The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
THE GRUBSTAKED MAN.
THERE were many tall caches along the bank of the river, on the outskirts of the tent “city” of Kusko, most of them provided with ladders. But Bruce Waring had never needed a ladder to make the platform, where his outfit was stored under a heavy tarpaulin. A bear hug of the post, a few vigorous kicks, and the lithe fellow was up. But not to-day.
He managed to climb halfway up, and then slid down again, and leaned against the post.
“I wonder what's the matter with me,” he muttered.
Every week since midsummer, he had come in to Kusko City from the distant, barren, swale where he was prospecting, for a pack of grub for himself and his Indian helper. Last night, though tired as usual, he could not sleep. To-day, the trail was stumblier, the muck bogs stickier, the mosquitos higher pitched of voice, more obstinately voracious than ever before.
Two men, smoking pipes, went by him bearing a stretcher. Waring followed them and caught up with the rear bearer.
“What's the matter with him?” he asked.
“Typhoid, of course,” was the answer.
Then Waring remembered that some one had told him that that scourge of the unsanitary northern camp had broken out in Kusko. “Perhaps I've got it,” he thought. “I'll find out.”
He followed on through the sprawl of flimsy canvas structures and willow-bough, mud-plastered shacks which Alaskan optimism had grandiloquently christened Kusko City, to a dirty, rambling row of tents at the edge of the dun, spudgy flat, through which the big river ran.
The stretcher bearers stopped in front of a khaki-colored tent, on which was crudely daubed a red cross, and the words: “Canned Milk Wanted in Exchange for Lives.”
“Hullo, doc!” called one.
“Doc” came up the line, from one of the muck-surrounded tents, and glanced at the blanket-covered man on the stretcher.
“Take him into the last tent over there, boys,” he directed casually. “He'll have to go on the floor, for the present, until the A M Company condescends to rummage through their warehouse for some more cots—if they've got 'em. What's the matter with you, young fellow?” he asked, turning with affected gruffness to the tall, wabbly looking, young prospector.
Waring grinned sheepishly. “I dunno; I'm kind of sick all over.”
Doctor Rose asked him a few questions, and then said: “Go along with that other fellow and lay alongside of him, and do what you can for him, for he's a deal sicker than you are, and very emaciated. You'll have plenty of time, yet, before you're bad. I'll see you later.”
He walked rapidly toward the other end of the row, answering the beckoning finger of a very large and very fat woman with a red cross sewed on her billowy bosom. Even at seventy-five yards, Bruce could see that her white gown was sadly in need of laundering.
Waring found the rough boards of Tent 11 of the Kusko Hospital very comfortable. He lay on his side, a single thickness of his Hudson's Bay blanket drawn to his chest, and watched the man who had lately occupied the stretcher. There was a bucket of boiled water, on an empty cream box, at the door. This seemed to constitute the entire medical equipment of hospital tent No. 11.
“Got a cache, somewhere?” asked the doctor, on his first visit to his new patient.
“You bet,” said Waring, “and it's a peach. I've been grubstaked by a prince of a man, and here I am lying”
“Forget it,” said Rose abruptly. “You'll dig no less gold for him than the next man. Where's your cache? You need some things here.”
Bruce described its location, and then tried to sleep.
Early next morning a stretcher man brought to Doctor Rose's tent—a floorless, eight by ten, bedroom, kitchen, office, and hospital dispensary all in one—the dunnage bag of Bruce Waring and the Red Cross monstrosity, squatting on the floor, pawed through it for personal-record data. Some letters, accounts, and memoranda in a leather pocketbook disclosed the fact that one Frederick R. Ticely had purchased and paid for a very extensive, though otherwise typical, Alaskan prospector's outfit, which had been shipped to Bruce Waring at Kusko City. The invoices were addressed to Ticely at the Ticely Realty Corporation, 106 Merchants Loan Building, Seattle—which was the information the Red Cross lady wanted. That address looked like help, and she waddled down the tent row till she found Doctor Rose—who was lifting a delirious patient back into his cot—and showed him the invoices.
“Ought to stand for a collect telegram, don't you think?” she asked.
“Without doubt. Tell him the boy is in his first week—and no money. That's the worst of these grubstaked men. They tell 'em outside that money's no good in Alaska; all they need is a good outfit!”
Whereupon, Mrs. McColgan, a Klondike veteran mining-camp nurse, spudged across the flat, to the river-front shacks, and sent a collect telegram on the Kusko Hospital's guaranty—which was none too good.
The Ticely Realty Corporation was a product of the erratic genius of Frederick Ransome Ticely, multiplied by the Seattle-Alaska status quo of post-Klondike days. A big fire, plus general stagnation in the West, had held the energies of that city in leash, for some years, when the great gold strike in the Yukon flashed upon the world. Men who, a few years later, would never have dreamed of a raw life in the outlands, disgusted with the torpor of the times, converted their assets into flour and bacon and took, therefore, a bill of lading on any crazy craft that could be patched up for a run up the Inside Passage.
Ticely, then a young and unmarried hardware salesman, was one of the argonauts. He managed to obtain a “lay” on one of the best claims, as it turned out later, on far-famed El Dorado Creek; struck good pay, and, just because he was Frederick Ticely and couldn't help it, sold it for thirty thousand dollars while the selling was good—and lost half a million! He invested in Hunker Creek benches, struck pay once more, and, the selling again being good, sold it for twenty thousand dollars' profit.
Indeed, he could not refrain from selling, any more than the drunkard can refrain from drinking or the liar from lying. With his fifty-odd thousand he organized the Ticely Realty Corporation, which was ninety-nine per cent Ticely and one per cent corporation. Also, he married Cecelia Bellingham, who, because she was as unlike him as only a woman could be who instinctively and passionately loathed the thing that is found on the seamy side of business, intensively attracted him, and was as intensively attracted by him. He needed live help and he got it; and if he had not been as bad a business man as he was good as a salesman—good being an utterly feeble word to describe his salesmanship—he would have made a million.
Near a summer resort, in the big timber of the Cascades, he found Bruce Waring burying his mother and shipping his young sister to an aunt, to go to school. Beyond a meager education, all the fellow possessed of tangible assets was a worthless homestead and a strong back. But he had ambition and a slow, steady, implacable sort of purpose to be something, if he could be it in his own way—which was a way that Frederick Ticely was one day to learn was not his way, till life, aided by Bruce Waring, ground him into something like the shape of that way.
Ticely, like all master salesmen, was a nearly unerring judge of men. Therefore he invited the gaunt, awkward, solemn-faced youth to come to Seattle and work for him. For which he was immediately repaid by a glance of high approval from Cecelia Ticely, whose approval was, next to putting over a seemingly impossible sale, the most glorious satisfaction that Frederick Ticely knew anything about.
In Seattle Waring worked on a high stool, lived in a small room, and boarded where he could do so most frugally. At first an occasional visitor, he soon became a weekly dinner guest of Cecelia Ticely and her husband—when the latter was not out of town en some wild hunt for subdivisible suburban land. She made Bruce feel so perfectly at home that his pride permitted this intimacy with the Ticelys.
He climbed other and better paying stools in the busy offices of the Ticely Realty Corporation, but his legs numbed, as they hunched themselves on the rungs; his feet itched for the crackle of dead fir twigs underfoot, or in a fire; his arms ached for the swing of an ax; his fingers tingled for the cool grip of a rifle.
Ticely was disappointed in him, as an employee. His work was good, but it was cheap work—hopelessly clerical; and this was not what he wanted in a man of his own choosing. He felt that his salesmanship, in which he had a satanic pride, had been at fault. He had proposed to sell to Waring a sure and rapid success, and Waring couldn't buy! Ticely had failed to make the sale!
So when, at dinner one evening, the young man talked in an unwonted manner of enthusiasm of the latest gold strike in the Kuskokwim country, Ticely, thoughtfully studying him a moment, asked:
“How would you like to take a run up there as the representative of—well, say Ticely & Waring, prospectors?”
Mrs. Ticely laughed. “You'd like to go yourself, you nomad!”
Not denying it, he waited for Waring's answer. “How does it strike you, Bruce?”
The young fellow was very serious. “If you mean it,” he finally replied, “why it's the one thing in the world I'd like to do—if you think I'd be likely to make good.”
“As likely as any man I know. All right, then; it's settled.”
Mrs. Ticely concealed in Waring's outfit a lot of jelly and the sort of cake that keeps. She could have bought it, but, instead, she made it herself; and she said good-by to him at the dock, and waited for her last handkerchief wave till the steamer was so far away she was sure he could no longer distinguish her.