A Hyperborean Brew
24
I am Memory and Torment–I am Town!
I am all that ever went with evening dress!”
The other man winced where he sat and dropped his head forward on
the table. Pentfield resumed the monotonous drumming with his
knuckles. A loud snap from the door attracted his attention. The
frost was creeping up the inside in a white sheet, and he began to
hum:-
“The flocks are folded, boughs are bare,
The salmon takes the sea;
And oh, my fair, would I somewhere
Might house my heart with thee.”
Silence fell and was not again broken till Billebedam arrived and
threw the dice box on the table.
“Um much cold,” he said. “Oleson um speak to me, um say um Yukon
freeze last night.”
“Hear that, old man!” Pentfield cried, slapping Hutchinson on the
shoulder. “Whoever wins can be hitting the trail for God’s country
this time tomorrow morning!”
He picked up the box, briskly rattling the dice.
“What’ll it be?”
“Straight poker dice,” Hutchinson answered. “Go on and roll them
out.”
Pentfield swept the dishes from the table with a crash and rolled
out the five dice. Both looked tragedy. The shake was without a
pair and five-spot high.
“A stiff!” Pentfield groaned.
After much deliberating Pentfield picked up all the five dice and
put them in the box.
“I’d shake to the five if I were you,” Hutchinson suggested.
“No, you wouldn’t, not when you see this,” Pentfield replied,
shaking out the dice.
Again they were without a pair, running this time in unbroken
sequence from two to six.
“A second stiff!” he groaned. “No use your shaking, Corry. You
can’t lose.”
The other man gathered up the dice without a word, rattled them,
rolled them out on the table with a flourish, and saw that he had
likewise shaken a six-high stiff.
A Hyperborean Brew
25
“Tied you, anyway, but I’ll have to do better than that,” he said,
gathering in four of them and shaking to the six. “And here’s what
beats you!”
But they rolled out deuce, tray, four, and five–a stiff still and
no better nor worse than Pentfield’s throw.
Hutchinson sighed.
“Couldn’t happen once in a million times,” said.
“Nor in a million lives,” Pentfield added, catching up the dice and
quickly throwing them out. Three fives appeared, and, after much
delay, he was rewarded by a fourth five on the second shake.
Hutchinson seemed to have lost his last hope.
But three sixes turned up on his first shake. A great doubt rose
in the other’s eyes, and hope returned into his. He had one more
shake. Another six and he would go over the ice to salt water and
the States.
He rattled the dice in the box, made as though to cast them,
hesitated, and continued rattle them.
“Go on! Go on! Don’t take all night about it!” Pentfield cried
sharply, bending his nails on the table, so tight was the clutch
with which he strove to control himself.
The dice rolled forth, an upturned six meeting their eyes. Both
men sat staring at it. There was a long silence. Hutchinson shot
a covert glance at his partner, who, still more covertly, caught
it, and pursed up his lips in an attempt to advertise his
unconcern.
Hutchinson laughed as he got up on his feet. It was a nervous,
apprehensive laugh. It was a case where it was more awkward to win
than lose. He walked over to his partner, who whirled upon him
fiercely:-
“Now you just shut up, Corry! I know all you’re going to say–that
you’d rather stay in and let me go, and all that; so don’t say it.
You’ve your own people in Detroit to see, and that’s enough.
Besides, you can do for me the very thing I expected to do if I
went out.”
“And that is–?”
Pentfield read the full question in his partner’s eyes, and
answered:-
“Yes, that very thing. You can bring her in to me. The only
difference will be a Dawson wedding instead of a San Franciscan
one.”
“But, man alike!” Corry Hutchinson objected “how under the sun can
I bring her in? We’re not exactly brother and sister, seeing that
A Hyperborean Brew
26
I have not even met her, and it wouldn’t be just the proper thing,
you know, for us to travel together. Of course, it would be all
right–you and I know that; but think of the looks of it, man!”
Pentfield swore under his breath, consigning the looks of it to a
less frigid region than Alaska.
“Now, if you’ll just listen and not get astride that high horse of
yours so blamed quick,” his partner went on, “you’ll see that the
only fair thing under the circumstances is for me to let you go out
this year. Next year is only a year away, and then I can take my
fling.”
Pentfield shook his head, though visibly swayed by the temptation.
“It won’t do, Corry, old man. I appreciate your kindness and all
that, but it won’t do. I’d be ashamed every time I thought of you
slaving away in here in my place.”
A thought seemed suddenly to strike him. Burrowing into his bunk
and disrupting it in his eagerness, he secured a writing-pad and
pencil, and sitting down at the table, began to write with
swiftness and certitude.
“Here,” he said, thrusting the scrawled letter into his partner’s
hand. “You just deliver that and everything’ll be all right.”
Hutchinson ran his eye over it and laid it down.
“How do you know the brother will be willing to make that beastly
trip in here?” he demanded.
”
Oh, he’ll do it for me–and for his sister,” Pentfield replied.
“You see, he’s tenderfoot, and I wouldn’t trust her with him alone.
But with you along it will be an easy trip and a safe one. As soon
as you get out, you’ll go to her and prepare her. Then you can
take your run east to your own people, and in the spring she and
her brother’ll be ready to start with you. You’ll like her, I
know, right from the jump; and from that, you’ll know her as soon
as you lay eyes on her.”
So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl’s
photograph pasted on the inside of the case. Corry Hutchinson
gazed at it with admiration welling up in his eyes.
“Mabel is her name,” Pentfield went on. “And it’s just as well you
should know how to find the house. Soon as you strike ‘Frisco,
take a cab, and just say, ‘Holmes’s place, Myrdon Avenue’–I doubt
if the Myrdon Avenue is necessary. The cabby’ll know where Judge
Holmes lives.
“And say,” Pentfield continued, after a pause, “it won’t be a bad
idea for you to get me a few little things which a–er–”
“A married man should have in his business,” Hutchinson blurted out
with a grin.
A Hyperborean Brew
27
Pentfield grinned back.
“Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and such
things. And you might get a good set of china. You know it’ll
come hard for her to settle down to this sort of thing. You can
freight them in by steamer around by Bering Sea. And, I say,
what’s the matter with a piano?”
Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily. His reluctance had
vanished, and he was warming up to his mission.
“By Jove! Lawrence,” he said at the conclusion of the council, as
they both rose to their feet, “I’ll bring back that girl of yours
in style. I’ll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all
that brother’ll have to do will be to see to her comfort and do for
her whatever I’ve forgotten. And I’ll forget damn little, I can
tell you.”
The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last
time and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the
frozen Yukon on his way to salt water and the world. Pentfield
went back to his Bonanza mine, which was many times more dreary
than before, and faced resolutely into the long winter. There was
work to be done, men to superintend, and operations to direct in
burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his heart was not in
the work. Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered logs of a
new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine. It was a
grand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms.
Each log was hand-hewed and squared–an expensive whim when the
axemen received a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing
could be too costly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live.
So he went about with the building of the cabin, singing, “And oh,
my fair, would I somewhere might house my heart with thee!” Also,
he had a calendar pinned on the wall above the table, and his first