had insisted that the lower centre-stake be driven first, next the
south-eastern; and so on around the four sides, including the upper
centre-stake on the way.
Smoke drove in his stake and was away with the leading dozen. Fires
had been lighted at the corners, and by each fire stood a policeman,
list in hand, checking off the names of the runners. A man was
supposed to call out his name and show his face. There was to be no
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staking by proxy while the real racer was off and away down the
creek.
At the first corner, beside Smoke’s stake, Von Schroeder placed his.
The mallets struck at the same instant. As they hammered, more
arrived from behind and with such impetuosity as to get in one
another’s way and cause jostling and shoving. Squirming through the
press and calling his name to the policeman, Smoke saw the Baron,
struck in collision by one of the rushers, hurled clean off his feet
into the snow. But Smoke did not wait. Others were still ahead of
him. By the light of the vanishing fire he was certain that he saw
the back, hugely looming, of Big Olaf, and at the south-western
corner Big Olaf and he drove their stakes side by side.
It was no light work, this preliminary obstacle race. The
boundaries of the claim totalled nearly a mile, and most of it was
over the uneven surface of a snow-covered, niggerhead flat. All
about Smoke men tripped and fell, and several times he pitched
forward himself, jarringly, on hands and knees. Once, Big Olaf fell
so immediately in front of him as to bring him down on top.
The upper centre-stake was driven by the edge of the bank, and down
the bank the racers plunged, across the frozen creek-bed, and up the
other side. Here, as Smoke clambered, a hand gripped his ankle and
jerked him back. In the flickering light of a distant fire, it was
impossible to see who had played the trick. But Arizona Bill, who
had been treated similarly, rose to his feet and drove his fist with
a crunch into the offender’s face. Smoke saw and heard as he was
scrambling to his feet, but before he could make another lunge for
the bank a fist dropped him half-stunned into the snow. He
staggered up, located the man, half-swung a hook for his jaw, then
remembered Shorty’s warning and refrained. The next moment, struck
below the knees by a hurtling body, he went down again.
It was a foretaste of what would happen when the men reached their
sleds. Men were pouring over the other bank and piling into the
jam. They swarmed up the bank in bunches, and in bunches were
dragged back by their impatient fellows. More blows were struck,
curses rose from the panting chests of those who still had wind to
spare, and Smoke, curiously visioning the face of Joy Gastell, hoped
that the mallets would not be brought into play. Overthrown, trod
upon, groping in the snow for his lost stakes, he at last crawled
out of the crush and attacked the bank farther along. Others were
doing this, and it was his luck to have many men in advance of him
in the race for the northwestern corner.
Down to the fourth corner, he tripped midway and in the long
sprawling fall lost his remaining stake. For five minutes he groped
in the darkness before he found it, and all the time the panting
runners were passing him. From the last corner to the creek he
began overtaking men for whom the mile-run had been too much. In
the creek itself Bedlam had broken loose. A dozen sleds were piled
up and overturned, and nearly a hundred dogs were locked in combat.
Among them men struggled, tearing the tangled animals apart, or
beating them apart with clubs. In the fleeting glimpse he caught of
it, Smoke wondered if he had ever seen a Dore grotesquery to
compare.
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Leaping down the bank beyond the glutted passage, he gained the
hard-footing of the sled-trail and made better time. Here, in
packed harbours beside the narrow trail, sleds and men waited for
runners that were still behind. From the rear came the whine and
rush of dogs, and Smoke had barely time to leap aside into the deep
snow. A sled tore past, and he made out the man, kneeling and
shouting madly. Scarcely was it by when it stopped with a crash of
battle. The excited dogs of a harboured sled, resenting the passing
animals, had got out of hand and sprung upon them.
Smoke plunged around and by. He could see the green lantern of Von
Schroeder, and, just below it, the red flare that marked his own
team. Two men were guarding Schroeder’s dogs, with short clubs
interposed between them and the trail.
“Come on, you Smoke! Come on, you Smoke!” he could hear Shorty
calling anxiously.
“Coming!” he gasped.
By the red flare he could see the snow torn up and trampled, and
from the way his partner breathed he knew a battle had been fought.
He staggered to the sled, and, in a moment he was falling on it,
Shorty’s whip snapped as he yelled: “Mush! you devils! Mush!”
The dogs sprang into the breast-bands, and the sled jerked abruptly
ahead. They were big animals–Hanson’s prize team of Hudson Bays–
and Smoke had selected them for the first stage, which included the
ten miles of Mono, the heavy-going of the cut-off across the flat at
the mouth, and the first ten miles of the Yukon stretch.
“How many are ahead?” he asked.
“You shut up an’ save your wind,” Shorty answered. “Hi! you brutes!
Hit her up! Hit her up!”
He was running behind the sled, towing on a short rope. Smoke could
not see him; nor could he see the sled on which he lay at full
length. The fires had been left in the rear, and they were tearing
through a wall of blackness as fast as the dogs could spring into
it. This blackness was almost sticky, so nearly did it take on the
seeming of substance.
Smoke felt the sled heel up on one runner as it rounded an invisible
curve, and from ahead came the snarls of beasts and the oaths of
men. This was known afterward as the Barnes-Slocum Jam. It was the
teams of these two men which first collided, and into it, at full
career, piled Smoke’s seven big fighters. Scarcely more than semi-
domesticated wolves, the excitement of that night on Mono Creek had
sent every dog fighting-mad. The Klondike dogs, driven without
reins, cannot be stopped except by voice, so that there was no
stopping this glut of struggle that heaped itself between the narrow
rims of the creek. From behind, sled after sled hurled into the
turmoil. Men who had their teams nearly extricated were overwhelmed
by fresh avalanches of dogs–each animal well-fed, well-rested, and
ripe for battle.
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“It’s knock down an’ drag out an’ plow through!” Shorty yelled in
his partner’s ear. “An’ watch out for your knuckles! You drag out
an’ let me do the punchin’!”
What happened in the next half hour Smoke never distinctly
remembered. At the end he emerged exhausted, sobbing for breath,
his jaw sore from a first-blow, his shoulder aching from the bruise
of a club, the blood running warmly down one leg from the rip of a
dog’s fangs, and both sleeves of his parka torn to shreds. As in a
dream, while the battle still raged behind, he helped Shorty
reharness the dogs. One, dying, they cut from the traces, and in
the darkness they felt their way to the repair of the disrupted
harnesses.
“Now you lie down an’ get your wind back,” Shorty commanded.
And through the darkness the dogs sped, with unabated strength, down
Mono Creek, across the long cut-off, and to the Yukon. Here, at the
junction with the main river-trail, somebody had lighted a fire, and
here Shorty said good bye. By the light of the fire, as the sled
leaped behind the flying dogs, Smoke caught another of the
unforgettable pictures of the North Land. It was of Shorty, swaying
and sinking down limply in the snow, yelling his parting
encouragement, one eye blackened and closed, knuckles bruised and
broken, and one arm, ripped and fang-torn, gushing forth a steady
stream of blood.
V.
“How many ahead?” Smoke asked, as he dropped his tired Hudson Bays
and sprang on the waiting sled at the first relay station.
“I counted eleven,” the man called after him, for he was already
away behind the leaping dogs.
Fifteen miles they were to carry him on the next stage, which would
fetch him to the mouth of White River. There were nine of them, but
they composed his weakest team. The twenty-five miles between White