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_ This time the trail was easier. It was better packed, and they
were not carrying mail against time. The day's run was shorter,
and likewise the hours on trail. On his mail run Daylight had
played out three Indians; but his present partners knew that they
must not be played out when they arrived at the Stewart bars, so
they set the slower pace. And under this milder toil, where his
companions nevertheless grew weary, Daylight recuperated and
rested up. At Forty Mile they laid over two days for the sake of
the dogs, and at Sixty Mile Daylight's team was left with the
trader. Unlike Daylight, after the terrible run from Selkirk to
Circle City, they had been unable to recuperate on the back
trail. So the four men pulled on from Sixty Mile with a fresh
team of dogs on Daylight's sled.
The following night they camped in the cluster of islands at the
mouth of the Stewart. Daylight talked town sites, and, though
the others laughed at him, he staked the whole maze of high,
wooded islands.
"Just supposing the big strike does come on the Stewart," he
argued. "Mebbe you-all'll be in on it, and then again mebbe
you-all won't. But I sure will. You-all'd better reconsider
and go in with me on it."
But they were stubborn.
"You're as bad as Harper and Joe Ladue," said Joe Hines.
"They're always at that game. You know that big flat jest below
the Klondike and under Moosehide Mountain? Well, the recorder at
Forty Mile was tellin' me they staked that not a month ago--The
Harper & Ladue Town Site. Ha! Ha! Ha!"
Elijah and Finn joined him in his laughter; but Daylight was
gravely in earnest.
"There she is!" he cried. "The hunch is working! It's in the
air, I tell you-all! What'd they-all stake the big flat for if
they-all didn't get the hunch? Wish I'd staked it."
The regret in his voice was provocative of a second burst of
laughter.
"Laugh, you-all, laugh! That's what's the trouble with you-all.
You-all think gold-hunting is the only way to make a stake. But
let me tell you-all that when the big strike sure does come,
you-all'll do a little surface-scratchin' and muck-raking, but
danged little you-all'll have to show for it. You-all laugh at
quicksilver in the riffles and think flour gold was manufactured
by God Almighty for the express purpose of fooling suckers and
chechaquos. Nothing but coarse gold for you-all, that's your
way, not getting half of it out of the ground and losing into the
tailings half of what you-all do get.
"But the men that land big will be them that stake the town
sites, organize the tradin' companies, start the banks--"
Here the explosion of mirth drowned him out. Banks in Alaska!
The idea of it was excruciating.
"Yep, and start the stock exchanges-"
Again they were convulsed. Joe Hines rolled over on his
sleeping-robe, holding his sides.
"And after them will come the big mining sharks that buy whole
creeks where you-all have been scratching like a lot of picayune
hens, and they-all will go to hydraulicking in summer and
steam-thawing in winter--"
Steam-thawing! That was the limit. Daylight was certainly
exceeding himself in his consummate fun-making.
Steam-thawing--when even wood-burning was an untried experiment,
a dream in the air!
"Laugh, dang you, laugh! Why your eyes ain't open yet. You-all
are a bunch of little mewing kittens. I tell you-all if that
strike comes on Klondike, Harper and Ladue will be millionaires.
And if it comes on Stewart, you-all watch the Elam Harnish town
site boom. In them days, when you-all come around makin' poor
mouths..." He heaved a sigh of resignation. "Well, I
suppose I'll have to give you-all a grub-stake or soup, or
something or other."
Daylight had vision. His scope had been rigidly limited, yet
whatever he saw, he saw big. His mind was orderly, his
imagination practical, and he never dreamed idly. When he
superimposed a feverish metropolis on a waste of timbered,
snow-covered flat, he predicated first the gold-strike that made
the city possible, and next he had an eye for steamboat landings,
sawmill and warehouse locations, and all the needs of a
far-northern mining city. But this, in turn, was the mere
setting for something bigger, namely, the play of temperament.
Opportunities swarmed in the streets and buildings and human and
economic relations of the city of his dream. It was a larger
table for gambling. The limit was the sky, with the Southland on
one side and the aurora borealis on the other. The play would be
big, bigger than any Yukoner had ever imagined, and he, Burning
Daylight, would see that he got in on that play.
In the meantime there was naught to show for it but the hunch.
But it was coming. As he would stake his last ounce on a good
poker hand, so he staked his life and effort on the hunch that
the future held in store a big strike on the Upper River. So he
and his three companions, with dogs, and sleds, and snowshoes,
toiled up the frozen breast of the Stewart, toiled on and on
through the white wilderness where the unending stillness was
never broken by the voices of men, the stroke of an ax, or the
distant crack of a rifle. They alone moved through the vast and
frozen quiet, little mites of earth-men, crawling their score of
miles a day, melting the ice that they might have water to drink,
camping in the snow at night, their wolf-dogs curled in
frost-rimed, hairy bunches, their eight snowshoes stuck on end in
the snow beside the sleds.
No signs of other men did they see, though once they passed a
rude poling-boat, cached on a platform by the river bank.
Whoever had cached it had never come back for it; and they
wondered and mushed on. Another time they chanced upon the site
of an Indian village, but the Indians had disappeared;
undoubtedly they were on the higher reaches of the Stewart in
pursuit of the moose-herds. Two hundred miles up from the Yukon,
they came upon what Elijah decided were the bars mentioned by Al
Mayo. A permanent camp was made, their outfit of food cached on
a high platform to keep it from the dogs, and they started work
on the bars, cutting their way down to gravel through the rim of
ice.
It was a hard and simple life. Breakfast over, and they were at
work by the first gray light; and when night descended, they did
their cooking and camp-chores, smoked and yarned for a while,
then rolled up in their sleeping-robes, and slept while the
aurora borealis flamed overhead and the stars leaped and danced
in the great cold. Their fare was monotonous: sour-dough bread,
bacon, beans, and an occasional dish of rice cooked along with a
handful of prunes. Fresh meat they failed to obtain. There was
an unwonted absence of animal life. At rare intervals they
chanced upon the trail of a snowshoe rabbit or an ermine; but in
the main it seemed that all life had fled the land. It was a
condition not unknown to them, for in all their experience, at
one time or another, they had travelled one year through a region
teeming with game, where, a year or two or three years later, no
game at all would be found.
Gold they found on the bars, but not in paying quantities.
Elijah, while on a hunt for moose fifty miles away, had panned
the surface gravel of a large creek and found good colors. They
harnessed their dogs, and with light outfits sledded to the
place. Here, and possibly for the first time in the history of
the Yukon, wood-burning, in sinking a shaft, was tried. It was
Daylight's initiative. After clearing away the moss and grass, a
fire of dry spruce was built. Six hours of burning thawed eight
inches of muck. Their picks drove full depth into it, and, when
they had shoveled out, another fire was started. They worked
early and late, excited over the success of the experiment. Six
feet of frozen muck brought them to gravel, likewise frozen.
Here progress was slower. But they learned to handle their fires
better, and were soon able to thaw five and six inches at a
burning. Flour gold was in this gravel, and after two feet it
gave away again to muck. At seventeen feet they struck a thin
streak of gravel, and in it coarse gold, testpans running as high
as six and eight dollars. Unfortunately, this streak of gravel
was not more than an inch thick. Beneath it was more muck,
tangled with the trunks of ancient trees and containing fossil
bones of forgotten monsters. But gold they had found--coarse
gold; and what more likely than that the big deposit would be
found on bed-rock? Down to bed-rock they would go, if it were
forty feet away. They divided into two shifts, working day and
night, on two shafts, and the smoke of their burning rose
continually.
It was at this time that they ran short of beans and that Elijah
was despatched to the main camp to bring up more grub. Elijah
was one of the hard-bitten old-time travelers himself. The round
trip was a hundred miles, but he promised to be back on the third
day, one day going light, two days returning heavy. Instead, he
arrived on the night of the second day. They had just gone to
bed when they heard him coming.
"What in hell's the matter now?" Henry Finn demanded, as the
empty sled came into the circle of firelight and as he noted that
Elijah's long, serious face was longer and even more serious.
Joe Hines threw wood on the fire, and the three men, wrapped in
their robes, huddled up close to the warmth. Elijah's whiskered
face was matted with ice, as were his eyebrows, so that, what of
his fur garb, he looked like a New England caricature of Father
Christmas.
"You recollect that big spruce that held up the corner of the
cache next to the river?" Elijah began.
The disaster was quickly told. The big tree, with all the
seeming of hardihood, promising to stand for centuries to come,
had suffered from a hidden decay. In some way its rooted grip on
the earth had weakened. The added burden of the cache and the
winter snow had been too much for it; the balance it had so long
maintained with the forces of its environment had been
overthrown; it had toppled and crashed to the ground, wrecking
the cache and, in turn, overthrowing the balance with environment
that the four men and eleven dogs had been maintaining. Their
supply of grub was gone. The wolverines had got into the wrecked
cache, and what they had not eaten they had destroyed.
"They plumb e't all the bacon and prunes and sugar and dog-food,"
Elijah reported, "and gosh darn my buttons, if they didn't gnaw
open the sacks and scatter the flour and beans and rice from Dan
to Beersheba. I found empty sacks where they'd dragged them a
quarter of a mile away."
Nobody spoke for a long minute. It was nothing less than a
catastrophe, in the dead of an Arctic winter and in a
game-abandoned land, to lose their grub. They were not
panic-stricken, but they were busy looking the situation squarely
in the face and considering. Joe Hines was the first to speak.
"We can pan the snow for the beans and rice... though there
wa'n't
more'n eight or ten pounds of rice left."
"And somebody will have to take a team and pull for Sixty Mile,"
Daylight said next.
"I'll go," said Finn.
They considered a while longer.
"But how are we going to feed the other team and three men till
he gets back?" Hines demanded.
"Only one thing to it," was Elijah's contribution. "You'll have
to take the other team, Joe, and pull up the Stewart till you
find them Indians. Then you come back with a load of meat.
You'll get here long before Henry can make it from Sixty Mile,
and while you're gone there'll only be Daylight and me to feed,
and we'll feed good and small."
"And in the morning we-all'll pull for the cache and pan snow to
find what grub we've got." Daylight lay back, as he spoke, and
rolled in his robe to sleep, then added: "Better turn in for an
early start. Two of you can take the dogs down. Elijah and
me'll skin out on both sides and see if we-all can scare up a
moose on the way down." _
Read next: PART I: CHAPTER VIII
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