it, and sometimes they chill their lungs. This leads up to a dry,
hacking cough, noticeably irritable when bacon is being fried.
After that, somewhere along in the spring or summer, a hole is
burned in the frozen muck. Into this a man’s carcass is dumped,
covered over with moss, and left with the assurance that it will
rise on the crack of Doom, wholly and frigidly intact. For those
of little faith, sceptical of material integration on that fateful
day, no fitter country than the Klondike can be recommended to die
in. But it is not to be inferred from this that it is a fit
country for living purposes.
It was very cold without, but it was not over-warm within. The
only article which might be designated furniture was the stove,
and for this the men were frank in displaying their preference.
Upon half of the floor pine boughs had been cast; above this were
spread the sleeping-furs, beneath lay the winter’s snowfall. The
remainder of the floor was moccasin-packed snow, littered with
pots and pans and the general impedimenta of an Arctic camp. The
stove was red and roaring hot, but only a bare three feet away lay
a block of ice, as sharp-edged and dry as when first quarried from
the creek bottom. The pressure of the outside cold forced the
inner heat upward. Just above the stove, where the pipe
penetrated the roof, was a tiny circle of dry canvas; next, with
the pipe always as centre, a circle of steaming canvas; next a
damp and moisture-exuding ring; and finally, the rest of the tent,
sidewalls and top, coated with a half-inch of dry, white, crystal-
encrusted frost.
“Oh! OH! OH!” A young fellow, lying asleep in the furs, bearded
and wan and weary, raised a moan of pain, and without waking
increased the pitch and intensity of his anguish. His body half-
lifted from the blankets, and quivered and shrank spasmodically,
as though drawing away from a bed of nettles.
“Roll’m over!” ordered Bettles. “He’s crampin’.”
And thereat, with pitiless good-will, he was pitched upon and
rolled and thumped and pounded by half-a-dozen willing comrades.
“Damn the trail,” he muttered softly, as he threw off the robes
and sat up. “I’ve run across country, played quarter three
seasons hand-running, and hardened myself in all manner of ways;
and then I pilgrim it into this God-forsaken land and find myself
an effeminate Athenian without the simplest rudiments of manhood!”
He hunched up to the fire and rolled a cigarette. “Oh, I’m not
whining. I can take my medicine all right, all right; but I’m
just decently ashamed of myself, that’s all. Here I am, on top of
Tales of the Klondyke
62
a dirty thirty miles, as knocked up and stiff and sore as a pink-
tea degenerate after a five-mile walk on a country turn-pike.
Bah! It makes me sick! Got a match?” “Don’t git the tantrums,
youngster.” Bettles passed over the required fire-stick and waxed
patriarchal. “Ye’ve gotter ‘low some for the breakin’-in.
Sufferin’ cracky! don’t I recollect the first time I hit the
trail! Stiff? I’ve seen the time it’d take me ten minutes to git
my mouth from the waterhole an’ come to my feet–every jint
crackin’ an’ kickin’ fit to kill. Cramp? In sech knots it’d take
the camp half a day to untangle me. You’re all right, for a cub,
any ye’ve the true sperrit. Come this day year, you’ll walk all
us old bucks into the ground any time. An’ best in your favor,
you hain’t got that streak of fat in your make-up which has sent
many a husky man to the bosom of Abraham afore his right and
proper time.”
“Streak of fat?”
“Yep. Comes along of bulk. ‘T ain’t the big men as is the best
when it comes to the trail.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Never heered of it, eh? Well, it’s a dead straight, open-an’-
shut fact, an’ no gittin’ round. Bulk’s all well enough for a
mighty big effort, but ‘thout stayin’ powers it ain’t worth a
continental whoop; an’ stayin’ powers an’ bulk ain’t runnin’
mates. Takes the small, wiry fellows when it comes to gittin’
right down an’ hangin’ on like a lean-jowled dog to a bone. Why,
hell’s fire, the big men they ain’t in it!”
“By gar!” broke in Louis Savoy, “dat is no, vot you call, josh! I
know one mans, so vaire beeg like ze buffalo. Wit him, on ze
Sulphur Creek stampede, go one small mans, Lon McFane. You know
dat Lon McFane, dat leetle Irisher wit ze red hair and ze grin.
An’ dey walk an’ walk an’ walk, all ze day long an’ ze night long.
And beeg mans, him become vaire tired, an’ lay down mooch in ze
snow. And leetle mans keek beeg mans, an’ him cry like, vot you
call–ah! vot you call ze kid. And leetle mans keek an’ keek an’
keek, an’ bime by, long time, long way, keek beeg mans into my
cabin. Tree days ‘fore him crawl out my blankets. Nevaire I see
beeg squaw like him. No nevaire. Him haf vot you call ze streak
of fat. You bet.”
“But there was Axel Gunderson,” Prince spoke up. The great
Scandinavian, with the tragic events which shadowed his passing,
had made a deep mark on the mining engineer. “He lies up there,
somewhere.” He swept his hand in the vague direction of the
mysterious east.
“Biggest man that ever turned his heels to Salt Water, or run a
moose down with sheer grit,” supplemented Bettles; “but he’s the
prove-the-rule exception. Look at his woman, Unga,–tip the
Tales of the Klondyke
63
scales at a hundred an’ ten, clean meat an’ nary ounce to spare.
She’d bank grit ‘gainst his for all there was in him, an’ see him,
an’ go him better if it was possible. Nothing over the earth, or
in it, or under it, she wouldn’t ‘a’ done.”
“But she loved him,” objected the engineer.
“‘T ain’t that. It–”
“Look you, brothers,” broke in Sitka Charley from his seat on the
grub-box. “Ye have spoken of the streak of fat that runs in big
men’s muscles, of the grit of women and the love, and ye have
spoken fair; but I have in mind things which happened when the
land was young and the fires of men apart as the stars. It was
then I had concern with a big man, and a streak of fat, and a
woman. And the woman was small; but her heart was greater than
the beef-heart of the man, and she had grit. And we traveled a
weary trail, even to the Salt Water, and the cold was bitter, the
snow deep, the hunger great. And the woman’s love was a mighty
love–no more can man say than this.”
He paused, and with the hatchet broke pieces of ice from the large
chunk beside him. These he threw into the gold pan on the stove,
where the drinking-water thawed. The men drew up closer, and he
of the cramps sought greater comfort vainly for his stiffened
body.
“Brothers, my blood is red with Siwash, but my heart is white. To
the faults of my fathers I owe the one, to the virtues of my
friends the other. A great truth came to me when I was yet a boy.
I learned that to your kind and you was given the earth; that the
Siwash could not withstand you, and like the caribou and the bear,
must perish in the cold. So I came into the warm and sat among
you, by your fires, and behold, I became one of you, I have seen
much in my time. I have known strange things, and bucked big, on
big trails, with men of many breeds. And because of these things,
I measure deeds after your manner, and judge men, and think
thoughts. Wherefore, when I speak harshly of one of your own
kind, I know you will not take it amiss; and when I speak high of
one of my father’s people, you will not take it upon you to say,
‘Sitka Charley is Siwash, and there is a crooked light in his eyes
and small honor to his tongue.’ Is it not so?”
Deep down in throat, the circle vouchsafed its assent.
“The woman was Passuk. I got her in fair trade from her people,
who were of the Coast and whose Chilcat totem stood at the head of
a salt arm of the sea. My heart did not go out to the woman, nor
did I take stock of her looks. For she scarce took her eyes from
the ground, and she was timid and afraid, as girls will be when
cast into a stranger’s arms whom they have never seen before. As
I say, there was no place in my heart for her to creep, for I had