in harness and packed up. But when all was ready, Fortune’s feet
itching to be off, Uri pulled an unused back-log to the fire and
sat down.
“Ever hear of the Dead Horse Trail?”
He glanced up meditatively and Fortune shook his head, inwardly
chafing at the delay.
“Sometimes there are meetings under circumstances which make men
remember,” Uri continued, speaking in a low voice and very slowly,
“and I met a man under such circumstances on the Dead Horse Trail.
Freighting an outfit over the White Pass in ’97 broke many a man’s
heart, for there was a world of reason when they gave that trail
its name. The horses died like mosquitoes in the first frost, and
from Skaguay to Bennett they rotted in heaps. They died at the
Rocks, they were poisoned at the Summit, and they starved at the
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32
Lakes; they fell off the trail, what there was of it, or they went
through it; in the river they drowned under their loads, or were
smashed to pieces against the boulders; they snapped their legs in
the crevices and broke their backs falling backwards with their
packs; in the sloughs they sank from sight or smothered in the
slime, and they were disembowelled in the bogs where the corduroy
logs turned end up in the mud; men shot them, worked them to
death, and when they were gone, went back to the beach and bought
more. Some did not bother to shoot them,–stripping the saddles
off and the shoes and leaving them where they fell. Their hearts
turned to stone–those which did not break–and they became
beasts, the men on Dead Horse Trail.
“It was there I met a man with the heart of a Christ and the
patience. And he was honest. When he rested at midday he took
the packs from the horses so that they, too, might rest. He paid
$50 a hundred-weight for their fodder, and more. He used his own
bed to blanket their backs when they rubbed raw. Other men let
the saddles eat holes the size of water-buckets. Other men, when
the shoes gave out, let them wear their hoofs down to the bleeding
stumps. He spent his last dollar for horseshoe nails. I know
this because we slept in the one bed and ate from the one pot, and
became blood brothers where men lost their grip of things and died
blaspheming God. He was never too tired to ease a strap or
tighten a cinch, and often there were tears in his eyes when he
looked on all that waste of misery. At a passage in the rocks,
where the brutes upreared hindlegged and stretched their forelegs
upward like cats to clear the wall, the way was piled with
carcasses where they had toppled back. And here he stood, in the
stench of hell, with a cheery word and a hand on the rump at the
right time, till the string passed by. And when one bogged he
blocked the trail till it was clear again; nor did the man live
who crowded him at such time.
“At the end of the trail a man who had killed fifty horses wanted
to buy, but we looked at him and at our own,–mountain cayuses
from eastern Oregon. Five thousand he offered, and we were broke,
but we remembered the poison grass of the Summit and the passage
in the Rocks, and the man who was my brother spoke no word, but
divided the cayuses into two bunches,–his in the one and mine in
the other,–and he looked at me and we understood each other. So
he drove mine to the one side and I drove his to the other, and we
took with us our rifles and shot them to the last one, while the
man who had killed fifty horses cursed us till his throat cracked.
But that man, with whom I welded blood-brothership on the Dead
Horse Trail–”
“Why, that man was John Randolph,” Fortune, sneering the while,
completed the climax for him.
Uri nodded, and said, “I am glad you understand.”
“I am ready,” Fortune answered, the old weary bitterness strong in
Tales of the Klondyke
33
his face again. “Go ahead, but hurry.”
Uri Bram rose to his feet.
“I have had faith in God all the days of my life. I believe He
loves justice. I believe He is looking down upon us now, choosing
between us. I believe He waits to work His will through my own
right arm. And such is my belief, that we will take equal chance
and let Him speak His own judgment.”
Fortune’s heart leaped at the words. He did not know much
concerning Uri’s God, but he believed in Chance, and Chance had
been coming his way ever since the night he ran down the beach and
across the snow. “But there is only one gun,” he objected.
“We will fire turn about,” Uri replied, at the same time throwing
out the cylinder of the other man’s Colt and examining it.
“And the cards to decide! One hand of seven up!”
Fortune’s blood was warming to the game, and he drew the deck from
his pocket as Uri nodded. Surely Chance would not desert him now!
He thought of the returning sun as he cut for deal, and he
thrilled when he found the deal was his. He shuffled and dealt,
and Uri cut him the Jack of Spades. They laid down their hands.
Uri’s was bare of trumps, while he held ace, deuce. The outside
seemed very near to him as they stepped off the fifty paces.
“If God withholds His hand and you drop me, the dogs and outfit
are yours. You’ll find a bill of sale, already made out, in my
pocket,” Uri explained, facing the path of the bullet, straight
and broad-breasted.
Fortune shook a vision of the sun shining on the ocean from his
eyes and took aim. He was very careful. Twice he lowered as the
spring breeze shook the pines. But the third time he dropped on
one knee, gripped the revolver steadily in both hands, and fired.
Uri whirled half about, threw up his arms, swayed wildly for a
moment, and sank into the snow. But Fortune knew he had fired too
far to one side, else the man would not have whirled.
When Uri, mastering the flesh and struggling to his feet, beckoned
for the weapon, Fortune was minded to fire again. But he thrust
the idea from him. Chance had been very good to him already, he
felt, and if he tricked now he would have to pay for it afterward.
No, he would play fair. Besides Uri was hard hit and could not
possibly hold the heavy Colt long enough to draw a bead.
“And where is your God now?” he taunted, as he gave the wounded
man the revolver.
And Uri answered: “God has not yet spoken. Prepare that He may
speak.”
Tales of the Klondyke
34
Fortune faced him, but twisted his chest sideways in order to
present less surface. Uri tottered about drunkenly, but waited,
too, for the moment’s calm between the catspaws. The revolver was
very heavy, and he doubted, like Fortune, because of its weight.
But he held it, arm extended, above his head, and then let it
slowly drop forward and down. At the instant Fortune’s left
breast and the sight flashed into line with his eye, he pulled the
trigger. Fortune did not whirl, but gay San Francisco dimmed and
faded, and as the sun-bright snow turned black and blacker, he
breathed his last malediction on the Chance he had misplayed.
SIWASH
“If I was a man–” Her words were in themselves indecisive, but
the withering contempt which flashed from her black eyes was not
lost upon the men-folk in the tent.
Tommy, the English sailor, squirmed, but chivalrous old Dick
Humphries, Cornish fisherman and erstwhile American salmon
capitalist, beamed upon her benevolently as ever. He bore women
too large a portion of his rough heart to mind them, as he said,
when they were in the doldrums, or when their limited vision would
not permit them to see all around a thing. So they said nothing,
these two men who had taken the half-frozen woman into their tent
three days back, and who had warmed her, and fed her, and rescued
her goods from the Indian packers. This latter had necessitated
the payment of numerous dollars, to say nothing of a demonstration
in force–Dick Humphries squinting along the sights of a
Winchester while Tommy apportioned their wages among them at his
own appraisement. It had been a little thing in itself, but it
meant much to a woman playing a desperate single-hand in the
equally desperate Klondike rush of ’97. Men were occupied with
their own pressing needs, nor did they approve of women playing,
single-handed, the odds of the arctic winter. “If I was a man, I