Jan: A Dog and a Romance Part 18

The next day, and the next, and the next brought a similar dispensation to the dogs; no more. By this time the nightly feeding had become a horrid and b.l.o.o.d.y battle.

"Nasty savage brutes!" said sponging Harry.

"Blood does tell," observed the oracular Beeching, himself by repute a man of family. "They're every one of 'em mongrels."

The son of lordly Finn and queenly Desdemona attached no meaning to these words, of course; but were it not for the discipline, the generations of discipline in his blood, he could have strangled these two muddlers for the tragic folly of their incompetence, the gross exhibition of their slackness.

As the men themselves began to feel the belly-pinch, they brought up no reserves of manhood, but, on the contrary, they took to cruelly beating their now weakened team, when the dogs were safely tethered in the traces, and to cowardly avoidance of the poor brutes at all other times.

Harry was quite unashamedly afraid to throw the dogs their beggarly half or quarter ration; and but for Beeching, it may be the dogs had starved while food still remained on the sled.

Maybe the fact that Beeching, with all his faults, had never reached Harry's depths as a sponger, preserved him from this particular crime.

But he had small ground in that for self-gratulation, since it is a fact remembered in the country that when he did eventually stagger down to salt water with his sadly reduced team, the dogs had positively not had their harness off for a week. Mr. Beeching and his precious partner had been afraid to let their dogs out of the traces and the safe reach of their whips!

The fatally unwise Gutty was the first to succ.u.mb. Fish downed him for a morsel of food he had grabbed; and when the team had been over the spot on which he fell, there simply was no Gutty left. Poll, the slighter of the two b.i.t.c.hes, died under Harry's whip--the haft of it--or she, like Jinny, would have seen salt water, because their s.e.x was their protection--from their fellow-dogs, though not from the now starving and insensate clowns who drove them.

Everything but the scant remains of the men's food had, of course, been jettisoned before this. The dogs made a meal of the smart water-proof sheets, and Jan ate Beeching's show pair of moccasins. The whole business forms a wretched and shameful record that need not be prolonged.

To be quite just, one should mention that Beeching was afoot (hammering Jan's protruding haunches) when they staggered into the township on the evening of the thirty-fifth day. Harry lay groaning on the sled, and had been there, too lame to walk, he said, too despicable, perhaps, for Death's consideration, for three days and more. The ten-dog team of prime-conditioned animals of five weeks before consisted now of seven gaunt, staggering creatures, each a bony framework, masked in dried blood and bruises; each suffering jarring agony from every tremulous step taken, and all together (as the market went) worth, it might be--to a very speculative dog-doctor--say, ten dollars. The team had cost the deplorable Beeching about three thousand.

But, as a matter of fact, Pad died in the moment of stoppage, and two of his mates got their release while yet in the traces. Jan, Jinny, and two others survived still at the bitter end of what was perhaps the most wretchedly bungled trip ever made over that famous trail.

x.x.xII

JAN OBEYS ORDERS AT THE GREAT DIVIDE

Experienced observers contended that the most truly remarkable thing about _Chechaquo_ Beeching was not, after all, his super-slackness or his criminal stupidity, but his invincible luck.

Where many good men and true, infinitely capable and knowledgeable, had starved, or failed to make a scavenger's wage, Beeching had tumbled into possession of a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and, after having sampled most methods of "burning" money known to the northland, still had fully half this sum to his credit.

That was one astounding proof of his tenderfoot's luck. But more remarkable evidence of it was found, by those who understood, in his memorable journey to salt water.

By all the rules of the game, men said, Beeching and his hanger-on should have been starved, frozen, and eaten by their outraged dogs a week or more before the end of their trip. And failing that, some old-timers pointed out, they should have been publicly lynched on arrival at salt water.

Instead, they fell into the hands of roughly good-natured men, who not only gave them food and drink and helped them down to the wharf, but actually set them up with a traveling-kit of new clothing.

Then, again, consider the really astounding fact that a steamer should have been waiting to cast off at the moment these two men arrived, and that her skipper held his ship up for half an hour to suit the convenience of the precious pair, and finally carried them on in his best two cabins!

"But what about the sled and the team?" whined Harry, as he and Beeching hobbled up the gangway of the waiting steamer, bound for luxury and civilization. It may be Harry had thought of these as one of his hard-earned perquisites.

"Oh, to blazes with the sled and dogs!" cried _Chechaquo_ Beeching. "The town's welcome to 'em, for all I care."

Generous man! And at that precise moment, his tough life starved and hammered out of his hardy body, the exhausted Fish was breathing his last--still in the traces; and Jan, in whom the fires of life, though better laid than those of ninety-nine dogs in a hundred, were burning very low just now--barely flickering, indeed--was concentrating such energies as remained in him upon gnawing feebly at his traces, for the double purpose of extracting some nutriment from them, if that might be, and freeing himself from their control.

The first of these aims was a tolerably hopeless one, since Jan could not just now swallow any hard thing. But in the second he achieved success, just as the steamer's gangway was hauled up and the population of the town was engaged in waving farewell to the craft that connected with the big outside world, where sentimentality and dollars rule, just as in the northland muscle, grit, endurance--and dollars rule. Yes, even there money does play one of the chief ruling parts. But, as a general thing, sentimentality does not.

The remaining wrecks of the team, two dead, one dying, and three too far gone in the same direction to be capable of any effort, lay where they had fallen at the moment when willing hands had come to help their masters to the steamer.

It may be that Jan had bigger physical reserves to draw upon than his mates had. It is more likely, however, that the powers which kept him striving still to live, after the others had given up effort, were factors on the mental side of his composition. His memories were stronger and more vivid, his imagination a thing far more complex, than that of any husky. Also his faith in men and his desire for their help and companionship--even after five weeks with Beeching and Harry--were greatly stronger than the same factors were in any of his team-mates.

The culminative influences of hundreds of generations of civilization spoke in him here.

And so, trailing beside him the gnawed-off ends of his traces, Jan dragged his emaciated frame along in jerks over the hard-trodden snow while the folk of the town cheered the departing steamer. In a little while Jan came to a small tent, the flap of which hung loose and open.

At the entrance Jan smelt the fresh trail of a man; from within came--to nostrils cunning as Jan's--the odor of foodstuffs. Jan propped and jerked himself feebly into the tent, though for months now he had known that it was forbidden to enter the habitations of men-folk.

Nosing weakly to and fro, Jan found on a low shelf a can of milk. A half-blind jab of his muzzle brought it tumbling to the ground. Its lid was open, but the milk was firmly frozen. Jan licked at it, cutting his deep flews as he did so on the uneven edges of the tin. The warmth of his tongue extracted a certain sweet milkiness from this. But the metal edges were raw and sharp; Jan's exhaustion was very great, and presently he sank down upon the twig-strewn ground, and lay there, breathing in weak, sobbingly uncertain gasps, the milk-can between his outstretched paws.

Jan was now drawing very near, nearer than he had ever been before, to the Great Divide.

Within a hundred yards of Jan were groups of solid frame houses, with warm kitchens in them, and abundant food. But the tent, standing by itself, came first; and, though he could not know it, the tent was, on the whole, the very best of all the habitations in that bleak little town--for Jan. For this tent was the temporary home of an American named Willis--James Gurney Willis; as knowledgeable a man as Jean himself and, in addition, one known wherever he went into the northland as a white man.

Not many minutes after Jan's lying down there Jim Willis came striding up to his tent from the wharf, and found the half of its floor-s.p.a.ce occupied by the gaunt wreck of the biggest hound he had ever seen.

Willis was a man of experience in other places than the northland, and he would always have known a bloodhound when he saw one. But never had he seen a hound of any kind with such a frame as that he saw before him now. The dead, blood-matted black and iron-gray coat was no bloodhound's coat, he thought; too long and wiry and dense for that. But yet the head--And, anyway, thought Willis, how came the poor beast to have died just there, in his tent?

And in that moment the heavy lids of Jan's eyes twitched and lifted a little. It was rather ghastly. They showed no eyes, properly speaking.

The eyes seemed to have receded, turned over, disappeared in some way.

All that the lifted lids showed Willis was two deep, triangular patches of blood-red membrane. And above the prominent, thatched brows rose the n.o.ble bloodhound forehead, serried wrinkle over wrinkle to the lofty peak of the skull.

"My G.o.d!" muttered Willis, with no irreverent intent.

Always rich in the bloodhound characteristic of abundant folds of loose, rolling skin about the head, neck, and shoulders, the wreck of Jan, from which so very many pounds of solid flesh had been lost during the past month, seemed to carry the skin of two hounds. And set deep in these pouched and pendent folds of skin--tattered, blood-stained banners of the hound's past glories--the face of Jan was as a wedge, incredibly long and narrow.

His eyes had been torn out, it seemed. That was what forced the exclamation from Willis. But it was only an abnormal extension of the blood-red haws that Willis saw. The eyeb.a.l.l.s had rolled up and back somewhat, as they mostly do when a hound is _in extremis_; but they would have shown if Jan had had the strength properly to lift his lids.

Yet he had seen Willis. It was his utter weakness, combined with the hanging weight of his wrinkled face and flew-skin, that caused the ghastly show of blood-red membrane only where eyeb.a.l.l.s should have been.

But Jan did see Willis, and the loose skin of his battered shoulders even shrank a little, in antic.i.p.ation of a blow. Jan thought himself still in the traces. (As a fact he was; and breast-band, too.)

The moment Willis spoke--his low "My G.o.d!"--Jan fancied he had heard the old order to "Mush on!" and doubtless that another blow from the haft of Beeching's whip was due. In view of his then desperate state, the effort with which Jan answered the command he fancied he heard was a positive miracle. He actually staggered to his feet, though too weak to lift his eyelids, and plunged forward, with weakly scrabbling paws, to throw his weight upon the traces. And plunging against nothing but s.p.a.ce, he had surely crashed to earth again, and in that moment crossed the Divide, but for Willis.

Willis was not of the type of men who waste breath over repet.i.tions of exclamation of surprise. As Jan slowly heaved up his body, in a last effort at duty, Willis swiftly lowered his own body, dropping upon his knees, both arms widely extended. And it was at Willis's broad chest, and between his strongly supporting arms, that the wreck of Jan plunged, in response to what must be reckoned by far the greatest effort, till then, that the great hound had ever made.

And if the thing had ended there, this incident alone proved that when he chose the tent, before any of the more ambitious habitations near by, Jan had chosen what was a.s.suredly the best place for him in all that town.

x.x.xIII

BACK TO THE TRAIL

Late that same evening two men who looked in to see Jim Willis found him playing sick-nurse to all that remained of the strangest-looking hound ever seen in those parts. His stove was well alight, and near by, on the bed, were a spoon, a flask of whisky, a dish of hot milk, and some meat-juice in a jar.

There was some talk about the hound, and then the bigger of the visitors said:

"Well, Jim, what's it to be? Will you tackle the job, or won't you? You must admit, if the trail _is_ bad, the money's pretty good. Will you go?"