The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
JOAN ASKS QUESTIONS.
The Joan Manners who strolled along in the wake of the sleds, with no apparent concern but to drink in the air and the light of the beautiful spring day, and see that her collie, ranging the copses of shrunken willow; flushed no early laying ptarmigan from their cozy nests, was a wiser and more worried Joan than the girl who had written her “dear friend” the latest of her four letters.
When she and her father, traveling “light,” overtook the stampeders, who had started from Nome some distance apart, in the fallacious belief that they could thus avoid attention, one of the first persons to be presented to her was Slim Jim Collins. She flushed and, for her father's sake, acknowledged his carefully deferential greetings. And she bowed to the others in his sled whom Collins named in turn—Hennessy and Miss O'Brien and her “lady friend,” Miss Anderson, who had been added to their party to comply with the conventions that outwardly rule even in a mining camp.
The eyes of Joan Manners and Pearl O'Brien met—and passed, Joan instantly deciding, in this contretemps, that, until she should have time to think it over, it would be wise to act as the Collins party acted—as though they had met her for the first time. She was a girl of quick discernments, and she realized that if wealthy Slim Jim Collins had become a member of this new mining venture, it was a mischance that called for delicate handling!
Her second and more perturbing discovery came gradually, as she grew acquainted with one after another of these travelers, bound for a common destination, and bound to each other by a common purpose, a common expectation. With tongues fettered no longer by the imagined secrecy that had made them in Nome the butt of many a droll jest, in their forgatherings on the trail they compared notes and discussed the pros and cons of their prospects with the utmost freedom and candor. And Joan's eyes were opened to the fact that all of them believed they were to be the favorites of fortune, the first arrivals in a mining region of virgin and surpassing richness.
Her father had hinted to her, before they started, that he and his associates believed that Midas was a far better creek than Ticely's admissions concerning it would lead one to suppose. But she had taken this partly as Ticely's conservatism—and Bruce Waring's, and partly as her father's optimism. Now, however, she learned that they knew, or thought they knew, that Midas was actually very rich, and that this conviction was founded upon certain facts which, though they were never openly referred to, seemed to be the common property of the leaders, if not of the entire party.
Timidly she sounded her father on the subject, and found him amiable but very reticent. It was, upon the whole, a very hopeful, a very excited, but also a very perplexed Joan Manners who clasped Bruce Waring's hand and smiled into his frank and smiling eyes.
The stampeders had halted when Waring and Ak Tul met them, the principal men bunching themselves on the tundra alongside the rotten snow trail they had made, and exchanging greetings and civilities with the much-embarrassed young stranger and his Eskimo comrade. Ticely duly presented his partner, and when he came to Collins—why, Collins was fussing with the loosened lashing of a sled! By which shift, he avoided the possibility of Waring's hand being refused him. Bruce said, “How do you do?” as he had to the others, and gave no sign beyond a lengthened glance at the stooping figure of the miner from Fairbanks.
To their question, “How did you leave things at Midas?” he merely replied, “Oh, all right.” Such a company on the move is an energetic one, and what further talk there was concerned the route over the divide, whose slopes they were approaching. Led by Ak Tuk, the caravan resumed its march, while Bruce remained with the outfit of the Manners, and gradually fell behind with Joan. Alone at last, a fleeting embarrassment succeeded. They looked at each other, and laughed—and it was gone!
“Isn't it queer,” she said, “that we should be together again, and in so strange a company?”
“It's quite a procession, all right,” replied Bruce laconically; and the girl gave him a quick glance.
“Did you get my letters?” she asked, with a slight return of the embarrassment.
“You bet I did. It was mighty good of you.”
“But think of the excitement of it all. I don't see how you ever remembered me or anybody else, you lucky dog.”
“Lucky dog!” he repeated, and a shadow crossed his face. “You mean what we've got there?”
“Why, yes, of course.” It was coming—the moment to which she had looked forward, the confirmation of her hopes or fears. For she was sure that this quiet, clear-eyed, indomitable young fellow would tell her nothing but the truth.
He looked ahead at Ticely who was walking along with Judge Manners and Slim Jim Collins, occasionally gesturing, debonair, thoroughly comfortable-looking.
“You remember what I said in my letter about our prospects?”
“Oh, yes. But I know how careful one must be about a thing like that in these treacherous mining camps.”
He halted and looked at her; opened his mouth to speak, and, glancing again toward his distant partner, closed it. But presently he asked:
“But my partner, Mr. Ticely—he said the same thing. He told me he did, and he wouldn't”
“Oh, yes,” she hastened to assure him, reading the thought in his face. “Yes, indeed, he said the same thing to father and me, and I presume to the others also. At any rate, no one has said that he said anything different. But”
“But?”
“But every one has the idea, the firm conviction, in fact, that the creek is wonderfully rich. And they have been making sacrifices”
“Sacrifices!”
“Selling things; letting go their property and possessions for much less than their value to get money quickly.”
“To buy”
“Midas; and the outfits that are coming to it. Others, you know, with heavier loads are coming by the rivers a little later.”
“Yes; go on!”
“I know that secrecy was necessary where so many are unscrupulous. So I think I can understand your having been very conservative in your actual statements, and yet your giving father and the others to understand”
She floundered miserably in her efforts to avoid the flat question. But his straight, set face and distant eyes helping her not at all, she threw up her head with a little jerk, her native bravery dominant.
“It's only the fact, after all, that counts—whether Midas is really rich or not. That is the one important thing.” She halted and looked into his face, and waited for some sort of answer, some sort of sign.
Waring returned her look, struggling ta control his expression. She thought his face hardened a little, and it did—hardened against the softness of his feeling for her that tempted him to frankness. When his words came, their caution, their measured constraint, made them cold to Joan.
“I haven't talked to Ticely. He is a very capable man, and I suppose he knows what he is doing.”
“That's very noncommittal, Bruce,” she said a little ruefully.
“I—know it is, Joan.”
It was not for several minutes that they resumed their conversation, and then they talked of other things.
The party camped that night in a grove of stunted white spruce, the last timber on the slopes of the pass through which Waring had monumented a route. He had added his little outfit to Ticely's, and after the two partners and their native had eaten supper, they were joined by Manners, Collins, Tholmes, “One-Word” Watkins, and several others. These came strolling up, one at a time, pipe or cigarette in mouth, and talked at first of everything except Midas—a stilted sort of converse which was so obviously preliminary as to be painful rather than entertaining to Waring. The talk had Ticely on edge—but for a different reason: He was apprehensive as to Waring's attitude. He feared that his young partner's replies to these questions, adroit, almost casual, that were put to him might be so bluntly honest as to tear away the shimmering, silken veil that had been woven about the facts.
His anxiety was short-lived. Waring was sufficiently responsive to avoid an effect of surly reticence, yet negative enough to avoid any awkward disclosure. His talk with Joan had helped him to this discreet attitude. He itched for a private interview with Ticely, but he had sense enough not to openly seek it. His chance came when the men, but little wiser than before, straggled back to their camps along the creek bank and wearily sought their sleeping bags.
Bruce threw a dry log across the coals and waited till the first blue flames that leaped flickeringly about it yellowed and steadied. Then he turned and looked into his partner's lighted face. Ticely returned his scrutiny without speaking. The oddity, the strangeness of their situation made, for the moment, its own communication between them. They smiled at length. Then Waring frowned.
“This is a hell of a situation, Fred! Tell me all about it.”
“Well, frankly, I do not like it myself,” replied Ticely, shrugging. “We've been very successful in getting the help we needed—money, supplies, and labor. Perhaps we've been too successful. I'm afraid these fellows think too favorably of the proposition.”
“How's that?” asked Bruce, determined to curb all criticism until Ticely's course had been fully explained to him.
And the elder man proceeded to give his young partner a truthful narrative of his operations in Nome, if an incomplete account can be called truthful. Yet he covered the gaps, too, in a way—the gaps which in a complete chronicle would have been occupied by the episodes of the poke, the telegrams and the diary! With these in mind, he merely said: “Of course, once they knew I was from a new and distant creek, everything I did or said was construed as another proof of the richness of the ground. And this, understand, in spite of my accurate description of just what we had! It's really amusing—the way people salt themselves in a mining country. I let them suppose what they would; for denial in such a situation is always vain, and, besides, the use they made of their imaginations was entirely to our interest.”
He paused, twisting his pipe in his fingers, his look penetrating the fire to the distant places its magic revealed.
“The company in Seattle will get practically all it needs—after a while that is, and by a roundabout route. I didn't care to take the local bank too wholly into my confidence!”
Bruce did not fully understand that, but he caught the flavor of it—“roundabout route”—“too wholly into my confidence.” It was a flavor that, applied to all that had gone before in Nome, was mightily perturbing to a cleanly taste. His brow darkened, and he drew strongly upon the brier stem in his mouth.
“There's a strong impression that they've all got that the creek is rich; that you wouldn't say so, but it's rich just the same. Joan—Miss Manners herself thought that. She told me so. I”
“What did you tell her?”
“What did I tell her?” replied Waring slowly, as if the question were an unnecessary one. “Why, I couldn't tell her anything—much, till I had a talk with you, could I?”
Ticely's stern eyes softened. “Good lad!” they said. He lit his pipe very carefully. Bruce was all there, he reflected; an inexperienced lad, but a thoroughly sensible and dependable one. He felt grateful to Waring for his discretion. It gave him a sense of temporary security, and evoked a little further and somewhat more confidential explanation—still leaving those gaps, however; or, at least, bridging them with generalities. He told him he had a lot to learn, yet, about business, which was a game—simply a game in which, naturally, you sought to raise the value of your commodity all you could.
“We had to sell some of this Midas ground while it was still only a prospect, and though I stated the bald truth, naturally I was glad that their disbelief in what I told them took forms that were very attractive to them, and favorable to us! They certainly bought and went on buying! We could have sold considerably more ground than we did, and at a higher price than I took. But I thought it best to cover our needs only.”
“Why,” asked Bruce with the keenest attention.
“Two reasons: I knew they were taking a big chance, and I really didn't want them to lose any more than is necessary—if things don't turn out well. The second reason is that the disappointment of a lot of people is likely to be awkward, to say the least!”
“I should say so!” Waring agreed sententiously. “Especially with a mixed bunch, as these fellows seem to be. They're not all like Manners and Tholmes. He's a business man, isn't he? I think I bought two sets of dog harness and an ax helve from him.”
“Yes, Tholmes & Hawthorne,” replied Ticely abstractedly. He was thinking how much more “mixed” was the bunch that was even now threading the tortuous waterways to Midas.
“There's that fellow Collins,” pursued Bruce. “Isn't that his name? What do you think of him?”
“A man with plenty of ready money. He's our heaviest investor. From Fairbanks. Good placer man I hear.”
“Look out for him!” Waring's lip curled and his forehead drew scowlingly. “A man who bullies a defenseless girl who has trusted herself to him on the trail isn't a good guy to tie to in any game, is he?”
“Was he the fellow!” Before Ticely left for Nome, Bruce had told him of the meeting with Joan Manners. “That complicates things somewhat, I'm afraid.”
“The whole thing's too complicated for me,” declared Waring uncomfortably. He ought, he supposed, to be thoroughly pleased with the situation. They had good prospects and provisions and equipment galore with which to develop them. And Joan Manners had stepped out of his dreams, and was with him in the flesh. Yet he was profoundly disquieted. Ticely read his thought, and put his hand on Bruce's arm.
“I'll handle them, my boy,” he assured him with a kind of cynical jauntiness. “They've got to take a chance. And so have we—with the ground and with them. I know 'em and I'll handle them. Leave 'em to me!”
“All right,” sighed Waring.
They raked the embers into a pile and began untying the thongs of their mukluk boots.