A thousand deaths by Jack London

rather, men who had been out on trail all night, were vociferating

their opinions concerning the utter and loathsome worthlessness of

Eldorado Creek. He grew frightened, felt in his pocket, and found

the deed to 24 ELDORADO.

Ten minutes later Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell were roused

from their blankets by a wild-eyed Swede that strove to force upon

them an ink-scrawled and very blotty piece of paper.

“Ay tank Ay take my money back,” he gibbered. “Ay tank Ay take my

money back.”

Tears were in his eyes and throat. They ran down his cheeks as he

knelt before them and pleaded and implored. But Bill and Kink did

not laugh. They might have been harder hearted.

“First time I ever hear a man squeal over a minin’ deal,” Bill

said. “An’ I make free to say ’tis too onusual for me to savvy.”

“Same here,” Kink Mitchell remarked. “Minin’ deals is like horse-

tradin’.”

They were honest in their wonderment. They could not conceive of

themselves raising a wail over a business transaction, so they

could not understand it in another man.

“The poor, ornery chechaquo,” murmured Hootchinoo Bill, as they

A Hyperborean Brew

45

watched the sorrowing Swede disappear up the trail.

“But this ain’t Too Much Gold,” Kink Mitchell said cheerfully.

And ere the day was out they purchased flour and bacon at

exorbitant prices with Ans Handerson’s dust and crossed over the

divide in the direction of the creeks that lie between Klondike and

Indian River.

Three months later they came back over the divide in the midst of a

snow-storm and dropped down the trail to 24 ELDORADO. It merely

chanced that the trail led them that way. They were not looking

for the claim. Nor could they see much through the driving white

till they set foot upon the claim itself. And then the air

lightened, and they beheld a dump, capped by a windlass that a man

was turning. They saw him draw a bucket of gravel from the hole

and tilt it on the edge of the dump. Likewise they saw another,

man, strangely familiar, filling a pan with the fresh gravel. His

hands were large; his hair wets pale yellow. But before they

reached him, he turned with the pan and fled toward a cabin. He

wore no hat, and the snow falling down his neck accounted for his

haste. Bill and Kink ran after him, and came upon him in the

cabin, kneeling by the stove and washing the pan of gravel in a tub

of water.

He was too deeply engaged to notice more than that somebody had

entered the cabin. They stood at his shoulder and looked on. He

imparted to the pan a deft circular motion, pausing once or twice

to rake out the larger particles of gravel with his fingers. The

water was muddy, and, with the pan buried in it, they could see

nothing of its contents. Suddenly he lifted the pan clear and sent

the water out of it with a flirt. A mass of yellow, like butter in

a churn, showed across the bottom.

Hootchinoo Bill swallowed. Never in his life had he dreamed of so

rich a test-pan.

“Kind of thick, my friend,” he said huskily. “How much might you

reckon that-all to be?”

Ans Handerson did not look up as he replied, “Ay tank fafty

ounces.”

“You must be scrumptious rich, then, eh?”

Still Ans Handerson kept his head down, absorbed in putting in the

fine touches which wash out the last particles of dross, though he

answered, “Ay tank Ay ban wort’ five hundred t’ousand dollar.”

“Gosh!” said Hootchinoo Bill, and he said it reverently.

“Yes, Bill, gosh!” said Kink Mitchell; and they went out softly and

closed the door.

THE ONE THOUSAND DOZEN

A Hyperborean Brew

46

David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man

of the one idea. Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North

rang on his ear, he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his

energy to its achievement. He figured briefly and to the point,

and the adventure became iridescent-hued, splendid. That eggs

would sell at Dawson for five dollars a dozen was a safe working

premise. Whence it was incontrovertible that one thousand dozen

would bring, in the Golden Metropolis, five thousand dollars.

On the other hand, expense was to be considered, and he considered

it well, for he was a careful man, keenly practical, with a hard

head and a heart that imagination never warmed. At fifteen cents a

dozen, the initial cost of his thousand dozen would be one hundred

and fifty dollars, a mere bagatelle in face of the enormous profit.

And suppose, just suppose, to be wildly extravagant for once, that

transportation for himself and eggs should run up eight hundred and

fifty more; he would still have four thousand clear cash and clean

when the last egg was disposed of and the last dust had rippled

into his sack

“You see, Alma,”–he figured it over with his wife, the cosy

dining-room submerged in a sea of maps, government surveys, guide-

books, and Alaskan itineraries,–“you see, expenses don’t really

begin till you make Dyea–fifty dollars’ll cover it with a first-

class passage thrown in. Now from Dyea to Lake Linderman, Indian

packers take your goods over for twelve cents a pound, twelve

dollars a hundred, or one hundred and twenty dollars a thousand.

Say I have fifteen hundred pounds, it’ll cost one hundred and

eighty dollars–call it two hundred and be safe. I am creditably

informed by a Klondiker just come out that I can buy a boat for

three hundred. But the same man says I’m sure to get a couple of

passengers for one hundred and fifty each, which will give me the

boat for nothing, and, further, they can help me manage it. And .

. . that’s all; I put my eggs ashore from the boat at Dawson. Now

let me see how much is that?”

“Fifty dollars from San Francisco to Dyea, two hundred from Dyea to

Linderman, passengers pay for the boat–two hundred and fifty all

told,” she summed up swiftly.

“And a hundred for my clothes and personal outfit,” he went on

happily; “that leaves a margin of five hundred for emergencies.

And what possible emergencies can arise?”

Alma shrugged her shoulders and elevated her brows. If that vast

Northland was capable of swallowing up a man and a thousand dozen

eggs, surely there was room and to spare for whatever else he might

happen to possess. So she thought, but she said nothing. She knew

David Rasmunsen too well to say anything.

“Doubling the time because of chance delays, I should make the trip

in two months. Think of it, Alma! Four thousand in two months!

Beats the paltry hundred a month I’m getting now. Why, we’ll build

further out where we’ll have more space, gas in every room, and a

A Hyperborean Brew

47

view, and the rent of the cottage’ll pay taxes, insurance, and

water, and leave something over. And then there’s always the

chance of my striking it and coming out a millionaire. Now tell

me, Alma, don’t you think I’m very moderate?”

And Alma could hardly think otherwise. Besides, had not her own

cousin,–though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black

sheep, the harum-scarum, the ne’er-do-well,–had not he come down

out of that weird North country with a hundred thousand in yellow

dust, to say nothing of a half-ownership in the hole from which it

came?

David Rasmunsen’s grocer was surprised when he found him weighing

eggs in the scales at the end of the counter, and Rasmunsen himself

was more surprised when he found that a dozen eggs weighed a pound

and a half–fifteen hundred pounds for his thousand dozen! There

would be no weight left for his clothes, blankets, and cooking

utensils, to say nothing of the grub he must necessarily consume by

the way. His calculations were all thrown out, and he was just

proceeding to recast them when he hit upon the idea of weighing

small eggs. “For whether they be large or small, a dozen eggs is a

dozen eggs,” he observed sagely to himself; and a dozen small ones

he found to weigh but a pound and a quarter. Thereat the city of

San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyed emissaries, and

commission houses and dairy associations were startled by a sudden

demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to the dozen.

Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars,

arranged for his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own

people, threw up his job, and started North. To keep within his

schedule he compromised on a second-class passage, which, because

of the rush, was worse than steerage; and in the late summer, a

pale and wabbly man, he disembarked with his eggs on the Dyea

beach. But it did not take him long to recover his land legs and

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