crawled in beside me under the blankets, I ventured a question.
“That woman’s crazy, isn’t she?”
“Crazy as a loon,” he answered.
LOST FACE
48
And before I could formulate my next question, Lon McFane, I swear, was
off to sleep. He always went to sleep that way–just crawled into the
blankets, closed his eyes, and was off, a demure little heavy breathing
rising on the air. Lon never snored.
And in the morning it was quick breakfast, feed the dogs, load the sled,
and hit the trail. We said good-by as we pulled out, and the woman stood
in the doorway and watched us off. I carried the vision of her unearthly
beauty away with me, just under my eyelids, and all I had to do, any time,
was to close them and see her again. The way was unbroken, Surprise
Lake being far off the travelled trails, and Lon and I took turn about at
beating down the feathery snow with our big, webbed shoes so that the
dogs could travel. “But you said you expected to meet Dave Walsh at the
cabin,” trembled on the tip of my tongue a score of times. I did not utter it.
I would wait until we knocked off in the middle of the day. And when the
middle of the day came, we went right on, for, as Lon explained, there was
a camp of moose hunters at the forks of the Teelee, and we could make
there by dark. But we didn’t make there by dark, for Bright, the lead-dog,
broke his shoulder-blade, and we lost an hour over him before we shot
him. Then, crossing a timber jam on the frozen bed of the Teelee, the sled
suffered a wrenching capsize, and it was a case of make camp and repair
the runner. I cooked supper and fed the dogs while Lon made the repairs,
and together we got in the night’s supply of ice and firewood. Then we sat
on our blankets, our moccasins steaming on upended sticks before the fire,
and had our evening smoke.
“You didn’t know her?” Lon queried suddenly. I shook my head.
“You noticed the color of her hair and eyes and her complexion, well,
that’s where she got her name–she was like the first warm glow of a
golden sunrise. She was called Flush of Gold. Ever heard of her?”
Somewhere I had a confused and misty remembrance of having heard the
name, yet it meant nothing to me. “Flush of Gold,” I repeated; “sounds like
the name of a dance-house girl.” Lon shook his head. “No, she was a good
woman, at least in that sense, though she sinned greatly just the same.”
“But why do you speak always of her in the past tense, as though she were
dead?”
“Because of the darkness on her soul that is the same as the darkness of
death. The Flush of Gold that I knew, that Dawson knew, and that Forty
Mile knew before that, is dead. That dumb, lunatic creature we saw last
night was not Flush of Gold.”
“And Dave?” I queried.
LOST FACE
49
“He built that cabin,” Lon answered. “He built it for her . . . and for
himself. He is dead. She is waiting for him there. She half believes he is
not dead. But who can know the whim of a crazed mind? Maybe she
wholly believes he is not dead. At any rate, she waits for him there in the
cabin he built. Who would rouse the dead? Then who would rouse the
living that are dead? Not I, and that is why I let on to expect to meet Dave
Walsh there last night. I’ll bet a stack that I’d a been more surprised than
she if I had met him there last night.”
“I do not understand,” I said. “Begin at the beginning, as a white man
should, and tell me the whole tale.”
And Lon began. “Victor Chauvet was an old Frenchman–born in the south
of France. He came to California in the days of gold. He was a pioneer. He
found no gold, but, instead, became a maker of bottled sunshine–in short,
a grape-grower and wine-maker. Also, he followed gold excitements. That
is what brought him to Alaska in the early days, and over the Chilcoot and
down the Yukon long before the Carmack strike. The old town site of Ten
Mile was Chauvet’s. He carried the first mail into Arctic City. He staked
those coal-mines on the Porcupine a dozen years ago. He grubstaked
Loftus into the Nippennuck Country. Now it happened that Victor
Chauvet was a good Catholic, loving two things in this world, wine and
woman. Wine of all kinds he loved, but of woman, only one, and she was
the mother of Marie Chauvet.”
Here I groaned aloud, having meditated beyond self- control over the fact
that I paid this man two hundred and fifty dollars a month.
“What’s the matter now?” he demanded.
“Matter?” I complained. “I thought you were telling the story of Flush of
Gold. I don’ want a biography of your old French winebibber.”
Lon calmly lighted his pipe, took one good puff, then put the pipe aside.
“And you asked me to begin at the beginning,” he said.
“Yes,” said I; “the beginning.”
“And the beginning of Flush of Gold is the old French winebibber, for he
was the father of Marie Chauvet, and Marie Chauvet was the Flush of
Gold. What more do you want ? Victor Chauvet never had much luck to
speak of. He managed to live, and to get along, and to take good care of
Marie, who resembled the one woman he had loved. He took very good
care of her. Flush of Gold was the pet name he gave her. Flush of Gold
Creek was named after her–Flush of Gold town site, too. The old man was
great on town sites, only he never landed them.
LOST FACE
50
“Now, honestly,” Lon said, with one of his lightning changes, “you’ve seen
her, what do you think of her–of her looks, I mean? How does she strike
your beauty sense?”
“She is remarkably beautiful,” I said. “I never saw anything like her in my
life. In spite of the fact, last night, that I guessed she was mad, I could not
keep my eyes off of her. It wasn’t curiosity. It was wonder, sheer wonder,
she was so strangely beautiful.”
“She was more strangely beautiful before the darkness fell upon her,” Lon
said softly. “She was truly the Flush of Gold. She turned all men’s hearts .
. . and heads. She recalls, with an effort, that I once won a canoe race at
Dawson–I, who once loved her, and was told by her of her love for me. It
was her beauty that made all men love her. She’d a got the apple from
Paris, on application, and there wouldn’t have been any Trojan War, and to
top it off she’d have thrown Paris down. And now she lives in darkness,
and she who was always fickle, for the first time is constant–and constant
to a shade, to a dead man she does not realize is dead.
“And this is the way it was. You remember what I said last night of Dave
Walsh–Big Dave Walsh? He was all that I said, and more, many times
more. He came into this country in the late eighties–that’s a pioneer for
you. He was twenty years old then. He was a young bull. When he was
twenty-five he could lift clear of the ground thirteen fifty-pound sacks of
flour. At first, each fall of the year, famine drove him out. It was a lone
land in those days. No river steamboats, no grub, nothing but salmon
bellies and rabbit tracks. But after famine chased him out three years, he
said he’d had enough of being chased; and the next year he stayed. He
lived on straight meat when he was lucky enough to get it; he ate eleven
dogs that winter; but he stayed. And the next winter he stayed, and the
next. He never did leave the country again. He was a bull, a great bull. He
could kill the strongest man in the country with hard work. He could
outpack a Chilcat Indian, he could outpaddle a Stick, and he could travel
all day with wet feet when the thermometer registered fifty below zero,
and that’s going some, I tell you, for vitality. You’d freeze your feet at
twenty-five below if you wet them and tried to keep on.
“Dave Walsh was a bull for strength. And yet he was soft and easynatured.
Anybody could do him, the latest short-horn in camp could lie his
last dollar out of him. ‘But it doesn’t worry me,’ he had a way of laughing
off his softness; ‘it doesn’t keep me awake nights.’ Now don’t get the idea
that he had no backbone. You remember about the bear he went after with