Part 53

Tenderly they carried the gabbing creature down to the timber and laid him on a bed of boughs. His condition told the grim tale of his wanderings, crazed with hunger and hardship.

Heating water, they poured it into him, dressing his wounds with strips from their underclothes. Of stimulants they had none, but fed him the last pinch of flour, together with the final rasher of salt pork, although they knew that these things are not good for starving men. For many days they had traveled on less than quarter rations themselves.

"What will we do?"

"It ain't over twenty miles to the niggers'. He'll die before we can get help back. D'ye reckon we can carry him?"

It was not sympathy which prompted Crowley, for he sympathized with his boyish companion, whose sufferings it hurt him sorely to augment. It was not pity; he pitied himself, and his own deplorable condition; nor did mercy enter into his processes, for the man had mercilessly planned to kill him, and he likewise had nursed a bitter hatred against him, which misfortune could only dim. It was not these things which moved him, but a vaguer, wilder quality; an elemental, unspoken, indefinable feeling of brotherhood throughout the length of the North, teaching subtly, yet absolutely and without appeal, that no man shall be left in his extremity to the cruel harshness of this forbidding land.

"Carry him?" Buck cried. "No! You're crazy! What's the use? He'll die, anyhow--and so'll we if we don't get grub soon." Buck was new to the country, and he was a boy.

"No, he won't. He lived hard and he'll die hard, for he's a hellion--he is. We've got to pack him in!"

"By God! I won't risk my life for a corpse--'specially one like him." The lad broke out in hysterical panic, for he had lived on the raggedest edge of his nerve these many days. Now his every muscle was dead and numbed with pain. Only his mind was clear, caused by the effort to force movement into his limbs. When he stopped walking he fell into a half-slumber which was acutely painful. When he arose to redrive his weary body it became freakish, so that he fell or collided with trees. He was bloody and bruised and cut. Carry a dead man? It was madness, and, besides, he felt an utter giving away at every joint.

He was too tired to make his reasoning plain; his tongue was thick, and Crowley's brain too calloused to grasp argument, therefore he squatted beside the muttering creature and wept impotently. He was asleep, with tears in his stubbly beard, when his partner finished the rude litter, yet he took up his end of the burden, as Crowley knew he would.

"You'll kill us both, damn ye!" he groaned.

"Probably so, but we can't leave him to them things." The other nodded at the vampires perched observantly in the surrounding firs.

Then began their great trial and temptation. For hours on end the birds fluttered from tree to tree, always in sight and hoarsely complaining till the sick fancies of the men distorted them into foul, gibing creatures of the Pit screaming with devilish glee at their anguish. Blindly they staggered through the forest while the limbs reached forth to block them, thrusting sharp needles into their eyes or whipping back viciously. Vines writhed up their legs, straining to delay their march, and the dank moss curled ankle-deep, slyly tripping their dragging, swollen feet. Nature hindered them sullenly, with all her heart-breaking implacability. They reeled constantly under their burden and grew to hate the ragged-barked trees that smote them so cruelly and so roughly tore their flesh. Ofttimes they fell, rolling the maniac limply from his couch, but they dragged him back and strained forward to the hideous racket of his mumblings, which grew louder as his delirium increased. They were forced to tie him to the poles, but could not stop his ghastly shriekings. At every pause the dismal ravens croaked and leered evilly from the shadows, till Buck shuddered and hid his face while Crowley gnashed his teeth. From time to time other birds joined them in anticipation of the feast, till they were ringed about, and the sight of this ever-growing, grisly, clamorous flock of watchers became awful to the men. They felt the horny talons searching their flesh and the hungry beaks tearing at their eyeballs.

A dog-sled and birch-bark practice covering both banks of the Yukon for two hundred miles yielded Doc Lewis sufficient revenue to grub-stake a Swede. Thus he slept warm, kept his feet dry, and was still a miner. He did not believe in hardship, and eschewed stampedes. Yet when he had seen the last able-bodied man vanish from camp on the Skookum run he grew restless. He scoffed at fake excitements to Jarvis, the faro-dealer, who also forbore the trail by virtue of his calling, but he got no satisfaction. A fortnight later he rolled his blankets and journeyed toilsomely up the river valley.

"Better late than never," he thought.

Arriving at the empty shack of the negroes, he camped, only to awaken during the night to the roar of the torrent at his door. Having seen other mountain streams in the break-up, he waited philosophically, hunting ptarmigan among the firs back of the cabin.

He had lost track of the days when, down the gulch, in the morning light, he descried a strange party approaching.

Two men bore between them a stretcher made from their shirts. They crawled with dreadful slowness, resting every hundred feet. Moreover, they stumbled and staggered aimlessly through the niggerheads. As they drew near he sighted their faces, from which the teeth grinned in a grimace of torture and through which the cheek-bones seemed to penetrate.

He knew what the signs boded. For years he had ministered to these necessities, and no man had ever approached his success.

"It is the rape of the North they are doing," he sighed. "We ravage her stores, but she takes grim toll from all of us." He moved the hot water forward on the stove, cleared off the rude table, and laid out his instrument-case.

WHEN THE MAIL CAME IN

We didn't like Montague Prosser at first--he was too clean. He wore his virtue like a bath-robe, flapping it in our faces. It was Whitewater Kelly who undertook to mitigate him one day, but, being as the nuisance stood an even fathom high and had a double-action football motion about him, Whitewater's endeavors kind of broke through the ice and he languished around in his bunk the next week while we sat up nights and changed his bandages.

Yes, Monty was equally active at repartee or rough-house, and he knocked Whitewater out from under his cap, slick and clean, just the way you snap a playing-card out from under a coin, which phenomenon terminated our tendencies to scoff and carp.

Personally, I didn't care. If a man wants to wallow about in a disgusting daily debauch of cleanliness, it is his privilege. If he squanders the fleeting moments brushing teeth, cleaning fingernails, and such technicalities, it stands to reason he won't have much time left to attend to his work and at the same time cultivate the essentials of life like smoking, drinking, and the proper valuation of a three-card draw. But, as I say, it's up to him, and outsiders who don't see merit in such a system shouldn't try to bust up his game unless they've got good foot-work and a knockout punch.

It wasn't so much these physical refinements that riled us as the rarefied atmosphere of his general mental and moral altitudes. To me there's eloquence and sentiment and romance and spiritual uplift in a real, full-grown, black-whiskered cuss-word. It's a great help in a mountainous country. Profanity is like steam in a locomotive--takes more to run you up-hill than on the level, and inasmuch as there's only a few men on the level, a violent vocabulary is a necessity and appeals to me like a certificate of good character and general capability.

There wasn't a thing doing with Prosser in the idiom line, however. His moral make-up was like his body, big and sound and white and manicured, and although his talk, alongside of ours, listened like it was skimmed and seminaried, still when we got to know him we found that his verbal structures had vital organs and hair on their chests just like anybody else's, and at the same time had the advantage of being fit to send through the mails.

He had left a widowed mother and come north on the main chance, like the rest of us, only he originated farther east. What made the particular ten-strike with us was the pride he took in that same mother. He gloried in her and talked about her in that hushed and nervous way a man speaks about a real mother or a regular sweetheart. We men-folks liked him all the better for it. I say we men, for he was a "shine" with the women--all nine of them. The camp was fifteen hundred strong that winter, over and above which was the aforesaid galaxy of nine, stranded on their way up-river to a Dawson dance-hall. The Yukon froze up and they had to winter with us. Of course there were the three married ladies, too, living with their husbands back on the Birch Ridge, but we never saw them and they didn't count. The others went to work at Eckert's theater.

Monty would have been right popular at Eckert's--he was a handsome lad--but he couldn't see those people with a field-glass. They simply scandalized him to death.

"I love to dance," said he, one night, as we looked on, "and the music sends thrills through me, but I won't do it."