The Magnetic North Part 52

The morning after the ejection of Potts, and his unwilling reception at the Big Cabin, Mac and O'Flynn failed to appear for breakfast.

"Guess they're huffy," says Potts, stretching out his feet, very comfortable in their straw-lined mucklucks, before the big blaze.

"Bring on the coffee, Kaviak."

"No," says the Colonel, "we won't begin without the other fellows."

"By the living Jingo, _I_ will then!" says Potts, and helps himself under the Colonel's angry eyes.

The other two conferred a moment, then drew on their parkis and mittens, and with great difficulty, in spite of yesterday's work, got the door open. It was pretty dark, but there was no doubt about it, the Little Cabin had disappeared.

"Look! isn't that a curl of smoke?" said the Boy.

"Yes, by George! they're snowed under!"

"Serve 'em right!"

A heavy sigh from the Colonel. "Yes, but _we'll_ have to dig 'em out!"

"Look here, Colonel"--the Boy spoke with touching solemnity--"_not before breakfast!_"

"Right you are!" laughed the Colonel; and they went in.

It was that day, after the others had been released and fed, that the Boy fell out with Potts concerning who had lost the hatchet--and they came to blows. A black eye and a b.l.o.o.d.y nose might not seem an illuminating contribution to the question, but no more was said about the hatchet after the Colonel had dragged the Boy off the prostrate form of his adversary.

But the Colonel himself lost his temper two days later when O'Flynn broached the seal set months before on the nearly empty demijohn. For those famous "temperance punches" the Colonel had drawn on his own small stock. He saw his blunder when O'Flynn, possessing himself of the demijohn, roared out:

"It's my whisky, I tell you! I bought it and paid furr it, and but for me it would be at the bottom o' the Yukon now."

"Yes, and you'd be at the bottom of the Yukon yourself if you hadn't been dragged out by the scruff o' your neck. And you'd be in a pretty fix now, if we left you alone with your whisky, which is about all you've got."

"We agreed," Potts chipped in, "that it should be kept for medicinal purposes only."

Sullenly O'Flynn sipped at his grog. Potts had "hogged most of the hootch."

"Look here, Boy," said Mac at supper, "I said I wouldn't eat off this plate again."

"Oh, dry up! One tin plate's like another tin plate."

"Are you reflecting on the washer-up, Mr. MacCann?" asked Potts.

"I'm saying what I've said before--that I've scratched my name on my plate, and I won't eat off this rusty, battered kettle-lid."

He held it up as if to shy it at the Boy. The young fellow turned with a flash in his eye and stood taut. Then in the pause he said quite low:

"Let her fly, MacCann."

But MacCann thought better of it. He threw the plate down on the table with a clatter. The Colonel jumped up and bent over the mush-pot at the fire, beside the Boy, whispering to him.

"Oh, all right."

When the Boy turned back to the table, with the smoking kettle, the cloud had gone from his face. MacCann had got up to hang a blanket over the door. While his back was turned the Boy brought a tin plate, still in good condition, set it down at Mac's place, planted a nail on end in the middle, and with three blows from a hammer fastened the plate firmly to the board.

"Maybe you can't hand it up for more as often as you like, but you'll always find it there," he said when McCann came back. And the laugh went against the dainty pioneer, who to the end of the chapter ate from a plate nailed fast to the table.

"I begin to understand," says the Colonel to the Boy, under cover of the others' talk, "why it's said to be such a devil of a test of a fellow's decency to winter in this infernal country."

"They say it's always a man's pardner he comes to hate most," returned the Boy, laughing good-humouredly at the Colonel.

"Naturally. Look at the row in the Little Cabin."

"That hasn't been the only row," the Boy went on more thoughtfully. "I say, Colonel"--he lowered his voice--"do you know there'll have to be a new system of rations? I've been afraid--now I'm _sure_--the grub won't last till the ice goes out."

"I know it," said the Colonel very gravely.

"Was there a miscalculation?"

"I hope it was that--or else," speaking still lower, "the stores have been tampered with, and not by Kaviak either. There'll be a h.e.l.l of a row." He looked up, and saw Potts watching them suspiciously. It had come to this: if two men talked low the others p.r.i.c.ked their ears. "But lack of grub," resumed the Colonel in his usual voice, as though he had not noticed, "is only one of our difficulties. Lack of work is just about as bad. It breeds a thousand devils. We're a pack o' fools. Here we are, all of us, hard hit, some of us pretty well cleaned out o'

ready cash, and here's dollars and dollars all round us, and we sit over the fire like a lot of G.o.d-forsaken natives."

"Dollars! Where?"

"Growin' on the trees, boys; a forest full."

"Oh, timber." Enthusiasm cooled.

"Look at what they say about those fellows up at Anvik, what they made last year."

"They've got a saw-mill."

"_Now_ they have. But they cut and sold cord-wood to the steamers two years before they got a mill, and next summer will be the biggest season yet. We ought to have set to, as soon as the cabins were built, and cut wood for the summer traffic. But since there are five of us, we can make a good thing of it yet."

The Colonel finally carried the day. They went at it next morning, and, as the projector of the work had privately predicted, a better spirit prevailed in the camp for some time. But here were five men, only one of whom had had any of the steadying grace of stiff discipline in his life, men of haphazard education, who had "chucked" more or less easy berths in a land of many creature comforts ... for this--to fell and haul birch and fir trees in an Arctic climate on half-rations! It began to be apparent that the same spirit was invading the forest that had possession of the camp; two, or at most three, did the work, and the rest shirked, got snow-blindness and rheumatism, and let the others do his share, counting securely, nevertheless, on his fifth of the proceeds, just as he counted (no matter what proportion he had contributed) on his full share of the common stock of food.

"I came out here a Communist--" said the Boy one day to the Colonel.

"And an agnostic," smiled the older man.

"Oh, I'm an agnostic all right, now and for ever. But this winter has cured my faith in Communism."

Early February brought not only lengthening daylight, but a radical change in the weather. The woodsmen worked in their shirt-sleeves, perspired freely, and said in the innocence of their hearts, "If winter comes early up here, spring does the same." The whole hillside was one slush, and the snow melting on the ill-made Little Cabin roof brought a shower-bath into the upper bunk.

Few things in nature so surely stir the pulse of man as the untimely coming of a few spring days, that have lost their way in the calendar, and wandered into winter. No trouble now to get the Big Chimney men away from the fireside. They held up their bloodless faces in the faint sunshine, and their eyes, with the pupils enlarged by the long reign of night, blinked feebly, like an owl's forced to face the morning.

There were none of those signs in the animal world outside, of premature stir and cheerful awaking, that in other lands help the illusion that winter lies behind, but there was that even more stimulating sweet air abroad, that subtle mixture of sun and yielding frost, that softened wind that comes blowing across the snow, still keen to the cheek, but subtly reviving to the sensitive nostril, and caressing to the eyes. The Big Chimney men drew deep breaths, and said in their hearts the battle was over and won.

Kaviak, for ever following at Mac's heels "like a rale Irish tarrier,"

found his allegiance waver in these stirring, blissful days, if ever Farva so belied character and custom as to swing an axe for any length of time. Plainly out of patience, Kaviak would throw off the musk-rat coat, and run about in wet mucklucks and a single garment--uphill, downhill, on important errands which he confided to no man.