Smoke Bellew Part 35

"It's a pint long, but hogshead strong."

"We're covering this spruce-tea route four times a day, and there are eighty of you to be dosed each time," Smoke informed Laura Sibley. "So we've no time to fool. Will you take it or must I hold your nose?" His thumb and forefinger hovered eloquently above her. "It's vegetable, so you needn't have any qualms."

"Qualms!" Shorty snorted. "No, sure, certainly not. It's the deliciousest dope!"

Laura Sibley hesitated. She gulped her apprehension.

"Well?" Smoke demanded peremptorily.

"I'll--I'll take it," she quavered. "Hurry up!"

That night, exhausted as by no hard day of trail, Smoke and Shorty crawled into their blankets.

"I'm fairly sick with it," Smoke confessed. "The way they suffer is awful. But exercise is the only remedy I can think of, and it must be given a thorough trial. I wish we had a sack of raw potatoes."

"Sparkins he can't wash no more dishes," Shorty said. "It hurts him so he sweats his pain. I seen him sweat it. I had to put him back in the bunk, he was that helpless."

"If only we had raw potatoes," Smoke went on. "The vital, essential something is missing from that prepared stuff. The life has been evaporated out of it."

"An' if that young fellow Jones in the Brownlow cabin don't croak before morning I miss my guess."

"For Heaven's sake be cheerful," Smoke chided.

"We got to bury him, ain't we?" came the indignant snort. "I tell you that boy's something awful--"

"Shut up," Smoke said.

And after several more indignant snorts, the heavy breathing of sleep arose from Shorty's bunk.

In the morning, not only was Jones dead, but one of the stronger men who had worked on the firewood squad was found to have hanged himself. A nightmare procession of days set in. For a week, steeling himself to the task, Smoke enforced the exercise and the spruce-tea. And one by one, and in twos and threes, he was compelled to knock off the workers. As he was learning, exercise was the last thing in the world for scurvy patients. The diminishing burial squad was kept steadily at work, and a surplus half-dozen graves were always burned down and waiting.

"You couldn't have selected a worse place for a camp," Smoke told Laura Sibley. "Look at it--at the bottom of a narrow gorge, running east and west. The noon sun doesn't rise above the top of the wall. You can't have had sunlight for several months."

"But how was I to know?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't see why not, if you could lead a hundred fools to a gold-mine."

She glared malevolently at him and hobbled on. Several minutes afterward, coming back from a trip to where a squad of groaning patients was gathering spruce-boughs, Smoke saw the seeress entering Amos Wentworth's cabin and followed after her. At the door he could hear her voice, whimpering and pleading.

"Just for me," she was begging, as Smoke entered. "I won't tell a soul."

Both glanced guiltily at the intruder, and Smoke was certain that he was on the edge of something, he knew not what, and he cursed himself for not having eavesdropped.

"Out with it," he commanded harshly. "What is it?"

"What is what?" Amos Wentworth asked sullenly. And Smoke could not name what was what.

Grimmer and grimmer grew the situation. In that dark hole of a canyon, where sunlight never penetrated, the horrible death list mounted up.

Each day, in apprehension, Smoke and Shorty examined each other's mouths for the whitening of the gums and mucous membranes--the invariable first symptom of the disease.

"I've quit," Shorty announced one evening. "I've been thinkin' it over, an' I quit. I can make a go at slave-drivin', but cripple-drivin's too much for my stomach. They go from bad to worse. They ain't twenty men I can drive to work. I told Jackson this afternoon he could take to his bunk. He was gettin' ready to suicide. I could see it stickin' out all over him. Exercise ain't no good."

"I've made up my mind to the same thing," Smoke answered. "We'll knock off all but about a dozen. They'll have to lend a hand. We can relay them. And we'll keep up the spruce-tea."

"It ain't no good."

"I'm about ready to agree with that, too, but at any rate it doesn't hurt them."

"Another suicide," was Shorty's news the following morning. "That Phillips is the one. I seen it comin' for days."

"We're up against the real thing," Smoke groaned. "What would you suggest, Shorty?"

"Who? Me? I ain't got no suggestions. The thing's got to run its course."

"But that means they'll all die," Smoke protested.

"Except Wentworth," Shorty snarled; for he had quickly come to share his partner's dislike for that individual.

The everlasting miracle of Wentworth's immunity perplexed Smoke. Why should he alone not have developed scurvy? Why did Laura Sibley hate him, and at the same time whine and snivel and beg from him? What was it she begged from him and that he would not give?

On several occasions Smoke made it a point to drop into Wentworth's cabin at meal-time. But one thing did he note that was suspicious, and that was Wentworth's suspicion of him. Next he tried sounding out Laura Sibley.

"Raw potatoes would cure everybody here," he remarked to the seeress. "I know it. I've seen it work before."

The flare of conviction in her eyes, followed by bitterness and hatred, told him the scent was warm.

"Why didn't you bring in a supply of fresh potatoes on the steamer?" he asked.

"We did. But coming up the river we sold them all out at a bargain at Fort Yukon. We had plenty of the evaporated kinds, and we knew they'd keep better. They wouldn't even freeze."

Smoke groaned. "And you sold them all?" he asked.

"Yes. How were we to know?"

"Now mightn't there have been a couple of odd sacks left?--accidentally, you know, mislaid on the steamer?"

She shook her head, as he thought, a trifle belatedly, then added, "We never found any."

"But mightn't there?" he persisted.

"How do I know?" she rasped angrily. "I didn't have charge of the commissary."

"And Amos Wentworth did," he jumped to the conclusion. "Very good.

Now what is your private opinion--just between us two. Do you think Wentworth has any raw potatoes stored away somewhere?"

"No; certainly not. Why should he?"

"Why shouldn't he?"