A thousand deaths by Jack London

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