“Where is the girl?” the Pole demanded. “Bring her up to the sleds before
the test goes on.”
When this had been carried out, Subienkow lay down in the snow, resting
his head on the log like a tired child about to sleep. He had lived so many
dreary years that he was indeed tired.
“I laugh at you and your strength, O Makamuk,” he said. “Strike, and
strike hard.”
He lifted his hand. Makamuk swung the axe, a broadaxe for the squaring
of logs. The bright steel flashed through the frosty air, poised for a
perceptible instant above Makamuk’s head, then descended upon
Subienkow’s bare neck. Clear through flesh and bone it cut its way, biting
deeply into the log beneath. The amazed savages saw the head bounce a
yard away from the blood-spouting trunk.
There was a great bewilderment and silence, while slowly it began to
dawn in their minds that there had been no medicine. The fur-thief had
outwitted them. Alone, of all their prisoners, he had escaped the torture.
That had been the stake for which he played. A great roar of laughter went
up. Makamuk bowed his head in shame. The fur-thief had fooled him. He
had lost face before all his people. Still they continued to roar out their
laughter. Makamuk turned, and with bowed head stalked away. He knew
that thenceforth he would be no longer known as Makamuk. He would be
Lost Face; the record of his shame would be with him until he died; and
whenever the tribes gathered in the spring for the salmon, or in the
summer for the trading, the story would pass back and forth across the
camp-fires of how the fur-thief died peaceably, at a single stroke, by the
hand of Lost Face.
“Who was Lost Face?” he could hear, in anticipation, some insolent young
buck demand. “Oh, Lost Face,” would be the answer, “he who once was
Makamuk in the days before he cut off the fur-thief’s head.”
LOST FACE
14
TRUST
ALL lines had been cast off, and the Seattle No. 4 was pulling slowly out
from the shore. Her decks were piled high with freight and baggage, and
swarmed with a heterogeneous company of Indians, dogs, and dogmushers,
prospectors, traders, and homeward-bound gold- seekers. A
goodly portion of Dawson was lined up on the bank, saying good-by. As
the gang-plank came in and the steamer nosed into the stream, the clamor
of farewell became deafening. Also, in that eleventh moment, everybody
began to remember final farewell messages and to shout them back and
forth across the widening stretch of water. Louis Bondell, curling his
yellow mustache with one hand and languidly waving the other hand to his
friends on shore, suddenly remembered something and sprang to the rail.
“Oh, Fred!” he bawled. “Oh, Fred!”
The “Fred” desired thrust a strapping pair of shoulders through the
forefront of the crowd on the bank and tried to catch Louis Bondell’s
message. The latter grew red in the face with vain vociferation. Still the
water widened between steamboat and shore.
“Hey, you, Captain Scott!” he yelled at the pilot-house. “Stop the boat!”
The gongs clanged, and the big stern wheel reversed, then stopped. All
hands on steamboat and on bank took advantage of this respite to
exchange final, new, and imperative farewells. More futile than ever was
Louis Bondell’s effort to make himself heard. The Seattle No. 4 lost way
and drifted down-stream, and Captain Scott had to go ahead and reverse a
second time. His head disappeared inside the pilot-house, coming into
view a moment later behind a big megaphone.
Now Captain Scott had a remarkable voice, and the “Shut up!” he
launched at the crowd on deck and on shore could have been heard at the
top of Moosehide Mountain and as far as Klondike City. This official
remonstrance from the pilot-house spread a film of silence over the tumult.
“Now, what do you want to say?” Captain Scott demanded.
“Tell Fred Churchill–he’s on the bank there–tell him to go to Macdonald.
It’s in his safe–a small gripsack of mine. Tell him to get it and bring it out
when he comes.”
LOST FACE
15
In the silence Captain Scott bellowed the message ashore through the
megaphone:–
“You, Fred Churchill, go to Macdonald–in his safe–small gripsac–
belongs to Louis Bondell– important! Bring it out when you come! Got
it?”
Churchill waved his hand in token that he had got it. In truth, had
Macdonald, half a mile away, opened his window, he’d have got it, too.
The tumult of farewell rose again, the gongs clanged, and the Seattle No. 4
went ahead, swung out into the stream, turned on her heel, and headed
down the Yukon, Bondell and Churchill waving farewell and mutual
affection to the last.
That was in midsummer. In the fall of the year, the W. H. Willis started up
the Yukon with two hundred homeward-bound pilgrims on board. Among
them was Churchill. In his state-room, in the middle of a clothes-bag, was
Louis Bondell’s grip. It was a small, stout leather affair, and its weight of
forty pounds always made Churchill nervous when he wandered too far
from it. The man in the adjoining state-room had a treasure of gold-dust
hidden similarly in a clothes-bag, and the pair of them ultimately arranged
to stand watch and watch. While one went down to eat, the other kept an
eye on the two state-room doors. When Churchill wanted to take a hand at
whist, the other man mounted guard, and when the other man wanted to
relax his soul, Churchill read four-months’-old newspapers on a camp
stool between the two doors.
There were signs of an early winter, and the question that was discussed
from dawn till dark, and far into the dark, was whether they would get out
before the freeze-up or be compelled to abandon the steamboat and tramp
out over the ice. There were irritating delays. Twice the engines broke
down and had to be tinkered up, and each time there were snow flurries to
warn them of the imminence of winter. Nine times the W. H. Willis
essayed to ascend the Five-Finger Rapids with her impaired machinery,
and when she succeeded, she was four days behind her very liberal
schedule. The question that then arose was whether or not the steamboat
Flora would wait for her above the Box Canon. The stretch of water
between the head of the Box Canon and the foot of the White Horse
Rapids was unnavigable for steamboats, and passengers were transshipped
at that point, walking around the rapids from one steamboat to the other.
There were no telephones in the country, hence no way of informing the
waiting Flora that the Willis was four days late, but coming.
When the W. H. Willis pulled into White Horse, it was learned that the
Flora had waited three days over the limit, and had departed only a few
hours before. Also, it was learned that she would tie up at Tagish Post till
LOST FACE
16
nine o’clock, Sunday morning. It was then four o’clock, Saturday
afternoon. The pilgrims called a meeting. On board was a large
Peterborough canoe, consigned to the police post at the head of Lake
Bennett. They agreed to be responsible for it and to deliver it. Next, they
called for volunteers. Two men were needed to make a race for the Flora.
A score of men volunteered on the instant. Among them was Churchill,
such being his nature that he volunteered before he thought of Bondell’s
gripsack. When this thought came to him, he began to hope that he would
not be selected; but a man who had made a name as captain of a college
foot-ball eleven, as a president of an athletic club, as a dog-musher and a
stampeder in the Yukon, and, moreover, who possessed such shoulders as
he, had no right to avoid the honor. It was thrust upon him and upon a
gigantic German, Nick Antonsen.
While a crowd of the pilgrims, the canoe on their shoulders, started on a
trot over the portage, Churchill ran to his state-room. He turned the
contents of the clothes-bag on the floor and caught up the grip, with the
intention of intrusting it to the man next door. Then the thought smote him
that it was not his grip, and that he had no right to let it out of his own
possession. So he dashed ashore with it and ran up the portage, changing it
often from one hand to the other, and wondering if it really did not weigh
more than forty pounds.
It was half-past four in the afternoon when the two men started. The
current of the Thirty Mile River was so strong that rarely could they use
the paddles. It was out on one bank with a tow-line over the shoulders,
stumbling over the rocks, forcing a way through the underbrush, slipping
at times and falling into the water, wading often up to the knees and waist;