The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
CHANCE VALUES OF GREEK MYTHS.
“Well, well, well!” greeted Ticely, as he jerked off his clumsy trail mitten, and they clasped and shook each other's hand.
“You—you yourself!” sputtered Waring. “Gee, I'm glad!” He was still wringing the hand of his best friend on earth, when there came a sudden thought that drove the gleeful, boyish cordiality from his face. “Unless—say, Mr. Ticely”
“It's Fred, now.”
“Eh—Fred”—the familiarity came hard—“say, you didn't misunderstand my message, did you? There isn't any real pay here, you know.”
“Not a bit, my boy,” Ticely assured him, while he struggled out of his caribou parka. He patted down his hair again—unconscious survival in him of the well-groomed city man. “Of course I hoped that your winter prospecting might show up something better. But all alone, this way, I suppose you couldn't do much.”
“Couldn't I!” exclaimed Bruce pridefully. “I've put down three shallow holes and one deep one since Ak Tuk left.”
“The dickens you did!” Ticely knew that job. “How many times did you climb your ladder?”
“Oh, I guess about seven hundred and thirty thousand. Nice and dry, though, and plenty of burning wood handy.”
Then he asked Ticely the question that had been hot in his throat from the moment of their meeting—“Why did you come?” Ticely told him frankly. And no one could be franker, when he wanted to be, nor more winningly frank, than Frederick Ticely
“So it's up to me, you see, to get a little money up here, old man,” he said, concluding his sketch of the recent vicissitudes of the Ticely Realty Corporation “I've done it before, and be gorry I can do it again!”
After dinner, they “got down to cases,” as Ticely called it, in the gambling vernacular he remembered Bruce made him a diagram of the lay of the stream and its tributary gulches, and the position of his shafts and cuts. And, very carefully and proudly, he showed his senior partner the little bottles of prospects
“We seem to have just about what you wired me,” said Ticely, summing it up. “A little more of it, now, that's all It's not-so—b-a-d. Or wouldn't be if”
“If it was nearer somewhere,” supplied Waring ruefully
“Well, my boy, I've seen 'nowhere' in Alaska become 'somewhere,' in short order—when gold was struck! What's the best route here from salt water?”
“Oh, the Yukon and Koyukuk,” answered Waring promptly “It's a long distance, of course, but supplies and machinery could be floated, in barges, to the mouth of the creek, and then up the creek, here, in large and very shallow draft poling boats”
“Fairbanks is the nearest town, for an all-water route,” meditated Ticely out loud. “And straight across the mountains it's not so very far to Nome. It's not much past the middle of December, and I think we'd better put down a few more holes before we”
His voice trailed away, with the bluish vapors from his pipe. He looked at the peeled poles of the cabin's low ceiling.
“What have you named this creek?” he suddenly asked.
“Nothing,” answered Bruce, a little shamefacedly. “I've been so busy burning down into the old thing. It's just 'the creek' to me.”
Ticely smiled indulgently. “And haven't staked anything, I suppose.”
“No.”
“First thing we must do. Some party of prospectors might drift along here, any time. Never take chances, Bruce, in Alaska—or elsewhere, for that matter. We'll name it Midas Creek.”
For a month Ticely tarried. At the lowest claim on the creek they put down a shaft, and it proved a deep one. It's bed rock brought up the average of their pay only slightly, but the sinking of it brought Bruce Waring into a still closer relation of gratitude to Frederick Ransome Ticely.
The younger man in the shaft, the elder on the windlass, toiling for nearly three weeks, they had made a depth of thirty-five feet, when a warm spell set in, and the outer air, no longer heavy enough to sink rapidly in the shaft, failed to displace the wood gases generated by their night's thawing; and Waring, who had had little experience with deep shafts, came near to taking the long trail. Ticely, receiving no response to his signaling below, called the Eskimo to man the windlass, slid down the rope, and found Waring sitting, stupidly, in a pile of gravel. Emptying the half-filled bucket, Ticely threw his partner over it and howled to Ak Tuk to hoist. He dampened his blue handkerchief in a pool, tied it over his nose and mouth, and waited patiently till Ak Tuk had got Waring out on the dump and lowered the rope again. Then he stood in its hook, signaled “up,” and himself was hauled to safety.
Bruce came out of his stupor in the cool air, but he was a mighty sick man for three days. The weather, meanwhile, had turned normally cold again, and they went to bed rock in safety. Then Ticely announced that he must go to Nome, to see what he could do toward procuring machinery and supplies, and men.
“Rome wasn't built in a day, my lad,” he told his wondering, doubting partner. “It would be months, or years, possibly, before you and I, unaided, could really develop this creek. The prospects are good enough to take a miner's chance of locating better. I think we'll find plenty of men who will take that chance with us.”
With a picked team, and what food could be spared, Ticely and Ak Tuk broke trail up the creek, the next morning, and, the following day, when they reached its head, Ticely told the native their destination. They were to go to Nome, but by a devious route, detouring far to the north to the camps of the Kobuc River. Accordingly, Ak Tuk skirted the hills for two whole days before he struck up toward a low pass and emerged westward on the head streams of the Kobuc.
They ran into a trail with only a few days' drift over it. It had a hard bottom, when you could keep it—and Ak Tuk had eyes in his snowshoes. With his help they reached Shungnak, a very small but not unprosperous placer camp, in two days of downriver travel; and here Ticely exchanged nearly a thousand dollars of cheeckakko—the vernacular for coin or currency—for the local gold dust, which was of dull, brassy hue. It was to obtain dust, as well as to “cover” his real starting point, that Ticely had chosen a semicircular route to the town of Nome.
At the mouth of the Kobuc they took the salt ice to Candle, and then, on well-beaten trails, crossed the Seward Peninsula at Nome. That little city of the Bering Sea, an aristocrat among the half dozen big towns of Alaska, was beginning to feel the coming of sad days—the pinch of worked-out placers. It was her pride that she had drawn El Dorado kings from the Klondike, in her first discoveries, an Anvil and Dexter; and when, next year, the very sands of her seashores were found to be gold flecked, the whole round world had sent its adventurous and covetous to her shores. Forty thousand strong, she had risen in tents, warehouses, frame buildings, shacks, and shanties that extended over five miles of beach and tundra, and “spoilers” made a new record in organized mining-camp graft. Great production followed, waned, and waxed again—when the eighth wonder of the mining world was suddenly revealed in the fabulously rich, third-beach line, an ancient sea strand, half gold, which was uncovered at the bottom of deep shafts sunk far back on the coastal plain. Fairbanks, and still newer towns, were booming, but “old Nome” still held her own—and would, till the third-beach line was gutted and dredgers should drone a requiem for the passing of the “individual miner.”
It was a Nome very propitious to the purposes of a man who had anything to sell, provided he was one who knew the game. Ticely, who had planned his campaign in detail—precisely as if it concerned a plot of choice bungalow sites in Seattle—not only knew the game, but how to play it! Being by nature a trader and, by education, a salesman of the up-to-date psychological school, he proposed merely to apply to Alaska's greatest commodity, placer ground, the principles he was accustomed to use, with eminent success, as the head of the Ticely Realty Company.
The game consisted, among other things, in a careful avoidance of the slightest appearance or suspicion of having anything to sell. And hence, Ticely took lodgings in the Penny River Hotel, which a fellow musher had assured him was just what he wanted. This, after Ticely had explained to him that what he wanted was a quiet and very inconspicuous place!
The fellow musher, who was little Othmer the painter, returning from a job at Port Safety, noted the fact that this quiet man who, with his Eskimo, had come evidently from a far place, cared to attract no attention whatever. That was point number one.
Ticely was tired, and he slept until nearly noon. Then he breakfasted with Ak Tuk, both because he was naturally democratic and fond of the native, and because it would mean to most white men that these two must have lived like brothers in some remote place from which they had just come. It was point number two. Next, he found a permanent place for his dog team, and installed the native as their keeper. Returning to the hotel, he paid for a week's lodging in advance, and paid for it in gold dust, choosing a time when several idle men were witnesses of his opening his sausagelike poke and pouring from it, into the hotel man's blower, a small quantity of dust.
“Where's she from, partner?” asked a curious man offhandedly.
“Candle.”
At that town he had seen the local product. Indeed, he had inspected it carefully. And he knew that this little-known Shungnak gold, which he had bought, was quite unlike the gold of Candle, which was a well-known dust in Nome:
The questioner exchanged significant glances with his friends, which Ticely did not appear to notice.
It is customary in a mining camp to ask men where their dust comes from. The excuse for so personal a question is the general interest which attaches to the subject of gold dust, and the often striking, and always minute, differences in the product of each creek. Usually no question of secrecy is involved, but in case there is, the man questioned may justly resent the inquiry, as an unwarrantable intrusion upon his private affairs. There are two ways of showing this resentment. One, is to intimate that the matter is none of the questioner's business And if it is patent that the questioner knew, or should have known, that his query would be unwelcome, he is usually answered in that way. The other way is a polite evasion, or a polite lie which, if obviously a lie, becomes a polite evasion. And this way it is etiquette to use, when, as in the case of Ticely, the questioner could not be supposed to know that the matter is a delicate one. Ticely's answer meant: “My dear fellow, I do not care to make you my confidant.”
It was one of those lies so conventional, in mining-camp life, as to leave no stigma upon the teller. Otherwise, he would not have told it, for Frederick Ticely was, in a literal sense, a particularly truthful man! But he created the false impression that he had reasons for keeping secret the source of his gold dust. People buy on impressions created by the seller, who produces them upon the mind of a buyer predisposed to receive them, through his wish to buy.
Ticely had named Midas Creek as he had named country residence sites: “Shady Lane”—the shade to be cast by future trees, possibly, in front of a future sun; or “Laughing Water,” from the artificial lake that some one proposed, or said he proposed, later to construct. Midas Creek, like Shady Lane or Laughing Water, had excellent prospects—prospects being, after all, matters of opinion! It was Ticely's fine art to lielessly create the impression that the prospects were realities.