The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X.
A BUSY CALM BEFORE THE STORM.
In the Gold Stampede of the Far North, whether large or small, an infinite variety of detail composes an ensemble which, in its broader features, is identical with that of every other stampede.
The way of the discovery, the number of men who vouch for it, the outer circumstances of its inception—these are as various as Alaska's rivers and mountains, its climate, soil, and rocks. But, whether, twenty or forty thousand strong, the stampeders crowd the waterways in great ocean liners, in river steamers, in boats and barges and canoes, to Kondike or Nome; or, on the other hand, in modest hundreds, equipped with pack horses, sleds, and dogs, they break new overland trails to lesser camps like Candle, Kougarok, Squirrel, or Midas—the phenomena of human life, of human struggle, is the same.
Emotions, passions, purposes; the means, the methods, the processes—these are identical. In principle they are one—The Stampede, that tense, fantastic drama of the North, whose placers, locked in frost and hidden beneath an inexpressive mantle of tundra mosses as spacious as a nation's territory, must still challenge the red-rimmed eyes and staggering feet of generations of prospectors to come. And these endlessly will reenact the great epic of Alaska, the Gold Stampede!
Midas, though in size and importance one of the smallest since the pre-Klondike strikes of Circle and Forty-mile first opened up the vast Yukon basin to the prospectors of the world, was in many respects the strangest stampede in all Alaska. It was unique in the fact that a single mind had conceived it, had molded certain other minds to a similar way of thinking, and these had molded the rest. Whether they came overland or by the roundabout way of the river, one thought, one belief, was common to them all. That Midas Creek was too rich for a cautious and canny fellow like Fred Ticely to have told the truth about it!
But the way the different individual minds and characters reacted to the events of their coming were as different as were the men and women themselves. One or two of the advance guard, thrown rapidly ahead. to cut more timber, could scarcely keep their hands out of the flooded shafts in the creek. If unrestrained by the others, they would have ignored their orders to cut wood, and gone to bailing out the holes to get at the gravel. The other extreme of these gave the dumps a mere glance and imperturbably took their axes up the wooded hill.
And so when the next contingent arrived. Manners, truer for the moment to a sense of his professional duty, set about finishing the commissioner's house that Bruce had framed for him. Hennessy could hardly tear himself away from Ticely and Waring's cabin, as though a kind of halo surrounded it which drew and held him like the unseen aura of a magnet. Collins, on the other hand, a more coldly deliberate man, looked to the swollen creak, now turbidly flushing out the last ice barriers from its sinuous channel, for the best landing point for the expected river boats, where he quickly erected a pole frame for the big storage tent in which were to be housed the precious supplies of the Midas Mining and Development Company.
Most of the advance party were connected either in direct interest or by employment with this hopeful concern, whose business-like organization reflected the up-to-date methods of present-day Alaska. While the various members were sizing up the externals of the place and getting their impressions, Ticely found opportunity to say to Waring:
“I'll get 'em together, Bruce, as soon as they've quit rubbering around the place. See 'em goo-gooing at the ground, as if they were expecting nuggets to jump out and hit 'em in the eye!”
He chuckled. Even in his thorough concern over the future the salesman in him could not but smack his lips at each new evidence of the spell he had cast upon them. Then he jerked back to action. “We'd better bring them over the flat yonder, and stow them your town-site stakes. Midas City—ahem!—is a real-estate proposition. I ought to be rather at home there. However, we won't put you on a high stool again, Bruce.”
“I should say not!” exclaimed Waring.
“But we'd better hold their attention on that town site—or on anything, in fact, except the bottom of those shafts!”
Waring putting in one of his blunt “why's,” Ticely showed a trace of impatience. 'Don't you see it will be better for us, and for them, too, since they've pulled up stakes in Nome and come here to settle, to get them as much settled as possible before they go to prospecting? Right now they could hitch up again and beat it back to Nome, after putting us through a mighty ugly ordeal. But if we get 'em to take off their things and stay a while—make camps, and quarrel a little over the choicest sites for cabins and stores, and start building and getting the big outfits in and unpacked and housed—get to feeling at home, you know, and well rooted to the place—why, then, you see the meager prospects won't drive them off! They'll get obstinate and hopeful. 'We've got to win, now,' they'll say. 'The darned old pay streak's got to show up, that's all.' Get me?”
Bruce “got” him. It was a kind of thought that was alien to the fiber of his mind, and with which, therefore, he had little sympathy. But his strong intelligence enabled him to grasp it fully. Evenly, and with almost a stolid face he replied:
“I dare say you're right. But wouldn't it be really better for them, in the long run, to make up their minds quickly, before they've done all these things and spent all that additional time and money?”
“It would be a great mistake,” answered Ticely earnestly. “Any one who had gone as far as we have ought to give this creek a good prospecting. A little time and labor now won't add much to what they've spent, while if they give up now they simply lose everything. Ah, judge, what do you think of the lay-out?”
Manners had strolled up, a few paces ahead of Collins. He looked very fit, after his two weeks in the crisp spring sunshine. His graying hair made a handsome contrast with his ruddy, smiling, sanguine face.
“Oh, fine country, fine Country, Ticely,” he replied, looking up and: down the wooded valley, bare of snow, now, except in the notches of its side ravines. “What's the next move?”
That played nicely into Ticely's hands. “Why the town site, I suppose. We'd better decide on the boundaries of it, and get whatever ground the company needs withdrawn at once, before the bunch arrives by the river. Mr. Collins, here, can probably come closer than any of us to sizing up the probable run of the gravel channel through the flat. For, of course, we'll have to consider the future working of the flat with as little interference as possible with the town property.” As he talked, he led them down the creek toward the future “Midas City.”
While an amateur surveyor readjusted the boundaries of the town site, Manners attended to the legal formalities; and with one or two other expert miners, Collins studied the channel in its relation to the shafts and cuts that Ticely and Waring had put down, and decided on the probable run of the gold. For the time being, the guess would have to do, he told Ticely; and when they returned to the scene of building operations where Bruce, heading a gang of axmen, was hewing and notching logs as fast as they were snaked downhill by the horse teams, Collins drew the group toward Waring, so that the latter must at least hear, even if he did not join, in the ensuing conversation, and proposed that a prospecting crew be put to work at once bailing out the shafts. The spring thaw had, of course, completely flooded them—a fact on which Ticely relied for much of the delay he needed to “handle” the situation.
“Pretty sloppy work,” warned the Midas magnate critically, “and unnecessarily expensive. With the flat still running surface water, it will seep in at least half as fast as it can be bailed out for a week or two yet. Why not start a few holes up on the bank, where it's drier?”
“Take too long to put 'em down,” said Collins briefly. “We'll get more idea of the lay of the pay streak in a week of drifting from your shafts than we could in two months of sinking new holes.”
Ticely knew that. He had an obvious defense, however—that these prospect holes were upon ground which he and Bruce had wholly retained. No one else had a right to work upon them. The claims in which he had sold the fractional interests that had been pooled in the Midas Mining and Development. Company were as yet untouched by pick or shovel. But, as it would have been the height of folly to use that defense, he merely suggested that they explore the holes below the town site where, he said, the prospects were the best. They might have been—by a cent or two! But his real reason was that these holes, being on gravel bars, would be difficult to drain.
That night they all talked it over at a “regular meeting” of the officers of the company, with delighted little Joan, as secretary, sitting at a make-shift table in the unfinished commissioner's office. There was no holding them back, even if Ticely had tried. The bed rock under the muck and gravel of Midas Creek was the unseen cynosure of all eyes; and in the morning a bailing crew was started at one of the upper holes and another at a lower. They would have put a couple of men at constructing a “Chinese pump,” a time-worn device of the nature of an endless chain of pockets, had not Ticely promised them, among his own supplies which were being rushed up the river, a very efficient little hand pump, which would lift water faster than any windlass and bucket crew could hoist it.
“I hope the current is swift on the river,” Ticely confided to his junior partner the next day. “If it isn't, the first poling boats will be up on time, now.”
Apparently the current was not very swift that spring, and he was right as to the result. In two days, several of the men he had employed in Nome reached Midas in a very slender red canoe that Ticely had admired and purchased in Nome. These men reported that the nearest of the big poling boats with the pumps and other important equipment were within ten miles of the mouth of Midas. The bailing had proceeded slowly, but with the early prospect of putting the pumps into operation, Ticely and Waring foresaw the early ending of their interlude of uncertainty.
The interlude had been utilized by Ticely to stabilize in every way the interest of the miners, but the period was too brief! But by Collins, though he in no way neglected his work, the time was utilized to cultivate Joan as much as she would permit, and that was no more and no less than a narrow civility to the man who was manager of the company in which her father had invested practically all he possessed in the world.
As she and her collie were returning up the creek from a ptarmigan hunt, her little spitfire of a .22 cradled in her arm, she paused curiously at the lower shaft workings. Collins, coming around the cribbing of the windlass, lifted his cap and asked her if she would like to go down the shaft. Going down shafts was an old story to Joan—which was the excuse she gave for declining. She moved away, but he joined her.
“Just going up to camp myself,” he remarked casually, as he walked along by her side, his lank form towering above her. “About through here for this afternoon. To-morrow morning will show us dry bed rock, and we'll soon see what we've got in that hole.”
It was the first time he had walked with her any distance—it was fully a quarter of a mile to the flat where axes and hammers were thudding on clean, sappy spruce timber—and it gave him an opportunity for real conversation with her. Too much of her leisure time had been spent with Bruce Waring, he thought. In reality, it was time which she could easily spare from her recording books; but it was a source of secret anger and irritation to Collins, who was deeply moved by the girl's beauty and by her refinement; to which he was not insensible, despite his own crudities and the coarseness of the life he had led. Between Waring's attitude toward him of casual brevity and Joan's polite avoidance of anything savoring of personal relations, he was made to realize perfectly the view they held concerning him.
“Say, Miss Manners,” he began abruptly after the silence that followed his first remarks, “there's something I want to explain to you.”
“There's something you certainly ought to,” replied Joan, who knew at once what he wished to speak about. In her heart she had hoped he would speak of it, and definitely apologize, for unless he did her pride would permit her no friendliness with him, and this was exceedingly awkward for all of them.
“Well, I don't know,” rejoined Collins, who had his own sort of pride in the matter. “It all depends on how you look at it. I didn't know who you were. And, anyhow, I wasn't going to eat you!”
Joan's eyes flashed. “No, and I don't suppose you are intending to eat Miss O'Brien!”
“Say, how long have you lived in Alaska?”
“Long enough to know things, if that is what you mean. But knowing them doesn't excuse them, does it?”
“I tell you I didn't know the kind of gal you were. But even at that, I wouldn't have hurt you any.”
“Oh, no, you wouldn't have done me bodily harm, I suppose—against my will,” admitted Joan wearily, for it wasn't the sort of explanation her pride demanded. “What you did wouldn't have been so bad on the boat or in a town. It would have been just fresh and cheeky, and it would have been up to—the girl—to set you right! But to let me start out with you for a long trip, when a girl has to fully trust a man—and begin that way” Wrath surged at the recollection: “How dared you!” she exclaimed, looking up at his eyes.
He met her gaze frankly—and admired her the more for her anger. “You were a mighty big temptation—for a very little girl!” he replied half humorously. “I'm—awfully sorry!”
Joan felt she ought to be appeased, at least for her father's sake and Bruce's. After a moment's reflection she said: “We had best say no more about it, perhaps. It was a very unfortunate thing to happen just before your getting into mining up here with my father and—Mr. Waring.”
“You ain't going to cut me out for it, now, are you, Miss Manners?”
It was hard to be friendly with this man. His innate coarseness jarred upon her—a coarseness greater even than that of his actual speech.
“Avoid you, I suppose you mean. No, I will try to forget it, and to be the same in my attitude toward you as to any of the other men.”
“Including Waring?”
Joan flushed angrily. “Please avoid personalities, Mr. Collins. You know precisely what I mean.”
They were at the camp already, and where their wet trails diverged they came to a halt, and he removed his cap. “If you'll really and truly forget it, that's all I want. That'll give me an even break. Good evening, Miss Manners.”
“Good evening,” she replied as pleasantly as she could. But when she resumed her walk her brow darkened once more, as she thought of Miss O'Brien, whom she would have liked to discuss with him—for Miss O'Brien's sake. Not only had Joan lived in Alaska long enough to “know things,” as she had told Collins, but she had seen and heard and thought enough to have sympathy and understanding without, however, abating one jot of the Puritanism—as we are wont to call a very universal sentiment in the clean of heart—which belonged to her innately.
Miss O'Brien and her friend, Miss Anderson, were living in a big tent and cooking for a number of men besides Collins and Hennessy. Their way of living in Nome was impossible in the camp at Midas, even had Collins not had his own reasons for observing the proprieties. He hoped what, in fact, was true, that neither Waring, Manners, nor Joan knew anything about the little house on the outskirts of Nome. Nevertheless it was not humanly possible for either Joan or Bruce to fail to suspect the truth. They had not, however, discussed this aspect of the affair of Collins.
Waring's state of mind during that two weeks' interlude was a complex one, and, therefore, very trying to a man of so forthright a make. Busy, harassed as he was, he saw much of Joan. Neither sought the other exactly; they gravitated. They couldn't help it; they were chums. And, responsive to that natural affinity, they would very soon have been lovers avowedly, if Waring had not hardened his heart to its own tenderness. He felt that if he made love to her, and she responded, as instinct told him she would, it would be all the worse for the girl when the inevitable trouble came. For renounce him she would, she must, in any case, unless, indeed, he were to solidify his defense in advance by making a clean breast of his own ignorance of whatever it was that Ticely had done in Nome to mislead them all—intentionally or otherwise. Afterward, such a defense, even if he were weak enough to make it, would be too late. But he had no thought of making it, either before or after the impending dénouement. He must take his medicine—with Ticely!
Constraint, therefore, strove with naturalness and freedom in his manner toward the girl and cooled the spontaneous joy of their comradeship. She remembered this manner of his afterward, and took it as the preying of a guilty conscience on the heart of a man whose impulses were superior to his actions. Waring drowned his perplexities as well as he could in herculean labor. He directed the ax gang, and while they were at work he doggedly persisted, night and day, in the prospecting of the bench. Only Ak Tuk, his helper, knew of this activity!
With the installation of the pumps, the shafts were drained, and the bed rock tested. With compressed lips, little said, Collins and Colwell drifted several feet, both up and down the creek. The pay was the same—if you could call it pay! The cat was out of the bag. Frederick Ticely had told no less than the truth about the gravel he had so far uncovered on Midas Creek!