Smoke Bellew Part 29

"Yes. I've been in swimming. Now! Ready? Hoist away!"

He sent up the two packs on the first trip, was consequently rebuked by Joy Gastell, and on the second trip came up himself.

Joy Gastell looked at him with glowing eyes, while her father and Carson were busy coiling the rope. "How could you cut loose in that splendid way?" she cried. "It was--it was glorious, that's all."

Smoke waved the compliment away with a deprecatory hand.

"I know all about it," she persisted. "Carson told me. You sacrificed yourself to save him."

"Nothing of the sort," Smoke lied. "I could see that swimming-pool right under me all the time."

VIII. THE HANGING OF CULTUS GEORGE

The way led steeply up through deep, powdery snow that was unmarred by sled-track or moccasin impression. Smoke, in the lead, pressed the fragile crystals down under his fat, short snow-shoes. The task required lungs and muscle, and he flung himself into it with all his strength.

Behind, on the surface he packed, strained the string of six dogs, the steam-jets of their breathing attesting their labor and the lowness of the temperature. Between the wheel-dog and the sled toiled Shorty, his weight divided between the guiding gee-pole and the haul, for he was pulling with the dogs. Every half-hour he and Smoke exchanged places, for the snow-shoe work was even more arduous than that of the gee-pole.

The whole outfit was fresh and strong. It was merely hard work being efficiently done--the breaking of a midwinter trail across a divide. On this severe stretch, ten miles a day they called a decent stint.

They kept in condition, but each night crawled well tired into their sleeping-furs. This was their sixth day out from the lively camp of Mucluc on the Yukon. In two days, with the loaded sled, they had covered the fifty miles of packed trail up Moose Creek. Then had come the struggle with the four feet of untouched snow that was really not snow, but frost-crystals, so lacking in cohesion that when kicked it flew with the thin hissing of granulated sugar. In three days they had wallowed thirty miles up Minnow Creek and across the series of low divides that separate the several creeks flowing south into Siwash River; and now they were breasting the big divide, past the Bald b.u.t.tes, where the way would lead them down Porcupine Creek to the middle reaches of Milk River. Higher up Milk River, it was fairly rumored, were deposits of copper. And this was their goal--a hill of pure copper, half a mile to the right and up the first creek after Milk River issued from a deep gorge to flow across a heavily timbered stretch of bottom. They would know it when they saw it. One-Eyed McCarthy had described it with sharp definiteness. It was impossible to miss it--unless McCarthy had lied.

Smoke was in the lead, and the small scattered spruce-trees were becoming scarcer and smaller, when he saw one, dead and bone-dry, that stood in their path. There was no need for speech. His glance to Shorty was acknowledged by a stentorian "Whoa!" The dogs stood in the traces till they saw Shorty begin to undo the sled-lashings and Smoke attack the dead spruce with an ax; whereupon the animals dropped in the snow and curled into b.a.l.l.s, the bush of each tail curved to cover four padded feet and an ice-rimmed muzzle.

The men worked with the quickness of long practice. Gold-pan, coffee-pot, and cooking-pail were soon thawing the heaped frost-crystals into water. Smoke extracted a stick of beans from the sled. Already cooked, with a generous admixture of cubes of fat pork and bacon, the beans had been frozen into this portable immediacy. He chopped off chunks with an ax, as if it were so much firewood, and put them into the frying-pan to thaw. Solidly frozen sourdough biscuits were likewise placed to thaw. In twenty minutes from the time they halted, the meal was ready to eat.

"About forty below," Shorty mumbled through a mouthful of beans. "Say--I hope it don't get colder--or warmer, neither. It's just right for trail breaking."

Smoke did not answer. His own mouth full of beans, his jaws working, he had chanced to glance at the lead-dog, lying half a dozen feet away. That gray and frosty wolf was gazing at him with the infinite wistfulness and yearning that glimmers and hazes so often in the eyes of Northland dogs. Smoke knew it well, but never got over the unfathomable wonder of it. As if to shake off the hypnotism, he set down his plate and coffee-cup, went to the sled, and began opening the dried-fish sack.

"Hey!" Shorty expostulated. "What 'r' you doin'?"

"Breaking all law, custom, precedent, and trail usage," Smoke replied.

"I'm going to feed the dogs in the middle of the day--just this once.

They've worked hard, and that last pull to the top of the divide is before them. Besides, Bright there has been talking to me, telling me all untellable things with those eyes of his."

Shorty laughed skeptically. "Go on an' spoil 'em. Pretty soon you'll be manicurin' their nails. I'd recommend cold cream and electric ma.s.sage--it's great for sled-dogs. And sometimes a Turkish bath does 'em fine."

"I've never done it before," Smoke defended. "And I won't again. But this once I'm going to. It's just a whim, I guess."

"Oh, if it's a hunch, go to it." Shorty's tones showed how immediately he had been mollified. "A man's always got to follow his hunches."

"It isn't a hunch, Shorty. Bright just sort of got on my imagination for a couple of twists. He told me more in one minute with those eyes of his than I could read in the books in a thousand years. His eyes were acrawl with the secrets of life. They were just squirming and wriggling there.

The trouble is I almost got them, and then I didn't. I'm no wiser than I was before, but I was near them." He paused and then added, "I can't tell you, but that dog's eyes were just spilling over with cues to what life is, and evolution, and star-dust, and cosmic sap, and all the rest--everything."

"Boiled down into simple American, you got a hunch," Shorty insisted.

Smoke finished tossing the dried salmon, one to each dog, and shook his head.

"I tell you yes," Shorty argued. "Smoke, it's a sure hunch. Something's goin' to happen before the day is out. You'll see. And them dried fish'll have a bearin'."

"You've got to show me," said Smoke.

"No, I ain't. The day'll take care of itself an' show you. Now listen to what I'm tellin' you. I got a hunch myself out of your hunch. I'll bet eleven ounces against three ornery toothpicks I'm right. When I get a hunch I ain't a-scared to ride it."

"You bet the toothpicks, and I'll bet the ounces," Smoke returned.

"Nope. That'd be plain robbery. I win. I know a hunch when it tickles me. Before the day's out somethin' 'll happen, an' them fish'll have a meanin'."

"h.e.l.l," said Smoke, dismissing the discussion contemptuously.

"An' it'll be h.e.l.l," Shorty came back. "An' I'll take three more toothpicks with you on them same odds that it'll be sure-enough h.e.l.l."

"Done," said Smoke.

"I win," Shorty exulted. "Chicken-feather toothpicks for mine."

An hour later they cleared the divide, dipped down past the Bald b.u.t.tes through a sharp elbow-canyon, and took the steep open slope that dropped into Porcupine Creek. Shorty, in the lead, stopped abruptly, and Smoke whoaed the dogs. Beneath them, coming up, was a procession of humans, scattered and draggled, a quarter of a mile long.

"They move like it was a funeral," Shorty noted.

"They've no dogs," said Smoke.

"Yep; there's a couple of men pullin' on a sled."

"See that fellow fall down? There's something the matter, Shorty, and there must be two hundred of them."

"Look at 'em stagger as if they was soused. There goes another."

"It's a whole tribe. There are children there."

"Smoke, I win," Shorty proclaimed. "A hunch is a hunch, an' you can't beat it. There she comes. Look at her!--surgin' up like a lot of corpses."

The ma.s.s of Indians, at sight of the two men, had raised a weird cry of joy and accelerated its pace.

"They're sure tolerable woozy," commented Shorty. "See 'em fallin' down in lumps and bunches."

"Look at the face of that first one," Smoke said. "It's starvation--that's what's the matter with them. They've eaten their dogs."

"What'll we do? Run for it?"

"And leave the sled and dogs?" Smoke demanded reproachfully.

"They'll sure eat us if we don't. They look hungry enough for it. h.e.l.lo, old skeeziks. What's wrong with you? Don't look at that dog that way. No cookin'-pot for him--savvy?"

The forerunners were arriving and crowding about them, moaning and plainting in an unfamiliar jargon. To Smoke the picture was grotesque and horrible. It was famine unmistakable. Their faces, hollow-cheeked and skin-stretched, were so many death's-heads. More and more arrived and crowded about, until Smoke and Shorty were hemmed in by the wild crew. Their ragged garments of skin and fur were cut and slashed away, and Smoke knew the reason for it when he saw a wizened child on a squaw's back that sucked and chewed a strip of filthy fur. Another child he observed steadily masticating a leather thong.