The Greatest Adventures Boxed Set: Jack London Edition. Jack London
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Hutchinson laughed as he got up on his feet. It was a nervous, apprehensive laugh. It was a case where it was more awkward to win than lose. He walked over to his partner, who whirled upon him fiercely:-
“Now you just shut up, Corry! I know all you’re going to say—that you’d rather stay in and let me go, and all that; so don’t say it. You’ve your own people in Detroit to see, and that’s enough. Besides, you can do for me the very thing I expected to do if I went out.”
“And that is—?”
Pentfield read the full question in his partner’s eyes, and answered:-
“Yes, that very thing. You can bring her in to me. The only difference will be a Dawson wedding instead of a San Franciscan one.”
“But, man alike!” Corry Hutchinson objected “how under the sun can I bring her in? We’re not exactly brother and sister, seeing that I have not even met her, and it wouldn’t be just the proper thing, you know, for us to travel together. Of course, it would be all right—you and I know that; but think of the looks of it, man!”
Pentfield swore under his breath, consigning the looks of it to a less frigid region than Alaska.
“Now, if you’ll just listen and not get astride that high horse of yours so blamed quick,” his partner went on, “you’ll see that the only fair thing under the circumstances is for me to let you go out this year. Next year is only a year away, and then I can take my fling.”
Pentfield shook his head, though visibly swayed by the temptation.
“It won’t do, Corry, old man. I appreciate your kindness and all that, but it won’t do. I’d be ashamed every time I thought of you slaving away in here in my place.”
A thought seemed suddenly to strike him. Burrowing into his bunk and disrupting it in his eagerness, he secured a writing-pad and pencil, and sitting down at the table, began to write with swiftness and certitude.
“Here,” he said, thrusting the scrawled letter into his partner’s hand. “You just deliver that and everything’ll be all right.”
Hutchinson ran his eye over it and laid it down.
“How do you know the brother will be willing to make that beastly trip in here?” he demanded.
“Oh, he’ll do it for me—and for his sister,” Pentfield replied. “You see, he’s tenderfoot, and I wouldn’t trust her with him alone. But with you along it will be an easy trip and a safe one. As soon as you get out, you’ll go to her and prepare her. Then you can take your run east to your own people, and in the spring she and her brother’ll be ready to start with you. You’ll like her, I know, right from the jump; and from that, you’ll know her as soon as you lay eyes on her.”
So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl’s photograph pasted on the inside of the case. Corry Hutchinson gazed at it with admiration welling up in his eyes.
“Mabel is her name,” Pentfield went on. “And it’s just as well you should know how to find the house. Soon as you strike ‘Frisco, take a cab, and just say, ‘Holmes’s place, Myrdon Avenue’—I doubt if the Myrdon Avenue is necessary. The cabby’ll know where Judge Holmes lives.
“And say,” Pentfield continued, after a pause, “it won’t be a bad idea for you to get me a few little things which a—er—”
“A married man should have in his business,” Hutchinson blurted out with a grin.
Pentfield grinned back.
“Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and such things. And you might get a good set of china. You know it’ll come hard for her to settle down to this sort of thing. You can freight them in by steamer around by Bering Sea. And, I say, what’s the matter with a piano?”
Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily. His reluctance had vanished, and he was warming up to his mission.
“By Jove! Lawrence,” he said at the conclusion of the council, as they both rose to their feet, “I’ll bring back that girl of yours in style. I’ll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all that brother’ll have to do will be to see to her comfort and do for her whatever I’ve forgotten. And I’ll forget damn little, I can tell you.”
The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last time and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the frozen Yukon on his way to salt water and the world. Pentfield went back to his Bonanza mine, which was many times more dreary than before, and faced resolutely into the long winter. There was work to be done, men to superintend, and operations to direct in burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his heart was not in the work. Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered logs of a new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine. It was a grand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms. Each log was hand-hewed and squared—an expensive whim when the axemen received a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing could be too costly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live.
So he went about with the building of the cabin, singing, “And oh, my fair, would I somewhere might house my heart with thee!” Also, he had a calendar pinned on the wall above the table, and his first act each morning was to check off the day and to count the days that were left ere his partner would come booming down the Yukon ice in the spring. Another whim of his was to permit no one to sleep in the new cabin on the hill. It must be as fresh for her occupancy as the square-hewed wood was fresh; and when it stood complete, he put a padlock on the door. No one entered save himself, and he was wont to spend long hours there, and to come forth with his face strangely radiant and in his eyes a glad, warm light.
In December he received a letter from Corry Hutchinson. He had just seen Mabel Holmes. She was all she ought to be, to be Lawrence Pentfield’s wife, he wrote. He was enthusiastic, and his letter sent the blood tingling through Pentfield’s veins. Other letters followed, one on the heels of another, and sometimes two or three together when the mail lumped up. And they were all in the same tenor. Corry had just come from Myrdon Avenue; Corry was just going to Myrdon Avenue; or Corry was at Myrdon Avenue. And he lingered on and on in San Francisco, nor even mentioned his trip to Detroit.
Lawrence Pentfield began to think that his partner was a great deal in the company of Mabel Holmes for a fellow who was going east to see his people. He even caught himself worrying about it at times, though he would have worried more had he not known Mabel and Corry so well. Mabel’s letters, on the other hand, had a great deal to say about Corry. Also, a thread of timidity that was near to disinclination ran through them concerning the trip in over the ice and the Dawson marriage. Pentfield wrote back heartily, laughing at her fears, which he took to be the mere physical ones of danger and hardship rather than those bred of maidenly reserve.
But the long winter and tedious wait, following upon the two previous long winters, were telling upon him. The superintendence of the men and the pursuit of the pay streak could not break the irk of the daily round, and the end of January found him making occasional trips to Dawson, where he could forget his identity for a space at the gambling tables. Because he could afford to lose, he won, and “Pentfield’s luck” became a stock phrase among the faro players.
His luck ran with him till the second week in February. How much farther it might have run is conjectural; for, after one big game, he never played again.
It was in the Opera House that it occurred, and for an hour it had seemed that he could not place his money on a card without making the card a winner. In the lull at the end of a deal, while the gamekeeper was shuffling the deck, Nick Inwood the owner of the game, remarked, apropos of nothing:-
“I say, Pentfield, I see that partner of yours has been cutting up monkey-shines on the outside.”
“Trust Corry to have a good time,” Pentfield had answered; “especially when he has earned it.”
“Every man to his taste,” Nick Inwood laughed; “but I should scarcely call getting married a good time.”