The Magnetic North Part 104

"Fetch him where?"

"Home!"

"When will that be?"

"Just as soon as I've put through the job up yonder." He jerked his head up the river, indicating the common goal.

And now O'Flynn, roaring as usual, had broken away from those who had obstructed his progress, and had flung himself upon the Colonel. When the excitement had calmed down a little, "Well," said the Colonel to the three ranged in front of him, Maudie looking on from above, "what you been doin' all these three months?"

"Doin'?"

"Well--a----"

"Oh, we done a lot."

They looked at one another out of the corners of their eyes and then they looked away. "Since the birds came," began Mac in the tone of one who wishes to let bygones be bygones.

"Och, yes; them burruds was foine!"

Potts pulled something out of his trousers pocket----a strange collapsed object. He took another of the same description out of another pocket. Mac's hands and O'Flynn's performed the same action.

Each man seemed to have his pockets full of these----

"What are they?"

"Money-bags, me bhoy! Made out o' the fut o' the 'Lasky swan, G.o.d bless 'em! Mac cahls 'em some haythen name, but everybuddy else cahls 'em illegant money-bags!"

In less than twenty minutes the steamer whistle shrieked. Nig bounded out of the A. C., frantic at the repet.i.tion of the insult; other dogs took the quarrel up, and the Ramparts rang.

The Boy followed the Captain out of the A. C. store. All the motley crew that had swarmed off to inspect Minook, swarmed back upon the Oklahoma. The Boy left the Captain this time, and came briskly over to his friends, who were taking leave of the Colonel.

"So you're all goin' on but me!" said the Colonel very sadly.

The Colonel's pardner stopped short, and looked at the pile of baggage.

"Got your stuff all ready!" he said.

"Yes." The answer was not free from bitterness. "I'll have the pleasure of packin' it back to the shack after you're gone."

"So you were all ready to go off and leave me," said the Boy.

The Colonel could not stoop to the obvious retort. His pardner came round the pile and his eyes fell on their common sleeping-bag, the two Nulato rifles, and other "traps," that meant more to him than any objects inanimate in all the world.

"What? you were goin' to carry off my things too?" exclaimed the Boy.

"That's all you get," Maudie burst out indignantly--"all you get for packin' his stuff down to the landin', to have it all ready for him, and worryin' yourself into shoe-strings for fear he'd miss the boat."

Mac, O'Flynn, and Potts condoled with the Colonel, while the fire of the old feud flamed and died.

"Yes," the Colonel admitted, "I'd give five hundred dollars for a ticket on that steamer."

He looked in each of the three faces, and knew the vague hope behind his words was vain. But the Boy had only laughed, and caught up the baggage as the last whistle set the Rampart echoes flying, piping, like a lot of frightened birds.

"Come along, then."

"Look here!" the Colonel burst out. "That's my stuff."

"It's all the same. You bring mine. I've got the tickets. You and me and Nig's goin' to the Klond.y.k.e."

CHAPTER XX

THE KLONd.y.k.e

"Poverty is an odious calling."--Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

On Monday morning, the 6th of June, they crossed the British line; but it was not till Wednesday, the 8th, at four in the afternoon, just ten months after leaving San Francisco, that the Oklahoma's pa.s.sengers saw between the volcanic hills on the right bank of the Yukon a stretch of boggy tundra, whereon hundreds of tents gleamed, pink and saffron. Just beyond the bold wooded height, wearing the deep scar of a landslide on its breast, just round that bend, the Klond.y.k.e river joins the Yukon--for this is Dawson, headquarters of the richest Placer Diggings the world has seen, yet wearing more the air of a great army encampment.

For two miles the river-bank shines with sunlit canvas--tents, tents everywhere, as far as eye can see, a mushroom growth masking the older cabins. The water-front swarms with craft, scows and canoes, birch, canvas, peterboro; the great bateaux of the northern lumberman, neat little skiffs, clumsy rafts; heavy "double-enders," whip-sawed from green timber, with capacity of two to five tons; lighters and barges carrying as much as forty tons--all having come through the perils of the upper lakes and shot the canon rapids.

As the Oklahoma steams nearer, the town blossoms into flags; a great murmur increases to a clamour; people come swarming down to the water-front, waving Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes as well----What does it all mean? A cannon booms, guns are fired, and as the Oklahoma swings into the bank a band begins to play; a cheer goes up from fifteen thousand throats: "Hurrah for the first steamer!"

The Oklahoma has opened the Klond.y.k.e season of 1898!

They got their effects off the boat, and pitched the old tent up on the Moosehide; then followed days full to overflowing, breathless, fevered, yet without result beyond a general stringing up of nerves. The special spell of Dawson was upon them all--the surface aliveness, the inner deadness, the sense of being cut off from all the rest of the world, as isolated as a man is in a dream, with no past, no future, only a fantastic, intensely vivid Now. This was the summer climate of the Klond.y.k.e. The Colonel, the Boy, and Captain Rainey maintained the illusion of prosecuting their affairs by frequenting the offices, stores, and particularly saloons, where buyers and sellers most did congregate. Frequent mention was made of a certain valuable piece of property.

Where was it?

"Down yonder at Minook;" and then n.o.body cared a straw.

It was true there was widespread dissatisfaction with the Klond.y.k.e.

Everyone agreed it had been overdone. It would support one-quarter of the people already here, and tens of thousands on their way! "Say Klond.y.k.e, and instantly your soberest man goes mad; say anything else, and he goes deaf."

Minook was a good camp, but it had the disadvantage of lying outside the magic district. The madness would, of course, not last, but meanwhile the time went by, and the people poured in day and night. Six great steamers full came up from the Lower River, and still the small craft kept on flocking like coveys of sea-fowl through the Upper Lakes, each party saying, "The crowd is behind."

On the 14th of June a toy whistle sounded shrill above the town, and in puffed a Liliputian "steel-hull" steamer that had actually come "on her own" through the canon and shot the White Horse Rapids. A steamer from the Upper River! after that, others. Two were wrecked, but who minded?

And still the people pouring in, and still that cry, "The crowd's behind!" and still the clamour for quicker, ampler means of transport to the North, no matter what it cost. The one consideration "to get there," and to get there "quickly," brought most of the horde by the Canadian route; yet, as against the two ocean steamers--all-sufficient the year before to meet the five river boats at St. Michael's--now, by the All-American route alone, twenty ocean steamers and forty-seven river boats, double-deckers, some two hundred and twenty-five feet long, and every one crowded to the guards with people coming to the Klond.y.k.e.

Meanwhile, many of those already there were wondering why they came and how they could get home. In the tons of "mail matter" for Dawson, stranded at Skaguay, must be those "instructions" from the Colonel's bank, at home, to the Canadian Bank of Commerce, Dawson City. He agreed with the Boy that if--very soon now--they had not disposed of the Minook property, they would go to the mines.

"What's the good?" rasped Mac. "Every foot staked for seventy miles."

"For my part," admitted the Boy, "I'm less grand than I was. I meant to make some poor devil dig out my Minook gold for me. It'll be the other way about: I'll dig gold for any man on Bonanza that'll pay me wages."

They sat slapping at the mosquitoes till a whistle screamed on the Lower River. The Boy called to Nig, and went down to the town to hear the news. By-and-by Mac came out with a pack, and said he'd be back in a day or two. After he had disappeared among the tents--a conquering army that had forced its way far up the hill by now--the Colonel got up and went to the spring for a drink. He stood there a long time looking out wistfully, not towards the common magnet across the Klond.y.k.e, but quite in the other direction towards the nearer gate of exit--towards home.