The camps of chaos/Couriers of chance
COURIERS OF CHANCE
FURTHER TALES OF "THE CAMPS OF CHAOS"
BY SAMUEL ALEXANDER WHITE
GAYLE OUTREMONT raised his bent head into the sweep of the blizzard that roared out of the White River's mouth. He listened; it seemed to him that, faint amid the demoniacal howling of the tempest, he heard a human shout. He battered his snow-plastered parka hood with his mittened hand to clear it of its inch-deep coat and give his ears a chance. A lull in the wind's terrific force helped his hearing, and the shout, though still weak, became audible enough. Gayle turned to the outfit behind him, to the wolfish string of dogs bellying through the drift, and to the hawk-nosed, parka-enshrouded figure hunched over the gee pole.
"Cronin, who in blazes owns that voice?" he asked.
"Nobody in blazes," growled ex-Marshal Cronin Hess.
"But I heard a voice, a human voice. You stop those dogs short and listen when she lulls."
Cronin halted the team at Gayle's heels, and immediately the five huskies dropped down and curled up in the snow, nesting low from the lash of the storm demon, their sharp-pointed noses laid upon their paws and their bushy tails laid over nose and paws for warmth.
At once the faint shouting rose through the storm wrack with redoubled strength, and hard on the shouting came the sound of a shot.
Gayle sprang away on his snowshoes, breaking trail through two feet of fresh snow which the blizzard had piled on the ice. In his swirling wake Cronin turned the dog team straight to the left from the middle course of the Yukon River and lashed them into a gallop. Another shot cracked out, followed by a wailing cry.
"Hey, you, hold on!" shouted Gayle, increasing his pace. "We're coming. Save your shells."
They could see nothing through the white curtain of the snowfall, but, heading for the sound and shouting as they went, Gayle and Cronin steered for the Yukon's bank. As they neared it, a voice hailed them, a voice that had in it the rasp of pain.
"Who's that?" it yelled. "Larvon?"
"No. Hess and Outremont. Who're you?"
"Rooney Ryan! Coast bound with Dyea mail!"
"But where are you, Rooney?"
"In the cove. No, don't turn south. Straight on!"
Gayle, feeling round the jut of a rock shoulder, broke suddenly into the cove and almost stumbled over Ryan, who lay at full length upon his blankets. The rock shoulder shut out the whistling arrows of the storm. Inside the cove the air was calm and quiet save where the drift spumed over the rocks on top of the farther wall and filtered through the spruce.
GAYLE'S eyes in a single glance took in the general aspect of the cove. In the same moment that he noted the recumbent Rooney he noted the different objects surrounding him: the broken sledge with the mail pouches atop, the ripped grub sacks, the canvas fly crazily propped on sticks, the meager fire that burned in front of the fly, the dead spruce tree, limb-lopped and trunk-chipped, which lay alongside Rooney. Also, Gayle observed that the snow all about had been padded in a strange manner, as if a man had done much wallowing, and, stiffened in fighting attitudes in the padded snow, stuck the dead bodies of five dogs. "Rooney, what's happened?"
Rooney gingerly tapped one of his blanketed legs. The leg gave out a wooden sound.
"Splints?" guessed Gayle.
Ryan nodded. "Don't know whether I got her set or not. But I took her before she started to swell. And she pains considerable. Good sign, they say. It was the spruce tree's fault, boys. Pinched me when I felled her to make camp."
"How'd you know we were coming in this storm?" asked Cronin.
"Heard your sled working on the river. Vibration, I guess. I'm low down to the ice here. But I thought it would be Borg Larvon bringing up supplies from Sixty-mile."
"Who's Borg Larvon?"
"Swede woodcutter. Has a camp a few miles up the White River. And his head must be as thick as his wood. I can hear his ax chopping on fine days, but he can't hear my revolver. I been signaling him days with all the shells I could spare."
"He'd take it for Indians after moose," declared Gayle, "and never dream there was any need to come to you."
"Well, I couldn't go to him. I couldn't walk a snowshoe with a crutch, and the drift was too deep to crawl."
"But your dogs! What killed your dogs?"
"The beggars rushed the grub the minute it happened. They had it all eaten before I could drop one with my gun, and then they rushed me. Saw I had only one pin and did their proper darnedest. I wanted to use the team, you see, and I hated like blazes to make it a finish fight, but I had to do it at last. I have been living on dog meat ever since."
Gayle and Cronin silently reached out hands to shake anew.
"You boys travelin' south?" asked Rooney as he relinquished their grip.
"No, we're hiking north," Cronin told him. "We been up the Selwyn River looking at some of our claims, and now we're heading back to Dawson."
At which information Ryan's stoicism for the first time deserted him, and disappointment gloomed his eyes. "Tarnation!" he breathed softly. "That's too bad. That's too plumb putrid bad!"
"Buck up, Rooney!" bantered Cronin. "What's the points of the compass got to do with it? We're here, ain't we? That's the tangible thing."
"But say, boys," ventured Rooney regretfully, "I sure wish you had been traveling south. Then you could have hiked my mail along as far as Selkirk and tried some way to get her sent on."
"What's it matter?" demanded Cronin. "Ain't the Dawson mail ever delayed? And what you running it through for, anyway? Just on a business trip to the coast?"
"Boys," confessed Ryan, a hectic flush coming into his swarthy, wind-seared cheeks, "I'm broke! All crowded creation wouldn't have made me admit it to you before, but now I got to. I been bucking a string of losses, and I'm just about doing the camel stunt under the last straw. I'm drained dry. I put up a stiff front all along, but the Troandike's mortgaged to the troughs on the roof. All my other holdings likewise, and my friends Monte Marlin and Seattle Simons ain't a bit better off. All Dawson says it's sure a famine winter this year, so we just had to make a break to get a stake to last till spring. Monte's got a chance to freight winter supplies for the Alaska Commercial Company. Seattle's working a lay on French Hill. And I grabbed the Dyea mail contract. This ain't no side whim on a business trip to the coast. I'm the regular mail courier carrying for the pay!"
"The deuce you are! Why didn't you tell us you were broke?" reproached Gayle. "Why didn't you hit us up for a loan? You know we'd have given it."
"I know, but I couldn't do it, boys. I got too much tarnation pride. I know I'm a plumb erratic character and game to buck any deal that breaks, but all the same I got my pride. I'd rather strike open water on the Thirty-mile and drown, dogs and all, than beg a loan. So I grabbed the mail contract first whack. There's a chance in that, boys. Not the regular wages, I don't mean, though that's a bare living and not to be despised in time of famine. But this is the first post out to salt water since the freeze-up. I've twenty-four hundred letters in them bags, and the senders put on a bonus if they go through in time to catch the ocean steamer at Dyea. If they catch that boat, they'll reach the States by Christmas. Savvy? You know what it means to get word home for Christmas when you can't come home yourself! Well, they gave me thirty days to Dyea and ten dollars a letter bonus if I made it. A twenty-four-thousand-dollar prize! She would have sure put me on my feet! And she looked safe in my poke when I pulled out of Dawson City on the 21st of November. The river trail was fair, and I made decent time. Four days to here. One hundred and seventy-six miles. Not too bad, eh? I got here at dark on the 24th and broke my leg the blasted minute after dark. That makes it ten days, according to my account. This is December the 4th, ain't it?"
"December the 4th, sure!" nodded Cronin.
"Them bags," pointing at the mail pouches still lashed on top of the broken sledge, "are supposed to be slung aboard the Seattle at Dyea by six o'clock on the evening of December the 20th. That's sixteen days away. Dyea's five hundred-odd miles away, and here I am, and you boys are going north. Aw—what's the bloody use of talking?"
ROONEY threw out a helpless hand in eloquent disgust and slumped moodily down into his blankets.
"You mean we were going north," mended Gayle, significantly.
Rooney sat erect with a jerk which made him grimace with pain. "Now I ain't asking you to do it," he rapped out. "And you ain't going to do it. It can't be done, anyway, and it would be rank lunacy to try. So roll into camp here, boys, and bind my splints a little better, and to-morrow you can haul me up to Borg Larvon's."
"No, we'll haul you up to Larvon's now, bind your leg a little better and then strike out with the mail," declared Gayle determinedly.
"But it's bloody craziness," protested Rooney. "The snow's against you and the blizzard. You'll hit ice jams and open water. The time limit ain't near enough so early in the winter, and I'm the one as knows it. Blazes!—if I hadn't wasted ten days in this cove. Curse that Borg Larvon to perdition' Why didn't he hear?"
"No use ripping and tearing, Rooney," soothed Cronin. "You talk as if you'd squandered your time, but I can't see any waste. Most two-legged men in your fix would be filling huskies' bellies by now. You've sure put up some scrap, staving off for ten days tree fall, bone break, fever, frost, and starvation. By thunder, if any gink ever deserved a bonus, you deserve this one! And I'll take it upon myself to speak for my partner as well as myself and swear you'll get it if there's any get to it."
"Oh, I know how you fellows feel about it! But I want you to take it out in feeling. I don't want you to start in a race that's already lost and mebbe lose yourselves. Just promise me before you take me up to Larvon's that you won't start."
"Go to blazing Brimstonia!" refused Cronin.
"Yes, plunk!" supplemented Gayle. "We're going to start. And I'll go one better and swear we'll get you that bonus whether there's any get to it or not"
"The good Lord knows I need it," Rooney admitted.
"Don't mention it," Cronin belittled.
IN an hour they hit the woodcutter's camp. It lay on the left limit of the White amid a regal stand of lofty spruce. All about the log cabin the solitary Swede had made a great cutting. The bench ground was stripped of the largest trees, and on the river bank the cordwood was piled like huge ramparts. Larvon, a hulking-shouldered, tow-headed man with a face so plastered with soot and grease that practically only his eyes were visible, came to the door at the sound of the shrieking sledge runners. He had quit work for the day and was frying moose meat for supper. He had a big fork in his hand, and the smoke of the burning fat enveloped him in a cloud. "Coom in; coom in," he invited heartily. "Where you ban trail?"
"Right here," Cronin told him. "And it ain't any pleasure trip either. Ryan's got a broken peg. Did it in the cove down yonder by the river mouth. He's been shooting signs to you for a week and a half."
"By tam!" ejaculated Larvon, a regretful, pained expression dimming his eyes. "Ay ban hear that shootin', but ay ban tank her Sticks after moose!"
"That's what I said you'd think," put in Gayle. "But never mind, Larvon. Don't feel guilty about it. You can do your part now. Hess and I are going to take his mail on to Dyea. Bonus on her. Savvy? Got to run on time. You see he gets the best of care till we come back. And give us a hand with him, will you?"
Carefully the men transferred Rooney from the sledge to the bunk in the cabin. There they attended to his leg. They dared not shift the splints, but over Rooney's own binding they wound a more secure bandage and propped the stiff limb comfortably on a wad of blankets. And once the administering was finished they hastily hauled out their dogs again.
"I tank you ban batter stop till morning," Larvon advised them. "The wind she drop then, yas."
"Can't risk it," Cronin refused. "It might be worse. It always blows for days here. Gets a clean sweep down the White and up the Stewart. It wasn't blowing much up Selwyn way. So Gayle and me been talking it over, and we figure we'll be running out of the storm all the time. If we run fast enough and far enough, we ought to strike tolerably clear country to-morrow. Savvy? Then we'll be that much to the good and free of the wind's hold-up."
"But eat a tam good supper first," pleaded Larvon. "Ay ban got moose meat nearly fried."
"Wish we could spare the time!" declared Hess wistfully. "But we can't. We've certain miles to make before we eat. So long, boys!"
It was four o'clock when they left Larvon's camp It was five when they mushed out of the White River's mouth and turned up the Yukon. By the custom of the trail they should have camped at six, but they kept right on through the dark and the blizzard. It was bitter work, and the most bitter part of it was in the lead, breaking the track through snow which seemed to have the weight and consistency of sand. Gayle and Cronin spelled each other at short intervals in this position.
They drove at the same rate as upon a packed surface. The pace took it out of themselves and out of the animals. Onward they flew through a wall of darkness, through a void that seemed no void at all but a space blocked with the stiff thrust of some intangible power. In addition to the resistance underfoot, there was resistance knee-high, breast-high, head-high.
At times they were at a loss to know or feel each other's presence. It was monotonous, agonizing labor that continued mile after mile, hour after hour, with no sound but the hissing swish of the snowshoes, the creak of frozen shoepacks, the grating churn of the sledge runners, the complaint of a lagging husky under the lash, and, embroiling all, the angry brawl of the blizzard. They camped far up the Yukon at midnight and cooked and ravenously ate bacon and flapjacks and drank hot coffee. The huskies sat in a ring about the fire and greedily watched their masters. They were under way again before dawn.
Although the back of the storm was broken, a bitterly cold wind began to moan in the spruce.
The nooning was of only a half hour's duration, and then the tireless rush went on. The sun failed them in the middle of the bleak afternoon, and again the dark came down. That night they won past Tulare Creek. The next day they reached Selwyn River, and on the fourth day, after a grueling run, they reached the post of Selkirk at the mouth of Pelly River.
The evening of the seventh day found them at the Little Salmon. But between the Little Salmon and the Big Salmon they encountered tedious ice jams. The thirty-six miles required sixteen hours of tremendous endeavor.
On the Hootalinqua the jams proved worse. A march of twenty hours was made to make the thirty-three miles. On the Thirty-mile River, which reaches from the mouth of the Hootalinqua to the foot of Lake Lebarge, they encountered open water, portages, and heartbreaking bluffs. Once the skim ice broke, a honeycombed ice bridge collapsed, and they lost three dogs in the current. They barely missed drowning a score of times.
On the morning of the 19th of December they pounded into White Horse, drew up with a crash in front of the Cañon House and stumbled inside. The old-timers surrounded them and demanded in the names of all the northern gods what special form of insanity obsessed them.
WHEN Cronin explained their mission they broke forth violently. "You can't make it," they insisted. "It's ninety-five miles from the Cañon to the head of Lake Bennett and thirty-four miles over the pass to Dyea. One hundred and twenty-nine miles in thirty-six hours! You sure can't make it!"
"We got to make it," declared Gayle angrily as he ripped off his iced garments. "What in blazes do you think we've come three hundred and seventy-five miles in fourteen days and a half for? Pastime? You rustle some dry clothes. Buy us the best team of malemutes old Silas Manning's got. And have them hitched and ready while we dress and eat."
"But it's plumb lunacy and brainstorm," the old-timers still argued. "Besides, there's a blizzard blowing on the tip of Chilkoot. Nobody's gone over for a week. Nothing can live through the pass."
"You get the clothes and dogs!"
That run of the partners is a lengthy story in the annals of the north. Wherever dogs and sleds are talked of, in camp or on trail, the tale of the run goes forth. It established a record in Arctic travel, and it lives in the history of the land. But of the harsh heroics of it the two were not in the condition or the mood to have much conception. They only knew that up the river stretch to the mouth of the McClintock and through Lake Marsh, Tagish Lake, Nares Lake, and Lake Bennett they lashed four miles an hour out of their dogs for twenty-four hours on end. From dawn to dawn they traveled. They did not stop to eat, but munched out of their hands as they went. The dogs got never a shred of food. They dared not feed them even when they hit Bennett at six o'clock next morning, lest they kill their speed.
Long Lake and Deep Lake slipped by and Happy Camp was gained. Crater Lake was won.
Up the hogback and across the slippery glacier the men dragged, dug in their moccasined toes for footing, and clutched projecting ice spikes for hand-holds. They rolled down in a tangle of dogs, harness, and mail sacks, and were compelled to climb twelve hundred feet to make the necessary two hundred.
Down the sheer five-hundred-foot pitch on the south side of the pass they dropped to the creek bed above the Scales. There was not even a trail, for a week of storm had tied up all traffic. The partners groped their way by the feel of the creek bed from the Scales down past Stone House. Midway to Sheep Camp the dogs wandered off the creek into a channel iced by the summer's glacial drip. But the smiting storm had deadened the wolf dogs' instinct.
Hugging the rocks of the channel wall to save themselves, the men saw the sled leap into space.
With infinite labor they backed up the channel and found a side lead down into the gulch. Three dogs were dead. Two were only waiting to be shot. The sled was a tangle of wood and steel shoeing. The mail pouches were ripped in a dozen places. But they made repairs and staggered through the cañon and across Dyea Flats.
Coming down out of the storm line on the mountain to the terminal moraine which filled Dyea Valley, near to Dyea Post and within sight of Dyea Inlet, Cronin's spirit gave out, and he slumped noiselessly into the snow. The fall switched the tump line from his head, and his burden of mail dropped down beside him.
Gayle stared stupidly at his partner's inert body. Then he heaved up Cronin's one-hundred-and-fifty-pound burden on top of his own and stumbled on past Dyea Post. His swollen, blizzard-seared eyes saw the Seattle in the inlet, the volume of smoke issuing from her funnel denoting fire pits hard stoked for sailing. The sound of anchor chains rattling through the hawse pipes drifted over the water, and Gayle goaded himself into a shambling run.
WILSON and Healey, traders at Dyea, stepped out of the door of the post to watch the Seattle getting out of the inlet, and before their astounded eyes Gayle lurched by.
"By the Sundowns' gods!" exclaimed Healey. "It's Outremont."
"What time?" gasped Gayle.
"Six o'clock. Why? What in blazes you packing?"
"The Dawson mail. I got to get the Seatlle."
On the instant they jumped out of the doorway and almost ran him down in the trail.
"Here," they yelled. "Give it up. Give it to us. We'll rush her aboard."
"No," Gayle refused. "You fellows go and carry Cronin in. He's up the valley apiece. Plumb bushed and quiet as a dead man. Go quick. The heat'll go out of him and he'll freeze."
Down toward his goal Gayle tottered to the tidewater that washed Dyea Beach. He had striven for sixteen days and traveled five hundred miles to gain it. He had not slept for two nights. He had mushed without appreciable pause for sixty hours in a string. He had covered in that final spurt of sixty hours over a hundred and forty miles of unspeakable trail, one hundred and seventeen of them on river and lake, nine of them up a mountain and nineteen of them down. He had martyred his body and tried his soul, and now, doubled up with three hundred pounds of mail on his back, he crawled along, squeezing the last yards out of the marrow of his bones.
At the water's edge the mail pouches crashed from his back into one of the boats that lined the beach. He fell aboard after the mail and shoved weakly off. As he dipped his oars the sounds of weighing anchor stopped, the Seattle's siren blew, and in an agonized glance across his shoulder he glimpsed her funnel smoke spout blacker and blacker. The fear that he had failed sent a wave of nausea sweeping over him. His eyes went blank for a second. His fingers lost the oar grips. Yet in that blank second there was imaged on his mental vision the picture of Ryan in the cove by the White River's mouth, staving off tree-fall, bone-break, fever, frost, and starvation. And there was likewise conjured up the Dawson thousands who had dispatched Christmas cheer out to their homes in the sunland and those thousands in the sunland who awaited the message from the Arctic.
THE thought impulse cleared Gayle's eyes. He bent down, scooped a double handful of water from the inlet and dashed the icy restorative in his face. Then his hands fell again upon the oar grips, and, straining in a frenzy, he drove the boat through the water in long leaps. His flashing blades gained on the slow-starting propeller. His craft ground under the Seattle's stern and bumped the moving side. He hammered the drumlike side with an oar and bellowed like a bull moose challenging to battle. A man left the deck-house and poked his head over the rail.
"Hey, you!" he yelled in a monstrous voice. "What boat is that?"
"Dawson mail! Christmas mail!" Gayle shrieked. "Throw a rope!"
The Seattle still moved, and Gayle worked one oar frantically sticking like a crab to the cliff-high side of the steamer, till the rope snaked down at his feet. Swiftly he ran the rope through the cords binding the mail pouches and signaled those above to haul.
The rowboat had lost way while he made fast. The mail sacks jerked across his gunwale and splashed in the inlet. But, the slack quickly taken up, they rose again, dripping, up the Seattle's side.
GAYLE, his eyes fixed trancelike, watched them till they vanished over the rail. Then he sat down with a thump on the seat amidships and stared at the waves drifting him back upon Dyea Beach. He had no strength left to lift an oar, but he could see Wilson and Healey there filtering brandy between Hess's teeth—and two others. The boat finally thudded on the icy beach. Two men of the Mounted Police, fresh over the pass by dog train, were there to meet him.
"Consarn your carcass!" anathematized one of them. "You made a tight race of it, but you lost by seconds. And your loss is my gain. Savvy? I'm Sergeant Silgarde, the new officer in charge at Sixty-mile. That's why I burned all creation behind you. I sure couldn't fall down on my first assignment. You don't sail on the Seattle this time. You come back to Dawson with me."
"To Dawson? What for?" the dizzy Outremont.
"Pah!" spat Silgarde contemptuously. Ignoring the question, he hooked an arm securely in Gayle's and turned to the man who held the boat. "Private Mattan, bring on the mail," he ordered.
"There's none to bring," announced Mattan dubiously, raising his head after a search. "The boat's empty."
"Then what have you done with it, eh?" demanded Silgarde, jolting Gayle roughly. "Dropped it in the inlet?"
"I put it aboard," Gayle grated, his anger rising through his weakness in a surge of fictitious strength. "What in thunder'd you think I was trying to do?"
"Oh! That's the game? Confederate aboard! Well, we've got you, and we'll get the money too. Don't you think for a minute you can pull off that stunt. We'll cable Seattle and the steamer'll be stopped outside the port The Alaska Commercial Company'll find their hundred thousand if they have to strip every passenger stark naked and pull the Seattle apart to the last rivet. They don't stand for robbery, that firm!"
"Robbery?" Gayle's swaying figure stiffened, and his eyes blazed into Silgarde's. "You're a new man on the Yukon, sergeant, and you don't happen to know me or my partner. That's why you're getting palaver instead of a fist under your jaw. Do I understand you to say you take me for a thief?"
"What else would I be taking you for? I got you with the goods on, didn't I? And don't you know you're under arrest?"
With the swiftness of a snake Gayle's right elbow doubled up, his fist poised under his armpit; but just before it started on the forward blow, Wilson, who with Healey had succeeded in getting the ex-marshal upon his feet, threw himself between.
"Don't strike, Gayle; don't strike!" Wilson implored. "Things look mixed enough as they are. Don't muddle them any worse. Silgarde's not to blame. He's only doing his duty. He says two men waylaid Betteille Trentoin, the mail courier, and stole the Dawson mail. Sake of a hundred thousand, you said, sergeant?"
"Sure," nodded Silgarde. "One hundred thousand hard cash, in big bills, belonging to the Alaska Commercial people. That was the only value in it. Trentoin said. The rest was letters, twenty-four hundred letters. Betteille crawled into Sixty-mile with a broken head, no dogs, and the story of how the two men jumped him from behind on the river trail. It happened below the mouth of the White, in a storm, on the 4th of December. Betteille was hit so suddenly he didn't see who laid him out, but he saw the trail they left. They lit upriver with his dogs. He knew there was no use following, so he lit down river for me at Sixty-mile. I lit after them, and I'm not done lighting yet. I'm going to light right back to Dawson with you now."
"Thunderation, Cronin!" exclaimed Gayle, reaching for a gulp of brandy "What do you know about that?"
Hess, leaning limply against Healey as against a wall, began to quiver with weak laughter.
"What you cackling at?" demanded Silgarde indignantly. "Mail robbery isn't any laughing matter, and you'll soon find that out."
"You don't understand, sergeant," chuckled Hess. "You've got the wrong men. It's Rooney Ryan you want, and we know where he is. We weren't trying to get out of the country with the mail, although mebbe it looked that way to you. Ryan sprung a courier rôle on us there by the White River, and we was running against time to put the mail aboard the Seattle and pull him down a bonus."
Cronin went on to explain Ryan's ruse to shift suspicion. At which, explanation Wilson and Healey grinned and nodded, for they knew Rooney of old, but Sergeant Silgarde scoffed in scorn.
"You can't make me swallow that tale," he declared. "I don't know anything of this Ryan you talk about. You've got to show him to me before I believe in him."
"We'll show him to you, all right," prophesied the ex-marshal, "when we get to the White River's mouth. You'll unbend enough to stop there and let us prove the truth of our statement, won't you?"
"Oh, sure, men, sure! I'll give you every chance that way. If this Ryan's there as you say, we'll freight him along to Dawson too and let Inspector Strickland decide between you."
"He'll be there. Men with broken legs don't run much. The spruce tree capped his play, sergeant, or he'd have been out of the country with the one hundred thousand before this and we'd have never run foul of you. The one hundred thousand didn't go with the letters. You can bank on that. He has it cached somewhere, and we'll find it along with him. But you'll have to sled us back."
WHILE Hess and Gayle stretched themselves upon the sledge and commenced to appropriate what they needed from the grub sack, Sergeant Silgarde scribbled a cable message to be sent from Skagway. This he left with Wilson and Healey for transmission, and at once pushed back across the snowy moraine of Dyea Valley.
They made the White River on the 8th of January and turned into the cove at dusk. The cove had been described to Sergeant Silgarde by Outremont and Hess. Now he saw that it corresponded with the description even to the minutest detail.
The same drift spumed over the rocks and filtered through the spruce tops down the cliff side like a silent fall of ghost-white sand. There lay the identical spruce tree, limb-lopped and trunk-chipped. The remains of fire showed in a dark heap beside it. Under the sprinkling of snow were starkly outlined the stiffened bodies of five and one-half dogs.
"Looks good to me!" decided Silgarde. "I want to tell you fellows straight that I've begun to like you on this trip and to have greater faith in you every day. Let's go up to the wood camp and see who's there."
THE wood camp, viewed from a distance, was as the partners had left it, high-piled on the White River's bank amid the regal stand of spruce. When they drew nearer, they saw that the cabin itself was cold and silent. The inside appeared even more deserted than the outside. The table as well as the floor was heaped with dust and dirt. The bunk on the wall wherein they had deposited Ryan was filled with rotten spruce boughs and powdery snow, while the rusted, dilapidated stove, stripped of lid, pipe and door, looked as if it had never fried a moose steak within a year.
"Thunderation!" exclaimed Gayle. 'I can't believe this is the same place, Cronin."
"It is," asserted Cronin, solemnly, "and it goes against us. I can't blame you, Silgarde, for saying nothing. But I tell you straight it's a frame-up. This cabin was in good condition and occupied a little over a month ago. The old-age grease has been plastered on and plastered on thick. A stove can be rusted and robbed, you know, a blanket of dust kicked up and a bunk filled with spruce mold and snow in a very short time. Ryan couldn't do it himself. The Swede Borg Larvon's done it. Ryan's bribed him to do it. They've sky-hiked to nowhere, but mind we'll get trace of them. A broken-legged man can't vanish in a country like this. We'll sure get trace of them in Dawson."
"I hope so," breathed Silgarde grimly. We may as well camp to-night by the old shack, and you can search it to see if you strike any clue."
They searched the cabin from the rafters down and pulled up tho floor, but there was nothing to be found. Without having discovered a single thing to support their story, the partners mushed out with Silgarde and Mattan on the river trail once more.
This failure turned the partners' cheerfulness to gloom. Robbery of the northern mail was a grave matter.
"WHAT you boys been doing now?" asked a voice behind them at the corner of Dawson Barracks parade ground.
Hess and Outremont wheeled to see Ryan, standing, whole-limbed, by the barracks inclosure with a grin on his face that was a mighty revelation. For a second both stared dumfounded, and then they both jumped for him, but Sergeant Silgarde and Private Mattan threw themselves between.
"Here, don't you know you're prisoners?" demanded the sergeant. "Get into the barracks square. Get in, I say, or I'll signal for a squad to manhandle you in."
"All right, sergeant, all right," yielded Gayle with a return of wisdom. "We sure forgot ourselves. But we had reason to. That's Ryan."
"Oh, it is!" Silgarde gazed hard at Ryan's sound limbs, and as he gazed the faith in his prisoners that had accumulated within him suddenly went out. "Then your broken-legged story isn't worth a Siwash curse. It's cells for you now, and the only person that'll see you is Outremont's wife."
"Can't we see her brother, our third partner, Thorpe Calgour?" asked Hess.
"No. Men that'll put up a brazen story like you have must be watched close. You can't see anybody but Outremont's wife."
"That's the person I want to see—Trudis," declared Gayle. "Silgarde, you send for her on the jump."
Within fifteen minutes Trudis was at the barracks, and within five more she was laughing and crying at one and the same time over Gayle's tale.
"Gayle, Gayle," she reproached, "you shouldn't have gone and frightened me by getting into jail like this."
"Bah! There's nothing to cry over. What worries me is that Ryan's branded us for tenderfeet all over Dawson."
Trudis's tears turned suddenly to hysterical laughter. "I know," she choked. "They'll die of laughteritis. Cronin, didn't you know Ryan better than to be taken in by his tableau?"
"You'd have been taken in yourself," snapped Hess. "And I don't see no joke. It's too serious a thing."
"It's the serious side of any joke that makes it good," reminded Tru.
"I don't mind the joke," complained Gayle. "I don't mind the seriousness of the thing much. What I do mind is that our record run was all for nothing."
"Oh, but it wasn't!" Tru informed him. "Ryan stuck to the truth as far as lay within him. I guess that's what made the tableau look so sincere. He and Simons must have arranged it. Marlin really is with the Alaska Commercial Company in some capacity. That must have been the way they discovered the money was going out. They are all hard up as he stated and grabbing for what they can get, and it's Ryan and Simons for the easy money every time. And I guess that's why Marlin got on for the moment with the Alaska Commercial people, just to spy out a good haul. But his talk about the mail was pretty nearly the truth. Take out the ten fictitious days he lay in the cove, and it holds sound. The Dawson mail was running on schedule and due in Dyea at six o'clock on the evening of the twentieth. There was a bonus on its twenty-four hundred letters of ten dollars a letter, but Betteille Trentoin was the man who was trying for it and not Ryan. You've pulled it down for Betteille. That's some satisfaction for you. He needs it. He's played in hard luck all summer. Lost three outfits and canoes, two on Tagish Lake and one on the Thirty-mile. It's a good turn you've done him in the face of a famine winter. And think of the distilled essence of joy in the letters."
"Good!" ejaculated Gayle, with a deep sigh of relief. "I'm satisfied to hear that. That knowledge is sure balm to my wounded feelings, and one smile of a sunland wife or kiddie over one letter we freighted will kill all Dawson's ridicule."
"But you and Thorpe get busy, Tru, and have Ryan arrested right away," directed Cronin.
"No, not yet," counseled Tru. "There are no lawyers in Dawson, but remember I can handle your case better than either of you. Ryan knows we haven't anything on him, or he wouldn't be here in Dawson. Neither he nor Seattle Simons would be here. They're not afraid of arrest. So just postpone their arrest till we have proof enough to convict them. They haven't the loot with them. Another thing: Seattle Simons has been in the business along with Ryan. They knew when you were due to leave the Selwyn and when the mail courier according to schedule was due to pass the White. They lay up near the Selwyn keeping watch on you, started down a little ahead of you and waylaid Betteille. Seattle disappeared with the money, while Ryan remained to make you the suspects of the job. A pretty plan, eh? Ryan in the cove for ten days, staving off tree-fall, bone-break, fever, frost, and starvation? Ha! Ha! Finish fight with the dogs? That's a lifelike touch. I'll bet he wasn't in the cove more than an hour or two. It wouldn't take long to shoot five dogs, carve one up, fell a tree on the mail sled, build a fire, trample the snow and whittle some splints. And when you kindly left him in Borg Larvon's care and started with the mail, he bribed the Swede to keep quiet and depart for the silent places. I'll take Thorpe along and investigate."
Trudis and her assistant, being absent a week investigating the scene of the transfer of the mail sacks, were not at the preliminary hearing.
When the court reconvened, the barracks room was jammed with Dawson men and men from many a mile of creek and trail. In a cleared space by the stove sat Inspector Strickland as magistrate. Sergeant Silgarde, Private Mattan, Betteille Trentoin, and Ryan were present, summoned by the Crown. On the bench Gayle Outremont and Cronin Hess sat alone until joined a few minutes before the opening of the court by Trudis and her brother Thorpe Calgour.
"This court," thundered Inspector Strickland, "is now doing business. The prisoners Gayle Outremont and Cronin Hess appear after remand to be tried on the charge of robbing the Dawson mail to the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. Sergeant Silgarde, enter the Seattle report, which was not available at the preliminary hearing."
SERGEANT SILGARDE, a cablegram in his hand, stood up in the middle of the cleared space. "This," waving the document, "is the reply to a cable dispatched by me from Skagway on the day of the prisoners' arrest inquiring as to the contents of the Dawson mail. It runs: 'Steamer Seattle stopped outside port as requested by civil and postal authorities. Mail examined. Passengers and ship searched. No money package found. Letters total twenty-four hundred, water-stained but all intact. Duly forwarded. Cable us new developments.’" "Counsel for the defense, any objections to the entering of that report?" asked Strickland.
"None," answered Trudis. "We knew beforehand what it would be. Enter it."
"The report is entered," boomed Strickland. "It is the only new evidence entered on behalf of the Crown since the preliminary hearing. There is no use wading through all the detail of that hearing again, and it is only on demand of the counsel for the defense that the court will do so. Counsel for the defense, do you make that demand?"
"I do not," waived Trudis.
"Then the evidence of the prosecution, being the evidence of Sergeant Silgarde, Private Mattan, and Betteille Trentoin, and the alibi of Rooney Ryan and Seattle Simons, stands as recorded. The prosecution's side of the case is closed. Unless the defense has some fresh evidence to offer, I shall give judgment according to the proven facts. Has the defense any further evidence? Does it wish to call more witnesses?"
"No," answered Trudis, "but I wish to cross-examine one witness already called by the Crown, one Seattle Simons."
"Don't you do it, Tru!" protested Cronin Hess, tugging at her elbow. "What in thunder d'you mean? Isn't it bad enough the way it is? I told you before not to do it. Sit down and waive that examination you've demanded."
"I wish to examine Simons," announced Tru in a louder voice, as she shook off Cronin's restraining hand. "And I beg the court's permission to examine him in an unorthodox way. Such a procedure is necessary because the case is an unorthodox case. My clients are all webbed up in a net of circumstantial evidence, a net woven by certain spidery perjurers who must remain unnamed. I ask a free hand in an endeavor to cut them loose. Does this court grant it?"
Inspector Strickland looked at Tru in puzzled surprise. It was evident that, in spite of his impartial pose as magistrate, he thought the defense had more to lose than to gain by calling the witness Simons. "The court does," he permitted, "The court recognizes the exigencies and ramifications of this case, and it gives you a free hand to introduce new evidence in any way you wish."
"BEFORE examining the witness," announced Trudis, "I wish to establish something like the identical conditions under which my clients approached the woodcutter's camp on the White River with their helpless burden. I want you all to kindly bear with me and consider this room the old, deserted shack. I shall try to create a similarity."
From under the loose folds of her parka, Trudis produced a small frying pan, a fork and a piece of meat. She threw the meat into the pan and placed the pan on the red-hot stove. Immediately the savor of frying moose steak filled the air, and the court room swam with the smoke of burning grease.
"This is the woodcutter's cabin as my clients found it. I shall ask my clients to step to the door, illustrate their coming and speak in the very conversation they used as recorded in the records of the preliminary hearing. Thorpe has left his dog team at the door. They will jingle the bells a bit to signal their arrival and use Thorpe himself in place of the broken-legged Ryan."
With a cavernous smile on his face Thorpe jumped up. Gayle and Cronin, casting wondering and doubtful glances at their erratic counsel, followed so slowly that Thorpe had to pull them along by the arms. The significance of their attitude was not lost upon the audience nor upon Ryan.
"Scared to try it," he sneered aloud. "They know such a fishy frame-up won't work in this court."
"You hold your silence, Rooney!" ordered Strickland, whirling on him and banging the table with his gavel. "You're out of order. Not another whimper out of you!"
"I shall now dispense with the court's assistance and take the liberty of summoning the witness myself," announced Trudis as the door closed on Gayle, Cronin, and Thorpe.
She opened the guard-room door and led out Seattle, drunker than a drunken Siwash, with a smile of imbecility and eyes that saw nothing in the crowded court room but the dense smoke of the burning moose steak.
Trudis piloted him carefully, located him in the cleared space by the stove and put the fork in his hand.
"Now," she whispered in his ear, "Hess and Outremont'll be here on the jump with Rooney and his broken leg. Don't forget what you're to do. And see that you sling the patter right smart."
BY the red-hot stove in the haze of grease smoke Seattle stood, fork in air above the pan of moose steak, nodding his head comprehendingly. Instantly behind the curtain of smoke there arose a scuffling among the row of chairs of the prosecution. Ryan was desperately struggling to rise and yell a warning to Seattle, but at a sign from Trudis Sergeant Silgarde and Private Mattan on either side of him were holding him in his seat and Silgarde's huge hand was gagging his mouth.
The scuffling and squeaking of the chairs sounded much like sledge runners dragging over packed snow, and the next instant the musical jingle of dog bells arose at the door.
Seattle made a zigzag line for the door and threw it open.
Outside he saw Hess and Gayle with a prone figure on the sledge they drove
"Coom in; coom in," he bellowed "Where you ban trail?"
"Right here," answered Cronin. "And it ain't any pleasure trip either. Ryan's got a broken peg. Did it in the cove down yonder by the river mouth. He's been shooting signs to you for a week and a half."
"By tam! Ay ban hear that shootin' but ay ban tank her Sticks after moose!"
"That's what I said you'd think," put in Gayle. "But never mind, Larvon Don't "feel guilty about it. You can do your part now. Hess and I are going to take his mail on to Dyea. Bonus on her. Savvy? Got to run on time. You see he gets the best of care till we come back. And give us a hand with him, will you?"
WHILE the court held its bated breath, Seattle stooped and gave them a hand. Carefully the three transferred the stiff-legged Thorpe Calgour, whose close-drawn parka hood concealed his face, from the sledge to the table in front of Strickland. It was just about the height of a wall bunk, and there the partners fiddled with Thorpe's leg a second and then made for their outfit again. "I tank you ban batter stop till morning," Seattle leered. "The wind she drop then, yas."
"Can't risk it," Cronin refused. "It might be worse. It always blows for days here. Gets a clean sweep down the White and up the Stewart. It wasn't blowing much up Selwyn way. So Gayle and me been talking it over, and we figure we'll be running out of the storm all the time. If we run fast enough and far enough, we ought to strike tolerably clear country to-morrow. Savvy? Then we'll be that much to the good and free of the wind's hold-up."
"But eat a tam good supper first," pleaded Seattle, flourishing his fork. "Ay ban got moose meat nearly fried."
Instead of answering further, Cronin Hess choked in an ever-rising paroxysm of mirth. Other men all round him choked also. Pandemonium reigned in the court room, while Inspector Strickland nearly split the table with his pounding gavel.
"Order! Order!" Strickland shouted. "I will not have disorder here. I'll fine you all for contempt of court. Stop that laughter this minute."
"It isn't laughter, inspector," wept Thorpe in all humility. "They're choking with the smoke."
"Then open the door and clear the smoke out," directed Strickland. "It's enough to strangle anyone."
Somebody kicked the frying pan off the stove and pulled the door open. A draft of frosty air blew a clear shaft through the haze. In that clear shaft stood the dazed and conscience-stricken Seattle, staring guiltily round him the while Trudis smeared his face from a little tin of soot and grease and clapped a tow-haired wig upon his head.
"Behold Borg Larvon, the Swede woodcutter who infested for the needful hour the deserted camp on the White," proclaimed Tru as she finished. "Borg Larvon, whom the prosecution deemed mythical and whom the defense thought departed sky-hiking for wilds unknown."
A FRESH surge of delirium rocked the court. Gayle Outremont sprang forward and swept Trudis up in his great arms.
"Tru," he eulogized, nearly hugging her head off, "you're a sparkling, effulgent, comet-tailed wonder!"
Sit down!" Strickland bellowed at them. "Sit down. You're out of order. You're all out of order. Every blessed one but Trudis is, and if you don't do better I'll clear the barracks and conduct the conclusion of this case in camera!"
The threat worked.
This pageant was too rich to be lost, and all in the court room suppressed for the moment their riotous impulses.
"Now," declaimed Trudis, who was still in order, "I have offered my fresh evidence. It rests with the court to judge of its importance. Only I would ask the court to compare the written evidence as taken down these last few minutes by the clerks with the written statements of my clients as recorded in the records of the preliminary hearing."
"It is compared," announced Strickland ominously as he set the sheets side by side, "and I find that it smashes the whole case against the accused. Outremont and Hess, you are honorably dismissed on the robbery charge. It now remains to apprehend the real culprits. The Crown can do that on its own initiative unless the defense wishes to lay a countercharge."
"The defense does," declared Trudis. "It loses no time in laying that countercharge, and it asks this court to arrest Rooney Ryan and Seattle Simons, and arraign them on the said charge. The defense, which now becomes the prosecution, has further incriminating evidence to submit."
"Arrested they are," nodded Strickland with a quick gesture to Silgarde and Mattan. "And arraigned they are. Go on with your incriminating evidence."
Trudis glanced at Thorpe, and Thorpe stepped outside the doorway. He appeared in another moment bearing the dead body of a malemute, which he deposited on Strickland's table. Every neck in the court room craned forward, while the inspector gazed suspiciously at the animal.
"What's this?" he demanded.
"The incriminating evidence," answered Trudis. "It is one of five and one-half dogs we found buried under the snow in the cove by the White River's mouth, one of Betteille Trentoin's dogs shot by the real culprits in the staging of the broken-leg tableau. Thorpe, go on and dissect it!"
THORPE, taking a long knife from his pocket, slit the malemute down the legs and up the belly. But no livid flesh nor clotted blood showed on his incisions. Only an astounding flow of plucked ends of green spruce littered the table, and, instead of yards of entrails,, out slid the Alaska Commercial Company's package of one hundred thousand dollars.
"A dead malemute, you see," laughed Tru, "but a skinned, stuffed malemute as well. An original cache, all right, and a fine piece of taxidermy. A little flat in the chest now, though. That's where the grease box and the tow-haired wig went in."
Gayle's arms flew out and hugged her anew, while the feet stamping and roaring of the court audience made the log walls quake.
Nor did Strickland call them to order. He stood up in the midst of the tumult, his cheeks all crimson and his eyes on fire, for his heart was riled at the duplicity which had so nearly forced him in the light of the law to pronounce judgment on his old friends.
"Rooney Ryan," he roared, "do you and Seattle Simons plead guilty to this countercharge? You'd better. That plea, coupled with the fact that the money's been recovered, is the only thing that'll lighten your sentence. Do you plead guilty or not guilty?"
Ryan looked once into the inspector's eyes. "Guilty for me," he quavered, "and—guilty for Seattle."
"Twelve months on the barracks woodpile," sentenced Strickland.