from a Puget Sound port, and managed to survive the contingent
miseries of steerage sea-sickness and steerage grub. He was
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88
rather sallow and drawn, but still his own indomitable self, when
he landed on the Dyea beach one day in the spring of the year.
Between the cost of dogs, grub, and outfits, and the customs
exactions of the two clashing governments, it speedily penetrated
to his understanding that the Northland was anything save a poor
man’s Mecca. So he cast about him in search of quick harvests.
Between the beach and the passes were scattered many thousands of
passionate pilgrims. These pilgrims Montana Kid proceeded to
farm. At first he dealt faro in a pine-board gambling shack; but
disagreeable necessity forced him to drop a sudden period into a
man’s life, and to move on up trail. Then he effected a corner in
horseshoe nails, and they circulated at par with legal tender,
four to the dollar, till an unexpected consignment of a hundred
barrels or so broke the market and forced him to disgorge his
stock at a loss. After that he located at Sheep Camp, organized
the professional packers, and jumped the freight ten cents a pound
in a single day. In token of their gratitude, the packers
patronized his faro and roulette layouts and were mulcted
cheerfully of their earnings. But his commercialism was of too
lusty a growth to be long endured; so they rushed him one night,
burned his shanty, divided the bank, and headed him up the trail
with empty pockets.
Ill-luck was his running mate. He engaged with responsible
parties to run whisky across the line by way of precarious and
unknown trails, lost his Indian guides, and had the very first
outfit confiscated by the Mounted Police. Numerous other
misfortunes tended to make him bitter of heart and wanton of
action, and he celebrated his arrival at Lake Bennett by
terrorizing the camp for twenty straight hours. Then a miners’
meeting took him in hand, and commanded him to make himself
scarce. He had a wholesome respect for such assemblages, and he
obeyed in such haste that he inadvertently removed himself at the
tail-end of another man’s dog team. This was equivalent to horse-
stealing in a more mellow clime, so he hit only the high places
across Bennett and down Tagish, and made his first camp a full
hundred miles to the north.
Now it happened that the break of spring was at hand, and many of
the principal citizens of Dawson were travelling south on the last
ice. These he met and talked with, noted their names and
possessions, and passed on. He had a good memory, also a fair
imagination; nor was veracity one of his virtues.
II
Dawson, always eager for news, beheld Montana Kid’s sled heading
down the Yukon, and went out on the ice to meet him. No, he
hadn’t any newspapers; didn’t know whether Durrant was hanged yet,
nor who had won the Thanksgiving game; hadn’t heard whether the
United States and Spain had gone to fighting; didn’t know who
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89
Dreyfus was; but O’Brien? Hadn’t they heard? O’Brien, why, he
was drowned in the White Horse; Sitka Charley the only one of the
party who escaped. Joe Ladue? Both legs frozen and amputated at
the Five Fingers. And Jack Dalton? Blown up on the “Sea Lion”
with all hands. And Bettles? Wrecked on the “Carthagina,” in
Seymour Narrows,–twenty survivors out of three hundred. And
Swiftwater Bill? Gone through the rotten ice of Lake LeBarge with
six female members of the opera troupe he was convoying. Governor
Walsh? Lost with all hands and eight sleds on the Thirty Mile.
Devereaux? Who was Devereaux? Oh, the courier! Shot by Indians
on Lake Marsh.
So it went. The word was passed along. Men shouldered in to ask
after friends and partners, and in turn were shouldered out, too
stunned for blasphemy. By the time Montana Kid gained the bank he
was surrounded by several hundred fur-clad miners. When he passed
the Barracks he was the centre of a procession. At the Opera
House he was the nucleus of an excited mob, each member struggling
for a chance to ask after some absent comrade. On every side he
was being invited to drink. Never before had the Klondike thus
opened its arms to a che-cha-qua. All Dawson was humming. Such a
series of catastrophes had never occurred in its history. Every
man of note who had gone south in the spring had been wiped out.
The cabins vomited forth their occupants. Wild-eyed men hurried
down from the creeks and gulches to seek out this man who had told
a tale of such disaster. The Russian half-breed wife of Bettles
sought the fireplace, inconsolable, and rocked back and forth, and
ever and anon flung white wood-ashes upon her raven hair. The
flag at the Barracks flopped dismally at half-mast. Dawson
mourned its dead.
Why Montana Kid did this thing no man may know. Nor beyond the
fact that the truth was not in him, can explanation be hazarded.
But for five whole days he plunged the land in wailing and sorrow,
and for five whole days he was the only man in the Klondike. The
country gave him its best of bed and board. The saloons granted
him the freedom of their bars. Men sought him continuously. The
high officials bowed down to him for further information, and he
was feasted at the Barracks by Constantine and his brother
officers. And then, one day, Devereaux, the government courier,
halted his tired dogs before the gold commissioner’s office.
Dead? Who said so? Give him a moose steak and he’d show them how
dead he was. Why, Governor Walsh was in camp on the Little
Salmon, and O’Brien coming in on the first water. Dead? Give him
a moose steak and he’d show them.
And forthwith Dawson hummed. The Barracks’ flag rose to the
masthead, and Bettles’ wife washed herself and put on clean
raiment. The community subtly signified its desire that Montana
Kid obliterate himself from the landscape. And Montana Kid
obliterated; as usual, at the tail-end of some one else’s dog
team. Dawson rejoiced when he headed down the Yukon, and wished
him godspeed to the ultimate destination of the case-hardened
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90
sinner. After that the owner of the dogs bestirred himself, made
complaint to Constantine, and from him received the loan of a
policeman.
III
With Circle City in prospect and the last ice crumbling under his
runners, Montana Kid took advantage of the lengthening days and
travelled his dogs late and early. Further, he had but little
doubt that the owner of the dogs in question had taken his trail,
and he wished to make American territory before the river broke.
But by the afternoon of the third day it became evident that he
had lost in his race with spring. The Yukon was growling and
straining at its fetters. Long detours became necessary, for the
trail had begun to fall through into the swift current beneath,
while the ice, in constant unrest, was thundering apart in great
gaping fissures. Through these and through countless airholes,
the water began to sweep across the surface of the ice, and by the
time he pulled into a woodchopper’s cabin on the point of an
island, the dogs were being rushed off their feet and were
swimming more often than not. He was greeted sourly by the two
residents, but he unharnessed and proceeded to cook up.
Donald and Davy were fair specimens of frontier inefficients.
Canadian-born, city-bred Scots, in a foolish moment they had
resigned their counting-house desks, drawn upon their savings, and
gone Klondiking. And now they were feeling the rough edge of the
country. Grubless, spiritless, with a lust for home in their
hearts, they had been staked by the P. C. Company to cut wood for
its steamers, with the promise at the end of a passage home.
Disregarding the possibilities of the ice-run, they had fittingly
demonstrated their inefficiency by their choice of the island on
which they located. Montana Kid, though possessing little
knowledge of the break-up of a great river, looked about him
dubiously, and cast yearning glances at the distant bank where the
towering bluffs promised immunity from all the ice of the
Northland.
After feeding himself and dogs, he lighted his pipe and strolled
out to get a better idea of the situation. The island, like all
its river brethren, stood higher at the upper end, and it was here
that Donald and Davy had built their cabin and piled many cords of
wood. The far shore was a full mile away, while between the
island and the near shore lay a back-channel perhaps a hundred
yards across. At first sight of this, Montana Kid was tempted to
take his dogs and escape to the mainland, but on closer inspection