pots and pans were being gathered up, blankets rolled, and the men
staggering under the loads to the boat. Here, on the banks, Mrs.
Sayther waited till the luggage was made ship-shape and her nest
prepared.
“We line up to de head of de island,” Pierre explained to her
while running out the long tow rope. “Den we tak to das back
channel, where de water not queek, and I t’ink we mak good tam.”
A scuffling and pattering of feet in the last year’s dry grass
caught his quick ear, and he turned his head. The Indian girl,
circled by a bristling ring of wolf dogs, was coming toward them.
Tales of the Klondyke
26
Mrs. Sayther noted that the girl’s face, which had been apathetic
throughout the scene in the cabin, had now quickened into blazing
and wrathful life.
“What you do my man?” she demanded abruptly of Mrs. Sayther. “Him
lay on bunk, and him look bad all the time. I say, ‘What the
matter, Dave? You sick?’ But him no say nothing. After that him
say, ‘Good girl Winapie, go way. I be all right bimeby.’ What
you do my man, eh? I think you bad woman.”
Mrs. Sayther looked curiously at the barbarian woman who shared
the life of this man, while she departed alone in the darkness of
night.
“I think you bad woman,” Winapie repeated in the slow, methodical
way of one who gropes for strange words in an alien tongue. “I
think better you go way, no come no more. Eh? What you think? I
have one man. I Indian girl. You ‘Merican woman. You good to
see. You find plenty men. Your eyes blue like the sky. Your
skin so white, so soft.”
Coolly she thrust out a brown forefinger and pressed the soft
cheek of the other woman. And to the eternal credit of Karen
Sayther, she never flinched. Pierre hesitated and half stepped
forward; but she motioned him away, though her heart welled to him
with secret gratitude. “It’s all right, Pierre,” she said.
“Please go away.”
He stepped back respectfully out of earshot, where he stood
grumbling to himself and measuring the distance in springs.
“Um white, um soft, like baby.” Winapie touched the other cheek
and withdrew her hand. “Bimeby mosquito come. Skin get sore in
spot; um swell, oh, so big; um hurt, oh, so much. Plenty
mosquito; plenty spot. I think better you go now before mosquito
come. This way,” pointing down the stream, “you go St. Michael’s;
that way,” pointing up, “you go Dyea. Better you go Dyea. Good-
by.”
And that which Mrs. Sayther then did, caused Pierre to marvel
greatly. For she threw her arms around the Indian girl, kissed
her, and burst into tears.
“Be good to him,” she cried. “Be good to him.”
Then she slipped half down the face of the bank, called back
“Good-by,” and dropped into the boat amidships. Pierre followed
her and cast off. He shoved the steering oar into place and gave
the signal. Le Goire lifted an old French chanson; the men, like
a row of ghosts in the dim starlight, bent their backs to the tow
line; the steering oar cut the black current sharply, and the boat
swept out into the night.
Tales of the Klondyke
27
WHICH MAKE MEN REMEMBER
Fortune La Pearle crushed his way through the snow, sobbing,
straining, cursing his luck, Alaska, Nome, the cards, and the man
who had felt his knife. The hot blood was freezing on his hands,
and the scene yet bright in his eyes,–the man, clutching the
table and sinking slowly to the floor; the rolling counters and
the scattered deck; the swift shiver throughout the room, and the
pause; the game-keepers no longer calling, and the clatter of the
chips dying away; the startled faces; the infinite instant of
silence; and then the great blood-roar and the tide of vengeance
which lapped his heels and turned the town mad behind him.
“All hell’s broke loose,” he sneered, turning aside in the
darkness and heading for the beach. Lights were flashing from
open doors, and tent, cabin, and dance-hall let slip their
denizens upon the chase. The clamor of men and howling of dogs
smote his ears and quickened his feet. He ran on and on. The
sounds grew dim, and the pursuit dissipated itself in vain rage
and aimless groping. But a flitting shadow clung to him. Head
thrust over shoulder, he caught glimpses of it, now taking vague
shape on an open expanse of snow, how merging into the deeper
shadows of some darkened cabin or beach-listed craft.
Fortune La Pearle swore like a woman, weakly, with the hint of
tears that comes of exhaustion, and plunged deeper into the maze
of heaped ice, tents, and prospect holes. He stumbled over taut
hawsers and piles of dunnage, tripped on crazy guy-ropes and
insanely planted pegs, and fell again and again upon frozen dumps
and mounds of hoarded driftwood. At times, when he deemed he had
drawn clear, his head dizzy with the painful pounding of his heart
and the suffocating intake of his breath, he slackened down; and
ever the shadow leaped out of the gloom and forced him on in
heart-breaking flight. A swift intuition lashed upon him, leaving
in its trail the cold chill of superstition. The persistence of
the shadow he invested with his gambler’s symbolism. Silent,
inexorable, not to be shaken off, he took it as the fate which
waited at the last turn when chips were cashed in and gains and
losses counted up. Fortune La Pearle believed in those rare,
illuminating moments, when the intelligence flung from it time and
space, to rise naked through eternity and read the facts of life
from the open book of chance. That this was such a moment he had
no doubt; and when he turned inland and sped across the snow-
covered tundra he was not startled because the shadow took upon it
greater definiteness and drew in closer. Oppressed with his own
impotence, he halted in the midst of the white waste and whirled
about. His right hand slipped from its mitten, and a revolver, at
level, glistened in the pale light of the stars.
Tales of the Klondyke
28
“Don’t shoot. I haven’t a gun.”
The shadow had assumed tangible shape, and at the sound of its
human voice a trepidation affected Fortune La Pearle’s knees, and
his stomach was stricken with the qualms of sudden relief.
Perhaps things fell out differently because Uri Bram had no gun
that night when he sat on the hard benches of the El Dorado and
saw murder done. To that fact also might be attributed the trip
on the Long Trail which he took subsequently with a most unlikely
comrade. But be it as it may, he repeated a second time, “Don’t
shoot. Can’t you see I haven’t a gun?”
“Then what the flaming hell did you take after me for?” demanded
the gambler, lowering his revolver.
Uri Bram shrugged his shoulders. “It don’t matter much, anyhow.
I want you to come with me.”
“Where?”
“To my shack, over on the edge of the camp.”
But Fortune La Pearle drove the heel of his moccasin into the snow
and attested by his various deities to the madness of Uri Bram.
“Who are you,” he perorated, “and what am I, that I should put my
neck into the rope at your bidding?”
“I am Uri Bram,” the other said simply, “and my shack is over
there on the edge of camp. I don’t know who you are, but you’ve
thrust the soul from a living man’s body,–there’s the blood red
on your sleeve,–and, like a second Cain, the hand of all mankind
is against you, and there is no place you may lay your head. Now,
I have a shack–”
“For the love of your mother, hold your say, man,” interrupted
Fortune La Pearle, “or I’ll make you a second Abel for the joy of
it. So help me, I will! With a thousand men to lay me by the
heels, looking high and low, what do I want with your shack? I
want to get out of here–away! away! away! Cursed swine! I’ve
half a mind to go back and run amuck, and settle for a few of
them, the pigs! One gorgeous, glorious fight, and end the whole
damn business! It’s a skin game, that’s what life is, and I’m
sick of it!”
He stopped, appalled, crushed by his great desolation, and Uri
Bram seized the moment. He was not given to speech, this man, and
that which followed was the longest in his life, save one long
afterward in another place.
“That’s why I told you about my shack. I can stow you there so
they’ll never find you, and I’ve got grub in plenty. Elsewise you
can’t get away. No dogs, no nothing, the sea closed, St. Michael