The camps of chaos/The teeth of famine
THE TEETH OF FAMINE
FURTHER TALES OF "THE CAMPS OF CHAOS"
BY SAMUEL ALEXANDER WHITE
THE river steamer Voyageur, one of the Arctic Circle Line which ex-Marshal Cronin Hess, Gayle Outremont, and Thorpe Calgour established on the Upper Yukon what time they made their pile on Davidson Creek, broke into view above the trading post of Selkirk at the Pelly's mouth. Her sides were white with blizzard-driven snow and sheathed in frozen spray. On her bow tossed a gargoyle figurehead of foam-pale mush ice. She drove at top speed, and her engines hammered incessantly in their feverish race with the frost. So fast she flew that the Selkirk inhabitants on the watch by the shore felt a pang of fear that she was going to ignore them and rush on down river. And no worse calamity than that could befall, for a famine threatened on the Yukon, and, like the men of golden Dawson, those of lonely Selkirk were counting the holes in their belts and concentrating their hopes upon the relief ship Voyageur to bring them supplies enough to tide them over the freeze-up till such time as the river ice would bear freight and freighting dog trains.
Twice before earlier in the fall had their hopes been dashed down, once when the C.D.C. boat Canadian sank in Five Finger Rapids and again as the N.C. steamer Hannah grounded fast below Tantalus Butte. The Voyageur was now their only salvation, and they gesticulated frantically upon the beach and bellowed lest they lose it till they saw her suddenly slow and buckle up the shore ice like glass as she swerved in to the post.
At the direction of Severil, the Selkirk trader, three French half-breeds and a Stick Indian in his employ ran forward to catch the Voyageur's lines, but no frozen hemp came snaking into their outstretched hands.
"No time to make fast!" yelled Cronin, grinning at Severil over the rail. "She'll hang a minute while we dump what you want. How many are you feeding?"
Severil took a swift glance about the group on the icy shore. He knew by heart their exact number, but in this emergency, when he had to assume full responsibility for their keep, he felt it necessary to make a final count. Besides himself there were his English clerk, the three French half-breeds and the Stick Indian aforementioned, two trappers and a prospector going up the Pelly to the Glenlyon Mountains and stayed by lack of supplies which they had figured on purchasing at the post, and a Government courier, coastward bound, whose canoe had been smashed to pieces by ice in an early winter gale at the Selwyn's mouth.
"Ten!" he answered. "And I've always a few stray bucks in the fall for a little debt. Call it twelve for margin. Twelve stomachs for thirty days. Can you stand it?"
Hess whistled speculatively. "Twelve stomachs for thirty days is eating some. We didn't count on more than half a dozen."
"Neither did I," confessed Severil, "but you see how the chances of the river have loaded me up with extras. I got to take care of them just the same as I would of myself. That's my need right now, and I hope you boys can stand it."
"What do you think, eh?" Hess asked his partner Gayle. "Can we stand it?"
"It's a large order under the present circumstances," declared Gayle. "There's Stewart City to provision yet before, we even start on Dawson and Klondike cities. We better cut it some. But we can't cut the mouths, so we'll have to cut the days. Three weeks is your limit, Severil. You can get stuff through from Whitehorse in that time."
"I don't know," brooded Severil, "but I'll try."
HE was glad of even three weeks' grace, and he knew there was no use in arguing with the partners. Lords of the moment were they, and at their spoken word men ate or starved. Swiftly they, with the assistance of Thorpe and one of the crew, detached Selkirk's portion of the provisions from a mountainous pile, the overflow of the hold, lashed under a tarpaulin on deck. The boxes, bundles, and bags were tossed overside in a heap upon the river bank, and the steamer veered out again into the middle of the ice-thickened current.
A cry of farewell went up from those on shore. She was the last boat they would see that year, and their first hour of eight months' wintry isolation was upon them. Forlorn they looked, standing on the desolate shore, the rude post buildings behind them and behind the post buildings the outer fringe of a thousand miles of wilderness. They cheered with a gloom in their eyes, but suddenly as those eyes, gazing past the Voyageur's stern, encountered a canoe in mid river, the gloom was usurped by a flash of joy, the joy of a farewell unexpectedly delayed. Severil darted forward, running a few paces along the bank, waving his hands excitedly and yelling for the steamer to stop.
"Canoe, Hess, canoe!" he roared. "Three men! In mid river!"
Severil pointed in the direction of the craft. The ex-marshal ran to the starboard rail, took a look across, and shouted an order to Captain Ravigne in the wheelhouse. The wheel went over. The Voyageur slowed again and drifted along with the pour of mush ice.
In the canoe in mid river the bowsman, who had stood up wildly waving his paddle blade to signal the steamer, suddenly sat down and added the impetus of his stroke to the strokes of his two companions. The Peterborough angled across the Yukon in long jumps, squelching through the mush ice with a hissing sound like that of lashing hail. At times it careened from the thrust of a floe, but skillfully wielded paddles, forcing the craft to yield at the moment of impact, saved its fragile sides.
"Good paddlers, Cronin!" commented Gayle, watching their work with an expert's eye. "No cheechakos in that bunch!"
"Yes," admitted Hess grudgingly, "they know the art of the ashen blade, but that doesn't make me love them any better. Condemn their hasty hearts and condemn our rotten luck! They flip up at the time when we least want them. Three more stomachs to fill, for by the look of things they're traveling light and grubless!"
THE canoe, shooting across the Voyageur's stern, showed an empty bottom. It rounded to on the port side and worked into the shelter of the steamer's hull. The bowsman upturned his face as he caught the rope Gayle and Cronin threw to him, and the partners recognized him as Rooney Ryan. Amidships squatted Monte Marlin, while the steersman's seat was filled by Seattle Simons.
"Now I love you less and less!" railed Cronin, as the three, knotting the rope to the canoe thwarts, came up hand over hand and dropped one after another across the rail. "Why in thunder couldn't you stay where you were, wherever that was?"
"Because we were out of grub!" panted Rooney, leaning back against the rail to get his breath the while Marlin and Simons drew up the canoe by the ropes. "We been prospecting up the Pelly. We were down to the last rind of bacon and the final bean. We simply had to hike for Dawson. All we were afraid of was that we'd miss the Voyageur here at Selkirk, but we got you just by the tips of our toe nails."
"Dawson!" exploded Hess. "A luscious lot you're wanted in Dawson, and a plagued lot of good you'll get going there. You're thinking to gorge yourselves, but you'll go on rations instead. Savvy that? There's a famine in Dawson City."
"Famine!" Ryan's breathless body stiffened.
The ex-marshal nodded surlily. "That's twice I intimated it. And again I say I can't see why you couldn't have stayed up the Pelly, killed a moose, and lived on straight meat for a while. You're only butting in down river and cutting the rations for each man smaller than ever. But that's our blasted luck! Captain Ravigne," yelling at the deck house, "full speed ahead!"
The canoe had topped the rail, and the Voyageur, throbbing violently to her full stride, leaped on down the Yukon to another outburst of the Selkirk inhabitants' cheers.
"Now, Ryan, you take an ax," Hess ordered, "and chop some of that ice from our bow. Marlin and Simons, you take a couple of poles out of the hold and stand at the forward port to fend off floes. We're traveling like a buck-jumping bighorn ram, and we don't want any impediments."
"But, look here," protested Ryan indignantly, "we're passengers. We boarded your boat at a regular port of call. We're paying full fare for passage from Selkirk to Dawson, and we're sure not going to kick in and work. Besides, we nigh paddled our gizzards out, and we ain't fit."
"You'll pay and you'll work," Cronin delivered the ultimatum, "or you'll be flung ashore without any grub sack. Take your choice. You'll do as the rest of us are doing or get off. We left Whitehorse mighty short-handed just because we didn't want to take the men in to feed, and here you turn up, impose yourself on people and declare a labor strike. Consarn your nerve! If it wasn't for putting my knuckles out of commission for the rest of the trip, I'd pummel you to punk. Now it's up to you. In the present crisis every gink on this boat has to turn to, willingly or unwillingly, and lend his help to freight these provisions to Dawson in the shortest possible time. Are you going to use that ax and them poles?"
Grumblingly Ryan and his two friends accepted the instruments of labor and toiled with the Voyageur's crew. The Voyageur, straining her machinery to the limit, pounded on and on. Mile after mile she tore off the Yukon's icy breast. The enormous headland halfway to the mouth of the Selwyn River loomed in view, but just as the wheel went over for the inshore course, the racing vessel staggered to a violent shock. Like the buckjumping bighorn ram Cronin had spoken of, her whole forepart reared in air. The impetus of her speed still shot her forward. Her bow cleared whatever obstruction she had hit and came down with a swoosh upon the mush ice. The plunge of the bow drew the rest of the vessel after it. As a bighorn clears a ledge of rock, the Voyageur cleared the obstacle in her path. Her stern kicked upward. She landed floating free but with her hull ripped for fifty feet and her propeller shaft broken clean.
The moment the Voyageur hit the obstruction, Gayle and Cronin along with the rest of the crew hit the deck. They scrambled up again, gasping for the breath that had been knocked out of them, and ran across to the deck house. The deck house, torn from its foundations, was slanting weirdly. The wheelsman with two broken ribs and a gash in his temple dripped blood out of the window, while Captain Ravigne himself heaved viciously at the jammed wheel.
"Why in blazes didn't you keep your course, Ravigne?" thundered Cronin.
"I did," snapped the captain. "I was fair on it."
"But you see what you've piled her into, rocks or something!"
"It couldn't be rocks, not in my course. It's débris brought down by the current, a sunken tree or maybe submerged floe ice. If I could only get this wheel loose!"
"You can't. And it's no use anyway. Her propeller's gone. It did an air dance twenty feet high, and yonder are the blades lying on that floe. She's settling fast. Can't you feel her? It's one Hades of a fix you've put the Voyageur in, Ravigne, tying her up for all winter, and it's one Hades of a fate you've pulled down on Dawson! They'll never get a whiff of bacon or a bloody bean from our bags till it's freighted in by dog teams. Savvy what that means? But there's no gain cursing about it. Gather the crew and get the stuff out of the hold and up on deck before it gets wet. It'll be safe there when she hits the gravel."
CAPTAIN RAVIGNE darted out of the wheel-house on his mission. Outremont helped the wheelsman below, while the ex-marshal looked about for Rooney Ryan.
Rooney's ax was overboard, and Cronin found him painfully rubbing the back of his skull as he conferred with Marlin and Simons by the port rail.
"You boys going to use your canoe?" Hess asked. "I'd like to know because it's the only craft aboard. We unshipped the steamer's boats at Whitehorse to make more room for grub."
"You bet we're going to use it," Ryan answered. "We've just put it to a vote. We're all in favor of taking a chance on beating the freeze-up to Dawson rather than stay for a month on this junk heap or even stagnate back at Selkirk. And don't try to take our canoe. You ain't got authority to do it, and we won't stand for the deal. Anyway it's no good to you. You can't send more grub in it than'll feed ourselves."
"I don't want to send grub. I want to send Thorpe on to wire Trudis, that's Gayle's wife, warning her of the situation. She's running the Arctic Circle store, and it's imperative that she should know what a fix we're in. Thorpe can get her from Stewart City. The wire's down between Selkirk and Stewart City or we could wire from the post."
"But we can wire ourselves," protested Ryan, "without lugging Thorpe's extra weight all the way to Stewart."
"I know, but I want him to go on to Dawson then to take charge of the relieving dog trains. If Thorpe's there, I'll know that the teams'll start the minute the ice'll bear. And likewise I know they'll get here. Savvy? I don't want any trouble with you boys. I don't want to engender any hard feelings over this business. I'd rather not go so far as to commandeer your craft. So I ask you in the interests of humanity and famine-pressed Dawson to give Thorpe passage."
"Well," returned Ryan slowly, "you ain't been any too courteous to us since we climbed aboard, but if you put it that way, in the interests of humanity and famine-pressed Dawson we will give Thorpe passage. But he's got to work. We ain't going to freight any dead idle weight."
"Oh, don't you worry about that! Thorpe's no slouch. He'll paddle your arms off. Go ahead and lower your canoe."
While the three dropped the Peterborough overboard with ropes, the ex-marshal scribbled a telegram on a scrap of paper for Thorpe to fling off for transmission at Stewart City.
The telegram read :
Trudis Outremont—
Arctic Circle store—
Dawson
Voyageur stove and stalled above the Selwyn River. Propeller broken, hull ripped. In Dawson in a month. Cut all sales to quarter-pound packages at one time. Try to keep some reserve as nothing can go on. Coming fast myself with Ryan, Martin, and Simons in canoe. Thorpe
While Cronin wrote the telegram Thorpe made ready for the journey, unearthed an extra paddle aboard the Voyageur and slid down the rope after the other three. Four paddles dipping and flickering in unison, the Peterborough flashed down-stream.
HESS watched it round the headland, and whereas he had cursed the coming of Ryan and the others, he now blessed their going when he thought that, barring mishaps and the jaws of the freeze-up, Thorpe would make Dawson in something under twenty-four hours.
Gayle and Cronin immediately turned their attention to the cargo of foodstuffs, aiding Captain Ravigne in the work of hoisting it on deck. Vigorously the short-handed crew slaved, but as fast as they emptied the hold the Voyageur continued to settle. Dark saw her on the bottom, and while Gayle and Cronin directed by lantern light the tarpaulin lashing over all on deck, there came a hail from under the steamer's stern. Gayle flashed his lantern over the side, and below he saw a man in a streaming parka supporting himself with his arms upon a small-sized ice floe.
"Who are you?" Gayle yelled. "And what are you doing there?"
"Thorpe—Thorpe," a familiar voice chattered. "I broke a floe from the shore and breasted it across. Hurry up. Throw a rope. It's certain degrees cold here."
The amazed and worried men dropped him a rope with a loop on the end.
Thorpe slipped it under his arms and allowed them to pull him up, for the water and ice in his heavy clothes weighed like lead.
"What's happened, Thorpe?" asked Gayle and Cronin together. "Where's Ryan and Marlin and Simons?"
"They've gone to Dawson sure. We went ashore up by the Selwyn River to light a fire to boil some hot tea against the frost. The three of them jumped me when I wasn't looking. Knocked me silly for a minute. When I woke up, they were gone. The telegram was gone too. I don't know what they wanted it for. But they know. Else why did they take it?"
Thorpe accompanied his logic with an ice-rattling shiver, and Gayle and Cronin paused to question no more but pushed him below to change his clothes and swallow some hot drink.
"Wouldn't that flabbergast you, Cronin?" demanded the angry Outremont. "Why'd they do it?"
"Search me," returned Cronin. "But I begin to have suspicions that that ain't the only thing they did. And do you know what we're going to do? We're going back to the spot where the Voyageur took the hurdle and see what she hit."
"But how'll we get there? Breast a floe like Thorpe?"
"No, I don't envy him his bath any. We'll rig a raft and go dry."
With a pair of hatches fastened upon the long, heavy poles used to fend off floes they engineered a raft. It was dropped overside, attached to the steamer by a long rope lest in a mishap it should be carried down stream. With a couple of poles to propel the raft, an ax and a lantern the partners poled back from the Voyageur's stern for a distance of one hundred feet. They knew the place of disaster by a snow-crowned rock in the middle of the river, and while Gayle propelled, Cronin began to feel with his pole for the obstruction. About ten feet farther up his sunken pole thumped against it. Gayle got his pole over it and hold the raft stationary while Hess continued his explorations under water. The gruel-like flow of mush ice masked everything below the surface, but Cronin defined the obstruction to his own satisfaction.
"A tree, Gayle; a sunken tree!" he exclaimed. "And rock anchored, or I'll be clammily engulfed! Wait till I use the ax. But mebbe you better push the raft up a little higher. There, I think we're clear."
Hess was tentatively feeling with the flat of his blade under water what was either a strand of rope or a long straight root. Slowly he twisted his ax helve and delivered short chops below the surface. Twice he missed. The third time he felt his blade bite. Something snapped, and right at the edge of the raft the gnarled and matted roots of a spruce tree, grotesque and slimy in the lantern light, reared up like some leviathan of the deeps. Gayle gave a violent shove to clear. The twisted mass scraped the raft poles, heaved in the air and fell again with a mighty splash, and just as the current began to whirl it round end on, Cronin, holding the light close, glimpsed the heavy hempen rope he had severed.
"Sure rock anchored as I said! The other end'll be the same. She was placed square athwart the ordinary course of navigation, and I'll bet a ten-foot quartz lead against a panful of flake gold that that pestiferous pariah of a Ryan placed her. Are you betting, Gayle?"
"No, Cronin, I'm not betting. You have a sure-enough hunch. But what I can't fathom is the reason for this stunt. Can you?"
"There I fall down, too, Gayle. I can't figure out any motive for it. There certainly ain't any motive. They've done it out of pure cussedness. Their story about prospecting up the Pelly was a lie. And they left Thorpe on the bank just because they didn't want to freight the extra weight of him to Stewart and could dispatch the telegram just as well themselves. They don't care a smatter whether the relieving dog teams ever get started or not. They got grub enough for a while—the grub we gave them. They figure we're stalled here for a month and by the time we get to Dawson they'll be out on some far creek with a laugh as long as their trail, but there they cut their cards too deep. Instead of a month from now, we start for Dawson now. If they beat the freeze-up to the golden city, we can too."
"Cronin," protested Gayle in amazement, "not on this raft! We'll never make the White River."
"No, on a boat procured at Selkirk Post. Savvy? It's back trail for us right sharp."
The slack of the raft rope drawn up by those on deck, Cronin and Gayle worked back to the Voyageur. There they hung a little while they explained things to Captain Ravigne, pocketed a few handfuls of grub dropped to them and called for Thorpe.
The latter came to the rail rigged out in a dry set of mackinaws.
"What are you going to do?" he asked.
"Beat it for Dawson City to catch the bloody barrators who wrecked our ship," Hess told him. "We're off to Selkirk now for a boat. You coming with us, or would you rather hug the fire a while and have us pick you up here when we come by?"
"I'll go with you," decided Thorpe. "There's no heat in hugging a fire. You scorch your face, and your back is freezing all the time. I'll go. A run'll warm me better."
He dropped down on to the makeshift raft, cut the rope, and the three poled across to the western shore of the Yukon. They retained one lantern, and by its glare they broke a channel in the shore ice and through the channel came to land. The moment they struck dry ground they were off, running with the stampeder's swift lope, Gayle to the fore with the lantern, Cronin next, and Thorpe warming his congealed blood in the rear. For a good two hours they kept it up, making a brief pause every half hour for a breathing spell. The sky was thickly overcast. There was no hint of stars or aurora to outline the contour of the rough and tortuous shore, but the joggling lantern flickering on Outremont's hip saved them from bruises and broken bones.
THEY struck Selkirk near midnight. The post was all in darkness, but at their pounding on the trading-room door Severil stuck his head out of the loft above. The lantern was partially hidden by Gay'e's coat. Severil could not guess at the composition of the midnight group, but he saw a sprinkling of arms and legs with here and there a shoulder or a head in the glow of the mellow light.
"Where are you from?" he demanded. "Who are you? How many of you? And how much grub have you got?"
"We're just down off the Macmillan River," boomed Cronin, disguising his voice in a hoarse croak. "Placer miners. Sixteen of us. And we haven't so much as a sour flapjack left. Hurry up and let us in. We're hungry."
Whereat Severil leaned far out of the loft with an astonishing flow of choice expletives and consigned placer mining and its sixteen exponents to uttermost perdition. In the middle of his tirade the three men burst into guffaws.
"Oh, quit it, Severil!" chuckled Gayle. "Hess sure got your goat with the word grub. But we're not going to eat you out this time. All we want is a boat that floats."
"By thunder!" exclaimed the abashed Severil. "It's you boys, eh? Bit of a fooler, eh? Tarnation, you've lifted such a weight from my mind that I forgive you your laugh! What's wrong? Steamer smash?"
"You've plugged it first crack," Cronin informed.
In a few words he went on to explain, and Severil came down the loft stairs on the run. "I've a light poling boat'll do you," he proffered. "Designed for speed rather than cargo. She's a lot faster than the ordinary boat in ice. Here she is in the shed."
He flung open the shed door at the back of the building and hauled out the trim, strong craft.
"Built for the business, oarlocks and all!" rejoiced Gayle. "I'll chop a hole, and you men launch her."
Into the hole that Gayle broke the boat was launched till it floated free. The three stepped in and, one chopping the ice in front as the craft progressed and the other two working the sweeps which served better than poles, they forged out to midstream.
"Thanks, Severil," yelled Hess, waving the lantern in good-by as they swung with the current. "And don't forget to give them sixteen placer men a good breakfast."
DOWN from Selkirk past the place of disaster the light poling boat drove. The Voyageur lay as quiet as a derelict, only with rail lights suspended to warn chance prospectors journeying off the creeks. The three partners dropped her behind and sped on, the glare of the lantern in their bow shining weirdly upon the ceaseless pour of mush ice and upon the white, grinning, saw-toothed floes darting at them in the rapids and eddies. All night they voyaged through the increasing cold. Dawn found them halfway to the White River; evening at the Stewart River and here Hess ran up to the telegraph office at Stewart City.
"Did Rooney Ryan wire Dawson from here yesterday?" he yelled over the operator's desk.
"No," answered the operator. "Ryan hasn't been here in a month."
"Thunderation!" snarled Hess. "Here, give me a message slip, quick."
"You can't get anything over," the operator told him. "The wire's down to the north somewhere."
"When'd it go down?" bellowed Cronin.
"About noon. We haven't located the—"
But Cronin Hess was racing for the river. "Ryan's cut communications," he shouted to the others, as he jumped into the poling boat. "Hit her up, boys. We can't get to Dawson too quick."
The boat dashed off down river, and, eating and snatching an hour's sleep by turns, they came in the gray of another dawn to Dawson City. In on the breast of the freeze-up they drove with their boat riding a floe to escape being crushed by the jams. They abandoned the craft in mid river, walked over a jumble of upended cakes to the bank and ran upstreet to the Arctic Circle store.
Trudis had just come down from her cabin on the hill and opened the store. She was in the act of putting fresh fuel on the coals of the all-night fire when the door opened, and she sprang up with a cry of joy at the three men's entrance. "In at last!" she greeted, throwing her arms about and kissing, first Gayle and then Thorpe.
"Here, where do I come in?" demanded Cronin with an injured air.
"You too and also," laughed Trudis, burying her nose in his frosted mustache. "I'm so glad you've brought my husband back, Cronin. But Dawson's asleep yet and doesn't know its good fortune. What was holding you so long?"
But the ex-marshal, not answering her query, was staring at the empty shelves behind Tru, shelves swept bare as polished glass, guiltless of even stray beans or coffee grains.
"Why in thunder did you sell, Tru?" he blurted in despair.
"Because I got your message to sell," returned Tru spiritedly, reaching over to a pile of bills, receipts, and other documents, and spreading a scrap of paper on the counter under Cronin's eyes. "There it is in black and white and dirt smudges."
THE ex-marshal scanned the paper, and a snarl ripped out of his throat. He rubbed his eyes and passed a hand over the writing as if there was some mesmerism in force, but the writing remained the same.
In pencil scrawl it read:
Voyageur momentarily delayed above Indian River. Piston heated. In Dawson in four hours. Give as large purchases as wanted at one time. No need to keep reserve as plenty coming on. Sending this ahead with Ryan, Marlin, and Simons in canoe. Thorpe.
Portions of the message were as Cronin had written, but by looking closely he could see where the former, words had been erased in places and the distorted version substituted.
"It's not our message, Tru," he declared. "Our message was:
"Voyageur store and stalled above the Selwyn River. Propeller broken, hull ripped. In Dawson in a month. Cut all sales to quarter-pound packages at one time. Try to keep some reserve as nothing can go on. Coming fast myself with Ryan, Marlin, and Simons in canoe. Thorpe.
"Thorpe went on with them to wire that message from Stewart, but they got the jump on Thorpe before they'd gone far and swiped the paper. Also they cut the wire this side of Stewart so we couldn't possibly get you."
"The brazen rascals!" exclaimed Trudis. "And they gave it to me as a message from you on the steamer at Indian River. But are you blaming me for selling?"
"No, Tru, he's not," Outremont cut in, passing an arm about her waist. "The paper said sell, and you sold. Now how much did you sell?"
"All I had reserved," she confessed. "We were down to the reserve. The C.D.C, N.A.T. & T., A.C.C, and N.C. stores were sold out over a week ago. Since that the run's been on the Arctic Circle. I staved it off and staved it off, cut the purchases 50 and 75 per cent, skimped and hoarded, but it was no good. When twelve thousand people besiege one store, stuff can't last. All I had left when your word came to me was the reserve which you cautioned me beforehand to hold till the Voyageur was heard from. When I took off the embargo, it went in an hour."
"How much?" asked Thorpe. "How many pounds?"
"Roughly speaking, twelve tons! About two pounds a person, spread over all Dawson! It sold at noon yesterday. The city's been on short rations for a fortnight, and they ate it in one meal. Understand? They imagined the Voyageur was at Indian River, eighteen miles away, and due before supper. I might as well confess that I ate two pounds for dinner myself. You can eat a pretty good meal after being on diet for two weeks. But I didn't eat any supper last night, and I haven't eaten any breakfast this morning."
"Neither have we eaten any breakfast," informed Gayle. "And we've bolted only a few handfuls of food in thirty hours. We made a race to reach you before Ryan and the rest, but they had the faster craft."
"Yes, and Dawsonites were just ready to jump for grub as fish jump for flies," enlightened Tru. "I feel pretty bad, Gayle, over the mistake I made. I certainly should have exercised some caution till I saw the smoke of your boat. But the hungry crowd carried me off my feet. I believe I'll cry over it yet."
"No, don't you dare cry," admonished Gayle, hugging her close. "Nobody's reprimanding you. But with the knowledge of Ryan's guile that's burst on my conception I'll show you with all the kindness of a worshiping husband where you might have been a little more wide-awake. Where's our daybook, Tru?"
TRUDIS took down a thick, moose-skin covered, yellow-leaved volume from the order desk, and Gayle ran over the pages till he found what he sought.
"Tru," he requested, "would you mind using your pencil for a minute? You're quicker with it than I am. Just make a total of the stuff bought by Ryan and his friends this fall. Never mind the dates. The purchases run through the months of August and September. Just the amount of grub and the price."
Quickly Trudis ferreted through the daybook entries, tabulating the dealings of Ryan and his two friends. The farther she ferreted, the more formidable grew the tabulations. Many articles purchased over and over in small quantities by the three men at different periods without exciting comment at the time now grew into amazing bulk when added together. When Trudis finished, she held a paper list several sheets long, but the stark total worked out thus:
- 5,000 dozen eggs at 50 cents a dozen … $2,500
- 6,000 pounds of butter at 50 cents a pound … 3,000
- 4,000 pounds sugar at 10 cents a pound … 400
- 100 pounds of tea at$1 a pound … 100
- 400 50-lb. sacks of flour at $4 a sack … 1,600
- 100,000 pounds potatoes at 10 cents a pound … 10,000
- 150,000 pounds bacon at 30 cents a pound … 45,000
- Total … $62,600
"For the land's sake!" ejaculated Trudis, staring half-unbelieving at the figures. "Who would have imagined it? Sometimes the purchases of those three did seem to me pretty frequent throughout the summer, but I knew they had men working creek claims for them, and in the rush of business the thought never occurred to me again."
"Yes, and that's where you might have been more wide-awake, Tru," smiled Gayle. "If you'd ever stopped to figure when the thought struck you, you'd have scented the conspiracy. He's bought that stuff at summer prices, trickled it off unnoticed and cached it somewhere. Now Dawson's gripped in the fangs of famine, and he has a corner in grub. We'll hear from him on the jump!"
THEY heard far sooner than they expected. Thorpe, who was exploring the remote corners of the Arctic Circle store building in the hope of discovering some overlooked provisions, opened for better light the door of the storeroom at the back.
"Look here!" he cried excitedly. "Look here!"
Thinking he had unearthed a bag of something, they ran out, but Thorpe was pointing to a placard tacked on the outside of the storeroom door. It had been placed there by night, and in the dim morning light neither Trudis nor Gayle nor Cronin had noticed it.
The partners and Trudis stared at it. Cronin had Trudis's total of the daybook entries in his hand. He spread the paper on the door alongside the placard and compared them. The items were not in the same order, but the amounts tallied exactly. In bold scrawl the placard ran:
SELLING ON SOURDOUGH STEEPLE
- 150,000 pounds bacon at $2 a pound.
- 400-500-lb. sacks flour at $40 a sack.
- 100 pounds tea at at $5 a pound.
- 6,000 pounds butter at $8 a pound.
- 4,000 pounds sugar at $1 a pound.
- 100,000 pounds potatoes at $1 a pound.
- 5,000 dozen eggs at $10 a dozen.
By
Rooney Ryan.
Monte Marlin
Seattle Simons.
The partners had expected this tabulation of the goods, but the prices staggered them. Flour that Ryan had brought for four dollars a sack he was offering at forty dollars, bacon bought at thirty cents a pound at two dollars, eggs bought for fifty cents a dozen at ten dollars a dozen, and so forth throughout the list of foodstuffs. Cronin took Trudis's pencil, penciled in on the edge of the placard what the sellers would realize on each article and added up the whole.
"Five hundred and eighteen thousand five hundred dollars!" he gasped. "He paid sixty-two thousand six hundred, and he aims to clear four hundred and fifty-five thousand nine hundred. Nearly half a million dollars to be coined out of the hunger pangs of famished Dawson! But by the shade of Schwatka the hound ain't going to do it!"
WITH a swish of his fingers Cronin ripped the placard from top to bottom, threw the remnants in the snow and shook a wrathful fist at Sourdough Steeple sticking up like a needle among the rock cliffs across the mile-wide Yukon.
"He's waiting there for Dawson to come to him, eh?" Cronin ranted. "Well, it's coming all right, and it's coming on the rampage. Tru, you slip round to the other stores and spread the news. And just tell the C.D.C, A.C.C, N.A.T. & T., and N.C. people what the Voyageur hit. Then they can guess what sunk the Canadian and the Hannah. And Thorpe," turning to the youth, "you shuffle yourself too. Marshal your dogs as you would for the frozen-in Voyageur. In the name of the Arctic Circle Company solicitor buy up every handy team you can and take them and enough drivers to handle them across the ice to the foot of them cliffs. Also, take a big cask with you—one of them big ones there in the back yard."
"What's the cask for, Cronin?" asked Gayle as Thorpe and Tru sped out of the store on their respective missions.
"You know Sourdough Steeple, sticking up in an unscalable bowl of cliff with a gap hundreds of feet deep broken off in front and a stringer of rock bridging the gap?"
"Sure, and Ryan, Marlin, and Simons'll be intrenched with the range of the rock bridge down to a hair. I wouldn't want to be the man to cross it, and it's the only gateway to the Steeple."
"No, it ain't either. Don't you remember the hole in the bottom the bowl, what must have been an underground stream or something at one time?"
"Oh, yes! But a person could hardly worm through it, and besides, its entrance, or its outlet maybe, is under the Yukon's surface."
"That's what the cask is for. Thorpe'll cut a hole in the side of the cask to fit that underwater entrance, sink the cask tight again.st the rock, plaster it about with muck and bail the water out. There we'll have a dry and secret entrance to Ryan's citadel."
"But it'll be worse storming the citadel that way than by the causeway, and I tell you right now I plumb refuse to plug that underground passage with my dead body. I choose starving for my demise."
"Wait till you're asked, partner; wait till you're asked. No man'll be forced into the controversy against his will. Rather than have that, I'll call for volunteers. I don't think numbers'll be lacking. Look at the horde coming up the street already!"
Gayle looked out of the door on a main street packed from wall to wall with befurred humanity marching thousands strong. There had been little need for Trudis to enlarge in spreading the news. The snow avenues of the golden city were already full of men looking for the Voyageur's coming. All Trudis had had to do was to explain the plight of the steamer at that moment. The rest they surmised when they read Ryan's proclamation. For not only had the door of the Arctic Circle store been placarded but the doors of all the public buildings in the place and also the walls of private cabins. The wrath of the crowd was mighty. They had been on short rations for a fortnight with but one square meal in that time, the midday feast before the famine. Not a man of them had had a scrap of supper or a bite of breakfast. The gripe of their healthy stomachs was keen, and it would momentarily grow keener unless they could bring themselves to barter for food the food's weight in gold.
This they vowed they would never do, and they howled for the blood of Ryan and appealed to Hess and Outremont in front of the Arctic Circle store to lead them to swift action.
"Come on," they chanted in a chorus of appalling volume. "Come on, you Cronin and Gayle, and smoke out this skunk-souled renegade of a grub cornerer. Let our feet fertilize the earth with his trampled remains."
"Sure," grinned Cronin from the doorway. "Gayle and me was just figuring on enlisting your aid and going across to citadeled Rooney to blow the trump of Jericho before his walls. But we need dog teams to freight the stuff back. I've sent Thorpe to get them. I s'pose you fellows have no objections if he appropriates your outfits?"
"No, no, none at all!" they answered. "But whoever handles them'll have to be mighty careful. Our dogs is so clean famished that we've had to keep them stick tied. We've been staying our hunger with scraps for a whale of a while, and they haven't had a smell at all. They'll sure eat the hands and feet off careless drivers and swallow their heads for dessert."
"Oh, trust Thorpe to manage them! He's handled dogs that hadn't eaten but two meals in three weeks. And all the drivers he gathers together'll be old-timers like himself. Savvy? Don't you worry about the huskies. All you got to worry about is the grub. Gayle, you lead the bunch down to the river bank and pick the soundest crossing—that path we used coming to shore. I forgot to give Thorpe explicit instructions about sinking yon cask. I'll have to sprint after him and tell him. I'll meet you down there in a minute."
AT the river bank the horde of Dawson men picked the spot where several ice jams had piled one on top of the other, forming a ridge of considerable height. Here was where the three partners had walked ashore from their boat. The ridge was quite solid when they disembarked, and it was momentarily freezing faster, cemented by the chill river water and the viscid mush ice. At once the men began to cross. Many of them were armed with rifles, and these they held crosswise in their hands to save themselves should they plunge through. Those who carried no rifles broke themselves poles from the scrub timber along the shore, and all worked over safely in single file. Cronin Hess heeled them across, and when he reached the other side he saw, a mile behind, the first of the dog teams in charge of Thorpe loping in their trail off the farther shore.
"Thorpe's no slouch," he told the crowd. "And I tell you we don't want to be slouches either. Climb up thundering fast."
Up the river wall of rock they swarmed to the flat plateau that crowned it. From its top they could mark Thorpe's string of dog teams, one hundred in all, bolting across the ice and disappearing at the base of the shore cliffs.
Beyond the plateau the men stood on a curving ridge of rock rose one hundred feet in air. It formed a natural and gigantic amphitheatre from whose pitted center sheered the thousand-foot spire of granite called the Sourdough Steeple. In ancient time the place had been an immense grotto pierced by a subterranean stream, but volcanic upheavals had crumbled the cavern roof, sealed the source of the stream and split an immense chasm five hundred feet deep in the floor of the plateau, a chasm bridged from Sourdough Steeple by a girder of granite.
This entrance to the amphitheatre the crowd expected Ryan to be guarding, but as they surged over the face of the plateau, they saw that he had gone one better than guarding. The girder blown up by dynamite or other heavy explosive, reposed, a pulverized mass at the bottom of the chasm. Ryan himself, a rifle across his arm, sat smoking on the precipice edge. Marlin, with a rifle on his knees, perched upon the stone grub cache at the foot of Sourdough Steeple; while, although the guarding of the opening of the subterranean passage seemed almost a superfluity since its other end was in the Yukon River, Simons sat sentinel-like with his legs in the hole.
"‘Day, men!" greeted Ryan laconically. "What's your order?"
A ROAR like that of a rising tempest rumbled from the throng. A doze rifles were outflung, and but for the ex-marshal's sanity Ryan would have bee riddled carrion in the depths of the abyss. Cronin cast himself in front the weapons.
"Hold on, boys," he commanded "You pull trigger and you knot your own noose. Remember Inspector Strickland and his mounted men over in the barracks yonder. Put the guns down That play won't fill your stomachs anyway. Look at Marlin intrenched behind the stone cache and Simons like a badger in his hole. You plug Ryan and you have to reckon with them still You'll reckon a long while. You'll reckon till your caved-in stomachs hit your spines, and they'll sit tight an gorge and gaze on your emaciated mains. Let your hammers down gent—so! You leave eruptions to me. The tongue is mightier than the Winchester if you know its wiles, and I've sure practiced some. Stand back from the precipice while I hold oration with the low-caste Eskimo."
Hess shoved back reckless ones in the front whose rashness seemed liable to lead to calamity, and faced Ryan across the gulf.
"Now you Shylock-hearted heathen, you coiner of women's and children's' hunger cries and good men's stomach agonies into miserly gold, I'll give you our order: One hundred and fifty thousand pounds of bacon, four hundred sacks of flour, one hundred pounds tea, six thousand pounds of butter, four thousand pounds of sugar, one hundred thousand pounds of potatoes, and five thousand dozen of eggs for nothing. Get me? You fill it or we'll fill ourselves."
"Like blazes I will," scoffed Ryan "What do you take me for?"
"For something fifty degrees worse than a cannibal ghoul gnawing on dead men's bones! Are you filling that order?"
"Not by a disastrous sight!"
"Think again. We're going to bridge."
"Go on and bridge. We'll perforate the first man as drops a stick."
"Gayle," requested Cronin, turning to Outremont, "yonder's storm-feller spruce on the edge of the plateau. The chasm's fifty feet wide. Two sixty foot trunks'll do it. Take the men and get them."
A CLAMOR of approbation from the crowd backed Hess's ultimatum. Hundreds with Outremont at their head rushed oft to the storm-felled timber and bore back like staffs in their hands two long, straight trees. They laid then down side by side, the butts within a few feet of the precipice edge, and walking under them from tips to butts upended them and poised them there awaiting Cronin's signal for the fall.
As they poised thus, Ryan raised his rifle.
"Don't think it bluff," he warned "You drop and I'll shoot. I'm dead within my rights. Inspector Strickland and his barracksful of mounted men ain't got any Indian sign on me. This ground I'm cached on is staked in my own name. I tended to that in the beginning. I've warned you not to trespass, and the minute you do I'll start pumping self-defense. You may get me, but you'll not get the grub. Monte and Seattle's behind ramparts, and they'll pick you off as fast as you wall them trees."
Tensely the crowd waited, eyes upon Hess's upraised hand for the signal to bridge, rifles sneaking surreptitiously to the level of their hips. For three full minutes Cronin waited, gazing not at Ryan but past Ryan at Seattle Simons, and in another second there happened what he waited for. Seattle suddenly uttered a violent shriek. Legs fang-torn and dripping blood, he sprang into the air from the hole wherein he had been crouching. After him like a missile from the hole bounded a huge, umbrella-ribbed, hunger-maddened husky, and after the first husky bounded another and another and another. Swiftly the earth vomited huskies in a perpetual gush, huskies crazy with the smell of Seattle's blood and the scent of the tons of food cached in the rocky amphitheatre.
"There's a living chain of huskies all the way down that passage clean to the Yukon's bank," grinned Hess. "Bringing the dogs across in harness was only a ruse to fool Ryan."
At Seattle's shriek Rooney had whirled round. In a rage he whirled back again. He fired once, wildly, across the chasm, the bullet whacking into the upstanding spruce trees, before springing away in a futile attempt to help Seattle dam the stream of savage beasts. Monte Marlin rushed from the cache to their aid at the same time, but the three might as well have attempted to check the Yukon's ice run in spring. In an overpowering geyser the wolf dogs spouted forth, eyes on fire, fangs agleam and slaver driveling from their famished mouths, and the half dozen that wilted in their air springs from the rifle volley were torn to pieces and bolted almost before they touched the snow. The rest were upon Ryan, Marlin, and Simons, slashing their Mackinaw trousers and German socks and splintering with their strong jaws the rifle butts that clubbed them.
BACKWARD yard by yard the trio retreated, now stemming no offensive onrush but battling desperately in withdrawal to the safety of Sourdough Steeple. Within ten feet of the base of the rock they flung their weapons in the face of the wolf-dog horde and flung themselves upon the rock needle, clutching, clambering, clawing a way up with their hands while kicking off the animals that clung to their feet. Ten hundred feet up they went till they found vantage in the niches near the top of the granite spire, and there they clung, sobbing for breath and gazing down with white faces upon the horde of semi-wolves hurling themselves at the rock slope in an essay of climbing and tearing furiously at the stones of the food cache at the base.
"Corner grub, will you?" Hess roared at them. "Now you know what the ancient baronial geezer who cornered corn and was eaten by rats felt like when the rat swarm jumped him."
HE dropped the hand he had held upraised throughout the wolf dogs' charge. "Hustle, boys," he exhorted. "Bridge her sudden or the brutes'll rip that cache stone from stone."
The spruce trees crashed down. The army of men poured across them, thousands strong, and savagely the wolf dogs turned at their coming. But now the fortunes of war were reversed. The dogs, outnumbered ten to one, were pressed, kicked and beaten away from the food cache. A double wall of human bodies was made from the cache to the bridge and through this neutral zone the remainder of the men carried forth the grub bags as through a picketed lane and piled them on the farther side of the chasm.
Then, leaving the dogs still besieging the rock needle and howling about the emptied cache, the men recrossed the chasm, tumbled the bridging spruce trees to the bottom and went back to feast in Dawson City.
For two full days they feasted, and those two full days, ere the chasm was rebridged and the huskies lured away with strips of succulent bacon, Ryan, Marlin, and Simons remained on Sourdough Steeple.
Perched a thousand feet in air, by day gray bumps against the slaty Arctic sky, by night black blots against the phosphorescent aurora and the glinting stars, with nothing but grim-clutched hand and foot holds between them and the fangs of famine below, they expiated their notorious crime.