarthy. They were a new kind of men to Buck (of which he was destined to see many more), and while he developed no affection for them, he none the less grew honestly to respect them. He speedily learned that Perrault and Francois were fair men, calm and impartial in administering justice, and too wise in the way of dogs to be fooled by dogs.

In the ‘tween-decks of the Narwhal, Buck and Curly joined two other dogs. One of them was a big, snow-white fellow from Spitzbergen who had been brought away by a whaling captain, and who had later accompanied a Geological Survey into the Barrens. He was friendly, in a treacherous sort of way, smiling into one’s face the while he meditated some underhand trick, as, for instance, when he stole from Buck’s food at the first meal. As Buck sprang to punish him, the lash of Francois’s whip sang through the air, reaching the culprit first; and nothing remained to Buck but to recover the bone. That was fair of Francois, he decided, and the half-breed began his rise in Buck’s estimation.

The other dog made no advances, nor received any; also, he did not attempt to steal from the newcomers. He was a gloomy, morose fellow, and he showed Curly plainly that all he desired was to be left alone, and further, that there would be trouble if he were not left alone. “Dave” he was called, and he ate and slept, or yawned between times, and took interest in nothing, not even when the Narwhal crossed Queen Charlotte Sound and rolled and pitched and bucked like a thing possessed. When Buck and Curly grew excited, half wild with fear, he raised his head as though annoyed, favored them with an incurious glance, yawned, and went to sleep again.

Day and night the ship throbbed to the tireless pulse of the propeller, and though one day was very like another, it was apparent to Buck that the weather was steadily growing colder. At last, one morning, the propeller was quiet, and the Narwhal was pervaded with an atmosphere of excitement. He felt it, as did the other dogs, and knew that a change was at hand. Francois leashed them and brought them on deck. At the first step upon the cold surface, Buck’s feet sank into a white mushy something very like mud. He sprang back with a snort. More of this white stuff was falling through the air. He shook himself, but more of it fell upon him. He sniffed it curiously, then licked some up on his tongue. It bit like fire, and the next instant was gone. This puzzled him. He tried it again, with the same result. The onlookers laughed uproariously, and he felt ashamed, he knew not why, for it was his first snow.

Chapter II. The Law of Club and Fang

Buck’s first day on the Dyea beach was like a nightmare. Every hour was filled with shock and surprise. He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial. No lazy, sun-kissed life was this, with nothing to do but loaf and be bored. Here was neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment’s safety. All was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb were in peril. There was imperative need to be constantly alert; for these dogs and men were not town dogs and men. They were savages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of club and fang.

He had never seen dogs fight as these wolfish creatures fought, and his first experience taught him an unforgetable lesson. It is true, it was a vicarious experience, else he would not have lived to profit by it. Curly was the victim. They were camped near the log store, where she, in her friendly way, made advances to a husky dog the size of a full-grown wolf, though not half so large as she. There was no warning, only a leap in like a flash, a metallic clip of teeth, a leap out equally swift, and Curly’s face was ripped open from eye to jaw.

It was the wolf manner of fighting, to strike and leap away; but there was more to it than this. Thirty or forty huskies ran to the spot and surrounded the combatants in an intent and silent circle. Buck did not comprehend that silent intentness, nor the eager way with which they were licking their chops. Curly rushed her antagonist, who struck again and leaped aside. He met her next rush with his chest, in a peculiar fashion that tumbled her off her feet. She never regained them, This was what the onlooking huskies had waited for. They closed in upon her, snarling and yelping, and she was buried, screaming with agony, beneath the bristling mass of bodies.

So sudden was it, and so unexpected, that Buck was taken aback. He saw Spitz run out his scarlet tongue in a way he had of laughing; and he saw Francois, swinging an axe, spring into the mess of dogs. Three men with clubs were helping him to scatter them. It did not take long. Two minutes from the time Curly went down, the last of her assailants were clubbed off. But she lay there limp and lifeless in the bloody, trampled snow, almost literally torn to pieces, the swart half-breed standing over her and cursing horribly. The scene often came back to Buck to trouble him in his sleep. So that was the way. No fair play. Once down, that was the end of you. Well, he would see to it that he never went down. Spitz ran out his tongue and laughed again, and from that moment Buck hated him with a bitter and deathless hatred.

Before he had recovered from the shock caused by the tragic passing of Curly, he received another shock. Francois fastened upon him an arrangement of straps and buckles. It was a harness, such as he had seen the grooms put on the horses at home. And as he had seen horses work, so he was set to work, hauling Francois on a sled to the forest that fringed the valley, and returning with a load of firewood. Though his dignity was sorely hurt by thus being made a draught animal, he was too wise to rebel. He buckled down with a will and did his best, though it was all new and strange. Francois was stern, demanding instant obedience, and by virtue of his whip receiving instant obedience; while Dave, who was an experienced wheeler, nipped Buck’s hind quarters whenever he was in error. Spitz was the leader, likewise experienced, and while he could not always get at Buck, he growled sharp reproof now and again, or cunningly threw his weight in the traces to jerk Buck into the way he should go. Buck learned easily, and under the combined tuition of his two mates and Francois made remarkable progress. Ere they returned to camp he knew enough to stop at “ho,” to go ahead at “mush,” to swing wide on the bends, and to keep clear of the wheeler when the loaded sled shot downhill at their heels.

“T’ree vair’ good dogs,” Francois told Perrault. “Dat Buck, heem pool lak hell. I tich heem queek as anyt’ing.”

By afternoon, Perrault, who was in a hurry to be on the trail with his despatches, returned with two more dogs. “Billee” and “Joe” he called them, two brothers, and true huskies both. Sons of the one mother though they were, they were as different as day and night. Billee’s one fault was his excessive good nature, while Joe was the very opposite, sour and introspective, with a perpetual snarl and a malignant eye. Buck received them in comradely fashion, Dave ignored them, while Spitz proceeded to thrash first one and then the other. Billee wagged his tail appeasingly, turned to run when he saw that appeasement was of no avail, and cried (still appeasingly) when Spitz’s sharp teeth scored his flank. But no matter how Spitz circled, Joe whirled around on his heels to face him, mane bristling, ears laid back, lips writhing and snarling, jaws clipping together as fast as he could snap, and eyes diabolically gleaming — the incarnation of belligerent fear. So terrible was his appearance that Spitz was forced to forego disciplining him; but to cover his own discomfiture he turned upon the inoffensive and wailing Billee and drove him to the confines of the camp.

By evening Perrault secured another dog, an old husky, long and lean and gaunt, with a battle-scarred face and a single eye which flashed a warning of prowess that commanded respect. He was called Sol-leks, which means the Angry One. Like Dave, he asked nothing, gave nothing, expected nothing; and when he marched slowly and deliberately into their midst, even Spitz left him alone. He had one peculiarity which Buck was unlucky enough to discover. He did not like to be approached on his blind side. Of this offence Buck was unwittingly guilty, and the first knowledge he had of his indiscretion was when Sol-leks whirled upon him and slashed his shoulder to the bone for three inches up and down. Forever after Buck avoided his blind side, and to the last of their comradeship had no more trouble. His only apparent ambition, like Dave’s, was to be left alone; though, as Buck was afterward to learn, each of them possessed one other and even more vital ambition.

That night Buck faced the great problem of sleeping. The tent, illumined by a candle, glowed warmly in the midst of the white plain; and when he, as a matter of course, entered it, both Perrault and Francois bombarded him with curses and cooking utensils, till he recovered from his consternation and fled ignominiously into the outer cold. A chill wind was blowing that nipped him sharply and bit with especial venom into his wounded shoulder. He lay down on the snow and attempted to sleep, but the frost soon drove him shivering to his feet. Miserable and disconsolate, he wandered about among the many tents, only to find that one place was as cold as another. Here and there savage dogs rushed upon him, but he bristled his neck-hair and snarled (for he was learning fast), and they let him go his way unmolested.

Finally an idea came to him. He would return and see how his own team-mates were making out. To his astonishment, they had disappeared. Again he wandered about through the great camp, looking for them, and again he returned. Were they in the tent? No, that could not be, else he would not have been driven out. Then where could they possibly be? With drooping tail and shivering body, very forlorn indeed, he aimlessly circled the tent. Suddenly the snow gave way beneath his fore legs and he sank down. Something wriggled under his feet. He sprang back, bristling and snarling, fearful of the unseen and unknown. But a friendly little yelp reassured him, and he went back to investigate. A whiff of warm air ascended to his nostrils, and there, curled up under the snow in a snug ball, lay Billee. He whined placatingly, squirmed and wriggled to show his good will and intentions, and even ventured, as a bribe for peace, to lick Buck’s face with his warm wet tongue.

Another lesson. So that was the way they did it, eh? Buck confidently selected a spot, and with much fuss and waste effort proceeded to dig a hole for himself. In a trice the heat from his body filled the confined space and he was asleep. The day had been long and arduous, and he slept soundly and comfortably, though he growled and barked and wrestled with bad dreams.

Nor did he open his eyes till roused by the noises of the waking camp. At first he did not know where he was. It had snowed during the night and he was completely buried. The snow walls pressed him on every side, and a great surge of fear swept through him — the fear of the wild thing for the trap. It was a token that he was harking back through his own life to the lives of his forebears; for he was a civilized dog, an unduly civilized dog, and of his own experience knew no trap and so could not of himself fear it. The muscles of his whole body contracted spasmodically and instinctively, the hair on his neck and shoulders stood on end, and with a ferocious snarl he bounded straight up into the blinding day, the snow flying about him in a flashing cloud. Ere he landed on his feet, he saw the white camp spread out before him and knew where he was and remembered all that had passed from the time he went for a stroll with Manuel to the hole he had dug for himself the night before.

A shout from Francois hailed his appearance. “Wot I say?” the dog-driver cried to Perrault. “Dat Buck for sure learn queek as anyt’ing.”

Perrault nodded gravely. As courier for the Canadian Government, bearing important despatches, he was anxious to secure the best dogs, and he was particularly gladdened by the possession of Buck.

Three more huskies were added to the team inside an hour, making a total of nine, and before another quarter of an hour had passed they were in harness and swinging up the trail toward the Dyea Canon. Buck was glad to be gone, and though the work was hard he found he did not particularly despise it. He was surprised at the eagerness which animated the whole team and which was communicated to him; but still more surprising was the change wrought in Dave and Sol-leks. They were new dogs, utterly transformed by the harness. All passiveness and unconcern had dropped from them. They were alert and active, anxious that the work should go well, and fiercely irritable with whatever, by delay or confusion, retarded that work. The toil of the traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.

Dave was wheeler or sled dog, pulling in front of him was Buck, then came Sol-leks; the rest of the team was strung out ahead, single file, to the leader, which position was filled by Spitz.

Buck had been purposely placed between Dave and Sol-leks so that he might receive instruction. Apt scholar that he was, they were equally apt teachers, never allowing him to linger long in error, and enforcing their teaching with their sharp teeth. Dave was fair and very wise. He never nipped Buck without cause, and he never failed to nip him when he stood in need of it. As Francois’s whip backed him up, Buck found it to be cheaper to mend his ways than to retaliate. Once, during a brief halt, when he got tangled in the traces and delayed the start, both Dave and Solleks flew at him and administered a sound trouncing. The resulting tangle was even worse, but Buck took good care to keep the traces clear thereafter; and ere the day was done, so well had he mastered his work, his mates about ceased nagging him. Francois’s whip snapped less frequently, and Perrault even honored Buck by lifting up his feet and carefully examining them.

It was a hard day’s run, up the Canon, through Sheep Camp, past the Scales and the timber line, across glaciers and snowdrifts hundreds of feet deep, and over the great Chilcoot Divide, which stands between the salt water and the fresh and guards forbiddingly the sad and lonely North. They made good time down the chain of lakes which fills the craters of extinct volcanoes, and late that night pulled into the huge camp at the head of Lake Bennett, where thousands of goldseekers were building boats against the break-up of the ice in the spring. Buck made his hole in the snow and slept the sleep of the exhausted just, but all too early was routed out in the cold darkness and harnessed with his mates to the sled.

That day they made forty miles, the trail being packed; but the next day, and for many days to follow, they broke their own trail, worked harder, and made poorer time. As a rule, Perrault travelled ahead of the team, packing the snow with webbed shoes to make it easier for them. Francois, guiding the sled at the gee-pole, sometimes exchanged places with him, but not often. Perrault was in a hurry, and he prided himself on his knowledge of ice, which knowledge was indispensable, for the fall ice was very thin, and where there was swift water, there was no ice at all.

Day after day, for days unending, Buck toiled in the traces. Always, they broke camp in the dark, and the first gray of dawn found them hitting the trail with fresh miles reeled off behind them. And always they pitched camp after dark, eating their bit of fish, and crawling to sleep into the snow. Buck was ravenous. The pound and a half of sun-dried salmon, which was his ration for each day, seemed to go nowhere. He never had enough, and suffered from perpetual hunger pangs. Yet the other dogs, because they weighed less and were born to the life, received a pound only of the fish and managed to keep in good condition.

He swiftly lost the fastidiousness which had characterized his old life. A dainty eater, he found that his mates, finishing first, robbed him of his unfinished ration. There was no defending it. While he was fighting off two or three, it was disappearing down the throats of the others. To remedy this, he ate as fast as they; and, so greatly did hunger compel him, he was not above taking what did not belong to him. He watched and learned. When he saw Pike, one of the new dogs, a clever malingerer and thief, slyly steal a slice of bacon when Perrault’s back was turned, he duplicated the performance the following day, getting away with the whole chunk. A great uproar was raised, but he was unsuspected; while Dub, an awkward blunderer who was always getting caught, was punished for Buck’s misdeed.

This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence. It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowship, to respect private property and personal feelings; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool, and in so far as he observed them he would fail to prosper.

Not that Buck reasoned it out. He was fit, that was all, and unconsciously he accommodated himself to the new mode of life. All his days, no matter what the odds, he had never run from a fight. But the club of the man in the red sweater had beaten into him a more fundamental and primitive code. Civilized, he could have died for a moral consideration, say the defence of Judge Miller’s riding-whip; but the completeness of his decivilization was now evidenced by his ability to flee from the defence of a moral consideration and so save his hide. He did not steal for joy of it, but because of the clamor of his stomach. He did not rob openly, but stole secretly and cunningly, out of respect for club and fang. In short, the things he did were done because it was easier to do them than not to do them.

His development (or retrogression) was rapid. His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues. Sight and scent became remarkably keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril. He learned to bite the ice out with his teeth when it collected between his toes; and when he was thirsty and there was a thick scum of ice over the water hole, he would break it by rearing and striking it with stiff fore legs. His most conspicuous trait was an ability to scent the wind and forecast it a night in advance. No matter how breathless the air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind that later blew inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug.

And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks. They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always. And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stiffness, and the cold, and dark.

Thus, as token of what a puppet thing life is, the ancient song surged through him and he came into his own again; and he came because men had found a yellow metal in the North, and because Manuel was a gardener’s helper whose wages did not lap over the needs of his wife and divers small copies of himself.

Chapter III. The Dominant Primordial Beast

The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce conditions of trail life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth. His newborn cunning gave him poise and control. He was too busy adjusting himself to the new life to feel at ease, and not only did he not pick fights, but he avoided them whenever possible. A certain deliberateness characterized his attitude. He was not prone to rashness and precipitate action; and in the bitter hatred between him and Spitz he betrayed no impatience, shunned all offensive acts.

On the other hand, possibly because he divined in Buck a dangerous rival, Spitz never lost an opportunity of showing his teeth. He even went out of his way to bully Buck, striving constantly to start the fight which could end only in the death of one or the other. Early in the trip this might have taken place had it not been for an unwonted accident. At the end of this day they made a bleak and miserable camp on the shore of Lake Le Barge. Driving snow, a wind that cut like a white-hot knife, and darkness had forced them to grope for a camping place. They could hardly have fared worse. At their backs rose a perpendicular wall of rock, and Perrault and Francois were compelled to make their fire and spread their sleeping robes on the ice of the lake itself. The tent they had discarded at Dyea in order to travel light. A few sticks of driftwood furnished them with a fire that thawed down through the ice and left them to eat supper in the dark.

Close in under the sheltering rock Buck made his nest. So snug and warm was it, that he was loath to leave it when Francois distributed the fish which he had first thawed over the fire. But when Buck finished his ration and returned, he found his nest occupied. A warning snarl told him that the trespasser was Spitz. Till now Buck had avoided trouble with his enemy, but this was too much. The beast in him roared. He sprang upon Spitz with a fury which surprised them both, and Spitz particularly, for his whole experience with Buck had gone to teach him that his rival was an unusually timid dog, who managed to hold his own only because of his great weight and size.

Francois was surprised, too, when they shot out in a tangle from the disrupted nest and he divined the cause of the trouble. “A-a-ah!” he cried to Buck. “Gif it to heem, by Gar! Gif it to heem, the dirty t’eef!”

Spitz was equally willing. He was crying with sheer rage and eagerness as he circled back and forth for a chance to spring in. Buck was no less eager, and no less cautious, as he likewise circled back and forth for the advantage. But it was then that the unexpected happened, the thing which projected their struggle for supremacy far into the future, past many a weary mile of trail and toil.

An oath from Perrault, the resounding impact of a club upon a bony frame, and a shrill yelp of pain, heralded the breaking forth of pandemonium. The camp was suddenly discovered to be alive with skulking furry forms, — starving huskies, four or five score of them, who had scented the camp from some Indian village. They had crept in while Buck and Spitz were fighting, and when the two men sprang among them with stout clubs they showed their teeth and fought back. They were crazed by the smell of the food. Perrault found one with head buried in the grub-box. His club landed heavily on the gaunt ribs, and the grub-box was capsized on the ground. On the instant a score of the famished brutes were scrambling for the bread and bacon. The clubs fell upon them unheeded. They yelped and howled under the rain of blows, but struggled none the less madly till the last crumb had been devoured.

In the meantime the astonished team-dogs had burst out of their nests only to be set upon by the fierce invaders. Never had Buck seen such dogs. It seemed as though their bones would burst through their skins. They were mere skeletons, draped loosely in draggled hides, with blazing eyes and slavered fangs. But the hunger-madness made them terrifying, irresistible. There was no opposing them. The team-dogs were swept back against the cliff at the first onset. Buck was beset by three huskies, and in a trice his head and shoulders were ripped and slashed. The din was frightful. Billee was crying as usual. Dave and Sol-leks, dripping blood from a score of wounds, were fighting bravely side by side. Joe was snapping like a demon. Once, his teeth closed on the fore leg of a husky, and he crunched down through the bone. Pike, the malingerer, leaped upon the crippled animal, breaking its neck with a quick flash of teeth and a jerk, Buck got a frothing adversary by the throat, and was sprayed with blood when his teeth sank through the jugular. The warm taste of it in his mouth goaded him to greater fierceness. He flung himself upon another, and at the same time felt teeth sink into his own throat. It was Spitz, treacherously attacking from the side.

Perrault and Francois, having cleaned out their part of the camp, hurried to save their sled-dogs. The wild wave of famished beasts rolled back before them, and Buck shook himself free. But it was only for a moment. The two men were compelled to run back to save the grub, upon which the huskies returned to the attack on the team. Billee, terrified into bravery, sprang through the savage circle and fled away over the ice. Pike and Dub followed on his heels, with the rest of the team behind. As Buck drew himself together to spring after them, out of the tail of his eye he saw Spitz rush upon him with the evident intention of overthrowing him. Once off his feet and under that mass of huskies, there was no hope for him. But he braced himself to the shock of Spitz’s charge, then joined the flight out on the lake.

Later, the nine team-dogs gathered together and sought shelter in the forest. Though unpursued, they were in a sorry plight. There was not one who was not wounded in four or five places, while some were wounded grievously. Dub was badly injured in a hind leg; Dolly, the last husky added to the team at Dyea, had a badly torn throat; Joe had lost an eye; while Billee, the good-natured, with an ear chewed and rent to ribbons, cried and whimpered throughout the night. At daybreak they limped warily back to camp, to find the marauders gone and the two men in bad tempers. Fully half their grub supply was gone. The huskies had chewed through the sled lashings and canvas coverings. In fact, nothing, no matter how remotely eatable, had escaped them. They had eaten a pair of Perrault’s moose-hide moccasins, chunks out of the leather traces, and even two feet of lash from the end of Francois’s whip. He broke from a mournful contemplation of it to look over his wounded dogs.

“Ah, my frien’s,” he said softly, “mebbe it mek you mad dog, dose many bites. Mebbe all mad dog, sacredam! Wot you t’ink, eh, Perrault?”

The courier shook his head dubiously. With four hundred miles of trail still between him and Dawson, he could ill afford to have madness break out among his dogs. Two hours of cursing and exertion got the harnesses into shape, and the wound-stiffened team was under way, struggling painfully over the hardest part of the trail they had yet encountered, and for that matter, the hardest between them and Dawson.

The Thirty Mile River was wide open. Its wild water defied the frost, and it was in the eddies only and in the quiet places that the ice held at all. Six days of exhausting toil were required to cover those thirty terrible miles. And terrible they were, for every foot of them was accomplished at the risk of life to dog and man. A dozen times, Perrault, nosing the way broke through the ice bridges, being saved by the long pole he carried, which he so held that it fell each time across the hole made by his body. But a cold snap was on, the thermometer registering fifty below zero, and each time he broke through he was compelled for very life to build a fire and dry his garments.

Nothing daunted him. It was because nothing daunted him that he had been chosen for government courier. He took all manner of risks, resolutely thrusting his little weazened face into the frost and struggling on from dim dawn to dark. He skirted the frowning shores on rim ice that bent and crackled under foot and upon which they dared not halt. Once, the sled broke through, with Dave and Buck, and they were half-frozen and all but drowned by the time they were dragged out. The usual fire was necessary to save them. They were coated solidly with ice, and the two men kept them on the run around the fire, sweating and thawing, so close that they were singed by the flames.

At another time Spitz went through, dragging the whole team after him up to Buck, who strained backward with all his strength, his fore paws on the slippery edge and the ice quivering and snapping all around. But behind him was Dave, likewise straining backward, and behind the sled was Francois, pulling till his tendons cracked.

Again, the rim ice broke away before and behind, and there was no escape except up the cliff. Perrault scaled it by a miracle, while Francois prayed for just that miracle; and with every thong and sled lashing and the last bit of harness rove into a long rope, the dogs were hoisted, one by one, to the cliff crest. Francois came up last, after the sled and load. Then came the search for a place to descend, which descent was ultimately made by the aid of the rope, and night found them back on the river with a quarter of a mile to the day’s credit.

By the time they made the Hootalinqua and good ice, Buck was played out. The rest of the dogs were in like condition; but Perrault, to make up lost time, pushed them late and early. The first day they covered thirty-five miles to the Big Salmon; the next day thirty-five more to the Little Salmon; the third day forty miles, which brought them well up toward the Five Fingers.

Buck’s feet were not so compact and hard as the feet of the huskies. His had softened during the many generations since the day his last wild ancestor was tamed by a cave-dweller or river man. All day long he limped in agony, and camp once made, lay down like a dead dog. Hungry as he was, he would not move to receive his ration of fish, which Francois had to bring to him. Also, the dog-driver rubbed Buck’s feet for half an hour each night after supper, and sacrificed the tops of his own moccasins to make four moccasins for Buck. This was a great relief, and Buck caused even the weazened face of Perrault to twist itself into a grin one morning, when Francois forgot the moccasins and Buck lay on his back, his four feet waving appealingly in the air, and refused to budge without them. Later his feet grew hard to the trail, and the worn-out foot-gear was thrown away.

At the Pelly one morning, as they were harnessing up, Dolly, who had never been conspicuous for anything, went suddenly mad. She announced her condition by a long, heartbreaking wolf howl that sent every dog bristling with fear, then sprang straight for Buck. He had never seen a dog go mad, nor did he have any reason to fear madness; yet he knew that here was horror, and fled away from it in a panic. Straight away he raced, with Dolly, panting and frothing, one leap behind; nor could she gain on him, so great was his terror, nor could he leave her, so great was her madness. He plunged through the wooded breast of the island, flew down to the lower end, crossed a back channel filled with rough ice to another island, gained a third island, curved back to the main river, and in desperation started to cross it. And all the time, though he did not look, he could hear her snarling just one leap behind. Francois called to him a quarter of a mile away and he doubled back, still one leap ahead, gasping painfully for air and putting all his faith in that Francois would save him. The dog-driver held the axe poised in his hand, and as Buck shot past him the axe crashed down upon mad Dolly’s head.

Buck staggered over against the sled, exhausted, sobbing for breath, helpless. This was Spitz’s opportunity. He sprang upon Buck, and twice his teeth sank into his unresisting foe and ripped and tore the flesh to the bone. Then Francois’s lash descended, and Buck had the satisfaction of watching Spitz receive the worst whipping as yet administered to any of the teams.

“One devil, dat Spitz,” remarked Perrault. “Some dam day heem keel dat Buck.”

“Dat Buck two devils,” was Francois’s rejoinder. “All de tam I watch dat Buck I know for sure. Lissen: some dam fine day heem get mad lak hell an’ den heem chew dat Spitz all up an’ spit heem out on de snow. Sure. I know.”

From then on it was war between them. Spitz, as lead-dog and acknowledged master of the team, felt his supremacy threatened by this strange Southland dog. And strange Buck was to him, for of the many Southland dogs he had known, not one had shown up worthily in camp and on trail. They were all too soft, dying under the toil, the frost, and starvation. Buck was the exception. He alone endured and prospered, matching the husky in strength, savagery, and cunning. Then he was a masterful dog, and what made him dangerous was the fact that the club of the man in the red sweater had knocked all blind pluck and rashness out of his desire for mastery. He was preeminently cunning, and could bide his time with a patience that was nothing less than primitive.

It was inevitable that the clash for leadership should come. Buck wanted it. He wanted it because it was his nature, because he had been gripped tight by that nameless, incomprehensible pride of the trail and trace — that pride which holds dogs in the toil to the last gasp, which lures them to die joyfully in the harness, and breaks their hearts if they are cut out of the harness. This was the pride of Dave as wheel-dog, of Sol-leks as he pulled with all his strength; the pride that laid hold of them at break of camp, transforming them from sour and sullen brutes into straining, eager, ambitious creatures; the pride that spurred them on all day and dropped them at pitch of camp at night, letting them fall back into gloomy unrest and uncontent. This was the pride that bore up Spitz and made him thrash the sled-dogs who blundered and shirked in the traces or hid away at harness-up time in the morning. Likewise it was this pride that made him fear Buck as a possible lead-dog. And this was Buck’s pride, too.

He openly threatened the other’s leadership. He came between him and the shirks he should have punished. And he did it deliberately. One night there was a heavy snowfall, and in the morning Pike, the malingerer, did not appear. He was securely hidden in his nest under a foot of snow. Francois called him and sought him in vain. Spitz was wild with wrath. He raged through the camp, smelling and digging in every likely place, snarling so frightfully that Pike heard and shivered in his hiding-place.

But when he was at last unearthed, and Spitz flew at him to punish him, Buck flew, with equal rage, in between. So unexpected was it, and so shrewdly managed, that Spitz was hurled backward and off his feet. Pike, who had been trembling abjectly, took heart at this open mutiny, and sprang upon his overthrown leader. Buck, to whom fair play was a forgotten code, likewise sprang upon Spitz. But Francois, chuckling at the incident while unswerving in the administration of justice, brought his lash down upon Buck with all his might. This failed to drive Buck from his prostrate rival, and the butt of the whip was brought into play. Half-stunned by the blow, Buck was knocked backward and the lash laid upon him again and again, while Spitz soundly punished the many times offending Pike.

In the days that followed, as Dawson grew closer and closer, Buck still continued to interfere between Spitz and the culprits; but he did it craftily, when Francois was not around, With the covert mutiny of Buck, a general insubordination sprang up and increased. Dave and Sol-leks were unaffected, but the rest of the team went from bad to worse. Things no longer went right. There was continual bickering and jangling. Trouble was always afoot, and at the bottom of it was Buck. He kept Francois busy, for the dog-driver was in constant apprehension of the life-and-death struggle between the two which he knew must take place sooner or later; and on more than one night the sounds of quarrelling and strife among the other dogs turned him out of his sleeping robe, fearful that Buck and Spitz were at it.

But the opportunity did not present itself, and they pulled into Dawson one dreary afternoon with the great fight still to come. Here were many men, and countless dogs, and Buck found them all at work. It seemed the ordained order of things that dogs should work. All day they swung up and down the main street in long teams, and in the night their jingling bells still went by. They hauled cabin logs and firewood, freighted up to the mines, and did all manner of work that horses did in the Santa Clara Valley. Here and there Buck met Southland dogs, but in the main they were the wild wolf husky breed. Every night, regularly, at nine, at twelve, at three, they lifted a nocturnal song, a weird and eerie chant, in which it was Buck’s delight to join.

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself — one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.

Seven days from the time they pulled into Dawson, they dropped down the steep bank by the Barracks to the Yukon Trail, and pulled for Dyea and Salt Water. Perrault was carrying despatches if anything more urgent than those he had brought in; also, the travel pride had gripped him, and he purposed to make the record trip of the year. Several things favored him in this. The week’s rest had recuperated the dogs and put them in thorough trim. The trail they had broken into the country was packed hard by later journeyers. And further, the police had arranged in two or three places deposits of grub for dog and man, and he was travelling light.

They made Sixty Mile, which is a fifty-mile run, on the first day; and the second day saw them booming up the Yukon well on their way to Pelly. But such splendid running was achieved not without great trouble and vexation on the part of Francois. The insidious revolt led by Buck had destroyed the solidarity of the team. It no longer was as one dog leaping in the traces. The encouragement Buck gave the rebels led them into all kinds of petty misdemeanors. No more was Spitz a leader greatly to be feared. The old awe departed, and they grew equal to challenging his authority. Pike robbed him of half a fish one night, and gulped it down under the protection of Buck. Another night Dub and Joe fought Spitz and made him forego the punishment they deserved. And even Billee, the good-natured, was less good-natured, and whined not half so placatingly as in former days. Buck never came near Spitz without snarling and bristling menacingly. In fact, his conduct approached that of a bully, and he was given to swaggering up and down before Spitz’s very nose.

The breaking down of discipline likewise affected the dogs in their relations with one another. They quarrelled and bickered more than ever among themselves, till at times the camp was a howling bedlam. Dave and Sol-leks alone were unaltered, though they were made irritable by the unending squabbling. Francois swore strange barbarous oaths, and stamped the snow in futile rage, and tore his hair. His lash was always singing among the dogs, but it was of small avail. Directly his back was turned they were at it again. He backed up Spitz with his whip, while Buck backed up the remainder of the team. Francois knew he was behind all the trouble, and Buck knew he knew; but Buck was too clever ever again to be caught red-handed. He worked faithfully in the harness, for the toil had become a delight to him; yet it was a greater delight slyly to precipitate a fight amongst his mates and tangle the traces.

At the mouth of the Tahkeena, one night after supper, Dub turned up a snowshoe rabbit, blundered it, and missed. In a second the whole team was in full cry. A hundred yards away was a camp of the Northwest Police, with fifty dogs, huskies all, who joined the chase. The rabbit sped down the river, turned off into a small creek, up the frozen bed of which it held steadily. It ran lightly on the surface of the snow, while the dogs ploughed through by main strength. Buck led the pack, sixty strong, around bend after bend, but he could not gain. He lay down low to the race, whining eagerly, his splendid body flashing forward, leap by leap, in the wan white moonlight. And leap by leap, like some pale frost wraith, the snowshoe rabbit flashed on ahead.

All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to kill — all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

But Spitz, cold and calculating even in his supreme moods, left the pack and cut across a narrow neck of land where the creek made a long bend around. Buck did not know of this, and as he rounded the bend, the frost wraith of a rabbit still flitting before him, he saw another and larger frost wraith leap from the overhanging bank into the immediate path of the rabbit. It was Spitz. The rabbit could not turn, and as the white teeth broke its back in mid air it shrieked as loudly as a stricken man may shriek. At sound of this, the cry of Life plunging down from Life’s apex in the grip of Death, the fall pack at Buck’s heels raised a hell’s chorus of delight.

Buck did not cry out. He did not check himself, but drove in upon Spitz, shoulder to shoulder, so hard that he missed the throat. They rolled over and over in the powdery snow. Spitz gained his feet almost as though he had not been overthrown, slashing Buck down the shoulder and leaping clear. Twice his teeth clipped together, like the steel jaws of a trap, as he backed away for better footing, with lean and lifting lips that writhed and snarled.

In a flash Buck knew it. The time had come. It was to the death. As they circled about, snarling, ears laid back, keenly watchful for the advantage, the scene came to Buck with a sense of familiarity. He seemed to remember it all, — the white woods, and earth, and moonlight, and the thrill of battle. Over the whiteness and silence brooded a ghostly calm. There was not the faintest whisper of air — nothing moved, not a leaf quivered, the visible breaths of the dogs rising slowly and lingering in the frosty air. They had made short work of the snowshoe rabbit, these dogs that were ill-tamed wolves; and they were now drawn up in an expectant circle. They, too, were silent, their eyes only gleaming and their breaths drifting slowly upward. To Buck it was nothing new or strange, this scene of old time. It was as though it had always been, the wonted way of things.

Spitz was a practised fighter. From Spitzbergen through the Arctic, and across Canada and the Barrens, he had held his own with all manner of dogs and achieved to mastery over them. Bitter rage was his, but never blind rage. In passion to rend and destroy, he never forgot that his enemy was in like passion to rend and destroy. He never rushed till he was prepared to receive a rush; never attacked till he had first defended that attack.

In vain Buck strove to sink his teeth in the neck of the big white dog. Wherever his fangs struck for the softer flesh, they were countered by the fangs of Spitz. Fang clashed fang, and lips were cut and bleeding, but Buck could not penetrate his enemy’s guard. Then he warmed up and enveloped Spitz in a whirlwind of rushes. Time and time again he tried for the snow-white throat, where life bubbled near to the surface, and each time and every time Spitz slashed him and got away. Then Buck took to rushing, as though for the throat, when, suddenly drawing back his head and curving in from the side, he would drive his shoulder at the shoulder of Spitz, as a ram by which to overthrow him. But instead, Buck’s shoulder was slashed down each time as Spitz leaped lightly away.

Spitz was untouched, while Buck was streaming with blood and panting hard. The fight was growing desperate. And all the while the silent and wolfish circle waited to finish off whichever dog went down. As Buck grew winded, Spitz took to rushing, and he kept him staggering for footing. Once Buck went over, and the whole circle of sixty dogs started up; but he recovered himself, almost in mid air, and the circle sank down again and waited.

But Buck possessed a quality that made for greatness — imagination. He fought by instinct, but he could fight by head as well. He rushed, as though attempting the old shoulder trick, but at the last instant swept low to the snow and in. His teeth closed on Spitz’s left fore leg. There was a crunch of breaking bone, and the white dog faced him on three legs. Thrice he tried to knock him over, then repeated the trick and broke the right fore leg. Despite the pain and helplessness, Spitz struggled madly to keep up. He saw the silent circle, with gleaming eyes, lolling tongues, and silvery breaths drifting upward, closing in upon him as he had seen similar circles close in upon beaten antagonists in the past. Only this time he was the one who was beaten.

There was no hope for him. Buck was inexorable. Mercy was a thing reserved for gentler climes. He manoeuvred for the final rush. The circle had tightened till he could feel the breaths of the huskies on his flanks. He could see them, beyond Spitz and to either side, half crouching for the spring, their eyes fixed upon him. A pause seemed to fall. Every animal was motionless as though turned to stone. Only Spitz quivered and bristled as he staggered back and forth, snarling with horrible menace, as though to frighten off impending death. Then Buck sprang in and out; but while he was in, shoulder had at last squarely met shoulder. The dark circle became a dot on the moon-flooded snow as Spitz disappeared from view. Buck stood and looked on, the successful champion, the dominant primordial beast who had made his kill and found it good.

Chapter IV. Who Has Won to Mastership

“Eh? Wot I say? I spik true w’en I say dat Buck two devils.” This was Francois’s speech next morning when he discovered Spitz missing and Buck covered with wounds. He drew him to the fire and by its light pointed them out.

“Dat Spitz fight lak hell,” said Perrault, as he surveyed the gaping rips and cuts.

“An’ dat Buck fight lak two hells,” was Francois’s answer. “An’ now we make good time. No more Spitz, no more trouble, sure.”

While Perrault packed the camp outfit and loaded the sled, the dog-driver proceeded to harness the dogs. Buck trotted up to the place Spitz would have occupied as leader; but Francois, not noticing him, brought Sol-leks to the coveted position. In his judgment, Sol-leks was the best lead-dog left. Buck sprang upon Sol-leks in a fury, driving him back and standing in his place.

“Eh? eh?” Francois cried, slapping his thighs gleefully. “Look at dat Buck. Heem keel dat Spitz, heem t’ink to take de job.”

“Go ‘way, Chook!” he cried, but Buck refused to budge.

He took Buck by the scruff of the neck, and though the dog growled threateningly, dragged him to one side and replaced Sol-leks. The old dog did not like it, and showed plainly that he was afraid of Buck. Francois was obdurate, but when he turned his back Buck again displaced Sol-leks, who was not at all unwilling to go.

Francois was angry. “Now, by Gar, I feex you!” he cried, coming back with a heavy club in his hand.

Buck remembered the man in the red sweater, and retreated slowly; nor did he attempt to charge in when Sol-leks was once more brought forward. But he circled just beyond the range of the club, snarling with bitterness and rage; and while he circled he watched the club so as to dodge it if thrown by Francois, for he was become wise in the way of clubs. The driver went about his work, and he called to Buck when he was ready to put him in his old place in front of Dave. Buck retreated two or three steps. Francois followed him up, whereupon he again retreated. After some time of this, Francois threw down the club, thinking that Buck feared a thrashing. But Buck was in open revolt. He wanted, not to escape a clubbing, but to have the leadership. It was his by right. He had earned it, and he would not be content with less.

Perrault took a hand. Between them they ran him about for the better part of an hour. They threw clubs at him. He dodged. They cursed him, and his fathers and mothers before him, and all his seed to come after him down to the remotest generation, and every hair on his body and drop of blood in his veins; and he answered curse with snarl and kept out of their reach. He did not try to run away, but retreated around and around the camp, advertising plainly that when his desire was met, he would come in and be good.

Francois sat down and scratched his head. Perrault looked at his watch and swore. Time was flying, and they should have been on the trail an hour gone. Francois scratched his head again. He shook it and grinned sheepishly at the courier, who shrugged his shoulders in sign that they were beaten. Then Francois went up to where Sol-leks stood and called to Buck. Buck laughed, as dogs laugh, yet kept his distance. Francois unfastened Sol-leks’s traces and put him back in his old place. The team stood harnessed to the sled in an unbroken line, ready for the trail. There was no place for Buck save at the front. Once more Francois called, and once more Buck laughed and kept away.

“T’row down de club,” Perrault commanded.

Francois complied, whereupon Buck trotted in, laughing triumphantly, and swung around into position at the head of the team. His traces were fastened, the sled broken out, and with both men running they dashed out on to the river trail.

Highly as the dog-driver had forevalued Buck, with his two devils, he found, while the day was yet young, that he had undervalued. At a bound Buck took up the duties of leadership; and where judgment was required, and quick thinking and quick acting, he showed himself the superior even of Spitz, of whom Francois had never seen an equal.

But it was in giving the law and making his mates live up to it, that Buck excelled. Dave and Sol-leks did not mind the change in leadership. It was none of their business. Their business was to toil, and toil mightily, in the traces. So long as that were not interfered with, they did not care what happened. Billee, the good-natured, could lead for all they cared, so long as he kept order. The rest of the team, however, had grown unruly during the last days of Spitz, and their surprise was great now that Buck proceeded to lick them into shape.

Pike, who pulled at Buck’s heels, and who never put an ounce more of his weight against the breast-band than he was compelled to do, was swiftly and repeatedly shaken for loafing; and ere the first day was done he was pulling more than ever before in his life. The first night in camp, Joe, the sour one, was punished roundly — a thing that Spitz had never succeeded in doing. Buck simply smothered him by virtue of superior weight, and cut him up till he ceased snapping and began to whine for mercy.

The general tone of the team picked up immediately. It recovered its old-time solidarity, and once more the dogs leaped as one dog in the traces. At the Rink Rapids two native huskies, Teek and Koona, were added; and the celerity with which Buck broke them in took away Francois’s breath.

“Nevaire such a dog as dat Buck!” he cried. “No, nevaire! Heem worth one t’ousan’ dollair, by Gar! Eh? Wot you say, Perrault?”

And Perrault nodded. He was ahead of the record then, and gaining day by day. The trail was in excellent condition, well packed and hard, and there was no new-fallen snow with which to contend. It was not too cold. The temperature dropped to fifty below zero and remained there the whole trip. The men rode and ran by turn, and the dogs were kept on the jump, with but infrequent stoppages.

The Thirty Mile River was comparatively coated with ice, and they covered in one day going out what had taken them ten days coming in. In one run they made a sixty-mile dash from the foot of Lake Le Barge to the White Horse Rapids. Across Marsh, Tagish, and Bennett (seventy miles of lakes), they flew so fast that the man whose turn it was to run towed behind the sled at the end of a rope. And on the last night of the second week they topped White Pass and dropped down the sea slope with the lights of Skaguay and of the shipping at their feet.

It was a record run. Each day for fourteen days they had averaged forty miles. For three days Perrault and Francois threw chests up and down the main street of Skaguay and were deluged with invitations to drink, while the team was the constant centre of a worshipful crowd of dog-busters and mushers. Then three or four western bad men aspired to clean out the town, were riddled like pepper-boxes for their pains, and public interest turned to other idols. Next came official orders. Francois called Buck to him, threw his arms around him, wept over him. And that was the last of Francois and Perrault. Like other men, they passed out of Buck’s life for good.

A Scotch half-breed took charge of him and his mates, and in company with a dozen other dog-teams he started back over the weary trail to Dawson. It was no light running now, nor record time, but heavy toil each day, with a heavy load behind; for this was the mail train, carrying word from the world to the men who sought gold under the shadow of the Pole.

Buck did not like it, but he bore up well to the work, taking pride in it after the manner of Dave and Sol-leks, and seeing that his mates, whether they prided in it or not, did their fair share. It was a monotonous life, operating with machine-like regularity. One day was very like another. At a certain time each morning the cooks turned out, fires were built, and breakfast was eaten. Then, while some broke camp, others harnessed the dogs, and they were under way an hour or so before the darkness fell which gave warning of dawn. At night, camp was made. Some pitched the flies, others cut firewood and pine boughs for the beds, and still others carried water or ice for the cooks. Also, the dogs were fed. To them, this was the one feature of the day, though it was good to loaf around, after the fish was eaten, for an hour or so with the other dogs, of which there were fivescore and odd. There were fierce fighters among them, but three battles with the fiercest brought Buck to mastery, so that when he bristled and showed his teeth they got out of his way.

Best of all, perhaps, he loved to lie near the fire, hind legs crouched under him, fore legs stretched out in front, head raised, and eyes blinking dreamily at the flames. Sometimes he thought of Judge Miller’s big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley, and of the cement swimming-tank, and Ysabel, the Mexican hairless, and Toots, the Japanese pug; but oftener he remembered the man in the red sweater, the death of Curly, the great fight with Spitz, and the good things he had eaten or would like to eat. He was not homesick. The Sunland was very dim and distant, and such memories had no power over him. Far more potent were the memories of his heredity that gave things he had never seen before a seeming familiarity; the instincts (which were but the memories of his ancestors become habits) which had lapsed in later days, and still later, in him, quickened and become alive again.

Sometimes as he crouched there, blinking dreamily at the flames, it seemed that the flames were of another fire, and that as he crouched by this other fire he saw another and different man from the half-breed cook before him. This other man was shorter of leg and longer of arm, with muscles that were stringy and knotty rather than rounded and swelling. The hair of this man was long and matted, and his head slanted back under it from the eyes. He uttered strange sounds, and seemed very much afraid of the darkness, into which he peered continually, clutching in his hand, which hung midway between knee and foot, a stick with a heavy stone made fast to the end. He was all but naked, a ragged and fire-scorched skin hanging part way down his back, but on his body there was much hair. In some places, across the chest and shoulders and down the outside of the arms and thighs, it was matted into almost a thick fur. He did not stand erect, but with trunk inclined forward from the hips, on legs that bent at the knees. About his body there was a peculiar springiness, or resiliency, almost catlike, and a quick alertness as of one who lived in perpetual fear of things seen and unseen.

At other times this hairy man squatted by the fire with head between his legs and slept. On such occasions his elbows were on his knees, his hands clasped above his head as though to shed rain by the hairy arms. And beyond that fire, in the circling darkness, Buck could see many gleaming coals, two by two, always two by two, which he knew to be the eyes of great beasts of prey. And he could hear the crashing of their bodies through the undergrowth, and the noises they made in the night. And dreaming there by the Yukon bank, with lazy eyes blinking at the fire, these sounds and sights of another world would make the hair to rise along his back and stand on end across his shoulders and up his neck, till he whimpered low and suppressedly, or growled softly, and the half-breed cook shouted at him, “Hey, you Buck, wake up!” Whereupon the other world would vanish and the real world come into his eyes, and he would get up and yawn and stretch as though he had been asleep.

It was a hard trip, with the mail behind them, and the heavy work wore them down. They were short of weight and in poor condition when they made Dawson, and should have had a ten days’ or a week’s rest at least. But in two days’ time they dropped down the Yukon bank from the Barracks, loaded with letters for the outside. The dogs were tired, the drivers grumbling, and to make matters worse, it snowed every day. This meant a soft trail, greater friction on the runners, and heavier pulling for the dogs; yet the drivers were fair through it all, and did their best for the animals.

Each night the dogs were attended to first. They ate before the drivers ate, and no man sought his sleeping-robe till he had seen to the feet of the dogs he drove. Still, their strength went down. Since the beginning of the winter they had travelled eighteen hundred miles, dragging sleds the whole weary distance; and eighteen hundred miles will tell upon life of the toughest. Buck stood it, keeping his mates up to their work and maintaining discipline, though he, too, was very tired. Billee cried and whimpered regularly in his sleep each night. Joe was sourer than ever, and Sol-leks was unapproachable, blind side or other side.

But it was Dave who suffered most of all. Something had gone wrong with him. He became more morose and irritable, and when camp was pitched at once made his nest, where his driver fed him. Once out of the harness and down, he did not get on his feet again till harness-up time in the morning. Sometimes, in the traces, when jerked by a sudden stoppage of the sled, or by straining to start it, he would cry out with pain. The driver examined him, but could find nothing. All the drivers became interested in his case. They talked it over at meal-time, and over their last pipes before going to bed, and one night they held a consultation. He was brought from his nest to the fire and was pressed and prodded till he cried out many times. Something was wrong inside, but they could locate no broken bones, could not make it out.

By the time Cassiar Bar was reached, he was so weak that he was falling repeatedly in the traces. The Scotch half-breed called a halt and took him out of the team, making the next dog, Sol-leks, fast to the sled. His intention was to rest Dave, letting him run free behind the sled. Sick as he was, Dave resented being taken out, grunting and growling while the traces were unfastened, and whimpering broken-heartedly when he saw Sol-leks in the position he had held and served so long. For the pride of trace and trail was his, and, sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.

When the sled started, he floundered in the soft snow alongside the beaten trail, attacking Sol-leks with his teeth, rushing against him and trying to thrust him off into the soft snow on the other side, striving to leap inside his traces and get between him and the sled, and all the while whining and yelping and crying with grief and pain. The half-breed tried to drive him away with the whip; but he paid no heed to the stinging lash, and the man had not the heart to strike harder. Dave refused to run quietly on the trail behind the sled, where the going was easy, but continued to flounder alongside in the soft snow, where the going was most difficult, till exhausted. Then he fell, and lay where he fell, howling lugubriously as the long train of sleds churned by.

With the last remnant of his strength he managed to stagger along behind till the train made another stop, when he floundered past the sleds to his own, where he stood alongside Sol-leks. His driver lingered a moment to get a light for his pipe from the man behind. Then he returned and started his dogs. They swung out on the trail with remarkable lack of exertion, turned their heads uneasily, and stopped in surprise. The driver was surprised, too; the sled had not moved. He called his comrades to witness the sight. Dave had bitten through both of Sol-leks’s traces, and was standing directly in front of the sled in his proper place.

He pleaded with his eyes to remain there. The driver was perplexed. His comrades talked of how a dog could break its heart through being denied the work that killed it, and recalled instances they had known, where dogs, too old for the toil, or injured, had died because they were cut out of the traces. Also, they held it a mercy, since Dave was to die anyway, that he should die in the traces, heart-easy and content. So he was harnessed in again, and proudly he pulled as of old, though more than once he cried out involuntarily from the bite of his inward hurt. Several times he fell down and was dragged in the traces, and once the sled ran upon him so that he limped thereafter in one of his hind legs.

But he held out till camp was reached, when his driver made a place for him by the fire. Morning found him too weak to travel. At harness-up time he tried to crawl to his driver. By convulsive efforts he got on his feet, staggered, and fell. Then he wormed his way forward slowly toward where the harnesses were being put on his mates. He would advance his fore legs and drag up his body with a sort of hitching movement, when he would advance his fore legs and hitch ahead again for a few more inches. His strength left him, and the last his mates saw of him he lay gasping in the snow and yearning toward them. But they could hear him mournfully howling till they passed out of sight behind a belt of river timber.

Here the train was halted. The Scotch half-breed slowly retraced his steps to the camp they had left. The men ceased talking. A revolver-shot rang out. The man came back hurriedly. The whips snapped, the bells tinkled merrily, the sleds churned along the trail; but Buck knew, and every dog knew, what had taken place behind the belt of river trees.

Chapter V. The Toil of Trace and Trail

Thirty days from the time it left Dawson, the Salt Water Mail, with Buck and his mates at the fore, arrived at Skaguay. They were in a wretched state, worn out and worn down. Buck’s one hundred and forty pounds had dwindled to one hundred and fifteen. The rest of his mates, though lighter dogs, had relatively lost more weight than he. Pike, the malingerer, who, in his lifetime of deceit, had often successfully feigned a hurt leg, was now limping in earnest. Sol-leks was limping, and Dub was suffering from a wrenched shoulder-blade.

They were all terribly footsore. No spring or rebound was left in them. Their feet fell heavily on the trail, jarring their bodies and doubling the fatigue of a day’s travel. There was nothing the matter with them except that they were dead tired. It was not the dead-tiredness that comes through brief and excessive effort, from which recovery is a matter of hours; but it was the dead-tiredness that comes through the slow and prolonged strength drainage of months of toil. There was no power of recuperation left, no reserve strength to call upon. It had been all used, the last least bit of it. Every muscle, every fibre, every cell, was tired, dead tired. And there was reason for it. In less than five months they had travelled twenty-five hundred miles, during the last eighteen hundred of which they had had but five days’ rest. When they arrived at Skaguay they were apparently on their last legs. They could barely keep the traces taut, and on the down grades just managed to keep out of the way of the sled.

“Mush on, poor sore feets,” the driver encouraged them as they tottered down the main street of Skaguay. “Dis is de las’. Den we get one long res’. Eh? For sure. One bully long res’.”

The drivers confidently expected a long stopover. Themselves, they had covered twelve hundred miles with two days’ rest, and in the nature of reason and common justice they deserved an interval of loafing. But so many were the men who had rushed into the Klondike, and so many were the sweethearts, wives, and kin that had not rushed in, that the congested mail was taking on Alpine proportions; also, there were official orders. Fresh batches of Hudson Bay dogs were to take the places of those worthless for the trail. The worthless ones were to be got rid of, and, since dogs count for little against dollars, they were to be sold.

Three days passed, by which time Buck and his mates found how really tired and weak they were. Then, on the morning of the fourth day, two men from the States came along and bought them, harness and all, for a song. The men addressed each other as “Hal” and “Charles.” Charles was a middle-aged, lightish-colored man, with weak and watery eyes and a mustache that twisted fiercely and vigorously up, giving the lie to the limply drooping lip it concealed. Hal was a youngster of nineteen or twenty, with a big Colt’s revolver and a hunting-knife strapped about him on a belt that fairly bristled with cartridges. This belt was the most salient thing about him. It advertised his callowness — a callowness sheer and unutterable. Both men were manifestly out of place, and why such as they should adventure the North is part of the mystery of things that passes understanding.

Buck heard the chaffering, saw the money pass between the man and the Government agent, and knew that the Scotch half-breed and the mail-train drivers were passing out of his life on the heels of Perrault and Francois and the others who had gone before. When driven with his mates to the new owners’ camp, Buck saw a slipshod and slovenly affair, tent half stretched, dishes unwashed, everything in disorder; also, he saw a woman. “Mercedes” the men called her. She was Charles’s wife and Hal’s sister — a nice family party.

Buck watched them apprehensively as they proceeded to take down the tent and load the sled. There was a great deal of effort about their manner, but no businesslike method. The tent was rolled into an awkward bundle three times as large as it should have been. The tin dishes were packed away unwashed. Mercedes continually fluttered in the way of her men and kept up an unbroken chattering of remonstrance and advice. When they put a clothes-sack on the front of the sled, she suggested it should go on the back; and when they had put it on the back, and covered it over with a couple of other bundles, she discovered overlooked articles which could abide nowhere else but in that very sack, and they unloaded again.

Three men from a neighboring tent came out and looked on, grinning and winking at one another.

“You’ve got a right smart load as it is,” said one of them; “and it’s not me should tell you your business, but I wouldn’t tote that tent along if I was you.”

“Undreamed of!” cried Mercedes, throwing up her hands in dainty dismay. “However in the world could I manage without a tent?”

“It’s springtime, and you won’t get any more cold weather,” the man replied.

She shook her head decidedly, and Charles and Hal put the last odds and ends on top the mountainous load.

“Think it’ll ride?” one of the men asked.

“Why shouldn’t it?” Charles demanded rather shortly.

“Oh, that’s all right, that’s all right,” the man hastened meekly to say. “I was just a-wonderin’, that is all. It seemed a mite top-heavy.”

Charles turned his back and drew the lashings down as well as he could, which was not in the least well.

“An’ of course the dogs can hike along all day with that contraption behind them,” affirmed a second of the men.

“Certainly,” said Hal, with freezing politeness, taking hold of the gee-pole with one hand and swinging his whip from the other. “Mush!” he shouted. “Mush on there!”

The dogs sprang against the breast-bands, strained hard for a few moments, then relaxed. They were unable to move the sled.

“The lazy brutes, I’ll show them,” he cried, preparing to lash out at them with the whip.

But Mercedes interfered, crying, “Oh, Hal, you mustn’t,” as she caught hold of the whip and wrenched it from him. “The poor dears! Now you must promise you won’t be harsh with them for the rest of the trip, or I won’t go a step.”

“Precious lot you know about dogs,” her brother sneered; “and I wish you’d leave me alone. They’re lazy, I tell you, and you’ve got to whip them to get anything out of them. That’s their way. You ask any one. Ask one of those men.”

Mercedes looked at them imploringly, untold repugnance at sight of pain written in her pretty face.

“They’re weak as water, if you want to know,” came the reply from one of the men. “Plum tuckered out, that’s what’s the matter. They need a rest.”

“Rest be blanked,” said Hal, with his beardless lips; and Mercedes said, “Oh!” in pain and sorrow at the oath.

But she was a clannish creature, and rushed at once to the defence of her brother. “Never mind that man,” she said pointedly. “You’re driving our dogs, and you do what you think best with them.”

Again Hal’s whip fell upon the dogs. They threw themselves against the breast-bands, dug their feet into the packed snow, got down low to it, and put forth all their strength. The sled held as though it were an anchor. After two efforts, they stood still, panting. The whip was whistling savagely, when once more Mercedes interfered. She dropped on her knees before Buck, with tears in her eyes, and put her arms around his neck.

“You poor, poor dears,” she cried sympathetically, “why don’t you pull hard? — then you wouldn’t be whipped.” Buck did not like her, but he was feeling too miserable to resist her, taking it as part of the day’s miserable work.

One of the onlookers, who had been clenching his teeth to suppress hot speech, now spoke up: —

“It’s not that I care a whoop what becomes of you, but for the dogs’ sakes I just want to tell you, you can help them a mighty lot by breaking out that sled. The runners are froze fast. Throw your weight against the gee-pole, right and left, and break it out.”

A third time the attempt was made, but this time, following the advice, Hal broke out the runners which had been frozen to the snow. The overloaded and unwieldy sled forged ahead, Buck and his mates struggling frantically under the rain of blows. A hundred yards ahead the path turned and sloped steeply into the main street. It would have required an experienced man to keep the top-heavy sled upright, and Hal was not such a man. As they swung on the turn the sled went over, spilling half its load through the loose lashings. The dogs never stopped. The lightened sled bounded on its side behind them. They were angry because of the ill treatment they had received and the unjust load. Buck was raging. He broke into a run, the team following his lead. Hal cried “Whoa! whoa!” but they gave no heed. He tripped and was pulled off his feet. The capsized sled ground over him, and the dogs dashed on up the street, adding to the gayety of Skaguay as they scattered the remainder of the outfit along its chief thoroughfare.

Kind-hearted citizens caught the dogs and gathered up the scattered belongings. Also, they gave advice. Half the load and twice the dogs, if they ever expected to reach Dawson, was what was said. Hal and his sister and brother-in-law listened unwillingly, pitched tent, and overhauled the outfit. Canned goods were turned out that made men laugh, for canned goods on the Long Trail is a thing to dream about. “Blankets for a hotel” quoth one of the men who laughed and helped. “Half as many is too much; get rid of them. Throw away that tent, and all those dishes, — who’s going to wash them, anyway? Good Lord, do you think you’re travelling on a Pullman?”

And so it went, the inexorable elimination of the superfluous. Mercedes cried when her clothes-bags were dumped on the ground and article after article was thrown out. She cried in general, and she cried in particular over each discarded thing. She clasped hands about knees, rocking back and forth broken-heartedly. She averred she would not go an inch, not for a dozen Charleses. She appealed to everybody and to everything, finally wiping her eyes and proceeding to cast out even articles of apparel that were imperative necessaries. And in her zeal, when she had finished with her own, she attacked the belongings of her men and went through them like a tornado.

This accomplished, the outfit, though cut in half, was still a formidable bulk. Charles and Hal went out in the evening and bought six Outside dogs. These, added to the six of the original team, and Teek and Koona, the huskies obtained at the Rink Rapids on the record trip, brought the team up to fourteen. But the Outside dogs, though practically broken in since their landing, did not amount to much. Three were short-haired pointers, one was a Newfoundland, and the other two were mongrels of indeterminate breed. They did not seem to know anything, these newcomers. Buck and his comrades looked upon them with disgust, and though he speedily taught them their places and what not to do, he could not teach them what to do. They did not take kindly to trace and trail. With the exception of the two mongrels, they were bewildered and spirit-broken by the strange savage environment in which they found themselves and by the ill treatment they had received. The two mongrels were without spirit at all; bones were the only things breakable about them.

With the newcomers hopeless and forlorn, and the old team worn out by twenty-five hundred miles of continuous trail, the outlook was anything but bright. The two men, however, were quite cheerful. And they were proud, too. They were doing the thing in style, with fourteen dogs. They had seen other sleds depart over the Pass for Dawson, or come in from Dawson, but never had they seen a sled with so many as fourteen dogs. In the nature of Arctic travel there was a reason why fourteen dogs should not drag one sled, and that was that one sled could not carry the food for fourteen dogs. But Charles and Hal did not know this. They had worked the trip out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so many dogs, so many days, Q.E.D. Mercedes looked over their shoulders and nodded comprehensively, it was all so very simple.

Late next morning Buck led the long team up the street. There was nothing lively about it, no snap or go in him and his fellows. They were starting dead weary. Four times he had covered the distance between Salt Water and Dawson, and the knowledge that, jaded and tired, he was facing the same trail once more, made him bitter. His heart was not in the work, nor was the heart of any dog. The Outsides were timid and frightened, the Insides without confidence in their masters.

Buck felt vaguely that there was no depending upon these two men and the woman. They did not know how to do anything, and as the days went by it became apparent that they could not learn. They were slack in all things, without order or discipline. It took them half the night to pitch a slovenly camp, and half the morning to break that camp and get the sled loaded in fashion so slovenly that for the rest of the day they were occupied in stopping and rearranging the load. Some days they did not make ten miles. On other days they were unable to get started at all. And on no day did they succeed in making more than half the distance used by the men as a basis in their dog-food computation.

It was inevitable that they should go short on dog-food. But they hastened it by overfeeding, bringing the day nearer when underfeeding would commence. The Outside dogs, whose digestions had not been trained by chronic famine to make the most of little, had voracious appetites. And when, in addition to this, the worn-out huskies pulled weakly, Hal decided that the orthodox ration was too small. He doubled it. And to cap it all, when Mercedes, with tears in her pretty eyes and a quaver in her throat, could not cajole him into giving the dogs still more, she stole from the fish-sacks and fed them slyly. But it was not food that Buck and the huskies needed, but rest. And though they were making poor time, the heavy load they dragged sapped their strength severely.

Then came the underfeeding. Hal awoke one day to the fact that his dog-food was half gone and the distance only quarter covered; further, that for love or money no additional dog-food was to be obtained. So he cut down even the orthodox ration and tried to increase the day’s travel. His sister and brother-in-law seconded him; but they were frustrated by their heavy outfit and their own incompetence. It was a simple matter to give the dogs less food; but it was impossible to make the dogs travel faster, while their own inability to get under way earlier in the morning prevented them from travelling longer hours. Not only did they not know how to work dogs, but they did not know how to work themselves.

The first to go was Dub. Poor blundering thief that he was, always getting caught and punished, he had none the less been a faithful worker. His wrenched shoulder-blade, untreated and unrested, went from bad to worse, till finally Hal shot him with the big Colt’s revolver. It is a saying of the country that an Outside dog starves to death on the ration of the husky, so the six Outside dogs under Buck could do no less than die on half the ration of the husky. The Newfoundland went first, followed by the three short-haired pointers, the two mongrels hanging more grittily on to life, but going in the end.

By this time all the amenities and gentlenesses of the Southland had fallen away from the three people. Shorn of its glamour and romance, Arctic travel became to them a reality too harsh for their manhood and womanhood. Mercedes ceased weeping over the dogs, being too occupied with weeping over herself and with quarrelling with her husband and brother. To quarrel was the one thing they were never too weary to do. Their irritability arose out of their misery, increased with it, doubled upon it, outdistanced it. The wonderful patience of the trail which comes to men who toil hard and suffer sore, and remain sweet of speech and kindly, did not come to these two men and the woman. They had no inkling of such a patience. They were stiff and in pain; their muscles ached, their bones ached, their very hearts ached; and because of this they became sharp of speech, and hard words were first on their lips in the morning and last at night.

Charles and Hal wrangled whenever Mercedes gave them a chance. It was the cherished belief of each that he did more than his share of the work, and neither forbore to speak this belief at every opportunity. Sometimes Mercedes sided with her husband, sometimes with her brother. The result was a beautiful and unending family quarrel. Starting from a dispute as to which should chop a few sticks for the fire (a dispute which concerned only Charles and Hal), presently would be lugged in the rest of the family, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people thousands of miles away, and some of them dead. That Hal’s views on art, or the sort of society plays his mother’s brother wrote, should have anything to do with the chopping of a few sticks of firewood, passes comprehension; nevertheless the quarrel was as likely to tend in that direction as in the direction of Charles’s political prejudices. And that Charles’s sister’s tale-bearing tongue should be relevant to the building of a Yukon fire, was apparent only to Mercedes, who disburdened herself of copious opinions upon that topic, and incidentally upon a few other traits unpleasantly peculiar to her husband’s family. In the meantime the fire remained unbuilt, the camp half pitched, and the dogs unfed.

Mercedes nursed a special grievance — the grievance of sex. She was pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless. They complained. Upon which impeachment of what to her was her most essential sex-prerogative, she made their lives unendurable. She no longer considered the dogs, and because she was sore and tired, she persisted in riding on the sled. She was pretty and soft, but she weighed one hundred and twenty pounds — a lusty last straw to the load dragged by the weak and starving animals. She rode for days, till they fell in the traces and the sled stood still. Charles and Hal begged her to get off and walk, pleaded with her, entreated, the while she wept and importuned Heaven with a recital of their brutality.

On one occasion they took her off the sled by main strength. They never did it again. She let her legs go limp like a spoiled child, and sat down on the trail. They went on their way, but she did not move. After they had travelled three miles they unloaded the sled, came back for her, and by main strength put her on the sled again.

In the excess of their own misery they were callous to the suffering of their animals. Hal’s theory, which he practised on others, was that one must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a club. At the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a toothless old squaw offered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the Colt’s revolver that kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal’s hip. A poor substitute for food was this hide, just as it had been stripped from the starved horses of the cattlemen six months back. In its frozen state it was more like strips of galvanized iron, and when a dog wrestled it into his stomach it thawed into thin and innutritious leathery strings and into a mass of short hair, irritating and indigestible.

And through it all Buck staggered along at the head of the team as in a nightmare. He pulled when he could; when he could no longer pull, he fell down and remained down till blows from whip or club drove him to his feet again. All the stiffness and gloss had gone out of his beautiful furry coat. The hair hung down, limp and draggled, or matted with dried blood where Hal’s club had bruised him. His muscles had wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh pads had disappeared, so that each rib and every bone in his frame were outlined cleanly through the loose hide that was wrinkled in folds of emptiness. It was heartbreaking, only Buck’s heart was unbreakable. The man in the red sweater had proved that.

As it was with Buck, so was it with his mates. They were perambulating skeletons. There were seven all together, including him. In their very great misery they had become insensible to the bite of the lash or the bruise of the club. The pain of the beating was dull and distant, just as the things their eyes saw and their ears heard seemed dull and distant. They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly. When a halt was made, they dropped down in the traces like dead dogs, and the spark dimmed and paled and seemed to go out. And when the club or whip fell upon them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they tottered to their feet and staggered on.

There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not rise. Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked Billee on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the carcass out of the harness and dragged it to one side. Buck saw, and his mates saw, and they knew that this thing was very close to them. On the next day Koona went, and but five of them remained: Joe, too far gone to be malignant; Pike, crippled and limping, only half conscious and not conscious enough longer to malinger; Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still faithful to the toil of trace and trail, and mournful in that he had so little strength with which to pull; Teek, who had not travelled so far that winter and who was now beaten more than the others because he was fresher; and Buck, still at the head of the team, but no longer enforcing discipline or striving to enforce it, blind with weakness half the time and keeping the trail by the loom of it and by the dim feel of his feet.

It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware of it. Each day the sun rose earlier and set later. It was dawn by three in the morning, and twilight lingered till nine at night. The whole long day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This murmur arose from all the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came from the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead and which had not moved during the long months of frost. The sap was rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air.

From every hill slope came the trickle of running water, the music of unseen fountains. All things were thawing, bending, snapping. The Yukon was straining to break loose the ice that bound it down. It ate away from beneath; the sun ate from above. Air-holes formed, fissures sprang and spread apart, while thin sections of ice fell through bodily into the river. And amid all this bursting, rending, throbbing of awakening life, under the blazing sun and through the soft-sighing breezes, like wayfarers to death, staggered the two men, the woman, and the huskies.

With the dogs falling, Mercedes weeping and riding, Hal swearing innocuously, and Charles’s eyes wistfully watering, they staggered into John Thornton’s camp at the mouth of White River. When they halted, the dogs dropped down as though they had all been struck dead. Mercedes dried her eyes and looked at John Thornton. Charles sat down on a log to rest. He sat down very slowly and painstakingly what of his great stiffness. Hal did the talking. John Thornton was whittling the last touches on an axe-handle he had made from a stick of birch. He whittled and listened, gave monosyllabic replies, and, when it was asked, terse advice. He knew the breed, and he gave his advice in the certainty that it would not be followed.

“They told us up above that the bottom was dropping out of the trail and that the best thing for us to do was to lay over,” Hal said in response to Thornton’s warning to take no more chances on the rotten ice. “They told us we couldn’t make White River, and here we are.” This last with a sneering ring of triumph in it.

“And they told you true,” John Thornton answered. “The bottom’s likely to drop out at any moment. Only fools, with the blind luck of fools, could have made it. I tell you straight, I wouldn’t risk my carcass on that ice for all the gold in Alaska.”

“That’s because you’re not a fool, I suppose,” said Hal. “All the same, we’ll go on to Dawson.” He uncoiled his whip. “Get up there, Buck! Hi! Get up there! Mush on!”

Thornton went on whittling. It was idle, he knew, to get between a fool and his folly; while two or three fools more or less would not alter the scheme of things.

But the team did not get up at the command. It had long since passed into the stage where blows were required to rouse it. The whip flashed out, here and there, on its merciless errands. John Thornton compressed his lips. Sol-leks was the first to crawl to his feet. Teek followed. Joe came next, yelping with pain. Pike made painful efforts. Twice he fell over, when half up, and on the third attempt managed to rise. Buck made no effort. He lay quietly where he had fallen. The lash bit into him again and again, but he neither whined nor struggled. Several times Thornton started, as though to speak, but changed his mind. A moisture came into his eyes, and, as the whipping continued, he arose and walked irresolutely up and down.

This was the first time Buck had failed, in itself a sufficient reason to drive Hal into a rage. He exchanged the whip for the customary club. Buck refused to move under the rain of heavier blows which now fell upon him. Like his mates, he was barely able to get up, but, unlike them, he had made up his mind not to get up. He had a vague feeling of impending doom. This had been strong upon him when he pulled in to the bank, and it had not departed from him. What of the thin and rotten ice he had felt under his feet all day, it seemed that he sensed disaster close at hand, out there ahead on the ice where his master was trying to drive him. He refused to stir. So greatly had he suffered, and so far gone was he, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they continued to fall upon him, the spark of life within flickered and went down. It was nearly out. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.

And then, suddenly, without warning, uttering a cry that was inarticulate and more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton sprang upon the man who wielded the club. Hal was hurled backward, as though struck by a falling tree. Mercedes screamed. Charles looked on wistfully, wiped his watery eyes, but did not get up because of his stiffness.

John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too convulsed with rage to speak.

“If you strike that dog again, I’ll kill you,” he at last managed to say in a choking voice.

“It’s my dog,” Hal replied, wiping the blood from his mouth as he came back. “Get out of my way, or I’ll fix you. I’m going to Dawson.”

Thornton stood between him and Buck, and evinced no intention of getting out of the way. Hal drew his long hunting-knife. Mercedes screamed, cried, laughed, and manifested the chaotic abandonment of hysteria. Thornton rapped Hal’s knuckles with the axe-handle, knocking the knife to the ground. He rapped his knuckles again as he tried to pick it up. Then he stooped, picked it up himself, and with two strokes cut Buck’s traces.

Hal had no fight left in him. Besides, his hands were full with his sister, or his arms, rather; while Buck was too near dead to be of further use in hauling the sled. A few minutes later they pulled out from the bank and down the river. Buck heard them go and raised his head to see, Pike was leading, Sol-leks was at the wheel, and between were Joe and Teek. They were limping and staggering. Mercedes was riding the loaded sled. Hal guided at the gee-pole, and Charles stumbled along in the rear.

As Buck watched them, Thornton knelt beside him and with rough, kindly hands searched for broken bones. By the time his search had disclosed nothing more than many bruises and a state of terrible starvation, the sled was a quarter of a mile away. Dog and man watched it crawling along over the ice. Suddenly, they saw its back end drop down, as into a rut, and the gee-pole, with Hal clinging to it, jerk into the air. Mercedes’s scream came to their ears. They saw Charles turn and make one step to run back, and then a whole section of ice give way and dogs and humans disappear. A yawning hole was all that was to be seen. The bottom had dropped out of the trail.

John Thornton and Buck looked at each other.

“You poor devil,” said John Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.

Chapter VI. For the Love of a Man

When John Thornton froze his feet in the previous December his partners had made him comfortable and left him to get well, going on themselves up the river to get out a raft of saw-logs for Dawson. He was still limping slightly at the time he rescued Buck, but with the continued warm weather even the slight limp left him. And here, lying by the river bank through the long spring days, watching the running water, listening lazily to the songs of birds and the hum of nature, Buck slowly won back his strength.

A rest comes very good after one has travelled three thousand miles, and it must be confessed that Buck waxed lazy as his wounds healed, his muscles swelled out, and the flesh came back to cover his bones. For that matter, they were all loafing, — Buck, John Thornton, and Skeet and Nig, — waiting for the raft to come that was to carry them down to Dawson. Skeet was a little Irish setter who early made friends with Buck, who, in a dying condition, was unable to resent her first advances. She had the doctor trait which some dogs possess; and as a mother cat washes her kittens, so she washed and cleansed Buck’s wounds. Regularly, each morning after he had finished his breakfast, she performed her self-appointed task, till he came to look for her ministrations as much as he did for Thornton’s. Nig, equally friendly, though less demonstrative, was a huge black dog, half bloodhound and half deerhound, with eyes that laughed and a boundless good nature.

To Buck’s surprise these dogs manifested no jealousy toward him. They seemed to share the kindliness and largeness of John Thornton. As Buck grew stronger they enticed him into all sorts of ridiculous games, in which Thornton himself could not forbear to join; and in this fashion Buck romped through his convalescence and into a new existence. Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never experienced at Judge Miller’s down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. With the Judge’s sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a working partnership; with the Judge’s grandsons, a sort of pompous guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse.

This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw further. He never forgot a kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to sit down for a long talk with them (“gas” he called it) was as much his delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. And when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, “God! you can all but speak!”

Buck had a trick of love expression that was akin to hurt. He would often seize Thornton’s hand in his mouth and close so fiercely that the flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterward. And as Buck understood the oaths to be love words, so the man understood this feigned bite for a caress.

For the most part, however, Buck’s love was expressed in adoration. While he went wild with happiness when Thornton touched him or spoke to him, he did not seek these tokens. Unlike Skeet, who was wont to shove her nose under Thornton’s hand and nudge and nudge till petted, or Nig, who would stalk up and rest his great head on Thornton’s knee, Buck was content to adore at a distance. He would lie by the hour, eager, alert, at Thornton’s feet, looking up into his face, dwelling upon it, studying it, following with keenest interest each fleeting expression, every movement or change of feature. Or, as chance might have it, he would lie farther away, to the side or rear, watching the outlines of the man and the occasional movements of his body. And often, such was the communion in which they lived, the strength of Buck’s gaze would draw John Thornton’s head around, and he would return the gaze, without speech, his heart shining out of his eyes as Buck’s heart shone out.

For a long time after his rescue, Buck did not like Thornton to get out of his sight. From the moment he left the tent to when he entered it again, Buck would follow at his heels. His transient masters since he had come into the Northland had bred in him a fear that no master could be permanent. He was afraid that Thornton would pass out of his life as Perrault and Francois and the Scotch half-breed had passed out. Even in the night, in his dreams, he was haunted by this fear. At such times he would shake off sleep and creep through the chill to the flap of the tent, where he would stand and listen to the sound of his master’s breathing.

But in spite of this great love he bore John Thornton, which seemed to bespeak the soft civilizing influence, the strain of the primitive, which the Northland had aroused in him, remained alive and active. Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof, were his; yet he retained his wildness and wiliness. He was a thing of the wild, come in from the wild to sit by John Thornton’s fire, rather than a dog of the soft Southland stamped with the marks of generations of civilization. Because of his very great love, he could not steal from this man, but from any other man, in any other camp, he did not hesitate an instant; while the cunning with which he stole enabled him to escape detection.

His face and body were scored by the teeth of many dogs, and he fought as fiercely as ever and more shrewdly. Skeet and Nig were too good-natured for quarrelling, — besides, they belonged to John Thornton; but the strange dog, no matter what the breed or valor, swiftly acknowledged Buck’s supremacy or found himself struggling for life with a terrible antagonist. And Buck was merciless. He had learned well the law of club and fang, and he never forewent an advantage or drew back from a foe he had started on the way to Death. He had lessoned from Spitz, and from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and knew there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.

He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn. He linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed. He sat by John Thornton’s fire, a broad-breasted dog, white-fanged and long-furred; but behind him were the shades of all manner of dogs, half-wolves and wild wolves, urgent and prompting, tasting the savor of the meat he ate, thirsting for the water he drank, scenting the wind with him, listening with him and telling him the sounds made by the wild life in the forest, dictating his moods, directing his actions, lying down to sleep with him when he lay down, and dreaming with him and beyond him and becoming themselves the stuff of his dreams.

So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, that each day mankind and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often as he gained the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton drew him back to the fire again.

Thornton alone held him. The rest of mankind was as nothing. Chance travellers might praise or pet him; but he was cold under it all, and from a too demonstrative man he would get up and walk away. When Thornton’s partners, Hans and Pete, arrived on the long-expected raft, Buck refused to notice them till he learned they were close to Thornton; after that he tolerated them in a passive sort of way, accepting favors from them as though he favored them by accepting. They were of the same large type as Thornton, living close to the earth, thinking simply and seeing clearly; and ere they swung the raft into the big eddy by the saw-mill at Dawson, they understood Buck and his ways, and did not insist upon an intimacy such as obtained with Skeet and Nig.

For Thornton, however, his love seemed to grow and grow. He, alone among men, could put a pack upon Buck’s back in the summer travelling. Nothing was too great for Buck to do, when Thornton commanded. One day (they had grub-staked themselves from the proceeds of the raft and left Dawson for the head-waters of the Tanana) the men and dogs were sitting on the crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bed-rock three hundred feet below. John Thornton was sitting near the edge, Buck at his shoulder. A thoughtless whim seized Thornton, and he drew the attention of Hans and Pete to the experiment he had in mind. “Jump, Buck!” he commanded, sweeping his arm out and over the chasm. The next instant he was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge, while Hans and Pete were dragging them back into safety.

“It’s uncanny,” Pete said, after it was over and they had caught their speech.

Thornton shook his head. “No, it is splendid, and it is terrible, too. Do you know, it sometimes makes me afraid.”

“I’m not hankering to be the man that lays hands on you while he’s around,” Pete announced conclusively, nodding his head toward Buck.

“Py Jingo!” was Hans’s contribution. “Not mineself either.”

It was at Circle City, ere the year was out, that Pete’s apprehensions were realized. “Black” Burton, a man evil-tempered and malicious, had been picking a quarrel with a tenderfoot at the bar, when Thornton stepped good-naturedly between. Buck, as was his custom, was lying in a corner, head on paws, watching his master’s every action. Burton struck out, without warning, straight from the shoulder. Thornton was sent spinning, and saved himself from falling only by clutching the rail of the bar.

Those who were looking on heard what was neither bark nor yelp, but a something which is best described as a roar, and they saw Buck’s body rise up in the air as he left the floor for Burton’s throat. The man saved his life by instinctively throwing out his arm, but was hurled backward to the floor with Buck on top of him. Buck loosed his teeth from the flesh of the arm and drove in again for the throat. This time the man succeeded only in partly blocking, and his throat was torn open. Then the crowd was upon Buck, and he was driven off; but while a surgeon checked the bleeding, he prowled up and down, growling furiously, attempting to rush in, and being forced back by an array of hostile clubs. A “miners’ meeting,” called on the spot, decided that the dog had sufficient provocation, and Buck was discharged. But his reputation was made, and from that day his name spread through every camp in Alaska.

Later on, in the fall of the year, he saved John Thornton’s life in quite another fashion. The three partners were lining a long and narrow poling-boat down a bad stretch of rapids on the Forty-Mile Creek. Hans and Pete moved along the bank, snubbing with a thin Manila rope from tree to tree, while Thornton remained in the boat, helping its descent by means of a pole, and shouting directions to the shore. Buck, on the bank, worried and anxious, kept abreast of the boat, his eyes never off his master.

At a particularly bad spot, where a ledge of barely submerged rocks jutted out into the river, Hans cast off the rope, and, while Thornton poled the boat out into the stream, ran down the bank with the end in his hand to snub the boat when it had cleared the ledge. This it did, and was flying down-stream in a current as swift as a mill-race, when Hans checked it with the rope and checked too suddenly. The boat flirted over and snubbed in to the bank bottom up, while Thornton, flung sheer out of it, was carried down-stream toward the worst part of the rapids, a stretch of wild water in which no swimmer could live.

Buck had sprung in on the instant; and at the end of three hundred yards, amid a mad swirl of water, he overhauled Thornton. When he felt him grasp his tail, Buck headed for the bank, swimming with all his splendid strength. But the progress shoreward was slow; the progress down-stream amazingly rapid. From below came the fatal roaring where the wild current went wilder and was rent in shreds and spray by the rocks which thrust through like the teeth of an enormous comb. The suck of the water as it took the beginning of the last steep pitch was frightful, and Thornton knew that the shore was impossible. He scraped furiously over a rock, bruised across a second, and struck a third with crushing force. He clutched its slippery top with both hands, releasing Buck, and above the roar of the churning water shouted: “Go, Buck! Go!”

Buck could not hold his own, and swept on down-stream, struggling desperately, but unable to win back. When he heard Thornton’s command repeated, he partly reared out of the water, throwing his head high, as though for a last look, then turned obediently toward the bank. He swam powerfully and was dragged ashore by Pete and Hans at the very point where swimming ceased to be possible and destruction began.

They knew that the time a man could cling to a slippery rock in the face of that driving current was a matter of minutes, and they ran as fast as they could up the bank to a point far above where Thornton was hanging on. They attached the line with which they had been snubbing the boat to Buck’s neck and shoulders, being careful that it should neither strangle him nor impede his swimming, and launched him into the stream. He struck out boldly, but not straight enough into the stream. He discovered the mistake too late, when Thornton was abreast of him and a bare half-dozen strokes away while he was being carried helplessly past.

Hans promptly snubbed with the rope, as though Buck were a boat. The rope thus tightening on him in the sweep of the current, he was jerked under the surface, and under the surface he remained till his body struck against the bank and he was hauled out. He was half drowned, and Hans and Pete threw themselves upon him, pounding the breath into him and the water out of him. He staggered to his feet and fell down. The faint sound of Thornton’s voice came to them, and though they could not make out the words of it, they knew that he was in his extremity. His master’s voice acted on Buck like an electric shock, He sprang to his feet and ran up the bank ahead of the men to the point of his previous departure.

Again the rope was attached and he was launched, and again he struck out, but this time straight into the stream. He had miscalculated once, but he would not be guilty of it a second time. Hans paid out the rope, permitting no slack, while Pete kept it clear of coils. Buck held on till he was on a line straight above Thornton; then he turned, and with the speed of an express train headed down upon him. Thornton saw him coming, and, as Buck struck him like a battering ram, with the whole force of the current behind him, he reached up and closed with both arms around the shaggy neck. Hans snubbed the rope around the tree, and Buck and Thornton were jerked under the water. Strangling, suffocating, sometimes one uppermost and sometimes the other, dragging over the jagged bottom, smashing against rocks and snags, they veered in to the bank.

Thornton came to, belly downward and being violently propelled back and forth across a drift log by Hans and Pete. His first glance was for Buck, over whose limp and apparently lifeless body Nig was setting up a howl, while Skeet was licking the wet face and closed eyes. Thornton was himself bruised and battered, and he went carefully over Buck’s body, when he had been brought around, finding three broken ribs.

“That settles it,” he announced. “We camp right here.” And camp they did, till Buck’s ribs knitted and he was able to travel.

That winter, at Dawson, Buck performed another exploit, not so heroic, perhaps, but one that put his name many notches higher on the totem-pole of Alaskan fame. This exploit was particularly gratifying to the three men; for they stood in need of the outfit which it furnished, and were enabled to make a long-desired trip into the virgin East, where miners had not yet appeared. It was brought about by a conversation in the Eldorado Saloon, in which men waxed boastful of their favorite dogs. Buck, because of his record, was the target for these men, and Thornton was driven stoutly to defend him. At the end of half an hour one man stated that his dog could start a sled with five hundred pounds and walk off with it; a second bragged six hundred for his dog; and a third, seven hundred.

“Pooh! pooh!” said John Thornton; “Buck can start a thousand pounds.”

“And break it out? and walk off with it for a hundred yards?” demanded Matthewson, a Bonanza King, he of the seven hundred vaunt.

“And break it out, and walk off with it for a hundred yards,” John Thornton said coolly.

“Well,” Matthewson said, slowly and deliberately, so that all could hear, “I’ve got a thousand dollars that says he can’t. And there it is.” So saying, he slammed a sack of gold dust of the size of a bologna sausage down upon the bar.

Nobody spoke. Thornton’s bluff, if bluff it was, had been called. He could feel a flush of warm blood creeping up his face. His tongue had tricked him. He did not know whether Buck could start a thousand pounds. Half a ton! The enormousness of it appalled him. He had great faith in Buck’s strength and had often thought him capable of starting such a load; but never, as now, had he faced the possibility of it, the eyes of a dozen men fixed upon him, silent and waiting. Further, he had no thousand dollars; nor had Hans or Pete.

“I’ve got a sled standing outside now, with twenty fiftypound sacks of flour on it,” Matthewson went on with brutal directness; “so don’t let that hinder you.”

Thornton did not reply. He did not know what to say. He glanced from face to face in the absent way of a man who has lost the power of thought and is seeking somewhere to find the thing that will start it going again. The face of Jim O’Brien, a Mastodon King and old-time comrade, caught his eyes. It was as a cue to him, seeming to rouse him to do what he would never have dreamed of doing.

“Can you lend me a thousand?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

“Sure,” answered O’Brien, thumping down a plethoric sack by the side of Matthewson’s. “Though it’s little faith I’m having, John, that the beast can do the trick.”

The Eldorado emptied its occupants into the street to see the test. The tables were deserted, and the dealers and gamekeepers came forth to see the outcome of the wager and to lay odds. Several hundred men, furred and mittened, banked around the sled within easy distance. Matthewson’s sled, loaded with a thousand pounds of flour, had been standing for a couple of hours, and in the intense cold (it was sixty below zero) the runners had frozen fast to the hard-packed snow. Men offered odds of two to one that Buck could not budge the sled. A quibble arose concerning the phrase “break out.” O’Brien contended it was Thornton’s privilege to knock the runners loose, leaving Buck to “break it out” from a dead standstill. Matthewson insisted that the phrase included breaking the runners from the frozen grip of the snow. A majority of the men who had witnessed the making of the bet decided in his favor, whereat the odds went up to three to one against Buck.

There were no takers. Not a man believed him capable of the feat. Thornton had been hurried into the wager, heavy with doubt; and now that he looked at the sled itself, the concrete fact, with the regular team of ten dogs curled up in the snow before it, the more impossible the task appeared. Matthewson waxed jubilant.

“Three to one!” he proclaimed. “I’ll lay you another thousand at that figure, Thornton. What d’ye say?”

Thornton’s doubt was strong in his face, but his fighting spirit was aroused — the fighting spirit that soars above odds, fails to recognize the impossible, and is deaf to all save the clamor for battle. He called Hans and Pete to him. Their sacks were slim, and with his own the three partners could rake together only two hundred dollars. In the ebb of their fortunes, this sum was their total capital; yet they laid it unhesitatingly against Matthewson’s six hundred.

The team of ten dogs was unhitched, and Buck, with his own harness, was put into the sled. He had caught the contagion of the excitement, and he felt that in some way he must do a great thing for John Thornton. Murmurs of admiration at his splendid appearance went up. He was in perfect condition, without an ounce of superfluous flesh, and the one hundred and fifty pounds that he weighed were so many pounds of grit and virility. His furry coat shone with the sheen of silk. Down the neck and across the shoulders, his mane, in repose as it was, half bristled and seemed to lift with every movement, as though excess of vigor made each particular hair alive and active. The great breast and heavy fore legs were no more than in proportion with the rest of the body, where the muscles showed in tight rolls underneath the skin. Men felt these muscles and proclaimed them hard as iron, and the odds went down to two to one.

“Gad, sir! Gad, sir!” stuttered a member of the latest dynasty, a king of the Skookum Benches. “I offer you eight hundred for him, sir, before the test, sir; eight hundred just as he stands.”

Thornton shook his head and stepped to Buck’s side.

“You must stand off from him,” Matthewson protested. “Free play and plenty of room.”

The crowd fell silent; only could be heard the voices of the gamblers vainly offering two to one. Everybody acknowledged Buck a magnificent animal, but twenty fifty-pound sacks of flour bulked too large in their eyes for them to loosen their pouch-strings.

Thornton knelt down by Buck’s side. He took his head in his two hands and rested cheek on cheek. He did not playfully shake him, as was his wont, or murmur soft love curses; but he whispered in his ear. “As you love me, Buck. As you love me,” was what he whispered. Buck whined with suppressed eagerness.

The crowd was watching curiously. The affair was growing mysterious. It seemed like a conjuration. As Thornton got to his feet, Buck seized his mittened hand between his jaws, pressing in with his teeth and releasing slowly, half-reluctantly. It was the answer, in terms, not of speech, but of love. Thornton stepped well back.

“Now, Buck,” he said.

Buck tightened the traces, then slacked them for a matter of several inches. It was the way he had learned.

“Gee!” Thornton’s voice rang out, sharp in the tense silence.

Buck swung to the right, ending the movement in a plunge that took up the slack and with a sudden jerk arrested his one hundred and fifty pounds. The load quivered, and from under the runners arose a crisp crackling.

“Haw!” Thornton commanded.

Buck duplicated the manoeuvre, this time to the left. The crackling turned into a snapping, the sled pivoting and the runners slipping and grating several inches to the side. The sled was broken out. Men were holding their breaths, intensely unconscious of the fact.

“Now, MUSH!”

Thornton’s command cracked out like a pistol-shot. Buck threw himself forward, tightening the traces with a jarring lunge. His whole body was gathered compactly together in the tremendous effort, the muscles writhing and knotting like live things under the silky fur. His great chest was low to the ground, his head forward and down, while his feet were flying like mad, the claws scarring the hard-packed snow in parallel grooves. The sled swayed and trembled, half-started forward. One of his feet slipped, and one man groaned aloud. Then the sled lurched ahead in what appeared a rapid succession of jerks, though it never really came to a dead stop again...half an inch...an inch... two inches... The jerks perceptibly diminished; as the sled gained momentum, he caught them up, till it was moving steadily along.

Men gasped and began to breathe again, unaware that for a moment they had ceased to breathe. Thornton was running behind, encouraging Buck with short, cheery words. The distance had been measured off, and as he neared the pile of firewood which marked the end of the hundred yards, a cheer began to grow and grow, which burst into a roar as he passed the firewood and halted at command. Every man was tearing himself loose, even Matthewson. Hats and mittens were flying in the air. Men were shaking hands, it did not matter with whom, and bubbling over in a general incoherent babel.

But Thornton fell on his knees beside Buck. Head was against head, and he was shaking him back and forth. Those who hurried up heard him cursing Buck, and he cursed him long and fervently, and softly and lovingly.

“Gad, sir! Gad, sir!” spluttered the Skookum Bench king. “I’ll give you a thousand for him, sir, a thousand, sir — twelve hundred, sir.”

Thornton rose to his feet. His eyes were wet. The tears were streaming frankly down his cheeks. “Sir,” he said to the Skookum Bench king, “no, sir. You can go to hell, sir. It’s the best I can do for you, sir.”

Buck seized Thornton’s hand in his teeth. Thornton shook him back and forth. As though animated by a common impulse, the onlookers drew back to a respectful distance; nor were they again indiscreet enough to interrupt.

Chapter VII. The Sounding of the Call

When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine, the history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.

But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River, passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the backbone of the continent.

John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased. Being in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner in the course of the day’s travel; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he kept on travelling, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later he would come to it. So, on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless future.

To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp, here and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through frozen muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by the heat of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted across blue mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers in slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest.

The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent, where wildfowl had been, but where then there was no life nor sign of life — only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches.

And through another winter they wandered on the obliterated trails of men who had gone before. Once, they came upon a path blazed through the forest, an ancient path, and the Lost Cabin seemed very near. But the path began nowhere and ended nowhere, and it remained mystery, as the man who made it and the reason he made it remained mystery. Another time they chanced upon the time-graven wreckage of a hunting lodge, and amid the shreds of rotted blankets John Thornton found a long-barrelled flint-lock. He knew it for a Hudson Bay Company gun of the young days in the Northwest, when such a gun was worth its height in beaver skins packed flat, And that was all — no hint as to the man who in an early day had reared the lodge and left the gun among the blankets.

Spring came on once more, and at the end of all their wandering they found, not the Lost Cabin, but a shallow placer in a broad valley where the gold showed like yellow butter across the bottom of the washing-pan. They sought no farther. Each day they worked earned them thousands of dollars in clean dust and nuggets, and they worked every day. The gold was sacked in moose-hide bags, fifty pounds to the bag, and piled like so much firewood outside the spruce-bough lodge. Like giants they toiled, days flashing on the heels of days like dreams as they heaped the treasure up.

There was nothing for the dogs to do, save the hauling in of meat now and again that Thornton killed, and Buck spent long hours musing by the fire. The vision of the short-legged hairy man came to him more frequently, now that there was little work to be done; and often, blinking by the fire, Buck wandered with him in that other world which he remembered.

The salient thing of this other world seemed fear. When he watched the hairy man sleeping by the fire, head between his knees and hands clasped above, Buck saw that he slept restlessly, with many starts and awakenings, at which times he would peer fearfully into the darkness and fling more wood upon the fire. Did they walk by the beach of a sea, where the hairy man gathered shellfish and ate them as he gathered, it was with eyes that roved everywhere for hidden danger and with legs prepared to run like the wind at its first appearance. Through the forest they crept noiselessly, Buck at the hairy man’s heels; and they were alert and vigilant, the pair of them, ears twitching and moving and nostrils quivering, for the man heard and smelled as keenly as Buck. The hairy man could spring up into the trees and travel ahead as fast as on the ground, swinging by the arms from limb to limb, sometimes a dozen feet apart, letting go and catching, never falling, never missing his grip. In fact, he seemed as much at home among the trees as on the ground; and Buck had memories of nights of vigil spent beneath trees wherein the hairy man roosted, holding on tightly as he slept.

And closely akin to the visions of the hairy man was the call still sounding in the depths of the forest. It filled him with a great unrest and strange desires. It caused him to feel a vague, sweet gladness, and he was aware of wild yearnings and stirrings for he knew not what. Sometimes he pursued the call into the forest, looking for it as though it were a tangible thing, barking softly or defiantly, as the mood might dictate. He would thrust his nose into the cool wood moss, or into the black soil where long grasses grew, and snort with joy at the fat earth smells; or he would crouch for hours, as if in concealment, behind fungus-covered trunks of fallen trees, wide-eyed and wide-eared to all that moved and sounded about him. It might be, lying thus, that he hoped to surprise this call he could not understand. But he did not know why he did these various things. He was impelled to do them, and did not reason about them at all.

Irresistible impulses seized him. He would be lying in camp, dozing lazily in the heat of the day, when suddenly his head would lift and his ears cock up, intent and listening, and he would spring to his feet and dash away, and on and on, for hours, through the forest aisles and across the open spaces where the niggerheads bunched. He loved to run down dry watercourses, and to creep and spy upon the bird life in the woods. For a day at a time he would lie in the underbrush where he could watch the partridges drumming and strutting up and down. But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called — called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.

One night he sprang from sleep with a start, eager-eyed, nostrils quivering and scenting, his mane bristling in recurrent waves. From the forest came the call (or one note of it, for the call was many noted), distinct and definite as never before, — a long-drawn howl, like, yet unlike, any noise made by husky dog. And he knew it, in the old familiar way, as a sound heard before. He sprang through the sleeping camp and in swift silence dashed through the woods. As he drew closer to the cry he went more slowly, with caution in every movement, till he came to an open place among the trees, and looking out saw, erect on haunches, with nose pointed to the sky, a long, lean, timber wolf.

He had made no noise, yet it ceased from its howling and tried to sense his presence. Buck stalked into the open, half crouching, body gathered compactly together, tail straight and stiff, feet falling with unwonted care. Every movement advertised commingled threatening and overture of friendliness. It was the menacing truce that marks the meeting of wild beasts that prey. But the wolf fled at sight of him. He followed, with wild leapings, in a frenzy to overtake. He ran him into a blind channel, in the bed of the creek where a timber jam barred the way. The wolf whirled about, pivoting on his hind legs after the fashion of Joe and of all cornered husky dogs, snarling and bristling, clipping his teeth together in a continuous and rapid succession of snaps.

Buck did not attack, but circled him about and hedged him in with friendly advances. The wolf was suspicious and afraid; for Buck made three of him in weight, while his head barely reached Buck’s shoulder. Watching his chance, he darted away, and the chase was resumed. Time and again he was cornered, and the thing repeated, though he was in poor condition, or Buck could not so easily have overtaken him. He would run till Buck’s head was even with his flank, when he would whirl around at bay, only to dash away again at the first opportunity.

But in the end Buck’s pertinacity was rewarded; for the wolf, finding that no harm was intended, finally sniffed noses with him. Then they became friendly, and played about in the nervous, half-coy way with which fierce beasts belie their fierceness. After some time of this the wolf started off at an easy lope in a manner that plainly showed he was going somewhere. He made it clear to Buck that he was to come, and they ran side by side through the sombre twilight, straight up the creek bed, into the gorge from which it issued, and across the bleak divide where it took its rise.

On the opposite slope of the watershed they came down into a level country where were great stretches of forest and many streams, and through these great stretches they ran steadily, hour after hour, the sun rising higher and the day growing warmer. Buck was wildly glad. He knew he was at last answering the call, running by the side of his wood brother toward the place from where the call surely came. Old memories were coming upon him fast, and he was stirring to them as of old he stirred to the realities of which they were the shadows. He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world, and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.

They stopped by a running stream to drink, and, stopping, Buck remembered John Thornton. He sat down. The wolf started on toward the place from where the call surely came, then returned to him, sniffing noses and making actions as though to encourage him. But Buck turned about and started slowly on the back track. For the better part of an hour the wild brother ran by his side, whining softly. Then he sat down, pointed his nose upward, and howled. It was a mournful howl, and as Buck held steadily on his way he heard it grow faint and fainter until it was lost in the distance.

John Thornton was eating dinner when Buck dashed into camp and sprang upon him in a frenzy of affection, overturning him, scrambling upon him, licking his face, biting his hand — ”playing the general tom-fool,” as John Thornton characterized it, the while he shook Buck back and forth and cursed him lovingly.

For two days and nights Buck never left camp, never let Thornton out of his sight. He followed him about at his work, watched him while he ate, saw him into his blankets at night and out of them in the morning. But after two days the call in the forest began to sound more imperiously than ever. Buck’s restlessness came back on him, and he was haunted by recollections of the wild brother, and of the smiling land beyond the divide and the run side by side through the wide forest stretches. Once again he took to wandering in the woods, but the wild brother came no more; and though he listened through long vigils, the mournful howl was never raised.

He began to sleep out at night, staying away from camp for days at a time; and once he crossed the divide at the head of the creek and went down into the land of timber and streams. There he wandered for a week, seeking vainly for fresh sign of the wild brother, killing his meat as he travelled and travelling with the long, easy lope that seems never to tire. He fished for salmon in a broad stream that emptied somewhere into the sea, and by this stream he killed a large black bear, blinded by the mosquitoes while likewise fishing, and raging through the forest helpless and terrible. Even so, it was a hard fight, and it aroused the last latent remnants of Buck’s ferocity. And two days later, when he returned to his kill and found a dozen wolverenes quarrelling over the spoil, he scattered them like chaff; and those that fled left two behind who would quarrel no more.

The blood-longing became stronger than ever before. He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survived. Because of all this he became possessed of a great pride in himself, which communicated itself like a contagion to his physical being. It advertised itself in all his movements, was apparent in the play of every muscle, spoke plainly as speech in the way he carried himself, and made his glorious furry coat if anything more glorious. But for the stray brown on his muzzle and above his eyes, and for the splash of white hair that ran midmost down his chest, he might well have been mistaken for a gigantic wolf, larger than the largest of the breed. From his St. Bernard father he had inherited size and weight, but it was his shepherd mother who had given shape to that size and weight. His muzzle was the long wolf muzzle, save that it was larger than the muzzle of any wolf; and his head, somewhat broader, was the wolf head on a massive scale.

His cunning was wolf cunning, and wild cunning; his intelligence, shepherd intelligence and St. Bernard intelligence; and all this, plus an experience gained in the fiercest of schools, made him as formidable a creature as any that roamed the wild. A carnivorous animal living on a straight meat diet, he was in full flower, at the high tide of his life, overspilling with vigor and virility. When Thornton passed a caressing hand along his back, a snapping and crackling followed the hand, each hair discharging its pent magnetism at the contact. Every part, brain and body, nerve tissue and fibre, was keyed to the most exquisite pitch; and between all the parts there was a perfect equilibrium or adjustment. To sights and sounds and events which required action, he responded with lightning-like rapidity. Quickly as a husky dog could leap to defend from attack or to attack, he could leap twice as quickly. He saw the movement, or heard sound, and responded in less time than another dog required to compass the mere seeing or hearing. He perceived and determined and responded in the same instant. In point of fact the three actions of perceiving, determining, and responding were sequential; but so infinitesimal were the intervals of time between them that they appeared simultaneous. His muscles were surcharged with vitality, and snapped into play sharply, like steel springs. Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy and pour forth generously over the world.

“Never was there such a dog,” said John Thornton one day, as the partners watched Buck marching out of camp.

“When he was made, the mould was broke,” said Pete.

“Py jingo! I t’ink so mineself,” Hans affirmed.

They saw him marching out of camp, but they did not see the instant and terrible transformation which took place as soon as he was within the secrecy of the forest. He no longer marched. At once he became a thing of the wild, stealing along softly, cat-footed, a passing shadow that appeared and disappeared among the shadows. He knew how to take advantage of every cover, to crawl on his belly like a snake, and like a snake to leap and strike. He could take a ptarmigan from its nest, kill a rabbit as it slept, and snap in mid air the little chipmunks fleeing a second too late for the trees. Fish, in open pools, were not too quick for him; nor were beaver, mending their dams, too wary. He killed to eat, not from wantonness; but he preferred to eat what he killed himself. So a lurking humor ran through his deeds, and it was his delight to steal upon the squirrels, and, when he all but had them, to let them go, chattering in mortal fear to the treetops.

As the fall of the year came on, the moose appeared in greater abundance, moving slowly down to meet the winter in the lower and less rigorous valleys. Buck had already dragged down a stray part-grown calf; but he wished strongly for larger and more formidable quarry, and he came upon it one day on the divide at the head of the creek. A band of twenty moose had crossed over from the land of streams and timber, and chief among them was a great bull. He was in a savage temper, and, standing over six feet from the ground, was as formidable an antagonist as even Buck could desire. Back and forth the bull tossed his great palmated antlers, branching to fourteen points and embracing seven feet within the tips. His small eyes burned with a vicious and bitter light, while he roared with fury at sight of Buck.

From the bull’s side, just forward of the flank, protruded a feathered arrow-end, which accounted for his savageness. Guided by that instinct which came from the old hunting days of the primordial world, Buck proceeded to cut the bull out from the herd. It was no slight task. He would bark and dance about in front of the bull, just out of reach of the great antlers and of the terrible splay hoofs which could have stamped his life out with a single blow. Unable to turn his back on the fanged danger and go on, the bull would be driven into paroxysms of rage. At such moments he charged Buck, who retreated craftily, luring him on by a simulated inability to escape. But when he was thus separated from his fellows, two or three of the younger bulls would charge back upon Buck and enable the wounded bull to rejoin the herd.

There is a patience of the wild — dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself — that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this patience belongs peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food; and it belonged to Buck as he clung to the flank of the herd, retarding its march, irritating the young bulls, worrying the cows with their half-grown calves, and driving the wounded bull mad with helpless rage. For half a day this continued. Buck multiplied himself, attacking from all sides, enveloping the herd in a whirlwind of menace, cutting out his victim as fast as it could rejoin its mates, wearing out the patience of creatures preyed upon, which is a lesser patience than that of creatures preying.

As the day wore along and the sun dropped to its bed in the northwest (the darkness had come back and the fall nights were six hours long), the young bulls retraced their steps more and more reluctantly to the aid of their beset leader. The down-coming winter was harrying them on to the lower levels, and it seemed they could never shake off this tireless creature that held them back. Besides, it was not the life of the herd, or of the young bulls, that was threatened. The life of only one member was demanded, which was a remoter interest than their lives, and in the end they were content to pay the toll.

As twilight fell the old bull stood with lowered head, watching his mates — the cows he had known, the calves he had fathered, the bulls he had mastered — as they shambled on at a rapid pace through the fading light. He could not follow, for before his nose leaped the merciless fanged terror that would not let him go. Three hundredweight more than half a ton he weighed; he had lived a long, strong life, full of fight and struggle, and at the end he faced death at the teeth of a creature whose head did not reach beyond his great knuckled knees.

From then on, night and day, Buck never left his prey, never gave it a moment’s rest, never permitted it to browse the leaves of trees or the shoots of young birch and willow. Nor did he give the wounded bull opportunity to slake his burning thirst in the slender trickling streams they crossed. Often, in desperation, he burst into long stretches of flight. At such times Buck did not attempt to stay him, but loped easily at his heels, satisfied with the way the game was played, lying down when the moose stood still, attacking him fiercely when he strove to eat or drink.

The great head drooped more and more under its tree of horns, and the shambling trot grew weak and weaker. He took to standing for long periods, with nose to the ground and dejected ears dropped limply; and Buck found more time in which to get water for himself and in which to rest. At such moments, panting with red lolling tongue and with eyes fixed upon the big bull, it appeared to Buck that a change was coming over the face of things. He could feel a new stir in the land. As the moose were coming into the land, other kinds of life were coming in. Forest and stream and air seemed palpitant with their presence. The news of it was borne in upon him, not by sight, or sound, or smell, but by some other and subtler sense. He heard nothing, saw nothing, yet knew that the land was somehow different; that through it strange things were afoot and ranging; and he resolved to investigate after he had finished the business in hand.

At last, at the end of the fourth day, he pulled the great moose down. For a day and a night he remained by the kill, eating and sleeping, turn and turn about. Then, rested, refreshed and strong, he turned his face toward camp and John Thornton. He broke into the long easy lope, and went on, hour after hour, never at loss for the tangled way, heading straight home through strange country with a certitude of direction that put man and his magnetic needle to shame.

As he held on he became more and more conscious of the new stir in the land. There was life abroad in it different from the life which had been there throughout the summer. No longer was this fact borne in upon him in some subtle, mysterious way. The birds talked of it, the squirrels chattered about it, the very breeze whispered of it. Several times he stopped and drew in the fresh morning air in great sniffs, reading a message which made him leap on with greater speed. He was oppressed with a sense of calamity happening, if it were not calamity already happened; and as he crossed the last watershed and dropped down into the valley toward camp, he proceeded with greater caution.

Three miles away he came upon a fresh trail that sent his neck hair rippling and bristling, It led straight toward camp and John Thornton. Buck hurried on, swiftly and stealthily, every nerve straining and tense, alert to the multitudinous details which told a story — all but the end. His nose gave him a varying description of the passage of the life on the heels of which he was travelling. He remarked the pregnant silence of the forest. The bird life had flitted. The squirrels were in hiding. One only he saw, — a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray dead limb so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence upon the wood itself.

As Buck slid along with the obscureness of a gliding shadow, his nose was jerked suddenly to the side as though a positive force had gripped and pulled it. He followed the new scent into a thicket and found Nig. He was lying on his side, dead where he had dragged himself, an arrow protruding, head and feathers, from either side of his body.

A hundred yards farther on, Buck came upon one of the sled-dogs Thornton had bought in Dawson. This dog was thrashing about in a death-struggle, directly on the trail, and Buck passed around him without stopping. From the camp came the faint sound of many voices, rising and falling in a sing-song chant. Bellying forward to the edge of the clearing, he found Hans, lying on his face, feathered with arrows like a porcupine. At the same instant Buck peered out where the spruce-bough lodge had been and saw what made his hair leap straight up on his neck and shoulders. A gust of overpowering rage swept over him. He did not know that he growled, but he growled aloud with a terrible ferocity. For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp cunning and reason, and it was because of his great love for John Thornton that he lost his head.

The Yeehats were dancing about the wreckage of the spruce-bough lodge when they heard a fearful roaring and saw rushing upon them an animal the like of which they had never seen before. It was Buck, a live hurricane of fury, hurling himself upon them in a frenzy to destroy. He sprang at the foremost man (it was the chief of the Yeehats), ripping the throat wide open till the rent jugular spouted a fountain of blood. He did not pause to worry the victim, but ripped in passing, with the next bound tearing wide the throat of a second man. There was no withstanding him. He plunged about in their very midst, tearing, rending, destroying, in constant and terrific motion which defied the arrows they discharged at him. In fact, so inconceivably rapid were his movements, and so closely were the Indians tangled together, that they shot one another with the arrows; and one young hunter, hurling a spear at Buck in mid air, drove it through the chest of another hunter with such force that the point broke through the skin of the back and stood out beyond. Then a panic seized the Yeehats, and they fled in terror to the woods, proclaiming as they fled the advent of the Evil Spirit.

And truly Buck was the Fiend incarnate, raging at their heels and dragging them down like deer as they raced through the trees. It was a fateful day for the Yeehats. They scattered far and wide over the country, and it was not till a week later that the last of the survivors gathered together in a lower valley and counted their losses. As for Buck, wearying of the pursuit, he returned to the desolated camp. He found Pete where he had been killed in his blankets in the first moment of surprise. Thornton’s desperate struggle was fresh-written on the earth, and Buck scented every detail of it down to the edge of a deep pool. By the edge, head and fore feet in the water, lay Skeet, faithful to the last. The pool itself, muddy and discolored from the sluice boxes, effectually hid what it contained, and it contained John Thornton; for Buck followed his trace into the water, from which no trace led away.

All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about the camp. Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and away from the lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John Thornton was dead. It left a great void in him, somewhat akin to hunger, but a void which ached and ached, and which food could not fill, At times, when he paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of it; and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself, — a pride greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily. It was harder to kill a husky dog than them. They were no match at all, were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs. Thenceforward he would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their hands their arrows, spears, and clubs.

Night came on, and a full moon rose high over the trees into the sky, lighting the land till it lay bathed in ghostly day. And with the coming of the night, brooding and mourning by the pool, Buck became alive to a stirring of the new life in the forest other than that which the Yeehats had made, He stood up, listening and scenting. From far away drifted a faint, sharp yelp, followed by a chorus of similar sharp yelps. As the moments passed the yelps grew closer and louder. Again Buck knew them as things heard in that other world which persisted in his memory. He walked to the centre of the open space and listened. It was the call, the many-noted call, sounding more luringly and compellingly than ever before. And as never before, he was ready to obey. John Thornton was dead. The last tie was broken. Man and the claims of man no longer bound him.

Hunting their living meat, as the Yeehats were hunting it, on the flanks of the migrating moose, the wolf pack had at last crossed over from the land of streams and timber and invaded Buck’s valley. Into the clearing where the moonlight streamed, they poured in a silvery flood; and in the centre of the clearing stood Buck, motionless as a statue, waiting their coming. They were awed, so still and large he stood, and a moment’s pause fell, till the boldest one leaped straight for him. Like a flash Buck struck, breaking the neck. Then he stood, without movement, as before, the stricken wolf rolling in agony behind him. Three others tried it in sharp succession; and one after the other they drew back, streaming blood from slashed throats or shoulders.

This was sufficient to fling the whole pack forward, pell-mell, crowded together, blocked and confused by its eagerness to pull down the prey. Buck’s marvellous quickness and agility stood him in good stead. Pivoting on his hind legs, and snapping and gashing, he was everywhere at once, presenting a front which was apparently unbroken so swiftly did he whirl and guard from side to side. But to prevent them from getting behind him, he was forced back, down past the pool and into the creek bed, till he brought up against a high gravel bank. He worked along to a right angle in the bank which the men had made in the course of mining, and in this angle he came to bay, protected on three sides and with nothing to do but face the front.

And so well did he face it, that at the end of half an hour the wolves drew back discomfited. The tongues of all were out and lolling, the white fangs showing cruelly white in the moonlight. Some were lying down with heads raised and ears pricked forward; others stood on their feet, watching him; and still others were lapping water from the pool. One wolf, long and lean and gray, advanced cautiously, in a friendly manner, and Buck recognized the wild brother with whom he had run for a night and a day. He was whining softly, and, as Buck whined, they touched noses.

Then an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward. Buck writhed his lips into the preliminary of a snarl, but sniffed noses with him, Whereupon the old wolf sat down, pointed nose at the moon, and broke out the long wolf howl. The others sat down and howled. And now the call came to Buck in unmistakable accents. He, too, sat down and howled. This over, he came out of his angle and the pack crowded around him, sniffing in half-friendly, half-savage manner. The leaders lifted the yelp of the pack and sprang away into the woods. The wolves swung in behind, yelping in chorus. And Buck ran with them, side by side with the wild brother, yelping as he ran.

And here may well end the story of Buck. The years were not many when the Yeehats noted a change in the breed of timber wolves; for some were seen with splashes of brown on head and muzzle, and with a rift of white centring down the chest. But more remarkable than this, the Yeehats tell of a Ghost Dog that runs at the head of the pack. They are afraid of this Ghost Dog, for it has cunning greater than they, stealing from their camps in fierce winters, robbing their traps, slaying their dogs, and defying their bravest hunters.

Nay, the tale grows worse. Hunters there are who fail to return to the camp, and hunters there have been whom their tribesmen found with throats slashed cruelly open and with wolf prints about them in the snow greater than the prints of any wolf. Each fall, when the Yeehats follow the movement of the moose, there is a certain valley which they never enter. And women there are who become sad when the word goes over the fire of how the Evil Spirit came to select that valley for an abiding-place.

In the summers there is one visitor, however, to that valley, of which the Yeehats do not know. It is a great, gloriously coated wolf, like, and yet unlike, all other wolves. He crosses alone from the smiling timber land and comes down into an open space among the trees. Here a yellow stream flows from rotted moose-hide sacks and sinks into the ground, with long grasses growing through it and vegetable mould overrunning it and hiding its yellow from the sun; and here he muses for a time, howling once, long and mournfully, ere he departs.

But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

The Kempton-Wace Letters

This 1903 epistolary novel was published anonymously by London and Anna Strunsky. It is a discussion of the philosophy of love and sex, written in the form of a series of letters between two men, “Herbert Wace,” a young scientist, and “Dane Kempton,” an elderly poet. Jack London wrote “Wace’s” letters, Anna Strunsky wrote “Kempton’s.” Kempton makes the case for feeling and emotion, while Wace analyzes love in Darwinian terms.

The first edition

I. From Dane Kempton to Herbert Wace

London,
3 a Queen’s Road, Chelsea, S.W.
August 14, 19 — .

Yesterday I wrote formally, rising to the occasion like the conventional happy father rather than the man who believes in the miracle and lives for it. Yesterday I stinted myself. I took you in my arms, glad of what is and stately with respect for the fulness of your manhood. It is to-day that I let myself leap into yours in a passion of joy. I dwell on what has come to pass and inflate myself with pride in your fulfilment, more as a mother would, I think, and she your mother.

But why did you not write before? After all, the great event was not when you found your offer of marriage accepted, but when you found you had fallen in love. Then was your hour. Then was the time for congratulation, when the call was first sounded and the reveille of Time and About fell upon your soul and the march to another’s destiny was begun. It is always more important to love than to be loved. I wish it had been vouchsafed me to be by when your spirit of a sudden grew willing to bestow itself without question or let or hope of return, when the self broke up and you grew fain to beat out your strength in praise and service for the woman who was soaring high in the blue wastes. You have known her long, and you must have been hers long, yet no word of her and of your love reached me. It was not kind to be silent.

Barbara spoke yesterday of your fastidiousness, and we told each other that you had gained a triumph of happiness in your love, for you are not of those who cheat themselves. You choose rigorously, straining for the heart of the end as do all rigorists who are also hedonists. Because we are in possession of this bit of data as to your temperamental cosmos we can congratulate you with the more abandon. Oh, Herbert, do you know that this is a rampant spring, and that on leaving Barbara I tramped out of the confines into the green, happier, it almost seems, than I have ever been? Do you know that because you love a woman and she loves you, and that because you are swept along by certain forces, that I am happy and feel myself in sight of my portion of immortality on earth, far more than because of my books, dear lad, far more?

I wish I could fly England and get to you. Should I have a shade less of you than formerly, if we were together now? From your too much green of wealth, a barrenness of friendship? It does not matter; what is her gain cannot be my loss. One power is mine, — without hindrance, in freedom and in right, to say to Ellen’s son, “Godspeed!” to place Hester Stebbins’s hand in his, and bid them forth to the sunrise, into the glory of day!

Ever your devoted father,
Dane Kempton.

II — From Herbert Wace to Dane Kempton

The Ridge,
Berkeley, California.
September 3, 19 — .

Here I am, back in the old quarters once more, with the old afternoon climb across the campus and up into the sky, up to the old rooms, the old books, and the old view. You poor fog-begirt Dane Kempton, could you but have lounged with me on the window couch, an hour past, and watched the light pass out of the day through the Golden Gate and the night creep over the Berkeley Hills and down out of the east! Why should you linger on there in London town! We grow away from each other, it seems — you with your wonder-singing, I with my joyful science.

Poesy and economics! Alack! alack! How did I escape you, Dane, when mind and mood you mastered me? The auguries were fair. I, too, should have been a singer, and lo, I strive for science. All my boyhood was singing, what of you; and my father was a singer, too, in his own fine way. Dear to me is your likening of him to Waring. — ”What’s become of Waring?” He was Waring. I can think of him only as one who went away, “chose land travel or seafaring.”

Gwynne says I am sometimes almost a poet — Gwynne, you know, Arthur Gwynne, who has come to live with me at The Ridge. “If it were not for your dismal science,” he is sure to add; and to fire him I lay it to the defects of early training. I know he thinks that I never half appreciated you, and that I do not appreciate you now. If you will recollect, you praised his verses once. He cherishes that praise amongst his sweetest treasures. Poor dear good old Gwynne, tender, sensitive, shrinking, with the face of a seraph and the heart of a maid. Never were two men more incongruously companioned. I love him for himself. He tolerates me, I do secretly believe, because of you. He longs to meet you, — he knew you well through my father, — and we often talk you over. Be sure at every opportunity I tear off your halo and trundle it about. Trust me, you receive scant courtesy.

How I wander on. My pen is unruly after the long vacation; my thought yet wayward, what of the fever of successful wooing. And besides, ... how shall I say?... such was the gracious warmth of your letter, of both your letters, that I am at a loss. I feel weak, inadequate. It almost seems as though you had made a demand upon something that is not in me. Ah, you poets! It would seem your delight in my marriage were greater than mine. In my present mood, it is you who are young, you who love; I who have lived and am old.

Yes, I am going to be married. At this present moment, I doubt not, a million men and women are saying the same thing. Hewers of wood and drawers of water, princes and potentates, shy-shrinking maidens and brazen-faced hussies, all saying, “I am going to be married.” And all looking forward to it as a crisis in their lives? No. After all, marriage is the way of the world. Considered biologically, it is an institution necessary for the perpetuation of the species. Why should it be a crisis? These million men and women will marry, and the work of the world go on just as it did before. Shuffle them about, and the work of the world would yet go on.

True, a month ago it did seem a crisis. I wrote you as much. It did seem a disturbing element in my life-work. One cannot view with equanimity that which appears to be totally disruptive of one’s dear little system of living. But it only appeared so; I lacked perspective, that was all. As I look upon it now, everything fits well and all will run smoothly I am sure.

You know I had two years yet to work for my Doctorate. I still have them. As you see, I am back to the old quarters, settled down in the old groove, hammering away at the old grind. Nothing is changed. And besides my own studies, I have taken up an assistant instructorship in the Department of Economics. It is an ambitious course, and an important one. I don’t know how they ever came to confide it to me, or how I found the temerity to attempt it, — which is neither here nor there. It is all agreed. Hester is a sensible girl.

The engagement is to be long. I shall continue my career as charted. Two years from now, when I shall have become a Doctor of Social Sciences (and candidate for numerous other things), I shall also become a benedict. My marriage and the presumably necessary honeymoon chime in with the summer vacation. There is no disturbing element even there. Oh, we are very practical, Hester and I. And we are both strong enough to lead each our own lives.

Which reminds me that you have not asked about her. First, let me shock you — she, too, is a scientist. It was in my undergraduate days that we met, and ere the half-hour struck we were quarrelling felicitously over Weismann and the neo-Darwinians. I was at Berkeley at the time, a cocksure junior; and she, far maturer as a freshman, was at Stanford, carrying more culture with her into her university than is given the average student to carry out.

Next, and here your arms open to her, she is a poet. Pre-eminently she is a poet — this must be always understood. She is the greater poet, I take it, in this dawning twentieth century, because she is a scientist; not in spite of being a scientist as some would hold. How shall I describe her? Perhaps as a George Eliot, fused with an Elizabeth Barrett, with a hint of Huxley and a trace of Keats. I may say she is something like all this, but I must say she is something other and different. There is about her a certain lightsomeness, a glow or flash almost Latin or oriental, or perhaps Celtic. Yes, that must be it — Celtic. But the high-stomached Norman is there and the stubborn Saxon. Her quickness and fine audacity are checked and poised, as it were, by that certain conservatism which gives stability to purpose and power to achievement. She is unafraid, and wide-looking and far-looking, but she is not over-looking. The Saxon grapples with the Celt, and the Norman forces the twain to do what the one would not dream of doing and what the other would dream beyond and never do. Do you catch me? Her most salient charm, is I think, her perfect poise, her exquisite adjustment.

Altogether she is a most wonderful woman, take my word for it. And after all she is described vicariously. Though she has published nothing and is exceeding shy, I shall send you some of her work. There will you find and know her. She is waiting for stronger voice and sings softly as yet. But hers will be no minor note, no middle flight. She is — well, she is Hester. In two years we shall be married. Two years, Dane. Surely you will be with us.

One thing more; in your letter a certain undertone which I could not fail to detect. A shade less of me than formerly? — I turn and look into your face — Waring’s handiwork you remember — his painter’s fancy of you in those golden days when I stood on the brink of the world, and you showed me the delights of the world and the way of my feet therein. So I turn and look, and look and wonder. A shade less of me, of you? Poesy and economics! Where lies the blame?

Herbert.

III — From Dane Kempton to Herbert Wace

London,
September 30, 19 — .

It is because you know not what you do that I cannot forgive you. Could you know that your letter with its catalogue of advantages and arrangements must offend me as much as it belies (let us hope) you and the woman of your love, I would pardon the affront of it upon us all, and ascribe the unseemly want of warmth to reserve or to the sadness which grips the heart when joy is too palpitant. But something warns me that you are unaware of the chill your words breathe, and that is a lapse which it is impossible to meet with indulgence.

“He does not love her,” was Barbara’s quick decision, and she laid the open letter down with a definiteness which said that you, too, are laid out and laid low. Your sister’s very wrists can be articulate. However, I laughed at her and she soon joined me. We do not mean to be extravagant with our fears. Who shall prescribe the letters of lovers to their sisters and foster-fathers? Yet there are some things their letters should be incapable of saying, and amongst them that love is not a crisis and a rebirth, but that it is common as the commonplace, a hit or miss affair which “shuffling” could not affect.

Barbara showed me your note to her. “Had I written like this of myself and Earl — ”

“You could not,” I objected.

“Then Herbert should have been as little able to do it,” she deduced with emphasis. Here I might have told her that men and women are races apart, but no one talks cant to Barbara. So I did not console her, and it stands against you in our minds that on this critical occasion you have baffled us with coldness.

An absence of six years, broken into twice by a brief few months, must work changes. When Barbara called your letter unnatural, she forgot how little she knows what is natural to you. She and I have been wont to predetermine you, your character, foothold, and outlook, by — say by the fact that you knew your Wordsworth and that you knew him without being able to take for yourself his austere peace. Youth which lives by hope is riven by unrest.

“I made no vows; vows were made for me,

Bond unknown to me was given

That I should be, else sinning gently,

A dedicated spirit.”

That pale sunrise seen from Mt. Tamalpais and your voice vibrant to fierceness on the “else sinning gently” — to me the splendour of rose on piled-up ridges of mist spoke all for you, so dear have you always been. It rested on the possible wonder of your life. It threw you into the scintillant Dawn with an abandon meet to a son of Waring.

Tell me, do you still read your Wordsworth on your knees? I am bent with regret for the time when your mind had no surprises for me, when the days were flushed halcyon with my hope in you. I resent your development if it is because of it that you speak prosaically of a prosaic marriage and of a honeymoon simultaneous with the Degree. I think you are too well pleased with the simultaneousness.

Yet the fact of the letter is fair. It cannot be that the soul of it is not. Hester Stebbins is a poet. I lean forward and think it out as I did some days ago when the news came. I conjure up the look of love. If the woman is content (how much more than content the feeling she bounds with in knowing you hers as she is yours), what better test that all is well? I conjure up the look of love. It is thus at meeting and thus at parting. Even here, to-night, when all is chill and hard to understand, I catch the flash and the warmth, and what I see restores you to me, but how deep the plummet of my mind needed to sound before it reached you. It is because you permitted yourself to speak when silence had expressed you better.

Show me the ideally real Hester Stebbins, the spark of fire which is she. The storms have not broken over her head. She will laugh and make poetry of her laughter. If before she met you she wept, that, too, will help the smiling. There is laughter which is the echo of a Miserere sobbed by the ages. Men chuckle in the irony of pain, and they smile cold, lessoned smiles in resignation; they laugh in forgetfulness and they laugh lest they die of sadness. A shrug of the shoulders, a widening of the lips, a heaving forth of sound, and the life is saved. The remedy is as drastic as are the drugs used for epilepsy, which in quelling the spasm bring idiocy to the patient. If we are made idiots by our laughter, we are paying dearly for the privilege of continuing in life.

Hester shall laugh because she is glad and must tell her joy, and she will not lose it in the telling. Greet her for me and hasten to prove yourself, for

“The Poet, gentle creature that he is,

Hath like the Lover, his unruly times;

His fits when he is neither sick nor well,

Though no distress be near him but his own

Unmanageable thoughts.”

You will judge by this letter that I am neither sick nor well, and that I reach for a distress which is not near. If I were Merchant rather than Poet, it would be otherwise with me.

Dane.

IV — From Herbert Wace to Dane Kempton

The Ridge,
Berkeley, California.
October 27, 19 — .

Do I still read my Wordsworth on my knees? Well, we may as well have it out. I have foreseen this day so long and shunned it that now I meet it almost with extended hands. No, I do not read my Wordsworth on my knees. My mind is filled with other things. I have not the time. I am not the Herbert Wace of six years gone. It is fair that you should know this; fair, also, that you should know the Herbert Wace of six years gone was not quite the lad you deemed him.

There is no more pathetic and terrible thing than the prejudice of love. Both you and I have suffered from it. Six years ago, ay, and before that, I felt and resented the growing difference between us. When under your spell, it seemed that I was born to lisp in numbers and devote myself to singing, that the world was good and all of it fit for singing. But away from you, even then, doubts faced me, and I knew in vague fashion that we lived in different worlds. At first in vague fashion, I say; and when with you again, your spell dominated me and I could not question. You were true, you were good, I argued, all that was wonderful and glorious; therefore, you were also right. You mastered me with your charm, as you were wont to master those who loved you.

But there came times when your sympathy failed me and I stood alone on outlooks I had achieved alone. There was no response from you. I could not hear your voice. I looked down upon a real world; you were caught up in a beautiful cloudland and shut away from me. Possibly it was because life of itself appealed to you, while to me appealed the mechanics of life. But be it as it may, yours was a world of ideas and fancies, mine a world of things and facts.

Enters here the prejudice of love. It was the lad that discovered our difference and concealed; it was the man who was blind and could not discover. There we erred, man and boy; and here, both men now, we make all well again.

Let me be explicit. Do you remember the passion with which I read the “Intellectual Development of Europe?” I understood not the tithe of it, but I was thrilled. My common sense was thrilled, I suppose; but it was all very joyous, gripping hold of the tangible world for the first time. And when I came to you, warm with the glow of adventure, you looked blankly, then smiled indulgently and did not answer. You regarded my ardour complacently. A passing humour of adolescence, you thought; and I thought: “Dane does not read his Draper on his knees.” Wordsworth was great to me; Draper was great also. You had no patience with him, and I know now, as I felt then, your consistent revolt against his materialistic philosophy.

Only the other day you complained of a letter of mine, calling it cold and analytical. That I should be cold and analytical despite all the prodding and pressing and moulding I have received at your hands, and the hands of Waring, marks only more clearly our temperamental difference; but it does not mark that one or the other of us is less a dedicated spirit. If I have wandered away from the warmth of poesy and become practical, have you not remained and become confirmed in all that is beautifully impractical? If I have adventured in a new world of common things, have you not lingered in the old world of great and impossible things? If I have shivered in the gray dawn of a new day, have you not crouched over the dying embers of the fire of yesterday? Ah, Dane, you cannot rekindle that fire. The whirl of the world scatters its ashes wide and far, like volcanic dust, to make beautiful crimson sunsets for a time and then to vanish.

None the less are you a dedicated spirit, priest that you are of a dying faith. Your prayers are futile, your altars crumbling, and the light flickers and drops down into night. Poetry is empty these days, empty and worthless and dead. All the old-world epic and lyric-singing will not put this very miserable earth of ours to rights. So long as the singers sing of the things of yesterday, glorifying the things of yesterday and lamenting their departure, so long will poetry be a vain thing and without avail. The old world is dead, dead and buried along with its heroes and Helens and knights and ladies and tournaments and pageants. You cannot sing of the truth and wonder of to-day in terms of yesterday. And no one will listen to your singing till you sing of to-day in terms of to-day.

This is the day of the common man. Do you glorify the common man? This is the day of the machine. When have you sung of the machine? The crusades are here again, not the Crusades of Christ but the Crusades of the Machine — have you found motive in them for your song? We are crusading to-day, not for the remission of sins, but for the abolition of sinning, of economic and industrial sinning. The crusade to Christ’s sepulchre was paltry compared with the splendour and might of our crusade to-day toward manhood. There are millions of us afoot. In the stillness of the night have you never listened to the trampling of our feet and been caught up by the glory and the romance of it? Oh, Dane! Dane! Our captains sit in council, our heroes take the field, our fighting men are buckling on their harness, our martyrs have already died, and you are blind to it, blind to it all!

We have no poets these days, and perforce we are singing with our hands. The walking delegate is a greater singer and a finer singer than you, Dane Kempton. The cold, analytical economist, delving in the dynamics of society, is more the prophet than you. The carpenter at his bench, the blacksmith by his forge, the boiler-maker clanging and clattering, are all warbling more sweetly than you. The sledge-wielder pours out more strength and certitude and joy in every blow than do you in your whole sheaf of songs. Why, the very socialist agitator, hustled by the police on a street corner amid the jeers of the mob, has caught the romance of to-day as you have not caught it and where you have missed it. He knows life and is living. Are you living, Dane Kempton?

Forgive me. I had begun to explain and reconcile our difference. I find I am lecturing and censuring you. In defending myself, I offend. But this I wish to say: We are so made, you and I, that your function in life is to dream, mine to work. That you failed to make a dreamer of me is no cause for heartache and chagrin. What of my practical nature and analytical mind, I have generalised in my own way upon the data of life and achieved a different code from yours. Yet I seek truth as passionately as you. I still believe myself to be a dedicated spirit.

And what boots it, all of it? When the last word is said, we are two men, by a thousand ties very dear to each other. There is room in our hearts for each other as there is room in the world for both of us. Though we have many things not in common, yet you are my dearest friend on earth, you who have been a second father to me as well.

You have long merited this explanation, and it was cowardly of me not to have made it before. My hope is that I have been sufficiently clear for you to understand.

Herbert.

V — From Dane Kempton to Herbert Wace

London,
3 a Queen’s Road, Chelsea, S.W.
November 16, 19 — .

You sigh “Poesy and Economics,” supplying the cause and thereby admitting the fact. I wish you had shown some reluctance to see my meaning, that you had preferred to waive the matter on the ground of insufficient data, that you had been less eager to ferret out the science of the thing. Do you remember how your boy’s respect rose for little Barbara whenever she cried when too readily forgiven? “She dreads a double standard,” you explained to me with generous heat. You sympathised with her fear lest I demand less of her than of you, honouring her insistence on an equality of duty as well as of privilege. Is the man Herbert less proud than the child Barbara, that you speak of a temperamental difference and ask for a special dispensation?

You are not in love (this you say in not gainsaying my attack on you, and so far I understand), because you are a student of Economics. At the last I stop. What is this about economics and poesy? About your emancipation from my riotously lyric sway? The hand of the forces by which you have been moulded cannot detain you from going out upon the love-quest. The fact of your preference for Draper cannot forestall your spirit’s need of love. There are many codes, but there is one law, binding alike on the economist and poet. It springs out of the common and unappeasable hunger, commanding that love seek love through night to day and through day to night.

Yet it is possible to put oneself outside the pale of the law, to refuse the gift of life and snap the tie between time and space and creature. It is possible to be too emaciated for interest or feeling. The men and women of the People know neither love nor art because they are too weary. They lie in sleep prostrate from great fatigue. Their bodies are too much tried with the hungers of the body and their spirits too dimly illumined with the hope of fair chances. It is also possible to fill oneself so full with an interest that all else is crowded out. You have done this. Like the cobbler who is a cobbler typically, the teacher who is a pedagogue, the physician and the lawyer who are pathologists merely, you are a fanatic of a text. You are in the toils of an idea, the idea of selection, as I well know, and you exploit it like a drudge. When a man finds that he cannot deal in petroleum without smelling of it, it is time that he turn to something else. Every man is engaged in the cause of keeping himself whole, in watching himself lest his man turn machine, in watching lest the outside world assail the inner. Nature spares the type, but the individual must spare himself. He is strong who is sensitive and who responds subtly to everything in his environment, but his response must be characteristic; he must sustain his personality and become more himself through the years. He alone is vital in the social scheme who lets nothing in him atrophy and who persists in being varied from all others in the scale of character to the degree of variability that was his at the beginning.

I read in your letter nothing but a decision to stop short and give over, as if you had strength for no more than your book and your theory! You have become slave to a small point of inquiry, and you call it the advance to a new time. “The crusade is on,” you say. Coronation rites for the commoners and destruction to superstition. I put my hand out to you in joy. The joy is in unholy worship of a fetish, the pain that there is no joy also deference to a fetish. Your creed thunders “Thou shalt not.” Love is a thing of yesterday. No room for anything that intimately concerns the self. But what are the apostles of the young thought preaching if it is not the right of men to their own, and what would it avail them to come into their own if life be stripped of romance?

I am dissatisfied because you are willing to live as others must live. You should stay aristocrat. Ferdinand Lassalle dressed with elegance for his working-men audiences, with the hope, he said, of reminding them that there was something better than their shabbiness. You are of the favoured, Herbert. It devolves upon you to endear your life to yourself. You do not agree with me. You do not believe that love is the law which controls freedom and life. Slave to your theory and rebel to the law, you lose your soul and imperil another’s.

“Gently! Gently!” I say to myself. Old sorrows and wrongs oppress me and I grow harsh. My heat only helps to convince you that my position is not based on the rational rightness you hold so essential and that therefore it is unlivable. I will state calmly, then, that it is wrong to marry without love. “For the perpetuation of the species” — that is noble of you! So you strip yourself of the thousand years of civilisation that have fostered you, you abandon your prerogative as a creature high in the scale of existence to obey an instinct and fulfil a function? You say: “These men and women will marry, and the work of the world go on just as it did before. Shuffle them about and the work of the world would yet go on.” And you are content. You feel no need of anything different from this condition.

Believe me, Herbert, these million men and women will not let you shuffle them about. There are forces stronger than force, shadows more real than reality. We know that the need of the unhungered for the one friend, one comrade, one mate, is good. We honour the love that persists in loving. More beautiful than starlight is the face of the lover when the Voice and the Vision enfold him. The race is consecrated to the worship of idea, and the lover who lays his all on the altar of romance (which is idea) is at one with the race. The arms of the unloved girl close about the formless air and more real than her loneliness and her sorrow is the imagined embrace, the awaited warm, close pressure of the hands, the fancied gaze. What does it mean? What secret was there for Leonardo in Mona Lisa’s smile, what for him in the motion of waters? You cannot explain the bloom, the charm, the smile of life, that which rains sunshine into our hearts, which tells us we are wise to hope and to have faith, which buckles on us an armour of activity, which lights the fires of the spirit, which gives us Godhead and renders us indomitable. Comparative anatomy cannot reason it down. It is sensibility, romance, idea. It is a fact of life toward which all other facts make. For the flush of rose-light in the heavens, the touch of a hand, the colour and shape of fruit, the tears that come for unnamed sorrows, the regrets of old men, are more significant than all the building and inventing done since the first social compact.

Forgive my tediousness. I have flaunted these truisms before you in order to exorcise that modern slang of yours which is more false than the overstrained forms of a feudal France. To shut out glory is not to be practical. You are not adjusting your life artistically; there is too much strain, too little warmth, too much self-complacence. I see that you are really younger than I thought. The world never censures the crimes of the spirit. You are safe from the world’s tongue lashings, and in that safety is the danger against which my friendship warns you.

I have been reading Hester’s poems, and I know that she is like them, nervous, vibrant, throbbing, sensitive. I have been reading your letters, and I think her soul will escape yours. If you have not love like hers, you have nothing with which to keep her. This I have undertaken to say to you. It is a strange role, yet conventional. I am the father whose matrimonial whims are not met by the son. The stock measure is to disinherit. But the cause of our quarrel is somewhat unusual, and I can be neither so practical nor so vulgar as to set about making codicils. Love is of no value to financiers; there is no bank for it nor may it be made over in a will. Rather is it carried on in the blood, even as Barbara carried it on into the life of her girl-babe. Your sister keeps me strong with the faith of love. May God be good to her! It was five years ago that she came to me and whispered, “Earl.” When she saw I could not turn to her in joy, she leaned her little head back against the roses of the porch and wept, more than was right, I fear, for a girl just betrothed. Earl was a cripple and poor and helpless, but Barbara knew better than we, for she knew how to give herself. Poor little one, whom nobody congratulated! She sends you and Hester her love, unfolding you both in her eager tenderness.

Dane.

VI — From the Same to the Same

London.
November 19, 19 — .

Metaphysics is contagious. I caught it from Barbara, and I cannot resist the impulse to pass it on, and to you of all others.

The mood leapt upon Barbara out of the pages of “Katia,” a story by Tolstoy. To my mind, it is a painful tale of lovers who outlive their love, killing it with their own hands, but the author means it to be a happily ending novel. Tolstoy attempts to show that men and women can find happiness only when they grow content to give over seeking love from one another. They may keep the memory but must banish the hope. “Hereafter, think of me only as the father of your children,” and the woman who had pined for that which had been theirs in the beginning of their union weeps softly, and agrees. Tolstoy calls this peace, but for Barbara and me this gain is loss, this end an end indeed, replete with all the tragedy of ending.

I found Barbara to-day on the last page of “Katia,” and much disturbed. “Dear, I saw a spirit break,” she said. I waited before asking whose, and when I did, she answered, “That of three-quarters of the world. The ghost of a Dream walked to-day — when after the spirit broke, I saw it — and myself and my Earl vanished in shadow. We and our love thinned away before the thought-shape.”

“Your dreaming, Barbara, can scarce be better than your living.”

We looked long at each other. She knew herself a happy woman, yet to-day the ghost had walked in the light, and her eyes were not held, and she saw. Even her life was not sufficient, even her plans were paltry, even her heart’s love was cramped. Such times of seeing come to happy men and to happy women. Barbara was reading the opinions of the world and the acceptances of the world, and in disliking them she came to doubt herself. Perhaps she, too, should be less at peace, she too may be amongst Pharisees a Pharisee.

“In the midst of the breaking of spirit, how can I know?” she demanded. “Love is sure,” I prompted, my hand on her forehead. “Earl and I are sure, dear,” she laughed low, and a drift of sobbing swept through the music; “it is not that we are in doubt about ourselves, but sometimes, like to-day, you understand, one finds oneself bitten by the sharp tooth of the world, and a despair courses through the veins and blinds the eyes, and then, in the midst of the bitterest throe, comes a great visioning.”

I heard her and understood, and my heart leapt as it had not done for long. Think of it, Herbert, fifty-three and still young! When was it that I last fluttered with joy? Ah, yes, that time the summer and the woods had a great deal to do with it, and a few words spoken by a boy. I think Barbara’s majesty of attainment through vicarious breaking of spirit a greater cause for rejoicing.

And then, in the midst of the bitterest throe, came a great visioning. When pain is good and to be thanked for, how good life is! By this alone may you know the proportion and the value of the good of being. Three-quarters of the world are broken spirited, but from out the wreckage a thought-shape, and it is well. The Vision fastens upon us, and what was full seems shrunken, what whole and of all time a passing bit, an untraceable flash. And that is well, for the dream recalls the hope, and the heart grows hardy with hoping and dreaming.

So Barbara.

And you? You do not repine because of these things. Let the Grand Mujik mutter a thousand heresies, let three-quarters of the world accept and live them, you would not think the unaspiring three-quarters broken-spirited. You would hail them right practical. And if you held a thought as firmly as your sister holds the thought of love, and you found yourself alone in your esteem of it, you would part from it and go over to the others. You would not be the fanatic your sister is, to stay so much the closer by it that of necessity she must doubt her own allegiance, fearing in her devotion that, without knowing it, she, too, is cold and but half alive. You would not see visions that would put your best to shame. The thought-shape of the more you could be, were you and the whole world finer and greater, would not walk before you. You would rest content and assured, and — I regret your assurance.

Always yours,
Dane Kempton.

VII — From Herbert Wace to Dane Kempton

The Ridge,
Berkeley, California.
December 6, 19 — .

No, I am not in love. I am very thankful that I am not. I pride myself on the fact. As you say, I may not be adjusting my life artistically to its environment (there is room for discussion there), but I do know that I am adjusting it scientifically. I am arranging my life so that I may get the most out of it, while the one thing to disorder it, worse than flood and fire and the public enemy, is love.

I have told you, from time to time, of my book. I have decided to call it “The Economic Man.” I am going over the proofs now, and my brain is in perfect working order. On the other hand, there is Professor Bidwell, who is likewise correcting proofs. Poor devil, he is in despair. He can do nothing with them. “I positively cannot think,” he complains to me, his hair rumpled and face flushed. He did not answer my knock the other day, and I came upon him with the neglected proofs under his elbows and his absent gaze directed through window and out of doors to some rosy cloudland beyond my ken. “It will be a failure, I know it will,” he growled to me. “My brain is dull. It refuses to act. I cannot imagine what has come over me.” But I could imagine very easily. He is in love (madly in love with what I take to be a very ordinary sort of girl), and expects shortly to be married. “Postpone the book for a time,” I suggested. He looked at me for a moment, then brought his fist down on the general disarray with a thumping “I will!” And take my word for it, Dane, a year hence, when the very ordinary girl greets him with the matronly kiss and his fever and folly have left him, he will take up the book and make a success of it.

Of course I am not in love. I have just come back from Hester — I ran down Saturday to Stanford and stopped over Sunday. Time did not pass tediously on the train. I did not look at my watch every other minute. I read the morning papers with interest and without impatience. The scenery was charming and I was unaware of the slightest hurry to reach my destination. I remember noting, when I came up the gravel walk between the rose-bushes, that my heart was not in my mouth as it should have been according to convention. In fact, the sun was uncomfortable, and I mopped my brow and decided that the roses stood in need of trimming. And really, you know, I had seen brighter days, and fairer views, and the world in more beautiful moods.

And when Hester stood on the veranda and held out her hands, my heart did not leap as though it were going to part company with me. Nor was I dizzy with — rapture, I believe. Nor did all the world vanish, and everything blot out, and leave only Hester standing there, lips curved and arms outstretched in welcome. Oh, I saw the curved lips and outstretched arms, and all the splendid young womanhood swaying there, and I was pleased and all that; but I did not think it too wonderful and impossible and miraculous and the rest of the fond rubbish I am sure poor Bidwell thinks when his eyes are gladdened by his ordinary sort of girl when he calls upon her.

What a comely young woman, is what I thought as I pressed Hester’s hands; and none of the ordinary sort either. She has health and strength and beauty and youth, and she will certainly make a most charming wife and excellent mother. Thus I thought, and then we chatted, had lunch, and passed a delightful afternoon together — an afternoon such as I might pass with you, or any good comrade, or with my wife.

All of which rational rightness is, I know, distasteful to you, Dane. And I confess I depict it with brutal frankness, failing to give credit to the gentler, tenderer side of me. Believe me, I am very fond of Hester. I respect and admire her. I am proud of her, too, and proud of myself that so fine a creature should find enough in me to be willing to mate with me. It will be a happy marriage. There is nothing cramped or narrow or incompatible about it. We know each other well — a wisdom that is acquired by lovers only after marriage, and even then with the likelihood of it being a painful wisdom. We, on the other hand, are not blinded by love madness, and we see clearly and sanely and are confident of our ability to live out the years together.

Herbert.

VIII — From the Same to the Same

The Ridge,
Berkeley, California.
December 11, 19 — .

I have been thinking about your romance and my rational rightness, and so this letter.

“One loves because he loves: this explanation is, as yet, the most serious and most decisive that has been found for the solution of this problem.” I do not know who has said this, but it might well have been you. And you might well say with Mlle. de Scudéri: “Love is — I know not what: which comes — I know not when: which is formed — I know not how: which enchants — I know not by what: and which ends — I know not when or why.”

You explain love by asserting that it is not to be explained. And therein lies our difference. You accept results; I search for causes. You stop at the gate of the mystery, worshipful and content. I go on and through, flinging the gate wide and formulating the law of the mystery which is a mystery no longer. It is our way. You worship the idea; I believe in the fact. If the stone fall, the wind blow, the grass and green things sprout; if the inorganic be vitalised, and take on sensibility, and perform functions, and die; if there be passions and pains, dreams and ambitions, flickerings of infinity and glimmerings of Godhead — it is for you to be smitten with the wonder of it and to memorialise it in pretty song, while for me remains to classify it as so much related phenomena, so much play and interplay of force and matter in obedience to ascertainable law.

There are two kinds of men: the wonderers and the doers; the feelers and the thinkers; the emotionals and the intellectuals. You take an emotional delight in living; I an intellectual delight. You feel a thing to be beautiful and joyful; I seek to know why it is beautiful and joyful. You are content that it is, no matter how it came to be; I, when I have learned why, strive that we may have more beautiful and joyful things. “The bloom, the charm, the smile of life” is all too wonderful for you to know; to me it is chiefly wonderful because I may know.

Oh, well, it is an ancient quarrel which neither you nor I shall outlive. I am rational, you are romantic, — that is all there is to it. You are more beautiful; I am more useful; and though you will not see it and will never be able to see it, you and your beauty rest on me. I came into the world before you, and I made the way for you. I was a hunter of beasts and a fighter of men. I discovered fire and covered my nakedness with the skins of animals. I builded cunning traps, and wove branches and long grasses and rushes and reeds into the thatch and roof-tree. I fashioned arrows and spears of bone and flint. I drew iron from the earth, and broke the first ground, and planted the first seed. I gave law and order to the tribe and taught it to fight with craft and wisdom. I enabled the young men to grow strong and lusty, and the women to find favour with them; and I gave safety to the women when their progeny came forth, and safety to the progeny while it gathered strength and years.

I did many things. Out of my blood and sweat and toil I made it possible that all men need not all the time hunt and fish and fight. The muscle and brain of every man were no longer called to satisfy the belly need. And then, when of my blood and sweat and toil I had made room, you came, high priest of mystery and things unknowable, singer of songs and seer of visions.

And I did you honour, and gave you place by feast and fire. And of the meat I gave you the tenderest, and of the furs the softest. Need I say that of women you took the fairest? And you sang of the souls of dead men and of immortality, of the hidden things, and of the wonder; you sang of voices whispering down the wind, of the secrets of light and darkness, and the ripple of running fountains. You told of the powers that pulsed the tides, swept the sun across the firmaments, and held the stars in their courses. Ay, and you scaled the sky and created for me the hierarchy of heaven.

These things you did, Dane; but it was I who made you, and fed you, and protected you. While you dreamed and sang, I laboured sore. And when danger came, and there was a cry in the night, and women and children huddling in fear, and strong men broken, and blare of trumpets and cry of battle at the outer gate — you fled to your altars and called vainly on your phantoms of earth and sea and sky. And I? I girded my loins, and strapped my harness on, and smote in the fighting line; and died, perchance, that you and the women and children might live.

And in times of peace you throve and waxed fat. But only by our brain and blood did we men of the fighting line make possible those times of peace. And when you throve, you looked about you and saw the beauty of the world and fancied yet greater beauty. And because of me your fancy became fact, and marvels arose in stone and bronze and costly wood.

And while your brows were bright, and you visioned things of the spirit, and rose above time and space to probe eternity, I concerned myself with the work of head and hand. I employed myself with the mastery of matter. I studied the times and seasons and the crops, and made the earth fruitful. I builded roads and bridges and moles, and won the secrets of metals and virtues of the elements. Bit by bit, and with great travail, I have conquered and enslaved the blind forces. I builded ships and ventured the sea, and beyond the baths of sunset found new lands. I conquered peoples, and organised nations and knit empires, and gave periods of peace to vast territories.

And the arts of peace flourished, and you multiplied yourself in divers ways. You were priest and singer and dancer and musician. You expressed your fancies in colours and metals and marbles. You wrote epics and lyrics — ay, as you to-day write lyrics, Dane Kempton. And I multiplied myself. I kept hunger afar off, and fire and sword from your habitation, and the bondsmen in obedience under you. I solved methods of government and invented systems of jurisprudence. Out of my toil sprang forms and institutions. You sang of them and were the slave of them, but I was the maker of them and the changer of them.

You worshipped at the shrine of the idea. I sought the fact and the law behind the fact. I was the worker and maker and liberator. You were conventional. Tradition bound you. You were full bellied and content, and you sang of the things that were. You were mastered by dogma. Did the Mediæval Church say the earth was flat, you sang of an earth that was flat, and danced and made your little shows on an earth that was flat. And you helped to bind me with chains and burn me with fire when my facts and the laws behind my facts shook your dogmas. Dante’s highest audacity could not transcend a material inferno. Milton could not shake off Lucifer and hell.

You were more beautiful. But not only was I more useful, but I made the way for you that there might be greater beauty. You did not reck of that. To you the heart was the seat of the emotions. I formulated the circulation of the blood. You gave charms and indulgences to the world; I gave it medicine and surgery. To you, famine and pestilence were acts of providence and punishment of sin: I made the world a granary and drained its cities. To you the mass of the people were poor lost wretches who would be rewarded in paradise or baked in hell. You could offer them no earthly happiness of decency. Forsooth, beggars as well as kings were of divine right. But I shattered the royal prerogatives and overturned the thrones of the one and lifted the other somewhat out of the dirt.

Nor is my work done. With my inventions and discoveries and rational enterprise, I draw the world together and make it kin. The uplift is but begun. And in the great world I am making I shall be as of old to you, Dane. I, who have made you and freed you, shall give you space and greater freedom. And, as of old, we shall quarrel as when first you came to me and found me at my rude earth-work. You shall be the scorner of matter, and I the master of matter. You may laugh at me and my work, but you shall not be absent from the feast nor shall your voice be silent. For, when I have conquered the globe, and enthralled the elements, and harnessed the stars, you shall sing the epic of man, and as of old it shall be of the deeds I have done.

Herbert.

IX — From Dane Kempton to Herbert Wace

3a Queen’s Road, Chelsea, S.W.
December 28, 19 — .

The curtain is rung down on an illusion, but it rises again on another, this time, as before, with the look of the absolute Good and True upon it. It is because we are at once actor and spectator that we find no fault with blinking sight and slothful thought. We are finite branded and content, except during the shrill, undermining moments when the orchestra is tuning up. “Thus we half-men struggle.”

I follow your letter and wonder whether your illusions have qualities of beauty which escape me. I give you the benefit of every doubt which it is possible for me to harbour with regard to my own system of illusions. You glorify the crowd practical. You attach yourself to the ranks that carried thought into action. You inspire yourself with rugged strength by dwelling on the achievements of ruggedness, forgetting that the progress of the world is not marshalled by those who work with line and rule. It was not his crew, but Columbus, who discovered America. The crew stood between the Old and the New, as indeed the crew always does. Between the idealist and his hope were hosts of practical enemies whom he had to subdue before he reached land. But I must not fall into your mistake of dividing men into categories. Men are not either intellectual or emotional; they are both. It is a rounded not an angular development which we follow. Feeling and thinking are not mutually exclusive, and the great personality feels deeply because he thinks highly, feels keenly because he sees widely. Common sense is not incompatible with uncommon sense, evil does not of necessity attend beauty, nor weakness the strength of genius.

I shall sing of the deeds you have done if your deeds are worthy of song. I shall sing a Song of the Sword, too, should the sword “thrust through the fatuous, thrust through the fungous brood.” Whatever helps the races to better life sings itself into racial lore, and I alone shall not refuse the tribute. When you come to see that the Iliad is as great a gift to the race as the doings of Achilles, that the Iliads are more significant than the doings they celebrate, you will cease to classify men into doers and singers. You will cease to dishonour yourself in the eyes of the singers with the hope that in so doing you gain somewhat elsewhere.

Professor Bidwell is in love and it interferes with his work. You have the advantage of him there, no doubt. However, you lose more than you gain. You have shattered the dream and have awakened. To what? What is this reality in which your universe is hung? Where shine the stars of your scientific heaven? By the beauty of your dreaming alone, Herbert, shall you be judged and known. You dream that you have learned the lesson, solved the problem, pierced the mystery, and become a prophet of matter. But matter does not include spirit, so the motif of your dream grows all confused. Your race epic omits the race. You sing the branch and the leaf rather than the sunlit and tenebral wood. Bidwell thinks his ordinary sort of girl a “lyric love, half angel and half bird, and all a wonder and a wild desire.” Bidwell exaggerates, perhaps, but unless he feels this for his wife, he has no wife. Barbara obeyed the voice of her heart. That sounds sentimental, but it is none the less a courageous thing to do. I was inconsistent enough to be sorry because she loved a crippled man. Bidwell and Barbara are wiser and happier than you can be, Herbert, than you from whose hand the map of Parnassus Hill has been filched.

Is there one state of consciousness better than another? I think yes. Better to have long, youthful thoughts and to thrill to vibrant emotions than to grovel sluggishly; better to hope and dream and aspire and sway to great harmonies than to be blind and deaf and dumb — better for the type, better for the immortality of the world’s soul. This to me is a vital thought, therefore life or death is in the issue. For the rest I know not. By the glimmer of light lent me, I can but guess greatness and descry vagueness. You go further and would touch the phantasmagorial veil. “Right!” I say, and I pray, “Godspeed.” But there must be intensity. Are you thrilled? Do you stretch out your arms and dream the beauty? It is only when you gaze into a reality empty of the voices of life that I would wake you to bid you dream better.

Well, Herbert, I have quarrelled with you and shall to the end, I promise. I wish I could take you away, hide you from your Hester’s sight, and pour my poetic spleen out on you. Oh, I shall torment you into reason and passion! Whatever you may choose to be, you are my son. I must take you and keep you as you are, of course, but I choose to tell the truth to you though I do love you and hold you mine. Disagreeable of me, but how else?

Dane.

X — From the Same to the Same

London.
Sunday, January 1, 19 — .

Behold, I have lived! I press your face to the breathing, stinging roses of my days, and bid you drink in the sweet and throb with the pain. What is my philosophy but a translation of the facts which have stamped me? Perhaps if I let you read these facts, you will the sooner come to share my consecration and my faith. I must teach you to know that you are the fact of my whole tangled web of facts, and that all that I have and am, and all that might have been I and mine, stretches itself out in the unmarked path which is before you.

I take you back with me to the road, white with dust, upon which like a Viking and like a feeble girl I have travelled. It is not long, but how many paths, what byways and what turns! What sudden glimpses of sea and sky, what inaccessibleness! Hark, from the wood on either side murmurings of hope and hard sobbing of despair, young laughter of joy and aged renunciations! See from amongst the pines the farewell gleam of a white hand. All of it dear — dearly bought and precious and miraculous, the heartache even as the gladness.

“Life is worth living

Through every grain of it,

From the foundations

To the last edge

Of the cornerstone, death.”

Ay, through every grain of it. Even that morning in the wood, thirty years ago, when your mother put her hand in mine and looked a great pity into my eyes. Indeed, she loved me well, but romance shone on the brow of John Wace. For her his face was sunlit, and she needs must take it between her hands and hold it forever. He was her Siegfried, her master. Thus the gods decreed, and we three obeyed. What else was there to do? We must be honest before all, and Ellen did not love me any more, and I must know it, and wipe out a past of deepest mutuality, and strengthen and console and restore the woman whose hand held mine while her eyes were turned elsewhere.

Before that bright, black summer morning which saw me woman-pitied, I knew I should have to renounce her. Their souls rushed together in their first meeting. John had been away, knocking about museums and colleges, and carrying on tempestuous radical work. He was splendidly picturesque. I was a youth of twenty-three, almost ten years his junior, a boy full of half-defined aims and groping powers, reaching toward what he had firm in his grasp. Ellen talked of his coming, and she planned that she should meet this my one friend in the environment she loved best — in my rooms, whose atmosphere, she declared, belonged to an earlier time and place. (She found in me Nolly Goldsmith and all of Grub Street.) So they met at the tea-table in my study, and a great warmth stole over your father. He spoke without looking at either of us, while Ellen looked as if her destiny had just begun.

Without, it rained. I strode to the window and in a dazed way stared at the lamp-post which was sticking out its flaming little tongue to the night. Why was I mocked? There was no mocking and there should have been no bitterness. Of that there was none either, after a while.

Ellen put her hand on my hair, and a strong primal emotion rose in me. In that moment civilisation was as if it had not been. I reverted to the primitive. The blood of forgotten ancestors, cave-men and river-men, reasoned me my ethics. I turned to her, met her flushed cheeks and moved being and the glory of dawning in her eyes. I measured my strength with hers and your father’s, Herbert. Easily, great strength was mine in my passion, easily I could carry her off!

You, too, have had moments of upheaval when you heard the growling of the tiger and the bear, when the brute crowded out the man. Then your soul writhed in derision, you scoffed at that which you had held to be the nobility of the soul, and you minced words satirically over the exquisiteness of the type which we have evolved. Then the experiment of life turned farce, the heavens fell about your ears and “Fool!” was upon your lips. Oh, the hurricane that sweeps over the soul when it is cheated of its joy! In the first instant of Ellen’s indifference, when I felt myself pushed out of her life, I forgot everything but my desire. I could not renounce her. I was in the throes of the passion for ownership.

Gentle girl between whom and myself there had been naught but sweetness and fellowship! How often had we talked large (we were very young!) of our sublimities and potentialities, how often had we pictured tragedies of surrender and greatened in the speaking! Ah, it should come true. For her and for me there must be miracles, and there were. So was the strength of the spirit proven, so was it shown to be “pure waft of the Will.” So was I confirmed in the creed which believes that to keep we must lose, and to live we must die. So was I assured that there may be but one way, and that, the way of service.

I did not grip her passionately in my arms. I withdrew; I did much to make her task of leaving me an easy one. Were it not for my efforts, it would have been harder for her to obey a mandate which made for my pain. She could not quite drown an old, Puritan voice, speaking with the authority of tradition, which bade her hold to her vows. Yes, I made it easy for her. Harrow my soul with theories of selection and survival if you dare!

In those days the spires of the temple were golden, the shrine white. The door was seen from every point in the fog-begirt world. We who worshipped knew not of doubt. Stirred by the rumbling organ tones of causes and ideas, we immolated our lives gladly. High priests of thought, we swung the censers and rose on the breast of the incense. Ellen and John and myself glorified God and enjoyed Him forever, — God, the Type, the Final Humanity, the giant Body Soul of man. In our hearts dwelt a religion which compelled us to serve the ideal. We strove to become what organically we felt the “Human with his drippings of warm tears” may become. We were the standard-bearers of the advancing margin of the world. We were the high-water mark toward which all the tides forever make. We were soldiers and priests.

And so when Ellen loved, and lacked courage for her love, I helped her. A past of kindness and ardour riveted her to my side. She knew that we were in feeling and fact divorced from each other by virtue of her stronger love for John, yet did she do battle with the rich young love. For two years we had been close; she had been so much my friend, she could not in maiden charity seal for me a so unwelcome fate. I had awakened her slumbering soul with my first look into the sphinx wonder of her eyes. For me she had become fire and dew, flame of the sun, and flower of the hill. Without me to help her do it she could not leave me.

To the master of matter this coping with spiritual abstractions must appear like juggling with intellectual phantasmagoria. Yet I protest that life is finally for intangible triumphs. Unnamed fragrances steal upon the senses and the soul revels and greatens. Unseen hands draw us to worlds afar, and we are gathered up in the dignity of the human spirit. Unknown ideas attract and hold us, and we take our place in the universe as intellectual factors. In giving up Ellen I helped her, and, sacredly better still, I sent on into a world of vague thinking and weak acting the impulse of devotion to revealed truth.

She had a sweet way of sitting low and resting her head on my knee. She sat through one whole day with me thus, and for hours I could have thought her asleep were it not for the waves of feeling which surged in her upturned face. Toward the end she raised her head, ecstasy in her eyes and on her cheek and lip. “Dane, I love you. Dane! Dane!” The whole of me was caught up in the accents of that tremulousness. She had know John three months; but her love for him was young, it had come unexpectedly, it was still unexpressed and ineffable. Her yearning for him led to softness toward me, and though she rose out of her mood as one does from a dream, the hours when we were like the angels, all love and all speech, were mine. So much was vouchsafed me.

Memories and echoes, gusts of sweet breath from the violets on your mother’s grave — the prophet of matter will have none of them, and, I fear, will pity me that I am so much theirs. I am yours also, dear lad, and I wish to serve you.

Dane Kempton.

XI — From Herbert Wace to Dane Kempton

The Ridge,
Berkeley, California.
January 20, 19 — .

I do not know whether to laugh or weep. I have just finished reading your letter, and I can hardly think. Words seem to have lost their meaning, and words, used as you use them, are without significance. You appear to speak a tongue strangely familiar, yet one I cannot understand. You are unintelligible, as, I dare say, I am to you.

And small wonder that we are unintelligible. Our difference presents itself quite clearly to the scientific mind, and somewhat in this fashion: Man acquires knowledge of the outer world through his sensations and perceptions. Sensation ends in sentiment, and perception ends in reason. These are the two sides of man’s nature, and the individual is determined and ruled by whichever side in him happens to be temperamentally dominant. I have already classed you as a feeler, myself as a thinker. This is, I think true. You, I am confident, feel it to be true. I reason why it is true. You accept it on faith as true, lose sight of the argument forthwith, and proceed to express it in emotional terms — which is to say that you take it to heart and feel badly because it happens to be so.

You feign to know this modern scientific slang, and you are contemptuous of it because you do not know it. The terms I use freight no ideas to you. They are sounds, rhythmic and musical, but they are not definite symbols of thought. Their facts you do not grasp. For instance, the prehensile organs of insects, the great toothed mandibles of the black stag-beetle, the amorous din of the male cicada and the muteness of his mate — these are facts which you cannot relate, one with the other, nor can you generalise upon them. Let me add to these related characters, and you cannot discern the law which is alike to all. What to you the fluttering moth, decked in gold and crimson, brilliant, iridescent, splendid? The beauty of it bids you bend to deity, otherwise it has no worth; it is a stimulus to religion, and that is all. So with the glowing incandescence of the stickleback and its polished scales of silver. What make you of the hoarse voice of the gorilla? Is not the dewlap of the ox inscrutable? the mane of the lion? the tusks of the boar? the musk-sack of the deer? In the amethyst and sapphire of the peacock’s wing you find no rationality; to you it is a manifestation of the wonder which is taboo. And so with the cock bird, displaying his feathered ruffs and furbelows, dancing strange antics and spilling out his heart in song.

I, on the other hand, dare to gather all these phenomena together, and find out the common truth, the common fact, the common law, which is generalisation, which is Science. I learn that there are two functions which all life must perform: Nutrition and Reproduction. And I learn that in all life, the performance, according to time and space and degree, is very like. The slug must take to itself food, else it will perish; and so I. The slug must procreate its kind, or its kind will perish; and so I. The need being the same, the only difference is in the expression. In all life come times and seasons when the individuals are aware of dim yearnings and blind compulsions and masterful desires. The senses are quickened and alert to the call of kind. And just as the fish and the reptile glimmeringly adumbrate man, so do these yearnings and desires adumbrate what man in himself calls “love,” spelled all out in capitals. I repeat, the need is the same. From the amœba, up the ladder of life to you and me, comes this passion of perpetuation. And in yourself, refine and sublimate as you will, it is none the less blind, unreasoning, and compelling.

And now we come to the point. In the development of life from low to high, there came a dividing of the ways. Instinct, as a factor of development, had its limitations. It culminated in that remarkable mechanism, the bee-swarm. It could go no farther. In that direction life was thwarted. But life, splendid and invincible, not to be thwarted, changed the direction of its advance, and reason became the all-potent developmental factor. Reason dawned far down in the scale of life; but it culminates in man and the end is not yet.

The lever in his arm he duplicates in wood and steel; the lenses in his eyes in glass; the visual impressions of his brain on chemically sensitised wood-pulp. He is able, reasoning from events and knowing the law, to control the blind forces and direct their operation. Having ascertained the laws of development, he is able to take hold of life and mould and knead it into more beautiful and useful forms. Domestic selection it is called. Does he wish horses which are fast, he selects the fastest. He studies the physics of velocity in relation to equine locomotion, and with an eye to withers, loins, hocks, and haunches, he segregates his brood mares and his stallions. And behold, in the course of a few years, he has a thoroughbred stock, swifter of foot than any ever in the world before.

Since he takes sexual selection into his own hands and scientifically breeds the fish and the fowl, the beast and the vegetable, why may he not scientifically breed his own kind? The fish and the fowl and the beast and the vegetable obey dim yearnings and vague desires and reproduce themselves. “Poor the reproduction,” says Man to Mother Nature; “allow me.” And Mother Nature is thrust aside and exceeded by this new creator, this Man-god.

These yearnings and desires of the beast and the vegetable are the best tools nature has succeeded in devising. Having devised them, she leaves their operation to the blindness of chance. Steps in man and controls and directs them. For the first time in the history of life conscious intelligence forms and transforms life. These yearnings and desires, promptings of the “abysmal fecundity,” have in man evolved into what is called “love.” They arise in instinct and sensation and culminate in sentiment and emotion. They master man, and the intellect of man, as they master the beast and all the acts of the beast. And they operate in the development of man with the same blindness of chance that they operate in the development of the beast.

Now this is the law: Love, as a means for the perpetuation and development of the human type, is very crude and open to improvement. What the intellect of man has done with the beast, the intellect of man may do with man.

It is a truism to say that my intellect is wiser than my emotions. So, knowing the precise value and use of this erotic phenomenon, this sexual madness, this love, I, for one, elect to choose my mate with my intellect. Thus I choose Hester. And I do truly love her, but in the intellectual sense and not the sense you fanatically demand. I am not seized with a loutish vertigo when I look upon her and touch her hand. Nor do I feel impelled to leave her presence if I would live, as did Dante the presence of Beatrice; nor the painful confusion of Rousseau, when, in the same room with Madame Goton, he seemed impelled to leap into the flaming fireplace. But I do feel for Hester what happily mated men and women, after they have lived down the passion, feel in the afternoon of life. It is the affection of man for woman, which is sanity. It is the sanity of intercourse which replaces love madness; the sanity which comes upon sparrows after the ardour of mating, when they leave off wrangling and chattering and set soberly to work to build their nest for the coming brood.

Pre-nuptial love is the madness of non-understanding and part-understanding. Post-nuptial affection is the sanity of complete understanding; it is based upon reason and service and healthy sacrifice. The first is a blind mating of the blind; the second, a clear and open-eyed union of male and female who find enough in common to warrant that union. In a word and in the fullest sense of the word, it is sex comradeship. Pre-nuptial love cannot survive marriage any considerable time. It is doomed inexorably to flicker out, and when it has flickered out it must be replaced by affection, or else the parties to it must separate. We well know that many men and women, unable to build up affection on the ruins of love, do separate, or if they do not, continue to live together in cold tolerance or bitter hatred.

Now, Hester is my mate. We have much in common. There is intellectual, spiritual, and physical affinity. The caress of her voice and the feel of her mind are pleasurable to me; likewise the touch of her hand (and you know that in the union of man and woman the higher affinities are not possible unless there first be physiological affinity). We shall go through life as comrades go, hand in hand, Hester and I; and great happiness will be ours. And because of all this I say you have no right to challenge my happiness, and vex my days, and feel for me as one dead.

My dear, bewildered Dane, come down out of the clouds. If I am wrong, I have gone over the ground. Then do you go over that ground with me and show where I am wrong. But do not pour out on me your romantic and poetic spleen. Confine yourself to the Fact, man, to the irrefragable Fact.

Herbert.

Ah, your later letter has just arrived. I can only say that I understand. But withal, I am pained that I am not nearer to you. These intellectual phantasmagoria rise up like huge amorphous ghosts and hold me from you. I cannot get through the mists and glooms to press your hand and tell you how dear I hold you. Do, Dane, do let us cease from this. Let us discuss no further. Let me care for Hester in my own way so long as I do no sin and harm no one; and be you father to us, and bless us who else must go unblessed. For Hester, also, is fatherless and motherless, and you must be to her as you are to me.

Herbert.

XII — From Dane Kempton to Herbert Wace

London,
3a Queen’s Road, Chelsea, S.W.
February 10, 19 — .

So we have got into an argument! I have been poring over your last two or three letters, and they read like a set of briefs for a debate. Doubtless mine have the same forensic quality. Our letters have become rebuttals, pure and simple. This discovery gave my pen pause for a week. It occurred to me that Walt Whitman must have meant didactic letters too, when he said of the fretters of our little world, “They make me sick talking of their duty to God.” Yet friend should speak to friend, should utter the word than which nothing is more sacred. “Let there be light, and there was light” — a ripple of light, and a flash, then the darkness broke and dispersed from the face of the waters. It was a trumpet-call of words bringing drama into a nebulous creation. Let the Word break up our night and let us not only grant, but avow the conviction it brings us, no matter what the consequence. Let us worship the irrefragable Fact.

You hold that marriage is an institution having for its purpose the perpetuation of the species, and that respect and affection are sufficient to bring two people into this most intimate possible relation. You also hold that the business of the world, pressing hard upon men, makes “love from their lives a thing apart,” and that this is as it should be. Your letters are an exposition and a defence of what I may loosely call the practical theory. You show that the world is for work and workers, and that life is for results as seen in institutions and visible achievements. I, on the other hand, maintain that it takes a greater dowry to marry upon than affection, and that men love as intensely and with as much abandon as women. People love in proportion to the depth of their natures, and the finest man in the world has an infinite capacity for giving and receiving love store. The spell is strongest upon the finest.

This, briefly, is what we have been saying to each other. You attack my idealism, call me dreamer, and accuse me of being out of joint with the time, which itself is rigorously in joint with the laws of growth. And I class you with the Philistine because of your exaggeration of practical values. I hold that it is gross to respect the fact tangible at the expense of the feeling ineffable.

In your last letter you exploit the theory of Nutrition and Reproduction with a charm and warmth which helps me see you as I have so long known you, and which tells me again that you are worth fighting for and saving. But to trace love to its biologic beginning is not to deny its existence. Love has a history as significant as that of life. When, eons ago, the primitive man looked at his neighbour and recognised him as a fellow to himself, consciousness of kind awoke and a cell was exploded which functioned love. When, through the ages, economic forces taught men the need of mutual aid, when everywhere in life the law of development charged men with leanings and desires and outreachings, then the sway of love began in life. What was subconscious became conscious, what, back in the past, was a mere adumbration gloried out in Aurora splendours. The love of a Juliet is the outgrowth of natural processes manifesting themselves everywhere down the scale, but it is also the gift of the last evolution, and it speaks to us from the topmost notch in the scale. The charm of morning rests on a Juliet’s love because its hour is young and yet old, striking the time of the past and the future. It is thus that the hunger of the race and the passion of the race become in the individual the need for happiness. The need of the race and the need of the individual are at once the same and different.

What was the point of your letter? That sexual selection obtains? I grant it. That it is incumbent upon us as intelligent men and women to call to the aid of instinct our social wisdom? I grant and avow it. But our social wisdom insists that we obey the choices of instinct; our social wisdom is only another phase of our refinement, which, in impelling us to a love of the beautiful, does not the less impel us to love. Our social wisdom educates our taste without lessening our taste for the thing. “Love a beautiful person nobly, but be sure you love her,” says our social wisdom with interesting tautology. Besides, you are a heretic to your own breed, Herbert. It is you who would forsake our present social wisdom, ruling modern men by laws which obtained in primitive life. It is you who steadily hark back to the past, and to states of consciousness which were but can never be again. The early facts of biology cannot include that which transcends them. To borrow from Ernest Seton Thompson, man is evolved with the lower orders in the same way that water is changed into steam, and the nature of the change, when it is effected, is as radical. Add a number of degrees of heat to water and it is still water. Let one degree be wanting to the necessary number, and the substance is still intact. Add the last degree, and water is no longer water. From water to steam is a radical change and a transformation.

You agree to improve upon the beasts of the fields and upon our own race in the past, and in this you go farther than you have need if marriage is for nothing else than to serve the instinct for perpetuation. You shew some respect for what is natural and instinctive, yet you say that all would be as well if individual choice had not prevailed, and men and women were “shuffled about.” You draw up a cold programme for action in affairs of the spirit and formulate a code of procedure in matters of the heart.

I have a programme too. Mine does not break with nature. On the contrary, it obeys every instinct and listens to every call on the senses. My love begins in my biologic self, grows with my growth, takes its hues from visioned sunsets in corn-flower skies, its grace from swaying rivers of grain seen in dreams. It is for me what it is for fish and fowl, beast and vegetable. It is my passion for perpetuation, but it is also something as different from this as I am different from beast and vegetable. My love is “blind, unreasoning, and compelling,” and for that I trust it. I do not conceive myself Man-god, therefore I do not say to Nature, “Allow me.” I cannot be sure that when I say it in the case of the horse, who obeys like me “dim yearning and vague desires,” I do not sacrifice him to a lust of my own. The lust for owning and spoiling is hard to cope with. Perhaps a purer time is near, when, upborne by a sense of the dignity of romance and the sacredness of life, man will refrain from laying rough hands on his mute brothers.

The romance which is my proof of the good of being does not rest on passion. The unclean fires that consume the loutish and degenerate are not of love. You quote instances of the hyperphysical and hysterical. The feeling that I would have you obey for your soul’s sake and without which you are but half alive, is not the blind passion of an oversexed sentimentalism. Rousseau was never in love in his life, though to say it were to accuse him of perjury.

One word more. Do you wish to know why I care? I care because I know you to be of those who are capable of love. Probably it was one little twist in your development that has turned you into alien ways of thinking and living. Yes, and more than for this I care because you are the fulfilment of a sacred past. You are the son of my sacrifice and your mother’s love.

I care very much indeed. I do not wish you to awake some terrible night to find that you had ended your romance before you had begun it. I vex your days and call you dead? It is because I know the life that is by the grace of God yours, and because I cannot bear to let you coffin it. Herbert, there is misery when the blood pales, and the tears dry up, and the flame of the heart sinks, and all that is left is a memory of a thought — a memory of very long ago when one was young and might have chosen to live.

I am sorry we darken the days for each other.

Your friend always,
Dane Kempton.

XIII — From the Same to the Same

London,
3a Queen’s Road, Chelsea, S.W.
February 12, 19 — .

Barbara and Earl celebrated their anniversary yesterday. Invitations were sent out, the guests consisting of Melville and myself. “Anniversary of what?” we asked. For answer we received inscrutable smiles. Birthdays are accidents of fate. You may regret the accident or you may be thick enough in illusion to rejoice over it, but you cannot in decency celebrate an occurrence wholly independent of personal control and yet concerning itself with you! Leave the merrymaking for appreciative friends. So rules Barbara. Not a birthday, then, nor the date of their marriage. The occasion was in some flash struck from Being, the memory of which enriches them, — in a mood that for an hour held them in strong grasp, in the utterance of a word charged with destiny, in the avowal of their love if their love awaited avowal. Whatever the cause, they honoured it with a will.

Barbara’s eyes flashed, her cheeks were sweetly suffused, and her voice was vibrant. Earl, too, was at his best. My heart loved this man who had lain all his life with death. His health is at its bad worst this winter, which fact made of the “Celebration” a rather heart-rending affair. He has been obliged to abandon the Journal, but we hope he can stay with the school. Meanwhile, his chronic invalidism of body and purse does not too much affect him. He keeps his charm of tenderness and strength. He rivets his pupils to him almost as he riveted his Barbara.

I have discovered my proof of this couple’s happiness. It is that I have always taken it for granted. Simple, is it not? And absolute. Often in their presence I catch myself imagining their mutual lives and seeing vaguely the graces that each brings to each. “How she must delight him!” I say. “How his eyes speak to her!” “They can never come to the end of each other,” and so on. The ordinary married couple so often brings a sense of distressed surprise: “How can these two foot it together?” “How did it happen?” “How can it go on?”

Last night counted to me. Your father and I have had such evenings, but I did not think I could do it all over again. We spoke with the fire (and conceit) of young students, exciting ourselves with expired theories, hoping old hopes, smarting under blows that perhaps had long ceased to fall. What then? What if we were ill-read in the facts? We could not have been wrong in the feeling. For the old hope that has been proven vain, a new; for the ancient hurt, a modern wrong, as great and as crying. It was good to feel that we had not grown too wise to harbour thoughts of change and redress, or too much ironed out with doctrine to be resigned. I confess it is long since I have eaten my heart in fury, in impatience, in wildness, but last night we awoke the radical in one another. We condemned the system. We placed ourselves outside the régime, refusing aught at its hands, registering our protest, hating the inordinate scheme of things only as hotly as we loved the juster Hand of a future time.

It is curious that we, offsprings of parvenue success, should be capable of such repudiation. Barbara accepts the Management without the trouble of a question. “What do you know? What do you know?” the girl demands, a radiant little angel in white, and a conservative. “You must know yourselves in the wrong, else would you smite your way through the world.”

Ah, Barbara has yet to learn that it is hard to live. It is not so hard to fight, and it is easy to rest neutral, but to be fighter and bearer both, to stand staunch, holding ever to the issue, and yet, without tameness, to take rebuff and wait, there’s the true course and the heroic. It is difficult when one has been conquered to know it. It is difficult to honour an outgrown ideal, which cost us, nevertheless, comfort and prestige — prizes which youth scorns and which oncoming age, pathetically enough, holds dear. It is difficult to pull up when driving too fast and too far, when galloping towards fanaticism, and it is impossible to whip oneself into passion and martyrdom. It is difficult to live, little Barbara.

For me it is also difficult to report a social function. At this one Browning presided, for Melville took up “Caponsacchi” and read it to us. That voice of his is in itself an interpretation, but Browning needs interpreting less than any other man who wrote great poems, because he wrote the greatest. It was four in the morning when the “O great, just, good God! Miserable me!” of the soldier-saint fell upon our ears. How we had listened! Earl steadily paced the floor, Barbara leaned her cheek upon my hand. Her soul was doing battle, and so was mine. We were all fighting the gallant fight. Read “Pompilia” and you are filled with reverence, read “Caponsacchi” and you are caught