The Greatest Adventures Boxed Set: Jack London Edition. Jack London
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along by afternoon. Forty Mile had the start of them by a hundred and seventy miles. But gee! they ain’t losin’ any time!”
“We’ll just sit here quiet-like and watch ‘em string by,” Bill said complacently.
As he spoke, another boat appeared in sight, followed after a brief interval by two others. By this time the first boat was abreast of the men on the bank. Its occupants did not cease poling while greetings were exchanged, and, though its progress was slow, a half-hour saw it out of sight up river.
Still they came from below, boat after boat, in endless procession. The uneasiness of Bill and Kink increased. They stole speculative, tentative glances at each other, and when their eyes met looked away in embarrassment. Finally, however, their eyes met and neither looked away.
Kink opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him and his mouth remained open while he continued to gaze at his partner.
“Just what I was thinken’, Kink,” said Bill.
They grinned sheepishly at each other, and by tacit consent started to walk away. Their pace quickened, and by the time they arrived at their cabin they were on the run.
“Can’t lose no time with all that multitude a-rushin’ by,” Kink spluttered, as he jabbed the sourdough can into the beanpot with one hand and with the other gathered in the frying-pan and coffeepot.
“Should say not,” gasped Bill, his head and shoulders buried in a clothes-sack wherein were stored winter socks and underwear. “I say, Kink, don’t forget the saleratus on the corner shelf back of the stove.”
Half-an-hour later they were launching the canoe and loading up, while the storekeeper made jocular remarks about poor, weak mortals and the contagiousness of “stampedin’ fever.” But when Bill and Kink thrust their long poles to bottom and started the canoe against the current, he called after them:-
“Well, so-long and good luck! And don’t forget to blaze a stake or two for me!”
They nodded their heads vigorously and felt sorry for the poor wretch who remained perforce behind.
Kink and Bill were sweating hard. According to the revised Northland Scripture, the stampede is to the swift, the blazing of stakes to the strong, and the Crown in royalties, gathers to itself the fulness thereof. Kink and Bill were both swift and strong. They took the soggy trail at a long, swinging gait that broke the hearts of a couple of tenderfeet who tried to keep up with them. Behind, strung out between them and Dawson (where the boats were discarded and land travel began), was the vanguard of the Circle City outfit. In the race from Forty Mile the partners had passed every boat, winning from the leading boat by a length in the Dawson eddy, and leaving its occupants sadly behind the moment their feet struck the trail.
“Huh! couldn’t see us for smoke,” Hootchinoo Bill chuckled, flirting the stinging sweat from his brow and glancing swiftly back along the way they had come.
Three men emerged from where the trail broke through the trees. Two followed close at their heels, and then a man and a woman shot into view.
“Come on, you Kink! Hit her up! Hit her up!”
Bill quickened his pace. Mitchell glanced back in more leisurely fashion.
“I declare if they ain’t lopin’!”
“And here’s one that’s loped himself out,” said Bill, pointing to the side of the trail.
A man was lying on his back panting in the culminating stages of violent exhaustion. His face was ghastly, his eyes bloodshot and glazed, for all the world like a dying man.
“Chechaquo!” Kink Mitchell grunted, and it was the grunt of the old “sour dough” for the greenhorn, for the man who outfitted with “self-risin’” flour and used baking-powder in his biscuits.
The partners, true to the old-timer custom, had intended to stake downstream from the strike, but when they saw claim 81 BELOW blazed on a tree,—which meant fully eight miles below Discovery,—they changed their minds. The eight miles were covered in less than two hours. It was a killing pace, over so rough trail, and they passed scores of exhausted men that had fallen by the wayside.
At Discovery little was to be learned of the upper creek. Cormack’s Indian brother-in-law, Skookum Jim, had a hazy notion that the creek was staked as high as the 30’s; but when Kink and Bill looked at the corner-stakes of 79 ABOVE, they threw their stampeding packs off their backs and sat down to smoke. All their efforts had been vain. Bonanza was staked from mouth to source,—“out of sight and across the next divide.” Bill complained that night as they fried their bacon and boiled their coffee over Cormack’s fire at Discovery.
“Try that pup,” Carmack suggested next morning.
“That pup” was a broad creek that flowed into Bonanza at 7 ABOVE. The partners received his advice with the magnificent contempt of the sour dough for a squaw-man, and, instead, spent the day on Adam’s Creek, another and more likely-looking tributary of Bonanza. But it was the old story over again—staked to the skyline.
For threes days Carmack repeated his advice, and for three days they received it contemptuously. But on the fourth day, there being nowhere else to go, they went up “that pup.” They knew that it was practically unstaked, but they had no intention of staking. The trip was made more for the purpose of giving vent to their ill-humour than for anything else. They had become quite cynical, sceptical. They jeered and scoffed at everything, and insulted every chechaquo they met along the way.
At No. 23 the stakes ceased. The remainder of the creek was open for location.
“Moose pasture,” sneered Kink Mitchell.
But Bill gravely paced off five hundred feet up the creek and blazed the corner-stakes. He had picked up the bottom of a candle-box, and on the smooth side he wrote the notice for his centre-stake:-
THIS MOOSE PASTURE IS RESERVED FOR THE
SWEDES AND CHECHAQUOS.
—BILL RADER.
Kink read it over with approval, saying:-
“As them’s my sentiments, I reckon I might as well subscribe.”
So the name of Charles Mitchell was added to the notice; and many an old sour dough’s face relaxed that day at sight of the handiwork of a kindred spirit.
“How’s the pup?” Carmack inquired when they strolled back into camp.
“To hell with pups!” was Hootchinoo Bill’s reply. “Me and Kink’s goin’ a-lookin’ for Too Much Gold when we get rested up.”
Too Much Gold was the fabled creek of which all sour doughs dreamed, whereof it was said the gold was so thick that, in order to wash it, gravel must first be shovelled into the sluice-boxes. But the several days’ rest, preliminary to the quest for Too Much Gold, brought a slight change in their plan, inasmuch as it brought one Ans Handerson, a Swede.
Ans Handerson had been working for wages all summer at Miller Creek over on the Sixty Mile, and, the summer done, had strayed up Bonanza like many another waif helplessly adrift on the gold tides that swept willy-nilly across the land. He was tall and lanky. His arms were long, like prehistoric man’s, and his hands were like soup-plates, twisted and gnarled, and big-knuckled from toil. He was slow of utterance and movement, and his eyes, pale blue as his hair was pale yellow, seemed filled with an immortal dreaming, the stuff of which no man knew, and himself least of all. Perhaps this appearance of immortal dreaming was due to a supreme and vacuous innocence. At any rate, this was the valuation men of ordinary clay put upon him, and there was nothing extraordinary about the composition of Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell.
The partners had spent a day of visiting and gossip, and in the evening met in the temporary quarters of the Monte Carlo—a large tent were stampeders rested their weary bones and bad whisky sold at a dollar a drink. Since the only money in circulation was dust, and since the house took the “down-weight” on the scales, a drink cost something more than