Connie Morgan in Alaska Part 2

Morning found him again on the trail. He begrudged every minute of inaction, for well he knew the fame of McDougall's mail dogs, and Dutch Henry's Hudson Bays. It turned warmer. The snow slumped under foot, and he lost two hours at midday, waiting for the stiffening chill of the lengthening shadows.

On the third day it snowed. Not the fierce, cutting snow of the fall and winter, but large, feathery flakes, that lay soft and deep on the crust and piled up in front of the sled. That night he camped early, for both boy and dogs were weary with the trail-strain.

During the night the snow stopped falling and the wind rose, driving it into huge drifts. Progress was slow now and every foot of the trail was hard-earned. Old Boris picked his way among boulders and drifts with the wisdom of long practice. Slasher settled down to a steady pull, and Big Mutt threw himself into the collar and fairly lifted the sled through the loose snow. Toward noon they slanted into a wide valley, and the tired eyes of the boy brightened as they saw the bold outcropping of red rock. Then immediately they grew serious, and he urged the dogs to greater effort, for, far down the valley, dotting the white expanse of snow, were many moving black specks.

Old Boris turned toward the north, and the boy saw the huge split rock a mile away. He was travelling ahead of the dogs now, throwing his weight onto the _babiche_ rope, his wide snowshoes breaking the trail. In spite of his efforts the pace was dishearteningly slow. Every few minutes he glanced back, and each time the black specks appeared larger and more distinct. He could make out men and sleds, and he knew by the long string of dogs that the first outfit was McDougall's.

"Hi! Hi! Mush you! Mush you!" faintly the sound was borne to his ears, and he knew that McDougall was gaining fast--he had already broken into Connie's own freshly made trail. The dogs heard it, too, and with c.o.c.ked ears plunged blindly ahead.

The split rock loomed tantalizingly near, and the boy thanked his stars that he had prepared his stakes beforehand. He loosened them from the back of the sled and, ax in hand, ploughed ahead through the loose snow.

His racket struck something hard and he pitched forward--it was one of Waseche Bill's stakes.

Feverishly he scrambled to his feet and drove in his own stakes, following Waseche's directions. With a final blow of his ax, he turned to face McDougall, who stared at him wide-eyed.

"You dang little scamp!" he roared. "You dang little sourdough!" And as he staked out number Two Below Discovery, the hillsides echoed back his laughter.

Other men came. Soon the valley of the Ten Bow was staked with claims running into the forties, both above and below Discovery. But the great prize of all was One Below, and it stood marked by the stakes of Sam Morgan's boy.

That night the valley of the Ten Bow was dotted with a hundred camp fires, and the air rang with s.n.a.t.c.hes of rude song and loud laughter.

Men pa.s.sed from fire to fire and Connie Morgan's name was on every tongue.

"The little scamp!" men laughed; "cut straight through the hills with them old discarded dogs, an' beat us to it!" "Now, what d'ye know 'bout _that_?" "If Sam Morgan c'd lived to seen it he'd be'n the tickledest man in the world!" "Poor old Sam--looks like his luck's turned at last!"

From the surrounding gloom a man stepped into the light of a large camp-fire near which Connie Morgan was seated talking with a group of prospectors. He was a little, rat-like man, with a pinched, weasel face and little black eyes that shone beadlike from between lashless lids.

"This Number One claim, boys, it ain't legal. It's staked by a boy. I'm a lawyer, an' I know. He's a minor, an' he can't hold no claim!" He spoke hurriedly, and eyed the men for signs of approval; then he advanced toward Connie, shaking a long, bony finger.

"You ain't twenty-one," he squeaked, "an' I command you to vacate this claim in the name of the law!" From the boy's side came a low growl.

There was a flash of grey in the firelight, and the wolf-dog was at the man's throat, bearing him backward into the snow.

The boy was on his feet in an instant, pulling at the dog and beating him off. Luckily for the man his throat was protected by the heavy _parka_ hood, and he sustained no real damage. He arose whimpering with fright.

The other men were on their feet now, and one of them knocked the revolver from the hand of the cowering man as he aimed it at the growling Slasher.

Big McDougall stepped forward, and, grasping the man by the shoulder, spun him around with a jerk.

"Look a here, you reptile! Kin ye guess what that dog 'ud of done to ye, an' it hadn't be'n fer the kid? Well, fer my part he c'd gone ahead an'

done it as it was. But, seein' he didn't, just ye listen to me! What he would done won't be a patchin' to what I _will_ do to ye, if ever ye open yer head about that there claim ag'in. An' that ain't all. There's a hundred men in this gulch--good men--sourdoughs, ev'ry one--an' the kid beat us all fair an' square. An', law or no law, we're right here to see that Sam Morgan's boy _does_ hold down that claim! _An' don't ye fergit it!_"

CHAPTER III

THE NEW CAMP

The fame of Ten Bow travelled to far reaches, and because in the gold country men are fascinated by prosperity, even though it is the prosperity of others, the shortening days brought many new faces into the mining camp of Ten Bow. Notwithstanding the fact that every square foot of the valley was staked, gaunt men, whose hollow eyes and depleted outfits spoke failure, mushed in from the hills, knowing that here cordwood must be chopped, windla.s.ses cranked, and fires kept going, and preferring the certainty of high wages at day labour to the uncertainty of a new strike in unscarred valleys.

It was six months since Waseche Bill had burst into Scotty McCollough's store at Hesitation with the news of his great strike in the red rock valley to the southward--news that spread like wildfire through the camp and sent two hundred men over the trail in a frenzied rush for gold.

It was a race long to be remembered in the Northland--the Ten Bow stampede. It is told to this day on the trails, by bearded _tillic.u.ms_ amid roars of bull-throated laughter and deep man-growls of approval, how the race was won by a boy--a slight, wiry, fifteen-year-old _chechako_ who, scorning the broad river trail with its hundred rushing dog teams, struck straight through the hill with a misfit three-dog outfit, and staked "One Below Discovery" under the very noses of Big McDougall and his mail team of gaunt _malamutes_, and Dutch Henry with his Hudson Bays.

From the glacier-studded seaboard to the great white death barriers beyond the Yukon, wherever men forgathered, the fame of Connie Morgan, and old Boris, Mutt, and Slasher, pa.s.sed from bearded lip to bearded lip, and the rough hearts of big, trail-toughened prospectors swelled with pride at the mention of his name. Only, in the big white country, he is never called Connie Morgan, but Sam Morgan's boy; for Sam Morgan was Alaska's--big, quiet Sam Morgan, who never made a "strike," but stood for a square deal and the right of things as they are. And, as they loved Sam Morgan, these men loved Sam Morgan's boy. For it had been told in the hills how d.i.c.k Colton found him, ill-clad and ragged, forlornly watching the wheezy little Yukon steamer swing out into the stream at Anvik, whence he had come in search of his father. And how, when he learned that Sam Morgan had crossed the Big Divide, he bravely clenched his little fists, choked back the hot tears, and told the big men of the North, as he faced them there, that he would stay in Alaska and dig for the gold his father never found.

The Ten Bow stampede depopulated Hesitation, and the new camp of Ten Bow sprang up in a day, two hundred miles to the southward. A camp of tents and _igloos_ it was, for in the mad scramble for gold men do not stop to build substantial cabins, but improvise makeshift shelters from the bitter cold of the long nights, out of whatever material is at hand. For the Ten Bow strike came late in the season and, knowing that soon the water from the melting snows would drive them from their claims, men worked feverishly in the black-mouthed shafts that dotted the valley, and at night chopped cordwood and kept the fires blazing that thawed out the gravel for the morrow's digging. When the break-up came men abandoned the shafts and, with rude cradles and sluices, and deep gold pans, set to work on the frozen gravel of the dumps.

And then it was men realized the richness of the Ten Bow strike. Not since the days of Sand Creek and the Klondike had gravel yielded such store of the precious metal. As they cleaned up the riffles they laughed and talked wildly of wealth undreamed; for the small dumps, representing a scant sixty days' digging, panned out more gold than any man in Ten Bow had ever taken out in a year--more than most men had taken out in many years of disheartening, bone-racking toil.

During the long days of the short summer, while the cold waters of Ten Bow rushed northward toward the Yukon, log cabins replaced the tents and _igloos_, and by the end of August Ten Bow a.s.sumed an air of stability which its prosperity warranted. Scotty McCollough freighted his goods from Hesitation and soon presided over a brand new log store, which varied in no whit nor particular from the other log stores of other camps.

Those were wonderful days for Connie Morgan. Days during which the vague, half-formed impressions of youth were recast in a rough mould by a.s.sociation with the bearded men who treated him as an equal. He learned their likes and dislikes, their joys and sorrows, their shortcomings and virtues, and in the learning, he came instinctively to look under the surface and gauge men by their true worth--which is so rarely the great world's measure of men. And, under the unconscious tutelage of these men, was laid the foundation for the uncompromising sense of right and justice which was to become the underlying principle of the hand-hammered character of the man who would one day help shape the destiny of Alaska, and safeguard her people from the outreaching greed of monopoly.

Daily the boy worked shoulder to shoulder with his partner, Waseche Bill, the man who had presented him with old Boris, and whispered of the short-cut through the hills which had enabled him to beat out the Ten Bow stampede.

Now, the building of cabins is not easy work. Getting out logs, notching their ends, and rolling them into place, one above another, is a man's job. And many were the pretexts and fictions by which the men of Ten Bow contrived to relieve Connie of the heavier work in the building of his home.

"Sonny," said Big McDougall one day, loafing casually over from the adjoining claim where his own cabin was nearing completion, "swar to gudeness, my back's like to bust wi' stoopin' over yon c.h.i.n.kin'.

C'u'dn't ye jist slip over to my place an' spell the auld mon off a bit.

I'm mos' petered out." So Connie obligingly departed and, as he rammed in the moss and daubed it with mud, peered through a crack and smiled knowingly as he watched the "petered out" man heaving and straining by the side of Waseche Bill in the setting of a log. And the next day it was Dutch Henry who removed the short pipe from his mouth and called from his doorway:

"Hey, kid! Them dawgs o' mine is gittin' plumb scan'lous fat an' lazy.

Seems like ef they don't git a workin' out they'll spile on me complete.

Looks like I never fin' no time to fool with 'em. Now, ef you c'd make out to take 'em down the trail today, I'd sure take it mighty kind of ye." And when Connie returned to the camp it was to find Dutch Henry helping Waseche Bill in the rope-rolling of a roof log. And so it went each day until the cabin stood complete under its dirt roof. Some one or another of the big-hearted miners, with a sly wink at Waseche Bill, invented a light job which would take the boy from the claim and then took his place, grinning happily.

But Connie Morgan understood, and because he loved these men, kept his own counsel, and the big men never knew that the small, serious-eyed boy saw through their deception.

At last the cabin was finished and the boy took a keen delight in helping his big partner in the building of the furniture. Two bunks, a table, three or four chairs, and a wash bench--rude but serviceable--were fashioned from light saplings and packing case boards, brought up from Scotty's store. In the new camps lumber is scarce, and the canny Scotchman realized a tidy sum from the sale of his empty boxes.

In the shortening days men returned to the diggings and sloshed about in the wet gravel, cleaning up as they went; for before long, the freezing of the water would compel them to throw the gravel onto dumps to be worked out the following spring.

The partners hired a man to help with the heavier work and Connie busied himself with the hundred and one odd jobs about the claims and cabin. He became a wonderful cook, and Waseche Bill, returning from the diggings, always found a hot meal of well-prepared food awaiting his ravenous appet.i.te, while the men of other cabins returned tired and wet to growl and grumble over the cooking of their grub.

Late in September the creek froze. Blizzard after whirling blizzard followed upon the heels of a heavy snowfall, and the Northland lay white and cold in the grip of the long winter. Ten Bow was a humming hive of activity. Windla.s.ses creaked in the thin, frosty air, to the half-m.u.f.fled cries of "haul away" which floated upward from the depths of the shafts, and the hillsides rang with the stroke of axes and the long crash of falling trees. By night the red flare of a hundred fires lighted the snow for miles and seemed reflected in the aurora-shot sky; and with each added bucketful, the dumps grew larger and showed black and ugly against the white snow of the valley.

To conform to the mining laws the partners sank a shaft on each claim, working them alternately, and the experienced eye of Waseche Bill told him that the gravel he daily shovelled into the bucket was fabulously rich in gold.

And then, one day, at a depth of ten feet, Waseche Bill's pick struck against something hard. He struck again and the steel rang loudly in the cistern-like shaft. With his shovel he sc.r.a.ped away the thin covering of loose gravel which was deepest where his claim joined Connie's.

That evening the boy wondered at the silence of his big partner, who devoured his beans and bacon and sourdough bread, and washed them down with great draughts of black coffee. But he spoke no word, and after supper helped Connie with the dishes and then, filling his pipe, tilted his chair against the log wall and smoked, apparently engrossed in deep thought. At the table, Connie, poring over the contents of a year-old ill.u.s.trated magazine, from time to time cast furtive glances toward the man and wondered at his strange silence. After a while the boy laid the magazine aside, drew the bootjack from beneath the bunk, pulled off his small boots, and with a sleepy "good-night, pardner," rolled snugly into his blankets.

CHAPTER IV

PARTNERS