The Magnetic North Part 102

Again the steamer swung out, hunting a new channel.

"Pitcairn's opinion is thought a lot of. The Geologic Survey men listen to Pitcairn. He helped them one year. He's one of those extraordinary old miners who can tell from the look of things, without even panning.

When he saw that pyrites on Idaho Bar he stopped dead. 'This looks good to me!' he said, and, Jee-rusalem! it was good!"

They stared at the Ramparts growing bolder, the river hurrying like a mill-race, the steamer feeling its way slow and cautiously like a blind man with a stick.

"Seven."

"Seven."

"Seven."

"Six and a half."

"Pitcairn says gold is always thickest on the inside of an elbow or turn in the stream. It's in a place like that my claim is."

The steamer swerved still further out from the course indicated on the chart. The pilot was still hunting a new channel, but still the Captain stood and listened, and it was not to the sounding of the Yukon Bar.

"They say there's no doubt about the whole country being glaciated."

"Hey?"

"Signs of glacial erosion everywhere."

The Captain looked sharply about as if his ship might be in some new danger.

"No doubt the gold is all concentrates."

"Oh, is that so?" He seemed relieved on the whole.

"Eight and a half," from below.

"Eight and a half," from the Captain.

"Eight and a half," from the pilot-house.

"Concentrates, eh?"

Something arresting, rich-sounding, in the news--a triple essence of the perfume of riches.

With the incantation of technical phrase over the witch-brew of adventure, gambling, and romance, that simmers in the mind when men tell of finding gold in the ground, with the addition of this salt of science comes a savour of homely virtue, an aroma promising sustenance and strength. It confounds suspicion and sees unbelief, first weaken, and at last do reverence. There is something hypnotic in the terminology. Enthusiasm, even backed by fact, will scare off your practical man, who yet will turn to listen to the theory of "the mechanics of erosion" and one of its proofs--"up there before our eyes, the striation of the Ramparts."

But Rainey was what he called "an old bird." His squinted pilot-eye came back from the glacier track and fell on the outlandish figure of his pa.s.senger. And with an inward admiration of his quality of extreme old-birdness, the Captain struggled against the trance.

"Didn't I hear you say something about going to Dawson?"

"Y-yes. I think Dawson'll be worth seeing."

"Holy Moses, yes! There's never been anything like Dawson before."

"And I want to talk to the big business men there. I'm not a miner myself. I mean to put my property on the market." As he said the words it occurred to him unpleasantly how very like McGinty they sounded. But he went on: "I didn't dream of spending so much time up here as I've put in already. I've got to get back to the States."

"You had any proposition yet?" The Captain led the way to his private room.

"About my claim? Not yet; but once I get it on the market----"

So full was he of a scheme of his own he failed to see that he had no need to go to Dawson for a buyer.

The Captain set out drinks, and still the talk was of the Bar. It had come now to seem impossible, even to an old bird, that, given those exact conditions, gold should not be gathered thick along that Bar.

"I regard it as a sure thing. Anyhow, it's recorded, and the a.s.sessment's done. All the district wants now is capital to develop it."

"Districts like that all over the map," said the old bird, with a final flutter of caution. "Even if the capital's found--if everything's ready for work, the summer's d.a.m.n short. But if it's a question of goin'

huntin' for the means of workin'----"

"There's time," returned the other quietly, "but there's none to waste.

You take me and my pardner----"

"Thought you didn't have a pardner," snapped the other, hot over such duplicity.

"Not in ownership; he's got another claim. But you take my pardner and me to Dawson----"

The Captain stood on his legs and roared:

"I can't, I tell you!"

"You can if you will--you will if you want that farm!"

Rainey gaped.

"Take us to Dawson, and I'll get a deed drawn up in Minook turning over one-third of my Idaho Bar property to John R. Rainey."

John R. Rainey gaped the more, and then finding his tongue:

"No, no. I'd just as soon come in on the Bar, but it's true what I'm tellin' you. There simply ain't an unoccupied inch on the Oklahoma this trip. It's been somethin' awful, the way I've been waylaid and prayed at for a pa.s.sage. People starvin' with bags o' money waitin' for 'em at the Dawson Bank! Settlements under water--men up in trees callin' to us to stop for the love of G.o.d--men in boats crossin' our channel, headin'

us off, thinkin' nothin' o' the risk o' bein' run down. 'Take us to Dawson!' it's the cry for fifteen hundred miles."

"Oh, come! you stopped for me."

The Captain smiled shrewdly.

"I didn't think it necessary at the time to explain. We'd struck bottom just then--new channel, you know; it changes a lot every time the ice goes out and the floods come down. I reversed our engines and went up to talk to the pilot. We backed off just after you boarded us. I must have been rattled to take you even to Minook."

"No. It was the best turn you've done yourself in a long while."

The Captain shook his head. It was true: the pa.s.sengers of the Oklahoma were crowded like cattle on a Kansas stock-car. He knew he ought to unload and let a good portion wait at Minook for that unknown quant.i.ty the next boat. He would issue the order, but that he knew it would mean a mutiny.

"I'll get into trouble for overloading as it is."