The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
CHANGING HORSES IN MIDSTREAM.
A week before Waring and Ivan, the Kuskokwim Indian, left Kaltag, a downriver steamer, the Michael Cudahy, stuck in the ice halfway between Nulato and Kaltag. She had bucked the slush ice for a week, hoping against hope to make the river mouth where, due to the later freezing of the salt water, she could count with certainty on reaching St. Michael with her little bunch of belated passengers,
She wore her bow half through forcing leads in the still-moving mass of granular ice when, early one morning the floating field of glinting gray paused—and moved no more for eight months! The captain cursed feelingly, for now the company would have to feed those fifteen passengers, for weeks on end, till he could get them back to Nulato.
Joan Manners, the quiet girl aboard, would probably have wept and might have had hysterics, if she had been that kind of a young woman. But five years of life on the upper Yukon enabled her to take the dilemma with the philosophy of the true adventurer and to show no trepidation to the ruling spirits of the Michael Cudahy. By which reference is made to “Slim Jim” Collins and his pals, which included at least one of the other two women. Ever since he had boarded the boat at the mouth of the Tanana River, Joan had had to make shift to avoid the attentions of the long, cadaverous miner from Fairbanks, the big camp of the Tanana. She thought he would have done better to confine his compliments, and his offers to promenade, to Miss O'Brien, who also was from Fairbanks and whom he seemed to know extremely well.
When the Cudahy became part and parcel of the Yukon ice field, Collins, cautiously venturing ashore, found an Indian village, somewhere up a tributary valley, and returned with the news that there were dogs to be had—and he had them; enough for one good team, which would be ready in a day or two. He and his friend Hennessy, a short, red-whiskered, intemperate individual, and Miss O'Brien, and also Miss Manners—if she would like to go—would run down-river to the Kaltag cut-off. They were all bound for Nome, and that was the way. It wasn't a great distance to the portage, only a three-days' run across to the road houses, up the Norton Sound coast, to their destination.
Joan's misery was a divided one. If she stayed, her father, Judge Manners, who was waiting for her in Nome, would go crazy with anxiety. If she accepted this invitation, she placed herself in the hands of two men whom she distrusted. No rough externals deceived this young frontierswoman, who would have seen in them rather insignia of dependability. But Slim Jim Collins, in the trimmest rig of the northern miner, well-to-do, ostentatious, wearing nuggets—he was of a type she knew. He and his like made good trailmates, often, but—she could not forget his obvious admiration of her.
She decided to go, for her father's sake. She had a small but very effective revolver, which, of course, she did not expect to have to use. Her equipment otherwise consisted of a small bag of necessary articles and her wolfskin robe. The master of the Michael Cudahy, with a sigh of relief, checked off four.
Betraying no misgivings, and with the most amiable spirit, twenty-year-old Joan Manners took her seat back of Miss O'Brien in the long, clumsy Indian sled, while Slim Jim Collins held the handle bars directly behind her. Hennessy jogged contentedly in the rear. Before the steamer was out of sight around a three-mile bend, Joan suspected that she had made a mistake, but it was not till toward evening, when it was too late to return alone, that she was sure of it. Collins, riding upon the back of the sled, had patted her shoulder earlier in the day. Now he essayed franker familiarities. She turned and rose in the sled.
“Surely, you don't wish to make me walk all the way back to the Cudahy!”
“My dear little girl,' he replied, “you couldn't do it and live, to-night. We've made too good time. Forget it, and be a good little sport. Nobody's going to kill you. You're in Alaska now!”
“I've been in Alaska perhaps as long as you have, Mr. Collins; and it isn't my way, and you know it very well. Please let us have an understanding, If you take me to Nome, in the way I wish to go, I shall be very grateful to you, and I or my father will repay you my full share of the cost. But if you force any caresses upon me, I shall have to kill you!”
Miss O'Brien had been giggling; but at this warning of her sister traveler she gasped:
“Gawd, girlie, don't pull any tragedy-queen stuff. It'll spoil our trip. He don't mean nothing. Take it from me.”
“Miss O'Brien is right,” said Collins soberly, “I meant-no harm at all. Most gals like a little pettin' now and then.”
Joan had resumed her seat, in silent misery, and was debating whether to chance freezing to death, in an attempted return to the steamer, or to go on—and keep incessant vigil over this suspiciously affectionate miner. She was in the throes of indecision, when suddenly she heard a faint jingle, and soon, in the dusk, she saw approaching them another sled.
The dogs of the two teams engaged on the instant of their encounter, and there was the usual tangle of bodies and harness and the bedlam of battle, punctuated by the harsh commands of their drivers. Slim Jim had run ahead to the fray and was pulling off his dogs. On the other side, a tall, lithe man and an Indian were doing the same thing with their own team,
A sudden determination came to Joan. She got out of the sled and stepped briskly to the lithe young man. She came-close to him and looked boldly up in his face. He drew off his cap in the frosty air and steadily returned her scrutiny, but in such a manner of good nature and respect that she said impulsively:
“I don't know who you are, but will you take me upriver with you to the steamer which is stuck in the ice? We left it this morning.”
Slim Jim Collins, turning his leader over to Hennessy, came up to them. Whereupon the girl moved a little closer to the stranger, who appreciated the significance of this slight movement.
Looking Collins in the eye, Bruce Waring said to the girl, “You seem to be afraid of this man. What's the matter, miss?”
“Nothing,” she replied calmly, “except—just what you have said.”
“Look here, stranger,” said Collins, “you mush on and keep out of my affairs.” And he shook a warning finger in Waring's face.
Bruce laughed lightly and went to Collins' sled, followed by the girl.
“Show me your things, Miss”
“Manners. Just this bag and robe.”
Collins stalked up. “See here, my friend, you butt out of this. You get me?” His eyes slitted.
Waring, satchel and robe under his left arm, paused a moment, his right hand at his body—a detail not lost on Collins. Watching the latter, alertly, Bruce said to Joan:
“Do you know the name and address of this gentleman?”
“I think I do,” answered Joan.
“That's good. Just get into my sled, Miss Manners.”
“In a moment.” She took a few steps toward Miss O'Brien, who was exceedingly nervous. “Won't you go back with me? You know I wouldn't have ventured on this trip with no other woman.”
“I'm in Mr. Collins' party,” the other answered coldly.
Joan stepped to Waring's sled and sat on the load. She watched the motionless men, her hand in her pocket, ready, if Hennessy took a hand in the dispute, to draw on him. Unless Hennessy did take a hand, she was sure that the stranger needed no assistance.
“I'll remember you,” said Collins sinisterly, as he moved to the rear end of his sleigh.
“Thanks,” said Bruce dryly. He did not move till Collins had driven off. Then he went to the girl and again took off his cap.
“I am Bruce Waring, from Seattle, a grubstaked prospector. I've been down at Kusko for nearly a year, and I'm going into the Koyukuk, somewhere, after gold.”
“So I supposed,” smiled Joan.
She looked about her. But for the presence of a stolid native, she was alone with this young stranger, in as vast and drear a solitude as any her imagination could know. For just a moment a timid fancy whispered: “Out of the frying pan into the fire, perhaps.” But her quiet heart and nerves reassured her.
“We'd better camp, I think,” suggested the young man, a little awkwardly.
“Of course,” agreed Joan, in as bravely casual a way as she could.
“Mush on, little fellers,” he called to the dogs, “Gee!” He swerved them to a wooded river bar, and brought them to a halt at the edge of the ice.
After a hearty supper, their backs to a blazing fire, she told him of what had led to her predicament. Her father, professionally a lawyer of not a little repute in his home State, had been a miner in the Yukon camps since she was a little girl. Over five years before, he had sent for her mother and herself, and they had lived happily together in the North, Manners practicing law at Eagle till, a year ago, he had left Joan teaching school and gone to Nome to accept the appointment of commissioner, an office similar to that of justice of the peace. Then Mrs. Manners had died of typhoid fever.
“I've just recovered from it, myself,” Waring told her gently.
She opened her big, dark eyes. “Oh, that's what makes you look so pale. I thought—but only for a moment—it was because you were afraid of that man!”
“Afraid?” said Bruce, puzzled. “Why, how could I be afraid of a man who tries to bully a woman?”
“You shouldn't be, of course,” agreed Joan. Then she finished her story.
“Poor father is heartbroken. And, naturally, he sent for me, at once. But I couldn't dispose of our things and get away until the last boat. And the beastly old thing waited too long!”
“It's been an early freeze-up, they tell me,” said Waring, in justice to the Cudahy's captain. “What did you say you wanted to do? Go back to the boat?”
Joan ruminated. “N-o-o, I really don't, of course,” she confessed. “Just when you appeared, it was the one thing I wanted to do. But, indeed, I'm just as anxious now, as I was this morning, to go on to father—else I never would have chanced the trip with those strange men.”
“What did they do that angered you?”
“Nothing much, perhaps. A little sentimental, a little—oh, too familiar. I was afraid! I would like to go to Nome.”
“I'll take you to Nome, Miss Manners, if you wish me to,” said Bruce after a pause. “Ryan, here, knows the Kaltag Cut-off.”
She looked him in the face, very seriously. In her earnestness, she looked at him very steadily, trying to read his very heart through his eyes. Then her little fretted brow cleared.
“I do wish you would, You are very, very kind.”
He built a lean-to for her, scraped away the snow, and made a thick bed of spruce plumes. Then he and Ivan took their sleeping bags and walked up the shore. Joan watched their retreating figures in a kind of dismay.
“Please don't go so far away,” she called.