The Popular Magazine/Volume 72/Number 1/The Avails of the Fraction

by Theodore Seixas Solomons

 

The Avails of the Fraction

By Theodore Seixas Solomons

Author of “The Berg Battlers,” “Clinging,” Etc.

 

Lederer's brains had availed against many men of cunning in their time. But this time the honest stupidity of a yokel set them at naught.

 

DOCTOR FERDINAND LEDERER had a beastly headache. He pressed a clean, wet handkerchief to his forehead as he lay in his tent on Gold Hill in the Klondike. He had just returned from an unsuccessful stampede. His pack lay flung in a corner. Dick Kibble, who was his “pardner,” but whom he always thought of as his man Friday, was outside, getting him something to eat and drink.

He was an ungallant figure, sprawled on the low bunk, his blue eyes dull with pain and despair. But, seen on the dank trail an hour before, the impression of him would have been different. Erect, his lithe, athletic figure bristling with energy, chin up, eyes frowning fiercely, he had run and won a long, hard race with fatigue, making it from Eureka Creek in ten hours where sturdy mushers would have taken fifteen or fallen by the wayside. Now he paid the penalty. But he never learned!

There had been no reason thus to overtax himself. A stampede to a rumored new gold strike is an intensive affair in the going, not in the returning. Whether you have staked a claim or have not you may take your time about getting back to your starting point. Doctor Lederer had staked a claim on a side gulch off Eureka more to be doing something than because he was at all impressed with the forlorn-looking place. He did not intend to pay fifteen dollars to the Canadian government to record the claim. Every river, creek and gulch for miles and miles around Dawson was being staked, the near-by ones long ago. Nothing came of it. Doctor Lederer, a newcomer and tenderfoot—with forty thousand others—knew this already. Still, there was always a chance—a bare chance. And he must strike it! He was under a strange imperative, always. He had to do what he wished; have what he wished. And his impatience in accomplishment extended to the unimportant. Hence he could not return to his fraction on Gold Hill at a sensible pace, but must needs suffer self-flagellation. Now he was paying—as he always paid!

Dick brought him strong coffee, baking-powder bread baked as only Dick knew how to bake it, ham and stewed dried apricots. The doctor frowned and gestured Dick to set it down on the low, upturned, empty canned-butter box. He frowned, pressed the handkerchief tighter to his temples, and planned, while Kibble, meek, sympathetic, sat at the other end of the tent, silent, waiting.

For the thousandth time he planned since he left Australia six months before. Sometimes he planned aloud—to Dick Kibble, who thought him a wonder at the game—but usually to himself, for Dick could not follow any but the more obvious moves. The subtler were debarred from Dick—or he from them—by reason of the simpler mind and simpler education of the young New Zealander whom Lederer had met on the steamer crossing the Pacific and hooked up with as a very fitting partner for one who needed a man Friday. There had been no difficulty in accomplishing the partnership, for Dick, alone, like himself, venturing, like himself, half across the world in search of the gold of the Klondike, was but too glad to become associated with a man so much his superior, so magnetic, so charming, so wonderfully educated and well-informed. A glance at Lederer's person, at the supple, graceful, muscular figure of the man, had removed the only doubt the young frontiersman had felt—the physical fitness of his new acquaintance for the struggle in a raw gold camp in the arctic wastes of America. The two had pooled their slender outfits when they landed in Seattle and transshiped for the Yukon. For four months, now, they had been together in the Klondike. Fall was upon them.

Lederer's planning took a hurried, hectic tinge from this imminence of fall. There was ice already on still pools. Very soon the last boats would be leaving and the long, deadly Northern winter would spread its white pall. He could not face that. He was a man who loved warmth, cheer. A native of Austria, reared in Italy, a cosmopolite of thirty-five years, he always had shunned the cold, the stern, the forbidding. He had not gone to Alaska to live in it but to take from it. When Kibble, facing a long fight for wealth or a competence, had spoken of “next winter,” Doctor Lederer had smiled to himself at the absurdity of it—for him! Kibble might do as he pleased. But he, Lederer, would be on the wing. He did not let Kibble know that. It would have been impolitic.

There had been before his mind, in his planning, three things: A new strike in which he, as an early stampeder, would be in on the ground floor; the fraction they were living on; and a coup. The coup might be anything. But coups—of the sort that this gentleman adventurer stooped to on occasion—were dangerous in the extreme. The stampedes were all more or less fakes, or, what was worse, started by honest fools. Eureka Creek was a case in point. That left the fraction as the one best chance.

A fraction, or fractional claim, as he had soon learned when, early in the spring they had reached Dawson ahead of many others and forged up the famous Bonanza Creek to the new strikes on the benches, was an area of ground staked between claims which, when the surveyors came to measure them, were found larger than the lawful size, thus leaving small plots between. Though every miner knew that these fractions were reserved by the government, they were eagerly seized upon and staked in the hope of a revision of the law, or, as frequently happened, of a favorable ruling by the gold commission based upon some real or fancied exception in favor of certain fractions. The Klondike was the wonder ground of the world; the gold in dust and great rugged nuggets, was almost spouting from it; and graft and “pull” and one underground influence and another wrought strange miracles on the fringes of official circles. Lederer, a month before, had made his attempts, received certain encouragements—and there the matter had rested.

It was a dangerous thing to permit the recording of a fraction. The circumstances must be exceptional. Lederer understood perfectly just what that word “exceptional” meant. It must be exceptionally rich—to justify the risk. The claims adjacent to this fraction staked by Lederer and Kibble were being opened up. They were as rich as any on rich Gold Hill. But was the fraction rich?

It took work to determine that, and Lederer had several objections to doing it. In the first place he never worked—with his hands. Not as a workman. Not as a laborer. In the second place, work might show that the pay streak missed the fraction, and then there would be no use moving heaven and earth to record the fraction, for who would want to buy it? In the third place, if gold were in it in plenty, there was still no assurance that the men on the fringes of officialdom would or could obtain the recording of it. Lederer compromised with these none-too-roseate considerations by letting Kibble do the work. One of them was enough to stampede about the country and look for chances of a coup.

Kibble didn't know what a coup was. He was a kind of Martha, a useful camp keeper and worker; reliable, steady, giving in always to the better judgment of Lederer the educated, the clever, the brilliant, the fine fellow. So Kibble had plugged away for months on the fraction, working alone—for Lederer saw to it that he was seldom in camp long enough to lend a hand—slaving in a narrow tunnel and a deep, slimy shaft in air that had killed three men in Gold Hill since the benches were opened up. Colors, another name for mere hopes, were all he had garnered thus far.

While Lederer sat holding his head and planning more desperately than ever before—the chill in the air frightening him—Dick Kibble sat on his empty box, waiting for a question. It did not annoy him in the least that the question was so slow in coming. That only prolonged the joy with which he anticipated it—and his answer.

“Well, Dick, my boy, anything new?” asked the man with the headache, finally. He had thrust out a hand for the steaming coffee cup.

Dick slyly parried the question. “How was the stampede?” he asked. “Get anything?”

“Staked a claim. Just to be doing something. I cannot find that there has been any gold produced. Colors, Dicky. You know colors, deah boy. That is Eureka Creek, which means, the Californians tell me, 'I have found it!' How absurd to call it that. Colors! Colors everywhere. How dare they start stampedes on colors!” Doctor Lederer glared balefully at the slice of bread he had seized. “I am very, very weary, Dicky—quite worn out!”

“Well, take it easy, doc,” replied Kibble genially. “What's that question you asked me?”

“Question?” Lederer thought. ”Oh, yes. Oh, nothing but—anything new? That was all.”

“Five dollars, seven fifty, three seventy-five, and near four dollars in four pans, doc. That's all that's new!”

“Where? Not here? Us?” Lederer sprang to a sitting posture.

“You're blooming right it's ours, doc. Leastways on the fraction that ought to be ours!”

Whereupon Doctor Lederer, painfully rising, gave his plannings the single direction of the fraction. It was a pitifully small fraction, but with such pans surely there was somebody, somebody who could bring influence enough now——

Having verified Kibble's news, and admiringly patted that young fellow on the back accompanied with many flattering words, he prepared to depart, though his headache was no better. He took medicines. He believed in strong medicines—quick action. He possessed an affinity with them—with their exaltings or depressings. In an hour he was on his way to Dawson City, seething caldron of the Klondike. He borrowed the last two ten-dollar bills that Kibble possessed, pressed flat in a combination diary and pocketbook which the New Zealander. kept in the bottom of his waterproofed dunnage bag. The fortunes of the partnership were at a very low ebb.

In four days he was back on Gold Hill trailing a quiet, businesslike person who knew how to pan gravel after taking it from a part of a tunnel face which could not by any chance have been salted. There was no doubt of it: the fraction, though small, was equally rich with the adjoining claim. It belonged to the Canadian central government. But the Canadian central government was in Ottawa, which was a long, long way off.

Dick Kibble, always tired, latterly, with his hard drilling and poor food—for the fellow saved the best of everything for his pardner the doc—was an interested observer of these testings. He had been introduced to the quiet, businesslike person as the partner, the man who had done most of the work on the fraction. He was interrogated. He exhibited the avails of the previous pans—bed-rock pans, of course, but a fine showing. The businesslike person said to Lederer, “All right. It seems to be as you say. Let's go back to town.”

Doctor Lederer called Dick to one side. “I think there's a big chance of getting our child christened, baptized and recorded,” he said in his facetious way, which usually puzzled Kibble, who laughed good-naturedly anyhow. But this allusion to their child and the recorder's office was very plain to the junior partner.

“What's this bloke out here for, doc?” He looked anxious.

“Wheels within wheels, my boy,” said the doctor in a low whisper. His manner with his young partner was always a combination of the mysterious and the confidential. It was a very potent mixture. “They've got to make something out of it themselves, you know, to afford to take the risk. Any time an inspector from Ottawa may come and check up on them. So, if we are to record, we must make a cut.”

“Oh, sure, doc—the bloomin' thieves!” It was Dick's invincible notion that the fraction law was an Ottawa steal. That was the only reason he was willing from the first to make whatever concessions might be necessary to the powers that were for the sake of a recording. Since he had found the pay streak he had almost literally danced on air. For he had a sweetheart near his homestead claim in the New Zealand bush settlement, but no wherewithal for the shanty and the plow. Now he dreamed dreams.

“I may be some little time in consummating the deal, Dick.” Doctor Lederer used large words when he wished to impress his partner in certain ways. He now looked about him in the tent. “I'll want my golf suit. Dining with the toffs, me boy, in our negotiations, perhaps.”

“You aren't going to sell out, doc, are you?” asked Dick anxiously.

“Only the slice we'll have to part with, Dicky. Unless”—Doctor Lederer desired to be candid—“unless the price offered is big. In that case—we'll talk it over first, of course.” He looked slyly at his leather bag, a thing he never took on the journeys afoot; it was too awkward. Queer, uncertain things were stirring in his mind. “I'd better take my best clothes in it. Look better, my boy. Not so?”

“Sure, make a flash, doc,” grinned Kibble.

“And—I spent the twenty dollars, Dicky. It just lasted. Better give me the pannings. You can pan some more right away, but say nothing till the fraction is ours.”

“Trust me, doc,” Dick chuckled. He was thinking absent-mindedly of how many pannings it would take to buy a span of oxen in the New Zealand bush settlement. But it would be sluicing, or rocking at worst, not panning, they'd be doing. He got the vials containing the panned gold and handed them to Lederer, who took them with his courtly nod and smile. Dick left the tent, and the man from many parts of the world gathered up his few good clothes, and this and that of personal possessions. He did not know exactly what might or might not happen. And it had been his rule, in such circumstances, to keep his possessions close at hand. He shortly left with the business-like person.

Dick Kibble ate a hurried meal of bread and beans and pulled a hand sled over the dry tundra moss a mile uphill to the fast-disappearing spruce forest to drag it down again filled with wood with which to build a fire in his tunnel and another in the shaft. The fellow was a tireless worker, a good man Friday. He knew that the partnership was one of brawn and brains. It was a very necessary combination in a mining camp. He was glad that “the doc” had the brains.

“The doc” had quite recovered from the Eureka trip. His few days in Dawson had quite set him up. The walk up Bonanza Creek to Gold Hill and the walk back again were nothing to him—a mere stimulation on the physical side to keep step with the enormous spiritual lift of his prospects. The businesslike individual walking by his side, or back of him or in front—as the trail twisted and angled erratically among dumps, across footbridges, around morasses—was hardly an impediment to his winging thought. He talked to him only enough to avoid the appearance of surliness or disdain, for if he were offended the man could, conceivably, lie about the fraction in his report.

He fell to thinking about the trail and comparing it with his life—as sinuous a course, with as many sudden angles, strange dippings into dangerous places, refreshing turns of luck into the high and safe—before the next inevitable slough of despond and quagmire. It was his life to perfection, mirrored through the tortuous mazes of Bonanza, its normal course of gentle curves fantastically hypertrophied by men gold-passion twisted. In Lederer's mood of present exaltation the simile tickled him.

In Dawson he saw, very soon—after the expert had seen them first—his true principals in the deal, or, at least, two men who stood to him as true principals. The transaction, normally following the course of first a recording of the fraction, thus vesting its title in the names of Lederer and Kibble and then a transfer of that title to the purchasers for a valuable consideration, was consummated both steps at once, just as boys, suspicious of each other, trade a broken jackknife and an apple—each with a hand on each, each letting go at the same moment.

The papers were prepared in the office of Pateller & Gridley, barristers. Lederer would have objected to them, had it not been unwise. For it was in that office that he and Dick had had prepared their location notices and also a general power of attorney from Dick, the brawn man, to Doctor Lederer, the brain man, so the latter could use his brain for the furtherance of their business at any time, whether or not the brawn man was personally present. That power of attorney was safely pinned in the inner pocket of Lederer's jaunty coat. His objection he could hardly have explained himself. It was based rather on the general principle that in matters sub rosa—and all Lederer's transactions, no matter how straight, were tinctured, by preference, with an undersurface flavor—no one affair should ever be linked with another affair.

Both Pateller and Gridley were out. They usually were. But their chief clerk, Bonbright, who was in, usually attended to simple matters of conveyancing anyhow, so there was no difference—except to Lederer who noted, with an inner frown, that this man was the same man who had made out the power of attorney from Dick to himself.

The papers were quickly signed and attested, and the consideration passed. Lederer, an hour before, had expressed a preference for currency over exchange “on the outside.” Currency was less safe than exchange, in case of theft. But Lederer, alert, worldly-wise, never feared theft. He accordingly was paid, for the transfer signed by himself for himself and by himself as attorney in fact for his copartner Richard Kibble, fifteen thousand dollars in fresh, crisp notes of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, Dawson City branch.

While Bonbright was preparing his acknowledgment upon the conveyance, Lederer did a simple, natural thing, a very slight thing, yet it was the mistake of his life. He gazed through the window—which faced the Dawson river front—and held his gaze for a moment or two upon the river steamer Moosomin, which was to be the last boat up the river. Bonbright was so used to making out acknowledgments that he did not have to concentrate upon them; and he observed Doctor Lederer looking at the Moosomin.

“Yes,” said Doctor Lederer, in answer to a polite inquiry as to what he was going to do now, “we're going to develop some other property we have.”

He was heard but not heeded—except possibly by Bonbright, who was indorsing the conveyance prior to handing it to Pateller & Gridley's two clients. The clients had asked him the question just in the way of one who says, “It's a nice day, isn't it?” They were not in the least interested in what Doctor Lederer did with himself or his money—which was a pittance to these men, or to the real principals they represented.

And thus ended, for Doctor Ferdinand Lederer, in perfect success, a long series of getting-acquainteds, feelers, hintings, passings from one man to another, covering the several months since he and Dick had staked the fraction. The chain had ended for the time in the blank wall of “It all depends on whether the fraction has got the stuff!” Dick had toiled and moiled and found the stuff. And now the real and successful end had come. On the narrow, crowded side- walk of the main street of Dawson, Doctor Lederer found himself alone, feeling very fit, and with more money in his pocket than he had possessed for several years. He wove through the sidewalk crowd, hardly aware that he was not alone. His intensities had begun delightfully to work upon him.

He was a man of infinite refinements of desire. He loved art, beauty, drink, food, raiment, horses, books, poetry, the society of intellectuals and even of ascetics—between times! His was a nature of complete sophistication, of perfect and utter artificiality. He could enjoy intensely just as he could suffer intensely—when deprived of enjoyment. An appetite unappeased gave him no rest, no peace. It was torture.

Appetite, for six months, had wound up in him like a fine steel spring. Now he felt the relentless pressure of it moistening his lips. About him were rough palaces of pleasure—food, drink, gambling. Uncouth! With a shudder he thought of Monte Carlo; even of Sydney. No, he could not relax—uncoil the fine steel spring of the subtle, beautiful passions that were his greatest natural gift—in this monstrous wooden city of the crude and cruel Northland of his immolation. For this that he had in his pocket, this genius of the lamp, he had suffered exquisitely, for months on end. Now he must enjoy exquisitely. He looked again at the water front—he had known since he first gazed at the river steamer from the law office that he was going to gaze upon it again and again in the next hour.

He crossed the wide, dray-laden street and interviewed a man at the wharf where was tied the Moosomin. He knew the sign said October 10th—two days hence. But was that to really be two days, or three or four? The man said it would be “pretty clost,” meaning close to the advertised sailing. Lederer sauntered over to a clean packing case, sat upon it in the still-genial autumn sunlight and thought—fighting.

He could run up to the fraction—which would not be disturbed for several days, he knew, by the purchasers. He could fix things with Dick the peasant, the yoeman, the clod. And then he could catch the boat—easily! With seven thousand five hundred dollars in his pocket, less his fare to Seattle. Seven thousand five hundred dollars did not seem very much to him—now. His fluent mind ran on to cities of the world—expensive cities to men of refined expensive tastes. He spent money—in his mind—for this and that. How expensive the things he loved most were. Soon he would be driven to practice his profession again—as an obscure physician. A thing he hated. But fifteen thousand dollars? Ah, that was twice as much. He wet his lips and proceeded, afresh, to spend money more craftily, conservatively, with only little spurts of lavishness. It sounded better—this fifteen thousand dollars.

Dick! Dick and money. It was hard to think of them together—fittingly. Consider, if you please, the differing natures of men. Their widely differing needs. Dick was happy working—with his hands. He, Lederer, was unhappy when forced to work—actually work. The struggle thus ended.

He bought—two days later—several bottles of wine and some good cigars. This was his only concession to the gilded palaces of Dawson City. He had written a letter to Dick, telling him their affairs were delayed somewhat but promised success. He sent it by a special carrier—an acquaintance of the Hill. Still, he worried a little when the Moosomin did not get off one day after her schedule. Nor two. But the third, early, she cast off and steamed up the river, bucking a skim of ice in the Dawson eddy. She would undoubtedly get up and out. Lederer opened his first bottle of wine.

It was some hours after Dawson had disappeared around the first upriver bend that he became acquainted with a congenial soul, a gambler of distinction, known to him by reputation. Lederer was not of this class. But he unbent, needing mightily a some one to whom to subtly vaunt. The gambler—this one, at least—understood the true meaning of making a half-round-the-world journey for a purpose of high chance. He would equally understand that a chance won is not to be renounced, either in whole or in part. He told his friend—as they drank the wine—obscured, rather by symbol and parable, of Dick, the drudge, the drone—of the day after day of his arid, stupid, obvious comments upon things and people. The gambler—a brilliant fellow—could comprehend the hate, or something quite akin to it, that six months of constant propinquity had bred in Lederer's heart for the plain, flat partner of the yoeman breed.

At Indian River the Moosomin stopped to take on wood—it was so much cheaper than at Dawson—and tied up for the night, there being no moon and the ice a bit troublesome to the pilot in the dark.

Lederer, in his narrow stateroom, was treating the gambler—and his woman friend—to some canned delicacies. For he had vowed to eat the grub of the country no longer. There was also a second bottle before them, a high light on its slender median line from the small brass bracket lamp. There was no marring of their converse except the thump of cordwood on the deck below—when the door opened. Dick Kibble, muddy and a little white, peered in!

“Why, Dick!” said Lederer, smiling affably, though his heart rumbled. He could not imagine it! Here was some extraordinary coincidence. Could Dick have gone hunting? His swift mind, stimulated by wine to tremendous self-confidence, instantly created an alibi. “Excuse me, dear friends,” he said to his companions of the little supper. “Want to see me, Dick?” He went out upon the narrow deck.

“Thought you were in Dawson, doc?”

Lederer had the impression that Dick, the never lying, had lied. Still—why not have thought him in Dawson? Yet——

“Well, well,” he said genially. “To think of your being over here on the river. No, I had to run up here—to Stewart, the next stop. My man was called away—delayed up there. Going up to consummate the deal. Strike while the iron's hot, my boy. Nothing like it. And you?”

“I got called away, too,” said Dick slowly. “I was tryin' to find Dowd. Up on the next claim, 'e was. Remember Dowd?” The smoothness of it deceived Lederer, who did not stop to think that Dick was miles from Gold Hill, and when one walks miles over the wet moss one has much time to think—of simple things to say, at least.

“Don't remember him,” replied Lederer indifferently. “But I was so seldom in

“Right, doc.” They were at the gangplank. “Boat's laid up for the night, they tell me. Come over to my camp and I'll tell you about Dowd, Glad I met you. Luck, I'll call it.”

“Luck? My word, Dicky!” Lederer had decided to follow him. If there was to be a scene—but of course that was impossible—still it was better enacted off somewhere. The boat was dangerous. A mounted police sergeant was aboard. There was the gambler, who had developed a slightly sneering attitude with the last bottle, and the presence of his woman friend. “Let's go,” he said. “I've things to tell you too. Almost sure of a sale, my boy. Matters couldn't look more encouraging. What?”

He received no reply as Dick led him along a path into the mossy woods. He did not like that. Dick always replied, though his reply was seldom worth listening to.

Dick, though, could not reply. He had exhausted, at one Herculean effort—the obscure reference to the apocryphal Dowd—his capacity for simulation. He would simulate no more, not unless it were absolutely necessary. To be alone with his partner was what he too wanted. He had no doubt of his power. No honest man like Dick Kibble, feeling as Dick Kibble felt, has doubt of his power.

There was a small, hidden camp a thousand yards down the river in the timber. There was a blanket, a frying pan and a small—a pitifully small—pack of grub, the last of the Lederer-Kibble outfit, which had been rather a brave one, in a modest way, when it had left Seattle.

The way was narrow in the brush where it debouched upon the small clearing. Dick let Lederer precede him. He always had done this and Lederer took no alarm. As Lederer stepped upon the sod of the camp Kibble sprang upon him and bore him down. Naturally the two men were less than equal, in Lederer's favor. Fourteen hours a day, however, is a hardening process when devoted to pick, shovel and ax. But Kibble took no chances. He had him down and a skinning knife held to his throat.

“Excuse me, doc,” he said, sobbing miserably. “Mebbe I'm wrong. I got to know. And you're too smart for me to take chances on.”

“Dick!” gasped Lederer, utter pathos in his voice. It was the cry of a man who finds the wife of his bosom unfaithful to him.

“I got wind you was goin' out,” said Dick doggedly, moving the knife not one hair's breadth away.

“Absurd!” snorted Lederer disgustedly. “How could you think——”

“I'll tell you. The bloke in that barrister's place that made the paper that give you the right to sell me out—he wrote me. I know it by 'eart. 'I remember you,' he says, 'from your Austrilian talk.' Took me for a blooming Austrilian, and remembers arskin' me about a pal of his, if I ever seen him. 'Your pardner,' he says, 'is selling your claim and takin' fifteen thousand for it while he's lookin' at the last steamer. Congratulations. And by the w'y,' he adds, 'the boat stops, I understand, at way points, the first bein' Indian River.'

“Doc, I gets that letter by reg'lar mail carrier the day after your letter come saying there was delay. You lied sure, or he lied. I'll find out. I got to. Move and I'll cut your throat!”

With his other hand he searched the pockets of the fear-stricken man—dumb, his wit strangely deserting him. He drew out a pocketbook, wrenching it free of the safety pins that secured it. Fumbling through it with his one free hand he drew forth a steamship ticket. He could not read it in the dark.

“For Stewart station, Dick. You foolish boy,” Lederer found tongue to pur—hoping still.

Kibble sprang up, holding the ticket against the glare of the coals of the camp fire. “Pretty big—for Stewart!” He remembered the tickets, coming into the country.

Holding the strip of pasteboard between him and the prone man so he might watch him against any attempt to rise, squinting, he read at the end, “Seattle!”

“You lie, doc, damn you!” He threw himself down upon the man again; again held the knife to his throat; again fumbled in his pockets, till a thought, a remembrance of the days when the two still had money, came to him, and instantly he tore open the man's clothes at his waist and found the money belt bulging with bank notes. The belt he tore from him and cast aside. Color—too much of it—came to his face.

Months passed before him, months of incredible toil for himself and the man of brain, who, he had believed, was using that brain for the two of them just as he, the man of brawn, was using his brawn—for the two of them. A flood of racking hardships suffused his mind, these infinitely more painful, soul-flaying, in the bitter retrospect. The fury of a patient man broke forth. He cast the knife aside.

“Get up!” he whispered hoarsely. “And fight!”

Lederer was a skillful boxer. But he had boxed only with gentlemen, or those so called. He would almost rather have been knifed than feel the writhe of perspiring flesh, the hot, panting breath of this enraged creature. Yet he could not choose but rise and fight, thinking of tricks.

He was besting the yoeman when his endurance failed. The fourteen hours a day at toil he had disdained was the other's advantage, Lederer's undoing. He found himself being mauled to unconsciousness.

In a brief lapse into consciousness—before he went to sleep again for many hours—he remembered signing something with a pencil that Kibble had forced into his hands. He had no idea what it was even after he came to himself, deathly sick, sore all over to the verge of paralysis. But there was a note that informed him:

I loved you like a brother, you low-lived scoundrel. And I worked for you like I done for myself. You think I liked it. That I ain't fit for nothing else. Now you try it. You'd leave me to starve in a strange country, or freeze to death, while you splurged with the money you robbed me out of.

I got your ticket and a paper saying you made up your mind to stay and let me have our ticket and go. I got your money, only not being a dirty thief I don't intend to keep it. I'll find that wife you deserted. You think I didn't twig to what you meant. I didn't, then. But now I know you deserted her. Because you deserted me. I'll give her your half, if I kin find her. If not it will be in a bank in Aukland for you. When you have starved and froze for a winter in the Klondike. Or else gone to work with your hands, which you despise. You can come out dead or else a man, or a little of a man, whichever you wish.

My share is fifteen hundred pounds, which will build me a shanty and buy me oxen and mostly pay for my land. And I will be married, God bless her. And may He have mercy on your soul. ⁠ Richard Kibble.

More stories by Mr. Solomons will appear in early issues.