IT was the summer of 1897, and there was trouble in the Tarwater
family. Grandfather Tarwater, after remaining properly subdued and
crushed for a quiet decade, had broken out again. This time it was
the Klondike fever. His first and one unvarying symptom of such
attacks was song. One chant only he raised, though he remembered
no more than the first stanza and but three lines of that. And the
family knew his feet were itching and his brain was tingling with
the old madness, when he lifted his hoarse-cracked voice, now
falsetto-cracked, in:

Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece.

Ten years earlier he had lifted the chant, sung to the air of the
“Doxology,” when afflicted with the fever to go gold-mining in
Patagonia. The multitudinous family had sat upon him, but had had
a hard time doing it. When all else had failed to shake his
resolution, they had applied lawyers to him, with the threat of
getting out guardianship papers and of confining him in the state
asylum for the insane – which was reasonable for a man who had, a
quarter of a century before, speculated away all but ten meagre
acres of a California principality, and who had displayed no better
business acumen ever since.

The application of lawyers to John Tarwater was like the
application of a mustard plaster. For, in his judgment, they were
the gentry, more than any other, who had skinned him out of the
broad Tarwater acres. So, at the time of his Patagonian fever, the
very thought of so drastic a remedy was sufficient to cure him. He
quickly demonstrated he was not crazy by shaking the fever from him
and agreeing not to go to Patagonia.

Next, he demonstrated how crazy he really was, by deeding over to
his family, unsolicited, the ten acres on Tarwater Flat, the house,
barn, outbuildings, and water-rights. Also did he turn over the
eight hundred dollars in bank that was the long-saved salvage of
his wrecked fortune. But for this the family found no cause for
committal to the asylum, since such committal would necessarily
invalidate what he had done.

“Grandfather is sure peeved,” said Mary, his oldest daughter,
herself a grandmother, when her father quit smoking.

All he had retained for himself was a span of old horses, a
mountain buckboard, and his one room in the crowded house.
Further, having affirmed that he would be beholden to none of them,
he got the contract to carry the United States mail, twice a week,
from Kelterville up over Tarwater Mountain to Old Almaden – which
was a sporadically worked quick-silver mine in the upland cattle
country. With his old horses it took all his time to make the two
weekly round trips. And for ten years, rain or shine, he had never
missed a trip. Nor had he failed once to pay his week’s board into
Mary’s hand. This board he had insisted on, in the convalescence
from his Patagonian fever, and he had paid it strictly, though he
had given up tobacco in order to be able to do it.

“Huh!” he confided to the ruined water wheel of the old Tarwater
Mill, which he had built from the standing timber and which had
ground wheat for the first settlers. “Huh! They’ll never put me
in the poor farm so long as I support myself. And without a penny
to my name it ain’t likely any lawyer fellows’ll come snoopin’
around after me.”

And yet, precisely because of these highly rational acts, it was
held that John Tarwater was mildly crazy!

The first time he had lifted the chant of “Like Argus of the
Ancient Times,” had been in 1849, when, twenty-two years’ of age,
violently attacked by the Californian fever, he had sold two
hundred and forty Michigan acres, forty of it cleared, for the
price of four yoke of oxen, and a wagon, and had started across the
Plains.

“And we turned off at Fort Hall, where the Oregon emigration went
north’ard, and swung south for Californy,” was his way of
concluding the narrative of that arduous journey. And Bill Ping
and me used to rope grizzlies out of the underbrush of Cache Slough
in the Sacramento Valley.”

Years of freighting and mining had followed, and, with a stake
gleaned from the Merced placers, he satisfied the land-hunger of
his race and time by settling in Sonoma County.

During the ten years of carrying the mail across Tarwater Township,
up Tarwater Valley, and over Tarwater Mountain, most all of which
land had once been his, he had spent his time dreaming of winning
back that land before he died. And now, his huge gaunt form more
erect than it had been for years, with a glinting of blue fires in
his small and close-set eyes, he was lifting his ancient chant
again.

“There he goes now – listen to him,” said William Tarwater.

“Nobody at home,” laughed Harris Topping, day labourer, husband of
Annie Tarwater, and father of her nine children.

The kitchen door opened to admit the old man, returning from
feeding his horses. The song had ceased from his lips; but Mary
was irritable from a burnt hand and a grandchild whose stomach
refused to digest properly diluted cows’ milk.

“Now there ain’t no use you carryin’ on that way, father,” she
tackled him. “The time’s past for you to cut and run for a place
like the Klondike, and singing won’t buy you nothing.”

“Just the same,” he answered quietly. “I bet I could go to that
Klondike place and pick up enough gold to buy back the Tarwater
lands.”

“Old fool!” Annie contributed.

“You couldn’t buy them back for less’n three hundred thousand and
then some,” was William’s effort at squelching him.

“Then I could pick up three hundred thousand, and then some, if I
was only there,” the old man retorted placidly.

“Thank God you can’t walk there, or you’d be startin’, I know,”
Mary cried. “Ocean travel costs money.”

“I used to have money,” her father said humbly.

“Well, you ain’t got any now – so forget it,” William advised.
“Them times is past, like roping bear with Bill Ping. There ain’t
no more bear.”

“Just the same – “

But Mary cut him off. Seizing the day’s paper from the kitchen
table, she flourished it savagely under her aged progenitor’s
nose.

“What do those Klondikers say? There it is in cold print. Only
the young and robust can stand the Klondike. It’s worse than the
north pole. And they’ve left their dead a-plenty there themselves.
Look at their pictures. You’re forty years older ‘n the oldest of
them.”

John Tarwater did look, but his eyes strayed to other photographs
on the highly sensational front page.

“And look at the photys of them nuggets they brought down,” he
said. “I know gold. Didn’t I gopher twenty thousand outa the
Merced? And wouldn’t it a-ben a hundred thousand if that
cloudburst hadn’t busted my wing-dam? Now if I was only in the
Klondike – “

“Crazy as a loon,” William sneered in open aside to the rest.

“A nice way to talk to your father,” Old Man Tarwater censured
mildly. “My father’d have walloped the tar out of me with a
single-tree if I’d spoke to him that way.”

“But you ARE crazy, father – ” William began.

“Reckon you’re right, son. And that’s where my father wasn’t
crazy. He’d a-done it.”

“The old man’s been reading some of them magazine articles about
men who succeeded after forty,” Annie jibed.

“And why not, daughter?” he asked. “And why can’t a man succeed
after he’s seventy? I was only seventy this year. And mebbe I
could succeed if only I could get to the Klondike – “

“Which you ain’t going to get to,” Mary shut him off.

“Oh, well, then,” he sighed, “seein’s I ain’t, I might just as well
go to bed.”

He stood up, tall, gaunt, great-boned and gnarled, a splendid ruin
of a man. His ragged hair and whiskers were not grey but snowy
white, as were the tufts of hair that stood out on the backs of his
huge bony fingers. He moved toward the door, opened it, sighed,
and paused with a backward look.

“Just the same,” he murmured plaintively, “the bottoms of my feet
is itching something terrible.”

Long before the family stirred next morning, his horses fed and
harnessed by lantern light, breakfast cooked and eaten by lamp
fight, Old Man Tarwater was off and away down Tarwater Valley on
the road to Kelterville. Two things were unusual about this usual
trip which he had made a thousand and forty times since taking the
mail contract. He did not drive to Kelterville, but turned off on
the main road south to Santa Rosa. Even more remarkable than this
was the paper-wrapped parcel between his feet. It contained his
one decent black suit, which Mary had been long reluctant to see
him wear any more, not because it was shabby, but because, as he
guessed what was at the back of her mind, it was decent enough to
bury him in.

And at Santa Rosa, in a second-hand clothes shop, he sold the suit
outright for two dollars and a half. From the same obliging
shopman he received four dollars for the wedding ring of his long-
dead wife. The span of horses and the wagon he disposed of for
seventy-five dollars, although twenty-five was all he received down
in cash. Chancing to meet Alton Granger on the street, to whom
never before had he mentioned the ten dollars loaned him in ‘74, he
reminded Alton Granger of the little affair, and was promptly paid.
Also, of all unbelievable men to be in funds, he so found the town
drunkard for whom he had bought many a drink in the old and palmy
days. And from him John Tarwater borrowed a dollar. Finally, he
took the afternoon train to San Francisco.

A dozen days later, carrying a half-empty canvas sack of blankets
and old clothes, he landed on the beach of Dyea in the thick of the
great Klondike Rush. The beach was screaming bedlam. Ten thousand
tons of outfit lay heaped and scattered, and twice ten thousand men
struggled with it and clamoured about it. Freight, by Indian-back,
over Chilcoot to Lake Linderman, had jumped from sixteen to thirty
cents a pound, which latter was a rate of six hundred dollars a
ton. And the sub-arctic winter gloomed near at hand. All knew it,
and all knew that of the twenty thousand of them very few would get
across the passes, leaving the rest to winter and wait for the late
spring thaw.

Such the beach old John Tarwater stepped upon; and straight across
the beach and up the trail toward Chilcoot he headed, cackling his
ancient chant, a very Grandfather Argus himself, with no outfit
worry in the world, for he did not possess any outfit. That night
he slept on the flats, five miles above Dyea, at the head of canoe
navigation. Here the Dyea River became a rushing mountain torrent,
plunging out of a dark canyon from the glaciers that fed it far
above.

And here, early next morning, he beheld a little man weighing no
more than a hundred, staggering along a foot-log under all of a
hundred pounds of flour strapped on his back. Also, he beheld the
little man stumble off the log and fall face-downward in a quiet
eddy where the water was two feet deep and proceed quietly to
drown. It was no desire of his to take death so easily, but the
flour on his back weighed as much as he and would not let him up.

“Thank you, old man,” he said to Tarwater, when the latter had
dragged him up into the air and ashore.

While he unlaced his shoes and ran the water out, they had further
talk. Next, he fished out a ten-dollar gold-piece and offered it
to his rescuer.

Old Tarwater shook his head and shivered, for the ice-water had wet
him to his knees.

“But I reckon I wouldn’t object to settin’ down to a friendly meal
with you.”

“Ain’t had breakfast?” the little man, who was past forty and who
had said his name was Anson, queried with a glance frankly curious.

“Nary bite,” John Tarwater answered.

“Where’s your outfit? Ahead?”

“Nary outfit.”

“Expect to buy your grub on the Inside?”

“Nary a dollar to buy it with, friend. Which ain’t so important as
a warm bite of breakfast right now.”

In Anson’s camp, a quarter of a mile on, Tarwater found a slender,
red-whiskered young man of thirty cursing over a fire of wet willow
wood. Introduced as Charles, he transferred his scowl and wrath to
Tarwater, who, genially oblivious, devoted himself to the fire,
took advantage of the chill morning breeze to create a draught
which the other had left stupidly blocked by stones, and soon
developed less smoke and more flame. The third member of the
party, Bill Wilson, or Big Bill as they called him, came in with a
hundred-and-forty-pound pack; and what Tarwater esteemed to be a
very rotten breakfast was dished out by Charles. The mush was half
cooked and mostly burnt, the bacon was charred carbon, and the
coffee was unspeakable.

Immediately the meal was wolfed down the three partners took their
empty pack-straps and headed down trail to where the remainder of
their outfit lay at the last camp a mile away. And old Tarwater
became busy. He washed the dishes, foraged dry wood, mended a
broken pack-strap, put an edge on the butcher-knife and camp-axe,
and repacked the picks and shovels into a more carryable parcel.

What had impressed him during the brief breakfast was the sort of
awe in which Anson and Big Bill stood of Charles. Once, during the
morning, while Anson took a breathing spell after bringing in
another hundred-pound pack, Tarwater delicately hinted his
impression.

“You see, it’s this way,” Anson said. “We’ve divided our
leadership. We’ve got specialities. Now I’m a carpenter. When we
get to Lake Linderman, and the trees are chopped and whipsawed into
planks, I’ll boss the building of the boat. Big Bill is a logger
and miner. So he’ll boss getting out the logs and all mining
operations. Most of our outfit’s ahead. We went broke paying the
Indians to pack that much of it to the top of Chilcoot. Our last
partner is up there with it, moving it along by himself down the
other side. His name’s Liverpool, and he’s a sailor. So, when the
boat’s built, he’s the boss of the outfit to navigate the lakes and
rapids to Klondike.

“And Charles – this Mr. Crayton – what might his speciality be?”
Tarwater asked.

“He’s the business man. When it comes to business and organization
he’s boss.”

“Hum,” Tarwater pondered. “Very lucky to get such a bunch of
specialities into one outfit.”

“More than luck,” Anson agreed. “It was all accident, too. Each
of us started alone. We met on the steamer coming up from San
Francisco, and formed the party. – Well, I got to be goin’.
Charles is liable to get kicking because I ain’t packin’ my share’
just the same, you can’t expect a hundred-pound man to pack as much
as a hundred-and-sixty-pounder.”

“Stick around and cook us something for dinner,” Charles, on his
next load in and noting the effects of the old man’s handiness,
told Tarwater.

And Tarwater cooked a dinner that was a dinner, washed the dishes,
had real pork and beans for supper, and bread baked in a frying-pan
that was so delectable than the three partners nearly foundered
themselves on it. Supper dishes washed, he cut shavings and
kindling for a quick and certain breakfast fire, showed Anson a
trick with foot-gear that was invaluable to any hiker, sang his
“Like Argus of the Ancient Times,” and told them of the great
emigration across the Plains in Forty-nine.

“My goodness, the first cheerful and hearty-like camp since we hit
the beach,” Big Bill remarked as he knocked out his pipe and began
pulling off his shoes for bed.

“Kind of made things easy, boys, eh?” Tarwater queried genially.

All nodded. “Well, then, I got a proposition, boys. You can take
it or leave it, but just listen kindly to it. You’re in a hurry to
get in before the freeze-up. Half the time is wasted over the
cooking by one of you that he might be puttin’ in packin’ outfit.
If I do the cookin’ for you, you all’ll get on that much faster.
Also, the cookin’ ‘ll be better, and that’ll make you pack better.
And I can pack quite a bit myself in between times, quite a bit,
yes, sir, quite a bit.”

Big Bill and Anson were just beginning to nod their heads in
agreement, when Charles stopped them.

“What do you expect of us in return?” he demanded of the old man.

“Oh, I leave it up to the boys.”

“That ain’t business,” Charles reprimanded sharply. “You made the
proposition. Now finish it.”

“Well, it’s this way – “

“You expect us to feed you all winter, eh?” Charles interrupted.

“No, siree, I don’t. All I reckon is a passage to Klondike in your
boat would be mighty square of you.”

“You haven’t an ounce of grub, old man. You’ll starve to death
when you get there.”

“I’ve been feedin’ some long time pretty successful,” Old Tarwater
replied, a whimsical light in his eyes. “I’m seventy, and ain’t
starved to death never yet.”

“Will you sign a paper to the effect that you shift for yourself as
soon as you get to Dawson?” the business one demanded.

“Oh, sure,” was the response.

Again Charles checked his two partners’ expressions of satisfaction
with the arrangement.

“One other thing, old man. We’re a party of four, and we all have
a vote on questions like this. Young Liverpool is ahead with the
main outfit. He’s got a say so, and he isn’t here to say it.”

“What kind of a party might he be?” Tarwater inquired.

“He’s a rough-neck sailor, and he’s got a quick, bad temper.”

“Some turbulent,” Anson contributed.

“And the way he can cuss is simply God-awful,” Big Bill testified.

“But he’s square,” Big Bill added.

Anson nodded heartily to this appraisal.

“Well, boys,” Tarwater summed up, “I set out for Californy and I
got there. And I’m going to get to Klondike. Ain’t a thing can
stop me, ain’t a thing. I’m going to get three hundred thousand
outa the ground, too. Ain’t a thing can stop me, ain’t a thing,
because I just naturally need the money. I don’t mind a bad temper
so long’s the boy is square. I’ll take my chance, an’ I’ll work
along with you till we catch up with him. Then, if he says no to
the proposition, I reckon I’ll lose. But somehow I just can’t see
‘m sayin’ no, because that’d mean too close up to freeze-up and too
late for me to find another chance like this. And, as I’m sure
going to get to Klondike, it’s just plumb impossible for him to say
no.”

Old John Tarwater became a striking figure on a trail unusually
replete with striking figures. With thousands of men, each back-
tripping half a ton of outfit, retracing every mile of the trail
twenty times, all came to know him and to hail him as “Father
Christmas.” And, as he worked, ever he raised his chant with his
age-falsetto voice. None of the three men he had joined could
complain about his work. True, his joints were stiff – he admitted
to a trifle of rheumatism. He moved slowly, and seemed to creak
and crackle when he moved; but he kept on moving. Last into the
blankets at night, he was first out in the morning, so that the
other three had hot coffee before their one before-breakfast pack.
And, between breakfast and dinner and between dinner and supper, he
always managed to back-trip for several packs himself. Sixty
pounds was the limit of his burden, however. He could manage
seventy-five, but he could not keep it up. Once, he tried ninety,
but collapsed on the trail and was seriously shaky for a couple of
days afterward.

Work! On a trail where hard-working men learned for the first time
what work was, no man worked harder in proportion to his strength
than Old Tarwater. Driven desperately on by the near-thrust of
winter, and lured madly on by the dream of gold, they worked to
their last ounce of strength and fell by the way. Others, when
failure made certain, blew out their brains. Some went mad, and
still others, under the irk of the man-destroying strain, broke
partnerships and dissolved life-time friendships with fellows just
as good as themselves and just as strained and mad.

Work! Old Tarwater could shame them all, despite his creaking and
crackling and the nasty hacking cough he had developed. Early and
late, on trail or in camp beside the trail he was ever in evidence,
ever busy at something, ever responsive to the hail of “Father
Christmas.” Weary back-trippers would rest their packs on a log or
rock alongside of where he rested his, and would say: “Sing us
that song of yourn, dad, about Forty-Nine.” And, when he had
wheezingly complied, they would arise under their loads, remark
that it was real heartening, and hit the forward trail again.

“If ever a man worked his passage and earned it,” Big Bill confided
to his two partners, “that man’s our old Skeezicks.”

“You bet,” Anson confirmed. “He’s a valuable addition to the
party, and I, for one, ain’t at all disagreeable to the notion of
making him a regular partner – “

“None of that!” Charles Crayton cut in. “When we get to Dawson
we’re quit of him – that’s the agreement. We’d only have to bury
him if we let him stay on with us. Besides, there’s going to be a
famine, and every ounce of grub’ll count. Remember, we’re feeding
him out of our own supply all the way in. And if we run short in
the pinch next year, you’ll know the reason. Steamboats can’t get
up grub to Dawson till the middle of June, and that’s nine months
away.”

“Well, you put as much money and outfit in as the rest of us,” Big
Bill conceded, “and you’ve a say according.”

“And I’m going to have my say,” Charles asserted with increasing
irritability. “And it’s lucky for you with your fool sentiments
that you’ve got somebody to think ahead for you, else you’d all
starve to death. I tell you that famine’s coming. I’ve been
studying the situation. Flour will be two dollars a pound, or ten,
and no sellers. You mark my words.”

Across the rubble-covered flats, up the dark canyon to Sheep Camp,
past the over-hanging and ever-threatening glaciers to the Scales,
and from the Scales up the steep pitches of ice-scoured rock where
packers climbed with hands and feet, Old Tarwater camp-cooked and
packed and sang. He blew across Chilcoot Pass, above timberline,
in the first swirl of autumn snow. Those below, without firewood,
on the bitter rim of Crater Lake, heard from the driving obscurity
above them a weird voice chanting:

“Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece.”

And out of the snow flurries they saw appear a tall, gaunt form,
with whiskers of flying white that blended with the storm, bending
under a sixty-pound pack of camp dunnage.

“Father Christmas!” was the hail. And then: “Three rousing cheers
for Father Christmas!”

Two miles beyond Crater Lake lay Happy Camp – so named because here
was found the uppermost fringe of the timber line, where men might
warm themselves by fire again. Scarcely could it be called timber,
for it was a dwarf rock-spruce that never raised its loftiest
branches higher than a foot above the moss, and that twisted and
grovelled like a pig-vegetable under the moss. Here, on the trail
leading into Happy Camp, in the first sunshine of half a dozen
days, Old Tarwater rested his pack against a huge boulder and
caught his breath. Around this boulder the trail passed, laden men
toiling slowly forward and men with empty pack-straps limping
rapidly back for fresh loads. Twice Old Tarwater essayed to rise
and go on, and each time, warned by his shakiness, sank back to
recover more strength. From around the boulder he heard voices in
greeting, recognized Charles Crayton’s voice, and realized that at
last they had met up with Young Liverpool. Quickly, Charles
plunged into business, and Tarwater heard with great distinctness
every word of Charles’ unflattering description of him and the
proposition to give him passage to Dawson.

“A dam fool proposition,” was Liverpool’s judgment, when Charles
had concluded. “An old granddad of seventy! If he’s on his last
legs, why in hell did you hook up with him? If there’s going to be
a famine, and it looks like it, we need every ounce of grub for
ourselves. We only out-fitted for four, not five.”

“It’s all right,” Tarwater heard Charles assuring the other.
“Don’t get excited. The old codger agreed to leave the final
decision to you when we caught up with you. All you’ve got to do
is put your foot down and say no.”

“You mean it’s up to me to turn the old one down, after your
encouraging him and taking advantage of his work clear from Dyea
here?”

“It’s a hard trail, Liverpool, and only the men that are hard will
get through,” Charles strove to palliate.

“And I’m to do the dirty work?” Liverpool complained, while
Tarwater’s heart sank.

“That’s just about the size of it,” Charles said. “You’ve got the
deciding.”

Then old Tarwater’s heart uprose again as the air was rent by a
cyclone of profanity, from the midst of which crackled sentences
like: – “Dirty skunks! . . . See you in hell first! . . . My
mind’s made up! . . . Hell’s fire and corruption! . . . The old
codger goes down the Yukon with us, stack on that, my hearty! . . .
Hard? You don’t know what hard is unless I show you! . . . I’ll
bust the whole outfit to hell and gone if any of you try to side-
track him! . . . Just try to side-track him, that is all, and
you’ll think the Day of Judgment and all God’s blastingness has hit
the camp in one chunk!”

Such was the invigoratingness of Liverpool’s flow of speech that,
quite without consciousness of effort, the old man arose easily
under his load and strode on toward Happy Camp.

From Happy Camp to Long Lake, from Long Lake to Deep Lake, and from
Deep Lake up over the enormous hog-back and down to Linderman, the
man-killing race against winter kept on. Men broke their hearts
and backs and wept beside the trail in sheer exhaustion. But
winter never faltered. The fall gales blew, and amid bitter
soaking rains and ever-increasing snow flurries, Tarwater and the
party to which he was attached piled the last of their outfit on
the beach.

There was no rest. Across the lake, a mile above a roaring
torrent, they located a patch of spruce and built their saw-pit.
Here, by hand, with an inadequate whipsaw, they sawed the spruce-
trunks into lumber. They worked night and day. Thrice, on the
night-shift, underneath in the saw-pit, Old Tarwater fainted. By
day he cooked as well, and, in the betweenwhiles, helped Anson in
the building of the boat beside the torrent as the green planks
came down.

The days grew shorter. The wind shifted into the north and blew
unending gales. In the mornings the weary men crawled from their
blankets and in their socks thawed out their frozen shoes by the
fire Tarwater always had burning for them. Ever arose the
increasing tale of famine on the Inside. The last grub steamboats
up from Bering Sea were stalled by low water at the beginning of
the Yukon Flats hundreds of miles north of Dawson. In fact, they
lay at the old Hudson Bay Company’s post at Fort Yukon inside the
Arctic Circle. Flour in Dawson was up to two dollars a pound, but
no one would sell. Bonanza and Eldorado Kings, with money to burn,
were leaving for the Outside because they could buy no grub.
Miners’ Committees were confiscating all grub and putting the
population on strict rations. A man who held out an ounce of grub
was shot like a dog. A score had been so executed already.

And, under a strain which had broken so many younger men, Old
Tarwater began to break. His cough had become terrible, and had
not his exhausted comrades slept like the dead, he would have kept
them awake nights. Also, he began to take chills, so that he
dressed up to go to bed. When he had finished so dressing, not a
rag of garment remained in his clothes bag. All he possessed was
on his back and swathed around his gaunt old form.

“Gee!” said Big Bill. “If he puts all he’s got on now, when it
ain’t lower than twenty above, what’ll he do later on when it goes
down to fifty and sixty below?”

They lined the rough-made boat down the mountain torrent, nearly
losing it a dozen times, and rowed across the south end of Lake
Linderman in the thick of a fall blizzard. Next morning they
planned to load and start, squarely into the teeth of the north, on
their perilous traverse of half a thousand miles of lakes and
rapids and box canyons. But before he went to bed that night,
Young Liverpool was out over the camp. He returned to find his
whole party asleep. Rousing Tarwater, he talked with him in low
tones.

“Listen, dad,” he said. – “You’ve got a passage in our boat, and if
ever a man earned a passage you have. But you know yourself you’re
pretty well along in years, and your health right now ain’t
exciting. If you go on with us you’ll croak surer’n hell. – Now
wait till I finish, dad. The price for a passage has jumped to
five hundred dollars. I’ve been throwing my feet and I’ve hustled
a passenger. He’s an official of the Alaska Commercial and just
has to get in. He’s bid up to six hundred to go with me in our
boat. Now the passage is yours. You sell it to him, poke the six
hundred into your jeans, and pull South for California while the
goin’s good. You can be in Dyea in two days, and in California in
a week more. What d’ye say?”

Tarwater coughed and shivered for a space, ere he could get freedom
of breath for speech.

“Son,” he said, “I just want to tell you one thing. I drove my
four yoke of oxen across the Plains in Forty-nine and lost nary a
one. I drove them plumb to Californy, and I freighted with them
afterward out of Sutter’s Fort to American Bar. Now I’m going to
Klondike. Ain’t nothing can stop me, ain’t nothing at all. I’m
going to ride that boat, with you at the steering sweep, clean to
Klondike, and I’m going to shake three hundred thousand out of the
moss-roots. That being so, it’s contrary to reason and common
sense for me to sell out my passage. But I thank you kindly, son,
I thank you kindly.”

The young sailor shot out his hand impulsively and gripped the old
man’s.

“By God, dad!” he cried. “You’re sure going to go then. You’re
the real stuff.” He looked with undisguised contempt across the
sleepers to where Charles Crayton snored in his red beard. “They
don’t seem to make your kind any more, dad.”

Into the north they fought their way, although old-timers, coming
out, shook their heads and prophesied they would be frozen in on
the lakes. That the freeze-up might come any day was patent, and
delays of safety were no longer considered. For this reason,
Liverpool decided to shoot the rapid stream connecting Linderman to
Lake Bennett with the fully loaded boat. It was the custom to line
the empty boats down and to portage the cargoes across. Even then
many empty boats had been wrecked. But the time was past for such
precaution.

“Climb out, dad,” Liverpool commanded as he prepared to swing from
the bank and enter the rapids.

Old Tarwater shook his white head.

“I’m sticking to the outfit,” he declared. “It’s the only way to
get through. You see, son, I’m going to Klondike. If I stick by
the boat, then the boat just naturally goes to Klondike, too. If I
get out, then most likely you’ll lose the boat.”

“Well, there’s no use in overloading,” Charles announced, springing
abruptly out on the bank as the boat cast off.

“Next time you wait for my orders!” Liverpool shouted ashore as the
current gripped the boat. “And there won’t be any more walking
around rapids and losing time waiting to pick you up!”

What took them ten minutes by river, took Charles half an hour by
land, and while they waited for him at the head of Lake Bennett
they passed the time of day with several dilapidated old-timers on
their way out. The famine news was graver than ever. The North-
west Mounted Police, stationed at the foot of Lake Marsh where the
gold-rushers entered Canadian territory, were refusing to let a man
past who did not carry with him seven hundred pounds of grub. In
Dawson City a thousand men, with dog-teams, were waiting the
freeze-up to come out over the ice. The trading companies could
not fill their grub-contracts, and partners were cutting the cards
to see which should go and which should stay and work the claims.

“That settles it,” Charles announced, when he learned of the action
of the mounted police on the boundary. “Old Man, you might as well
start back now.”

“Climb aboard!” Liverpool commanded. “We’re going to Klondike,
and old dad is going along.”

A shift of gale to the south gave them a fair wind down Lake
Bennett, before which they ran under a huge sail made by Liverpool.
The heavy weight of outfit gave such ballast that he cracked on as
a daring sailor should when moments counted. A shift of four
points into the south-west, coming just at the right time as they
entered upon Caribou Crossing, drove them down that connecting link
to lakes Tagish and Marsh. In stormy sunset and twilight – they
made the dangerous crossing of Great Windy Arm, wherein they beheld
two other boat-loads of gold-rushers capsize and drown.

Charles was for beaching for the night, but Liverpool held on,
steering down Tagish by the sound of the surf on the shoals and by
the occasional shore-fires that advertised wrecked or timid
argonauts. At four in the morning, he aroused Charles. Old
Tarwater, shiveringly awake, heard Liverpool order Crayton aft
beside him at the steering-sweep, and also heard the one-sided
conversation.

“Just listen, friend Charles, and keep your own mouth shut,”
Liverpool began. “I want you to get one thing into your head and
keep it there: OLD DAD’S GOING BY THE POLICE. UNDERSTAND? HE’S
GOING BY. When they examine our outfit, old dad’s got a fifth
share in it, savvee? That’ll put us all ‘way under what we ought
to have, but we can bluff it through. Now get this, and get it
hard: THERE AIN’T GOING TO BE ANY FALL-DOWN ON THIS BLUFF – “

“If you think I’d give away on the old codger – ” Charles began
indignantly.

“You thought that,” Liverpool checked him, “because I never
mentioned any such thing. Now – get me and get me hard: I don’t
care what you’ve been thinking. It’s what you’re going to think.
We’ll make the police post some time this afternoon, and we’ve got
to get ready to pull the bluff without a hitch, and a word to the
wise is plenty.”

“If you think I’ve got it in my mind – ” Charles began again.

“Look here,” Liverpool shut him off. “I don’t know what’s in your
mind. I don’t want to know. I want you to know what’s in my mind.
If there’s any slip-up, if old dad gets turned back by the police,
I’m going to pick out the first quiet bit of landscape and take you
ashore on it. And then I’m going to beat you up to the Queen’s
taste. Get me, and get me hard. It ain’t going to be any half-way
beating, but a real, two-legged, two-fisted, he-man beating. I
don’t expect I’ll kill you, but I’ll come damn near to half-killing
you.”

“But what can I do?” Charles almost whimpered.

“Just one thing,” was Liverpool’s final word. “You just pray. You
pray so hard that old dad gets by the police that he does get by.
That’s all. Go back to your blankets.”

Before they gained Lake Le Barge, the land was sheeted with snow
that would not melt for half a year. Nor could they lay their boat
at will against the bank, for the rim-ice was already forming.
Inside the mouth of the river, just ere it entered Lake Le Barge,
they found a hundred storm-bound boats of the argonauts. Out of
the north, across the full sweep of the great lake, blew an
unending snow gale. Three mornings they put out and fought it and
the cresting seas it drove that turned to ice as they fell in-
board. While the others broke their hearts at the oars, Old
Tarwater managed to keep up just sufficient circulation to survive
by chopping ice and throwing it overboard.

Each day for three days, beaten to helplessness, they turned tail
on the battle and ran back into the sheltering river. By the
fourth day, the hundred boats had increased to three hundred, and
the two thousand argonauts on board knew that the great gale
heralded the freeze-up of Le Barge. Beyond, the rapid rivers would
continue to run for days, but unless they got beyond, and
immediately, they were doomed to be frozen in for six months to
come.

“This day we go through,” Liverpool announced. “We turn back for
nothing. And those of us that dies at the oars will live again and
go on pulling.”

And they went through, winning half the length of the lake by
nightfall and pulling on through all the night hours as the wind
went down, falling asleep at the oars and being rapped awake by
Liverpool, toiling on through an age-long nightmare while the stars
came out and the surface of the lake turned to the unruffledness of
a sheet of paper and froze skin-ice that tinkled like broken glass
as their oar-blades shattered it.

As day broke clear and cold, they entered the river, with behind
them a sea of ice. Liverpool examined his aged passenger and found
him helpless and almost gone. When he rounded the boat to against
the rim-ice to build a fire and warm up Tarwater inside and out,
Charles protested against such loss of time.

“This ain’t business, so don’t you come horning in,” Liverpool
informed him. “I’m running the boat trip. So you just climb out
and chop firewood, and plenty of it. I’ll take care of dad. You,
Anson, make a fire on the bank. And you, Bill, set up the Yukon
stove in the boat. Old dad ain’t as young as the rest of us, and
for the rest of this voyage he’s going to have a fire on board to
sit by.”

All of which came to pass; and the boat, in the grip of the
current, like a river steamer with smoke rising from the two joints
of stove-pipe, grounded on shoals, hung up on split currents, and
charged rapids and canyons, as it drove deeper into the Northland
winter. The Big and Little Salmon rivers were throwing mush-ice
into the main river as they passed, and, below the riffles, anchor-
ice arose from the river bottom and coated the surface with crystal
scum. Night and day the rim-ice grew, till, in quiet places, it
extended out a hundred yards from shore. And Old Tarwater, with
all his clothes on, sat by the stove and kept the fire going.
Night and day, not daring to stop for fear of the imminent freeze-
up, they dared to run, an increasing mushiness of ice running with
them.

“What ho, old hearty?” Liverpool would call out at times.

“Cheer O,” Old Tarwater had learned to respond.

“What can I ever do for you, son, in payment?” Tarwater, stoking
the fire, would sometimes ask Liverpool, beating now one released
hand and now the other as he fought for circulation where he
steered in the freezing stern-sheets.

“Just break out that regular song of yours, old Forty-Niner,” was
the invariable reply.

And Tarwater would lift his voice in the cackling chant, as he
lifted it at the end, when the boat swung in through driving cake-
ice and moored to the Dawson City bank, and all waterfront Dawson
pricked its ears to hear the triumphant paean:

Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece,

Charles did it, but he did it so discreetly that none of his party,
least of all the sailor, ever learned of it. He saw two great open
barges being filled up with men, and, on inquiry, learned that
these were grubless ones being rounded up and sent down the Yukon
by the Committee of Safety. The barges were to be towed by the
last little steamboat in Dawson, and the hope was that Fort Yukon,
where lay the stranded steamboats, would be gained before the river
froze. At any rate, no matter what happened to them, Dawson would
be relieved of their grub-consuming presence. So to the Committee
of Safety Charles went, privily to drop a flea in its ear
concerning Tarwater’s grubless, moneyless, and aged condition.
Tarwater was one of the last gathered in, and when Young Liverpool
returned to the boat, from the bank he saw the barges in a run of
cake-ice, disappearing around the bend below Moose-hide Mountain.

Running in cake-ice all the way, and several times escaping jams in
the Yukon Flats, the barges made their hundreds of miles of
progress farther into the north and froze up cheek by jowl with the
grub-fleet. Here, inside the Arctic Circle, Old Tarwater settled
down to pass the long winter. Several hours’ work a day, chopping
firewood for the steamboat companies, sufficed to keep him in food.
For the rest of the time there was nothing to do but hibernate in
his log cabin.

Warmth, rest, and plenty to eat, cured his hacking cough and put
him in as good physical condition as was possible for his advanced
years. But, even before Christmas, the lack of fresh vegetables
caused scurvy to break out, and disappointed adventurer after
disappointed adventurer took to his bunk in abject surrender to
this culminating misfortune. Not so Tarwater. Even before the
first symptoms appeared on him, he was putting into practice his
one prescription, namely, exercise. From the junk of the old
trading post he resurrected a number of rusty traps, and from one
of the steamboat captains he borrowed a rifle.

Thus equipped, he ceased from wood-chopping, and began to make more
than a mere living. Nor was he downhearted when the scurvy broke
out on his own body. Ever he ran his trap-lines and sang his
ancient chant. Nor could the pessimist shake his surety of the
three hundred thousand of Alaskan gold he as going to shake out of
the moss-roots.

“But this ain’t gold-country,” they told him.

“Gold is where you find it, son, as I should know who was mining
before you was born, ‘way back in Forty-Nine,” was his reply.
“What was Bonanza Creek but a moose-pasture? No miner’d look at
it; yet they washed five-hundred-dollar pans and took out fifty
million dollars. Eldorado was just as bad. For all you know,
right under this here cabin, or right over the next hill, is
millions just waiting for a lucky one like me to come and shake it
out.”

At the end of January came his disaster. Some powerful animal that
he decided was a bob-cat, managing to get caught in one of his
smaller traps, dragged it away. A heavy snow-fall put a stop
midway to his pursuit, losing the trail for him and losing himself.
There were but several hours of daylight each day between the
twenty hours of intervening darkness, and his efforts in the grey
light and continually falling snow succeeded only in losing him
more thoroughly. Fortunately, when winter snow falls in the
Northland the thermometer invariably rises; so, instead of the
customary forty and fifty and even sixty degrees below zero, the
temperature remained fifteen below. Also, he was warmly clad and
had a full matchbox. Further to mitigate his predicament, on the
fifth day he killed a wounded moose that weighed over half a ton.
Making his camp beside it on a spruce-bottom, he was prepared to
last out the winter, unless a searching party found him or his
scurvy grew worse.

But at the end of two weeks there had been no sign of search, while
his scurvy had undeniably grown worse. Against his fire, banked
from outer cold by a shelter-wall of spruce-boughs, he crouched
long hours in sleep and long hours in waking. But the waking hours
grew less, becoming semi-waking or half-dreaming hours as the
process of hibernation worked their way with him. Slowly the
sparkle point of consciousness and identity that was John Tarwater
sank, deeper and deeper, into the profounds of his being that had
been compounded ere man was man, and while he was becoming man,
when he, first of all animals, regarded himself with an
introspective eye and laid the beginnings of morality in
foundations of nightmare peopled by the monsters of his own ethic-
thwarted desires.

Like a man in fever, waking to intervals of consciousness, so Old
Tarwater awoke, cooked his moose-meat, and fed the fire; but more
and more time he spent in his torpor, unaware of what was day-dream
and what was sleep-dream in the content of his unconsciousness.
And here, in the unforgetable crypts of man’s unwritten history,
unthinkable and unrealizable, like passages of nightmare or
impossible adventures of lunacy, he encountered the monsters
created of man’s first morality that ever since have vexed him into
the spinning of fantasies to elude them or do battle with them.

In short, weighted by his seventy years, in the vast and silent
loneliness of the North, Old Tarwater, as in the delirium of drug
or anaesthetic, recovered within himself, the infantile mind of the
child-man of the early world. It was in the dusk of Death’s
fluttery wings that Tarwater thus crouched, and, like his remote
forebear, the child-man, went to myth-making, and sun-heroizing,
himself hero-maker and the hero in quest of the immemorable
treasure difficult of attainment.

Either must he attain the treasure – for so ran the inexorable
logic of the shadow-land of the unconscious – or else sink into the
all-devouring sea, the blackness eater of the light that swallowed
to extinction the sun each night . . . the sun that arose ever in
rebirth next morning in the east, and that had become to man man’s
first symbol of immortality through rebirth. All this, in the
deeps of his unconsciousness (the shadowy western land of
descending light), was the near dusk of Death down into which he
slowly ebbed.

But how to escape this monster of the dark that from within him
slowly swallowed him? Too deep-sunk was he to dream of escape or
feel the prod of desire to escape. For him reality had ceased.
Nor from within the darkened chamber of himself could reality
recrudesce. His years were too heavy upon him, the debility of
disease and the lethargy and torpor of the silence and the cold
were too profound. Only from without could reality impact upon him
and reawake within him an awareness of reality. Otherwise he would
ooze down through the shadow-realm of the unconscious into the all-
darkness of extinction.

But it came, the smash of reality from without, crashing upon his
ear drums in a loud, explosive snort. For twenty days, in a
temperature that had never risen above fifty below, no breath of
wind had blown movement, no slightest sound had broken the silence.
Like the smoker on the opium couch refocusing his eyes from the
spacious walls of dream to the narrow confines of the mean little
room, so Old Tarwater stared vague-eyed before him across his dying
fire, at a huge moose that stared at him in startlement, dragging a
wounded leg, manifesting all signs of extreme exhaustion; it, too,
had been straying blindly in the shadow-land, and had wakened to
reality only just ere it stepped into Tarwater’s fire.

He feebly slipped the large fur mitten lined with thickness of wool
from his right hand. Upon trial he found the trigger finger too
numb for movement. Carefully, slowly, through long minutes, he
worked the bare hand inside his blankets, up under his fur PARKA,
through the chest openings of his shirts, and into the slightly
warm hollow of his left arm-pit. Long minutes passed ere the
finger could move, when, with equal slowness of caution, he
gathered his rifle to his shoulder and drew bead upon the great
animal across the fire.

At the shot, of the two shadow-wanderers, the one reeled downward
to the dark and the other reeled upward to the light, swaying
drunkenly on his scurvy-ravaged legs, shivering with nervousness
and cold, rubbing swimming eyes with shaking fingers, and staring
at the real world all about him that had returned to him with such
sickening suddenness. He shook himself together, and realized that
for long, how long he did not know, he had bedded in the arms of
Death. He spat, with definite intention, heard the spittle crackle
in the frost, and judged it must be below and far below sixty
below. In truth, that day at Fort Yukon, the spirit thermometer
registered seventy-five degrees below zero, which, since freezing-
point is thirty-two above, was equivalent to one hundred and seven
degrees of frost.

Slowly Tarwater’s brain reasoned to action. Here, in the vast
alone, dwelt Death. Here had come two wounded moose. With the
clearing of the sky after the great cold came on, he had located
his bearings, and he knew that both wounded moose had trailed to
him from the east. Therefore, in the east, were men – whites or
Indians he could not tell, but at any rate men who might stand by
him in his need and help moor him to reality above the sea of dark.

He moved slowly, but he moved in reality, girding himself with
rifle, ammunition, matches, and a pack of twenty pounds of moose-
meat. Then, an Argus rejuvenated, albeit lame of both legs and
tottery, he turned his back on the perilous west and limped into
the sun-arising, re-birthing east. . . .

Days later – how many days later he was never to know – dreaming
dreams and seeing visions, cackling his old gold-chant of Forty-
Nine, like one drowning and swimming feebly to keep his
consciousness above the engulfing dark, he came out upon the snow-
slope to a canyon and saw below smoke rising and men who ceased
from work to gaze at him. He tottered down the hill to them, still
singing; and when he ceased from lack of breath they called him
variously: Santa Claus, Old Christmas, Whiskers, the Last of the
Mohicans, and Father Christmas. And when he stood among them he
stood very still, without speech, while great tears welled out of
his eyes. He cried silently, a long time, till, as if suddenly
bethinking himself, he sat down in the snow with much creaking and
crackling of his joints, and from this low vantage point toppled
sidewise and fainted calmly and easily away.

In less than a week Old Tarwater was up and limping about the
housework of the cabin, cooking and dish-washing for the five men
of the creek. Genuine sourdoughs (pioneers) they were, tough and
hard-bitten, who had been buried so deeply inside the Circle that
they did not know there was a Klondike Strike. The news he brought
them was their first word of it. They lived on an almost straight-
meat diet of moose, caribou, and smoked salmon, eked out with wild
berries and somewhat succulent wild roots they had stocked up with
in the summer. They had forgotten the taste of coffee, made fire
with a burning glass, carried live fire-sticks with them wherever
they travelled, and in their pipes smoked dry leaves that bit the
tongue and were pungent to the nostrils.

Three years before, they had prospected from the head-reaches of
the Koyokuk northward and clear across to the mouth of the
Mackenzie on the Arctic Ocean. Here, on the whaleships, they had
beheld their last white men and equipped themselves with the last
white man’s grub, consisting principally of salt and smoking
tobacco. Striking south and west on the long traverse to the
junction of the Yukon and Porcupine at Fort Yukon, they had found
gold on this creek and remained over to work the ground.

They hailed the advent of Tarwater with joy, never tired of
listening to his tales of Forty-Nine, and rechristened him Old
Hero. Also, with tea made from spruce needles, with concoctions
brewed from the inner willow bark, and with sour and bitter roots
and bulbs from the ground, they dosed his scurvy out of him, so
that he ceased limping and began to lay on flesh over his bony
framework. Further, they saw no reason at all why he should not
gather a rich treasure of gold from the ground.

“Don’t know about all of three hundred thousand,” they told him one
morning, at breakfast, ere they departed to their work, “but how’d
a hundred thousand do, Old Hero? That’s what we figure a claim is
worth, the ground being badly spotted, and we’ve already staked
your location notices.”

“Well, boys,” Old Tarwater answered, “and thanking you kindly, all
I can say is that a hundred thousand will do nicely, and very
nicely, for a starter. Of course, I ain’t goin’ to stop till I get
the full three hundred thousand. That’s what I come into the
country for.”

They laughed and applauded his ambition and reckoned they’d have to
hunt a richer creek for him. And Old Hero reckoned that as the
spring came on and he grew spryer, he’d have to get out and do a
little snooping around himself.

“For all anybody knows,” he said, pointing to a hillside across the
creek bottom, “the moss under the snow there may be plumb rooted in
nugget gold.”

He said no more, but as the sun rose higher and the days grew
longer and warmer, he gazed often across the creek at the definite
bench-formation half way up the hill. And, one day, when the thaw
was in full swing, he crossed the stream and climbed to the bench.
Exposed patches of ground had already thawed an inch deep. On one
such patch he stopped, gathered a bunch of moss in his big gnarled
hands, and ripped it out by the roots. The sun smouldered on dully
glistening yellow. He shook the handful of moss, and coarse
nuggets, like gravel, fell to the ground. It was the Golden Fleece
ready for the shearing.

Not entirely unremembered in Alaskan annals is the summer stampede
of 1898 from Fort Yukon to the bench diggings of Tarwater Hill.
And when Tarwater sold his holdings to the Bowdie interests for a
sheer half-million and faced for California, he rode a mule over a
new-cut trail, with convenient road houses along the way, clear to
the steamboat landing at Fort Yukon.

At the first meal on the ocean-going steamship out of St. Michaels,
a waiter, greyish-haired, pain-ravaged of face, scurvy-twisted of
body, served him. Old Tarwater was compelled to look him over
twice in order to make certain he was Charles Crayton.

“Got it bad, eh, son?” Tarwater queried.

“Just my luck,” the other complained, after recognition and
greeting. “Only one of the party that the scurvy attacked. I’ve
been through hell. The other three are all at work and healthy,
getting grub-stake to prospect up White River this winter. Anson’s
earning twenty-five a day at carpentering, Liverpool getting twenty
logging for the saw-mill, and Big Bill’s getting forty a day as
chief sawyer. I tried my best, and if it hadn’t been for scurvy .
. .”

“Sure, son, you done your best, which ain’t much, you being
naturally irritable and hard from too much business. Now I’ll tell
you what. You ain’t fit to work crippled up this way. I’ll pay
your passage with the captain in kind remembrance of the voyage you
gave me, and you can lay up and take it easy the rest of the trip.
And what are your circumstances when you land at San Francisco?”

Charles Crayton shrugged his shoulders.

“Tell you what,” Tarwater continued. “There’s work on the ranch
for you till you can start business again.”

“I could manage your business for you – ” Charles began eagerly.

“No, siree,” Tarwater declared emphatically. “But there’s always
post-holes to dig, and cordwood to chop, and the climate’s fine . .
. “

Tarwater arrived home a true prodigal grandfather for whom the
fatted calf was killed and ready. But first, ere he sat down at
table, he must stroll out and around. And sons and daughters of
his flesh and of the law needs must go with him fulsomely eating
out of the gnarled old hand that had half a million to disburse.
He led the way, and no opinion he slyly uttered was preposterous or
impossible enough to draw dissent from his following. Pausing by
the ruined water wheel which he had built from the standing timber,
his face beamed as he gazed across the stretches of Tarwater
Valley, and on and up the far heights to the summit of Tarwater
Mountain – now all his again.

A thought came to him that made him avert his face and blow his
nose in order to hide the twinkle in his eyes. Still attended by
the entire family, he strolled on to the dilapidated barn. He
picked up an age-weathered single-tree from the ground.

“William,” he said. “Remember that little conversation we had just
before I started to Klondike? Sure, William, you remember. You
told me I was crazy. And I said my father’d have walloped the tar
out of me with a single-tree if I’d spoke to him that way.”

“Aw, but that was only foolin’,” William temporized.

William was a grizzled man of forty-five, and his wife and grown
sons stood in the group, curiously watching Grandfather Tarwater
take off his coat and hand it to Mary to hold.

“William – come here,” he commanded imperatively.

No matter how reluctantly, William came.

“Just a taste, William, son, of what my father give me often
enough,” Old Tarwater crooned, as he laid on his son’s back and
shoulders with the single-tree. “Observe, I ain’t hitting you on
the head. My father had a gosh-wollickin’ temper and never drew
the line at heads when he went after tar. – Don’t jerk your elbows
back that way! You’re likely to get a crack on one by accident.
And just tell me one thing, William, son: is there nary notion in
your head that I’m crazy?”

“No!”<

He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent voice,
gentle-spoken as a maid’s, seemed the placid embodiment of some deep-seated
melancholy. He was the Leopard Man, but he did not look it. His business in
life, whereby he lived, was to appear in a cage of performing leopards before
vast audiences, and to thrill those audiences by certain exhibitions of nerve
for which his employers rewarded him on a scale commensurate with the thrills
he produced.

As I say, he did not look it. He was narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered, and
anaemic, while he seemed not so much oppressed by gloom as by a sweet and
gentle sadness, the weight of which was as sweetly and gently borne. For an
hour I had been trying to get a story out of him, but he appeared to lack
imagination. To him there was no romance in his gorgeous career, no deeds of
daring, no thrills–nothing but a gray sameness and infinite boredom.

Lions? Oh, yes! he had fought with them. It was nothing. All you had to do was
to stay sober. Anybody could whip a lion to a standstill with an ordinary
stick. He had fought one for half an hour once. Just hit him on the nose every
time he rushed, and when he got artful and rushed with his head down, why, the
thing to do was to stick out your leg. When he grabbed at the leg you drew it
back and hit hint on the nose again. That was all.

With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he showed me his
scars. There were many of them, and one recent one where a tigress had reached
for his shoulder and gone down to the bone. I could see the neatly mended
rents in the coat he had on. His right arm, from the elbow down, looked as
though it had gone through a threshing machine, what of the ravage wrought by
claws and fangs. But it was nothing, he said, only the old wounds bothered him
somewhat when rainy weather came on.

Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as anxious
to give me a story as I was to get it.

“I suppose you’ve heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another man?” he
asked.

He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.

“Got the toothache,” he explained. “Well, the lion-tamer’s big play to the
audience was putting his head in a lion’s mouth. The man who hated him
attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing that lion crunch
down. He followed the show about all over the country. The years went by and
he grew old, and the lion-tamer grew old, and the lion grew old. And at last
one day, sitting in a front seat, he saw what he had waited for. The lion
crunched down, and there wasn’t any need to call a doctor.”

The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which would
have been critical had it not been so sad.

“Now, that’s what I call patience,” he continued, “and it’s my style. But it
was not the style of a fellow I knew. He was a little, thin, sawed-off,
sword-swallowing and juggling Frenchman. De Ville, he called himself, and he
had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and used to dive from under the roof
into a net, turning over once on the way as nice as you please.

“De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as quick
as the paw of a tiger. One day, because the ring-master called him a
frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little worse, he shoved him
against the soft pine background he used in his knife-throwing act, so quick
the ring-master didn’t have time to think, and there, before the audience, De
Ville kept the air on fire with his knives, sinking them into the wood all
around the ring-master so close that they passed through his clothes and most
of them bit into his skin.

“The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was pinned
fast. So the word went around to watch out for De Ville, and no one dared be
more than barely civil to his wife. And she was a sly bit of baggage, too,
only all hands were afraid of De Ville.

“But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing. He was the
lion-tamer, and he had the self-same trick of putting his head into the lion’s
mouth. He’d put it into the mouths of any of them, though he preferred
Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always be depended upon.

“As I was saying, Wallace–’King’ Wallace we called him–was afraid of nothing
alive or dead. He was a king and no mistake. I’ve seen him drunk, and on a
wager go into the cage of a lion that’d turned nasty, and without a stick beat
him to a finish. Just did it with his fist on the nose.

“Madame de Ville–”

At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around. It was a divided
cage, and a monkey, poking through the bars and around the partition, had had
its paw seized by a big gray wolf who was trying to pull it off by main
strength. The arm seemed stretching out longer end longer like a thick
elastic, and the unfortunate monkey’s mates were raising a terrible din. No
keeper was at hand, so the Leopard Man stepped over a couple of paces, dealt
the wolf a sharp blow on the nose with the light cane he carried, and returned
with a sadly apologetic smile to take up his unfinished sentence as though
there had been no interruption.

“–looked at King Wallace and King Wallace looked at her, while De Ville
looked black. We warned Wallace, but it was no use. He laughed at us, as he
laughed at De Ville one day when he shoved De Ville’s head into a bucket of
paste because he wanted to fight.

“De Ville was in a pretty mess–I helped to scrape him off; but he was cool as
a cucumber and made no threats at all. But I saw a glitter in his eyes which I
had seen often in the eyes of wild beasts, and I went out of my way to give
Wallace a final warning. He laughed, but he did not look so much in Madame de
Ville’s direction after that.

“Several months passed by. Nothing had happened and I was beginning to think
it all a scare over nothing. We were West by that time, showing in ‘Frisco. It
was during the afternoon performance, and the big tent was filled with women
and children, when I went looking for Red Denny, the head canvas-man, who had
walked off with my pocket-knife.

“Passing by one of the dressing tents I glanced in through a hole in the
canvas to see if I could locate him. He wasn’t there, but directly in front of
me was King Wallace, in tights, waiting for his turn to go on with his cage of
performing lions. He was watching with much amusement a quarrel between a
couple of trapeze artists. All the rest of the people in the dressing tent
were watching the same thing, with the exception of De Ville whom I noticed
staring at Wallace with undisguised hatred. Wallace and the rest were all too
busy following the quarrel to notice this or what followed.

“But I saw it through the hole in the canvas. De Ville drew his handkerchief
from his pocket, made as though to mop the sweat from his face with it (it was
a hot day), and at the same time walked past Wallace’s back. The look troubled
me at the time, for not only did I see hatred in it, but I saw triumph as
well.

“‘De Ville will bear watching,’ I said to myself, and I really breathed easier
when I saw him go out the entrance to the circus grounds and board an electric
car for down town. A few minutes later I was in the big tent, where I had
overhauled Red Denny. King Wallace was doing his turn and holding the audience
spellbound. He was in a particularly vicious mood, and he kept the lions
stirred up till they were all snarling, that is, all of them except old
Augustus, and he was just too fat and lazy and old to get stirred up over
anything.

“Finally Wallace cracked the old lion’s knees with his whip and got him into
position. Old Augustus, blinking good-naturedly, opened his mouth and in
popped Wallace’s head. Then the jaws came together, crunch, just like that.”

The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetly wistful fashion, and the far-away look
came into his eyes.

“And that was the end of King Wallace,” he went on in his sad, low voice.
“After the excitement cooled down I watched my chance and bent over and
smelled Wallace’s head. Then I sneezed.”

“It . . . it was . . .?” I queried with halting eagerness.

“Snuff–that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old Augustus
never meant to do it. He only sneezed.”

“Because we are sick they take away our liberty. We have obeyed the
law. We have done no wrong. And yet they would put us in prison.
Molokai is a prison. That you know. Niuli, there, his sister was
sent to Molokai seven years ago. He has not seen her since. Nor
will he ever see her. She must stay there until she dies. This is
not her will. It is not Niuli’s will. It is the will of the white
men who rule the land. And who are these white men?

“We know. We have it from our fathers and our fathers’ fathers.
They came like lambs, speaking softly. Well might they speak
softly, for we were many and strong, and all the islands were ours.
As I say, they spoke softly. They were of two kinds. The one kind
asked our permission, our gracious permission, to preach to us the
word of God. The other kind asked our permission, our gracious
permission, to trade with us. That was the beginning. Today all
the islands are theirs, all the land, all the cattle–everything is
theirs. They that preached the word of God and they that preached
the word of Rum have fore-gathered and become great chiefs. They
live like kings in houses of many rooms, with multitudes of servants
to care for them. They who had nothing have everything, and if you,
or I, or any Kanaka be hungry, they sneer and say, ‘Well, why don’t
you work? There are the plantations.’

Koolau paused. He raised one hand, and with gnarled and twisted
fingers lifted up the blazing wreath of hibiscus that crowned his
black hair. The moonlight bathed the scene in silver. It was a
night of peace, though those who sat about him and listened had all
the seeming of battle-wrecks. Their faces were leonine. Here a
space yawned in a face where should have been a nose, and there an
arm-stump showed where a hand had rotted off. They were men and
women beyond the pale, the thirty of them, for upon them had been
placed the mark of the beast.

They sat, flower-garlanded, in the perfumed, luminous night, and
their lips made uncouth noises and their throats rasped approval of
Koolau’s speech. They were creatures who once had been men and
women. But they were men and women no longer. They were monsters–
in face and form grotesque caricatures of everything human. They
were hideously maimed and distorted, and had the seeming of
creatures that had been racked in millenniums of hell. Their hands,
when they possessed them, were like harpy claws. Their faces were
the misfits and slips, crushed and bruised by some mad god at play
in the machinery of life. Here and there were features which the
mad god had smeared half away, and one woman wept scalding tears
from twin pits of horror, where her eyes once had been. Some were
in pain and groaned from their chests. Others coughed, making
sounds like the tearing of tissue. Two were idiots, more like huge
apes marred in the making, until even an ape were an angel. They
mowed and gibbered in the moonlight, under crowns of drooping,
golden blossoms. One, whose bloated ear-lobe flapped like a fan
upon his shoulder, caught up a gorgeous flower of orange and scarlet
and with it decorated the monstrous ear that flip-flapped with his
every movement.

And over these things Koolau was king. And this was his kingdom,–a
flower-throttled gorge, with beetling cliffs and crags, from which
floated the blattings of wild goats. On three sides the grim walls
rose, festooned in fantastic draperies of tropic vegetation and
pierced by cave-entrances–the rocky lairs of Koolau’s subjects. On
the fourth side the earth fell away into a tremendous abyss, and,
far below, could be seen the summits of lesser peaks and crags, at
whose bases foamed and rumbled the Pacific surge. In fine weather a
boat could land on the rocky beach that marked the entrance of
Kalalau Valley, but the weather must be very fine. And a cool-
headed mountaineer might climb from the beach to the head of Kalalau
Valley, to this pocket among the peaks where Koolau ruled; but such
a mountaineer must be very cool of head, and he must know the wild-
goat trails as well. The marvel was that the mass of human wreckage
that constituted Koolau’s people should have been able to drag its
helpless misery over the giddy goat-trails to this inaccessible
spot.

“Brothers,” Koolau began.

But one of the mowing, apelike travesties emitted a wild shriek of
madness, and Koolau waited while the shrill cachination was tossed
back and forth among the rocky walls and echoed distantly through
the pulseless night.

“Brothers, is it not strange? Ours was the land, and behold, the
land is not ours. What did these preachers of the word of God and
the word of Rum give us for the land? Have you received one dollar,
as much as one dollar, any one of you, for the land? Yet it is
theirs, and in return they tell us we can go to work on the land,
their land, and that what we produce by our toil shall be theirs.
Yet in the old days we did not have to work. Also, when we are
sick, they take away our freedom.”

“Who brought the sickness, Koolau?” demanded Kiloliana, a lean and
wiry man with a face so like a laughing faun’s that one might expect
to see the cloven hoofs under him. They were cloven, it was true,
but the cleavages were great ulcers and livid putrefactions. Yet
this was Kiloliana, the most daring climber of them all, the man who
knew every goat-trail and who had led Koolau and his wretched
followers into the recesses of Kalalau.

“Ay, well questioned,” Koolau answered. “Because we would not work
the miles of sugar-cane where once our horses pastured, they brought
the Chinese slaves from overseas. And with them came the Chinese
sickness–that which we suffer from and because of which they would
imprison us on Molokai. We were born on Kauai. We have been to the
other islands, some here and some there, to Oahu, to Maui, to
Hawaii, to Honolulu. Yet always did we come back to Kauai. Why did
we come back? There must be a reason. Because we love Kauai. We
were born here. Here we have lived. And here shall we die–unless-
-unless–there be weak hearts amongst us. Such we do not want.
They are fit for Molokai. And if there be such, let them not
remain. Tomorrow the soldiers land on the shore. Let the weak
hearts go down to them. They will be sent swiftly to Molokai. As
for us, we shall stay and fight. But know that we will not die. We
have rifles. You know the narrow trails where men must creep, one
by one. I, alone, Koolau, who was once a cowboy on Niihau, can hold
the trail against a thousand men. Here is Kapalei, who was once a
judge over men and a man with honour, but who is now a hunted rat,
like you and me. Hear him. He is wise.”

Kapalei arose. Once he had been a judge. He had gone to college at
Punahou. He had sat at meat with lords and chiefs and the high
representatives of alien powers who protected the interests of
traders and missionaries. Such had been Kapalei. But now, as
Koolau had said, he was a hunted rat, a creature outside the law,
sunk so deep in the mire of human horror that he was above the law
as well as beneath it. His face was featureless, save for gaping
orifices and for the lidless eyes that burned under hairless brows.

“Let us not make trouble,” he began. “We ask to be left alone. But
if they do not leave us alone, then is the trouble theirs and the
penalty. My fingers are gone, as you see.” He held up his stumps
of hands that all might see. “Yet have I the joint of one thumb
left, and it can pull a trigger as firmly as did its lost neighbour
in the old days. We love Kauai. Let us live here, or die here, but
do not let us go to the prison of Molokai. The sickness is not
ours. We have not sinned. The men who preached the word of God and
the word of Rum brought the sickness with the coolie slaves who work
the stolen land. I have been a judge. I know the law and the
justice, and I say to you it is unjust to steal a man’s land, to
make that man sick with the Chinese sickness, and then to put that
man in prison for life.”

“Life is short, and the days are filled with pain,” said Koolau.
“Let us drink and dance and be happy as we can.”

From one of the rocky lairs calabashes were produced and passed
round. The calabashes were filled with the fierce distillation of
the root of the ti-plant; and as the liquid fire coursed through
them and mounted to their brains, they forgot that they had once
been men and women, for they were men and women once more. The
woman who wept scalding tears from open eye-pits was indeed a woman
apulse with life as she plucked the strings of an ukulele and lifted
her voice in a barbaric love-call such as might have come from the
dark forest-depths of the primeval world. The air tingled with her
cry, softly imperious and seductive. Upon a mat, timing his rhythm
to the woman’s song Kiloliana danced. It was unmistakable. Love
danced in all his movements, and, next, dancing with him on the mat,
was a woman whose heavy hips and generous breast gave the lie to her
disease-corroded face. It was a dance of the living dead, for in
their disintegrating bodies life still loved and longed. Ever the
woman whose sightless eyes ran scalding tears chanted her love-cry,
ever the dancers of love danced in the warm night, and ever the
calabashes went around till in all their brains were maggots
crawling of memory and desire. And with the woman on the mat danced
a slender maid whose face was beautiful and unmarred, but whose
twisted arms that rose and fell marked the disease’s ravage. And
the two idiots, gibbering and mouthing strange noises, danced apart,
grotesque, fantastic, travestying love as they themselves had been
travestied by life.

But the woman’s love-cry broke midway, the calabashes were lowered,
and the dancers ceased, as all gazed into the abyss above the sea,
where a rocket flared like a wan phantom through the moonlit air.

“It is the soldiers,” said Koolau. “Tomorrow there will be
fighting. It is well to sleep and be prepared.”

The lepers obeyed, crawling away to their lairs in the cliff, until
only Koolau remained, sitting motionless in the moonlight, his rifle
across his knees, as he gazed far down to the boats landing on the
beach.

The far head of Kalalau Valley had been well chosen as a refuge.
Except Kiloliana, who knew back-trails up the precipitous walls, no
man could win to the gorge save by advancing across a knife-edged
ridge. This passage was a hundred yards in length. At best, it was
a scant twelve inches wide. On either side yawned the abyss. A
slip, and to right or left the man would fall to his death. But
once across he would find himself in an earthly paradise. A sea of
vegetation laved the landscape, pouring its green billows from wall
to wall, dripping from the cliff-lips in great vine-masses, and
flinging a spray of ferns and air-plants in to the multitudinous
crevices. During the many months of Koolau’s rule, he and his
followers had fought with this vegetable sea. The choking jungle,
with its riot of blossoms, had been driven back from the bananas,
oranges, and mangoes that grew wild. In little clearings grew the
wild arrowroot; on stone terraces, filled with soil scrapings, were
the taro patches and the melons; and in every open space where the
sunshine penetrated were papaia trees burdened with their golden
fruit.

Koolau had been driven to this refuge from the lower valley by the
beach. And if he were driven from it in turn, he knew of gorges
among the jumbled peaks of the inner fastnesses where he could lead
his subjects and live. And now he lay with his rifle beside him,
peering down through a tangled screen of foliage at the soldiers on
the beach. He noted that they had large guns with them, from which
the sunshine flashed as from mirrors. The knife-edged passage lay
directly before him. Crawling upward along the trail that led to it
he could see tiny specks of men. He knew they were not the
soldiers, but the police. When they failed, then the soldiers would
enter the game.

He affectionately rubbed a twisted hand along his rifle barrel and
made sure that the sights were clean. He had learned to shoot as a
wild-cattle hunter on Niihau, and on that island his skill as a
marksman was unforgotten. As the toiling specks of men grew nearer
and larger, he estimated the range, judged the deflection of the
wind that swept at right angles across the line of fire, and
calculated the chances of overshooting marks that were so far below
his level. But he did not shoot. Not until they reached the
beginning of the passage did he make his presence known. He did not
disclose himself, but spoke from the thicket.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

“We want Koolau, the leper,” answered the man who led the native
police, himself a blue-eyed American.

“You must go back,” Koolau said.

He knew the man, a deputy sheriff, for it was by him that he had
been harried out of Niihau, across Kauai, to Kalalau Valley, and out
of the valley to the gorge.

“Who are you?” the sheriff asked.

“I am Koolau, the leper,” was the reply.

“Then come out. We want you. Dead or alive, there is a thousand
dollars on your head. You cannot escape.”

Koolau laughed aloud in the thicket.

“Come out!” the sheriff commanded, and was answered by silence.

He conferred with the police, and Koolau saw that they were
preparing to rush him.

“Koolau,” the sheriff called. “Koolau, I am coming across to get
you.”

“Then look first and well about you at the sun and sea and sky, for
it will be the last time you behold them.”

“That’s all right, Koolau,” the sheriff said soothingly. “I know
you’re a dead shot. But you won’t shoot me. I have never done you
any wrong.”

Koolau grunted in the thicket.

“I say, you know, I’ve never done you any wrong, have I?” the
sheriff persisted.

“You do me wrong when you try to put me in prison,” was the reply.
“And you do me wrong when you try for the thousand dollars on my
head. If you will live, stay where you are.”

“I’ve got to come across and get you. I’m sorry. But it is my
duty.”

“You will die before you get across.”

The sheriff was no coward. Yet was he undecided. He gazed into the
gulf on either side and ran his eyes along the knife-edge he must
travel. Then he made up his mind.

“Koolau,” he called.

But the thicket remained silent.

“Koolau, don’t shoot. I am coming.”

The sheriff turned, gave some orders to the police, then started on
his perilous way. He advanced slowly. It was like walking a tight
rope. He had nothing to lean upon but the air. The lava rock
crumbled under his feet, and on either side the dislodged fragments
pitched downward through the depths. The sun blazed upon him, and
his face was wet with sweat. Still he advanced, until the halfway
point was reached.

“Stop!” Koolau commanded from the thicket. “One more step and I
shoot.”

The sheriff halted, swaying for balance as he stood poised above the
void. His face was pale, but his eyes were determined. He licked
his dry lips before he spoke.

“Koolau, you won’t shoot me. I know you won’t.”

He started once more. The bullet whirled him half about. On his
face was an expression of querulous surprise as he reeled to the
fall. He tried to save himself by throwing his body across the
knife-edge; but at that moment he knew death. The next moment the
knife-edge was vacant. Then came the rush, five policemen, in
single file, with superb steadiness, running along the knife-edge.
At the same instant the rest of the posse opened fire on the
thicket. It was madness. Five times Koolau pulled the trigger, so
rapidly that his shots constituted a rattle. Changing his position
and crouching low under the bullets that were biting and singing
through the bushes, he peered out. Four of the police had followed
the sheriff. The fifth lay across the knife-edge still alive. On
the farther side, no longer firing, were the surviving police. On
the naked rock there was no hope for them. Before they could
clamber down Koolau could have picked off the last man. But he did
not fire, and, after a conference, one of them took off a white
undershirt and waved it as a flag. Followed by another, he advanced
along the knife-edge to their wounded comrade. Koolau gave no sign,
but watched them slowly withdraw and become specks as they descended
into the lower valley.

Two hours later, from another thicket, Koolau watched a body of
police trying to make the ascent from the opposite side of the
valley. He saw the wild goats flee before them as they climbed
higher and higher, until he doubted his judgment and sent for
Kiloliana, who crawled in beside him.

“No, there is no way,” said Kiloliana.

“The goats?” Koolau questioned.

“They come over from the next valley, but they cannot pass to this.
There is no way. Those men are not wiser than goats. They may fall
to their deaths. Let us watch.”

“They are brave men,” said Koolau. “Let us watch.”

Side by side they lay among the morning-glories, with the yellow
blossoms of the hau dropping upon them from overhead, watching the
motes of men toil upward, till the thing happened, and three of
them, slipping, rolling, sliding, dashed over a cliff-lip and fell
sheer half a thousand feet.

Kiloliana chuckled.

“We will be bothered no more,” he said.

“They have war guns,” Koolau made answer. “The soldiers have not
yet spoken.”

In the drowsy afternoon, most of the lepers lay in their rock dens
asleep. Koolau, his rifle on his knees, fresh-cleaned and ready,
dozed in the entrance to his own den. The maid with the twisted
arms lay below in the thicket and kept watch on the knife-edge
passage. Suddenly Koolau was startled wide awake by the sound of an
explosion on the beach. The next instant the atmosphere was
incredibly rent asunder. The terrible sound frightened him. It was
as if all the gods had caught the envelope of the sky in their hands
and were ripping it apart as a woman rips apart a sheet of cotton
cloth. But it was such an immense ripping, growing swiftly nearer.
Koolau glanced up apprehensively, as if expecting to see the thing.
Then high up on the cliff overhead the shell burst in a fountain of
black smoke. The rock was shattered, the fragments falling to the
foot of the cliff.

Koolau passed his hand across his sweaty brow. He was terribly
shaken. He had had no experience with shell-fire, and this was more
dreadful than anything he had imagined.

“One,” said Kapahei, suddenly bethinking himself to keep count.

A second and a third shell flew screaming over the top of the wall,
bursting beyond view. Kapahei methodically kept the count. The
lepers crowded into the open space before the caves. At first they
were frightened, but as the shells continued their flight overhead
the leper folk became reassured and began to admire the spectacle.

The two idiots shrieked with delight, prancing wild antics as each
air-tormenting shell went by. Koolau began to recover his
confidence. No damage was being done. Evidently they could not aim
such large missiles at such long range with the precision of a
rifle.

But a change came over the situation. The shells began to fall
short. One burst below in the thicket by the knife-edge. Koolau
remembered the maid who lay there on watch, and ran down to see.
The smoke was still rising from the bushes when he crawled in. He
was astounded. The branches were splintered and broken. Where the
girl had lain was a hole in the ground. The girl herself was in
shattered fragments. The shell had burst right on her.

First peering out to make sure no soldiers were attempting the
passage, Koolau started back on the run for the caves. All the time
the shells were moaning, whining, screaming by, and the valley was
rumbling and reverberating with the explosions. As he came in sight
of the caves, he saw the two idiots cavorting about, clutching each
other’s hands with their stumps of fingers. Even as he ran, Koolau
saw a spout of black smoke rise from the ground, near to the idiots.
They were flung apart bodily by the explosion. One lay motionless,
but the other was dragging himself by his hands toward the cave.
His legs trailed out helplessly behind him, while the blood was
pouring from his body. He seemed bathed in blood, and as he crawled
he cried like a little dog. The rest of the lepers, with the
exception of Kapahei, had fled into the caves.

“Seventeen,” said Kapahei. “Eighteen,” he added.

This last shell had fairly entered into one of the caves. The
explosion caused the caves to empty. But from the particular cave
no one emerged. Koolau crept in through the pungent, acrid smoke.
Four bodies, frightfully mangled, lay about. One of them was the
sightless woman whose tears till now had never ceased.

Outside, Koolau found his people in a panic and already beginning to
climb the goat-trail that led out of the gorge and on among the
jumbled heights and chasms. The wounded idiot, whining feebly and
dragging himself along on the ground by his hands, was trying to
follow. But at the first pitch of the wall his helplessness
overcame him and he fell back.

“It would be better to kill him,” said Koolau to Kapahei, who still
sat in the same place.

“Twenty-two,” Kapahei answered. “Yes, it would be a wise thing to
kill him. Twenty-three–twenty-four.”

The idiot whined sharply when he saw the rifle levelled at him.
Koolau hesitated, then lowered the gun.

“It is a hard thing to do,” he said.

“You are a fool, twenty-six, twenty-seven,” said Kapahei. “Let me
show you.”

He arose, and with a heavy fragment of rock in his hand, approached
the wounded thing. As he lifted his arm to strike, a shell burst
full upon him, relieving him of the necessity of the act and at the
same time putting an end to his count.

Koolau was alone in the gorge. He watched the last of his people
drag their crippled bodies over the brow of the height and
disappear. Then he turned and went down to the thicket where the
maid had keen killed. The shell-fire still continued, but he
remained; for far below he could see the soldiers climbing up. A
shell burst twenty feet away. Flattening himself into the earth, he
heard the rush of the fragments above his body. A shower of hau
blossoms rained upon him. He lifted his head to peer down the
trail, and sighed. He was very much afraid. Bullets from rifles
would not have worried him, but this shell-fire was abominable.
Each time a shell shrieked by he shivered and crouched; but each
time he lifted his head again to watch the trail.

At last the shells ceased. This, he reasoned, was because the
soldiers were drawing near. They crept along the trail in single
file, and he tried to count them until he lost track. At any rate,
there were a hundred or so of them–all come after Koolau the leper.
He felt a fleeting prod of pride. With war guns and rifles, police
and soldiers, they came for him, and he was only one man, a crippled
wreck of a man at that. They offered a thousand dollars for him,
dead or alive. In all his life he had never possessed that much
money. The thought was a bitter one. Kapahei had been right. He,
Koolau, had done no wrong. Because the haoles wanted labour with
which to work the stolen land, they had brought in the Chinese
coolies, and with them had come the sickness. And now, because he
had caught the sickness, he was worth a thousand dollars–but not to
himself. It was his worthless carcass, rotten with disease or dead
from a bursting shell, that was worth all that money.

When the soldiers reached the knife-edged passage, he was prompted
to warn them. But his gaze fell upon the body of the murdered maid,
and he kept silent. When six had ventured on the knife-edge, he
opened fire. Nor did he cease when the knife-edge was bare. He
emptied his magazine, reloaded, and emptied it again. He kept on
shooting. All his wrongs were blazing in his brain, and he was in a
fury of vengeance. All down the goat-trail the soldiers were
firing, and though they lay flat and sought to shelter themselves in
the shallow inequalities of the surface, they were exposed marks to
him. Bullets whistled and thudded about him, and an occasional
ricochet sang sharply through the air. One bullet ploughed a crease
through his scalp, and a second burned across his shoulder-blade
without breaking the skin.

It was a massacre, in which one man did the killing. The soldiers
began to retreat, helping along their wounded. As Koolau picked
them off he became aware of the smell of burnt meat. He glanced
about him at first, and then discovered that it was his own hands.
The heat of the rifle was doing it. The leprosy had destroyed most
of the nerves in his hands. Though his flesh burned and he smelled
it, there was no sensation.

He lay in the thicket, smiling, until he remembered the war guns.
Without doubt they would open upon him again, and this time upon the
very thicket from which he had inflicted the danger. Scarcely had
he changed his position to a nook behind a small shoulder of the
wall where he had noted that no shells fell, than the bombardment
recommenced. He counted the shells. Sixty more were thrown into
the gorge before the war-guns ceased. The tiny area was pitted with
their explosions, until it seemed impossible that any creature could
have survived. So the soldiers thought, for, under the burning
afternoon sun, they climbed the goat-trail again. And again the
knife-edged passage was disputed, and again they fell back to the
beach.

For two days longer Koolau held the passage, though the soldiers
contented themselves with flinging shells into his retreat. Then
Pahau, a leper boy, came to the top of the wall at the back of the
gorge and shouted down to him that Kiloliana, hunting goats that
they might eat, had been killed by a fall, and that the women were
frightened and knew not what to do. Koolau called the boy down and
left him with a spare gun with which to guard the passage. Koolau
found his people disheartened. The majority of them were too
helpless to forage food for themselves under such forbidding
circumstances, and all were starving. He selected two women and a
man who were not too far gone with the disease, and sent them back
to the gorge to bring up food and mats. The rest he cheered and
consoled until even the weakest took a hand in building rough
shelters for themselves.

But those he had dispatched for food did not return, and he started
back for the gorge. As he came out on the brow of the wall, half a
dozen rifles cracked. A bullet tore through the fleshy part of his
shoulder, and his cheek was cut by a sliver of rock where a second
bullet smashed against the cliff. In the moment that this happened,
and he leaped back, he saw that the gorge was alive with soldiers.
His own people had betrayed him. The shell-fire had been too
terrible, and they had preferred the prison of Molokai.

Koolau dropped back and unslung one of his heavy cartridge-belts.
Lying among the rocks, he allowed the head and shoulders of the
first soldier to rise clearly into view before pulling trigger.
Twice this happened, and then, after some delay, in place of a head
and shoulders a white flag was thrust above the edge of the wall.

“What do you want?” be demanded.

“I want you, if you are Koolau the leper,” came the answer.

Koolau forgot where he was, forgot everything, as he lay and
marvelled at the strange persistence of these haoles who would have
their will though the sky fell in. Aye, they would have their will
over all men and all things, even though they died in getting it.
He could not but admire them, too, what of that will in them that
was stronger than life and that bent all things to their bidding.
He was convinced of the hopelessness of his struggle. There was no
gainsaying that terrible will of the haoles. Though he killed a
thousand, yet would they rise like the sands of the sea and come
upon him, ever more and more. They never knew when they were
beaten. That was their fault and their virtue. It was where his
own kind lacked. He could see, now, how the handful of the
preachers of God and the preachers of Rum had conquered the land.
It was because -

“Well, what have you got to say? Will you come with me?”

It was he voice of the invisible man under the white flag. There he
was, like any haole, driving straight toward the end determined.

“Let us talk,” said Koolau.

The man’s head and shoulders arose, then his whole body. He was a
smooth-faced, blue-eyed youngster of twenty-five, slender and natty
in his captain’s uniform. He advanced until halted, then seated
himself a dozen feet away.

“You are a brave man,” said Koolau wonderingly. “I could kill you
like a fly.”

“No, you couldn’t,” was the answer.

“Why not?”

“Because you are a man, Koolau, though a bad one. I know your
story. You kill fairly.”

Koolau grunted, but was secretly pleased.

“What have you done with my people?” he demanded. “The boy, the two
women, and the man?”

“They gave themselves up, as I have now come for you to do.”

Koolau laughed incredulously.

“I am a free man,” he announced. “I have done no wrong. All I ask
is to be left alone. I have lived free, and I shall die free. I
will never give myself up.”

“Then your people are wiser than you,” answered the young captain.
“Look–they are coming now.”

Koolau turned and watched the remnant of his band approach.
Groaning and sighing, a ghastly procession, it dragged its
wretchedness past. It was given to Koolau to taste a deeper
bitterness, for they hurled imprecations and insults at him as they
went by; and the panting hag who brought up the rear halted, and
with skinny, harpy-claws extended, shaking her snarling death’s head
from side to side, she laid a curse upon him. One by one they
dropped over the lip-edge and surrendered to the hiding soldiers.

“You can go now,” said Koolau to the captain. “I will never give
myself up. That is my last word. Good-bye.”

The captain slipped over the cliff to his soldiers. The next
moment, and without a flag of truce, he hoisted his hat on his
scabbard, and Koolau’s bullet tore through it. That afternoon they
shelled him out from the beach, and as he retreated into the high
inaccessible pockets beyond, the soldiers followed him.

For six weeks they hunted him from pocket to pocket, over the
volcanic peaks and along the goat-trails. When he hid in the
lantana jungle, they formed lines of beaters, and through lantana
jungle and guava scrub they drove him like a rabbit. But ever he
turned and doubled and eluded. There was no cornering him. When
pressed too closely, his sure rifle held them back and they carried
their wounded down the goat-trails to the beach. There were times
when they did the shooting as his brown body showed for a moment
through the underbrush. Once, five of them caught him on an exposed
goat-trail between pockets. They emptied their rifles at him as he
limped and climbed along his dizzy way. Afterwards they found
bloodstains and knew that he was wounded. At the end of six weeks
they gave up. The soldiers and police returned to Honolulu, and
Kalalau Valley was left to him for his own, though head-hunters
ventured after him from time to time and to their own undoing.

Two years later, and for the last time, Koolau crawled into a
thicket and lay down among the ti-leaves and wild ginger blossoms.
Free he had lived, and free he was dying. A slight drizzle of rain
began to fall, and he drew a ragged blanket about the distorted
wreck of his limbs. His body was covered with an oilskin coat.
Across his chest he laid his Mauser rifle, lingering affectionately
for a moment to wipe the dampness from the barrel. The hand with
which he wiped had no fingers left upon it with which to pull the
trigger.

He closed his eyes, for, from the weakness in his body and the fuzzy
turmoil in his brain, he knew that his end was near. Like a wild
animal he had crept into hiding to die. Half-conscious, aimless and
wandering, he lived back in his life to his early manhood on Niihau.
As life faded and the drip of the rain grew dim in his ears it
seemed to him that he was once more in the thick of the horse-
breaking, with raw colts rearing and bucking under him, his stirrups
tied together beneath, or charging madly about the breaking corral
and driving the helping cowboys over the rails. The next instant,
and with seeming naturalness, he found himself pursuing the wild
bulls of the upland pastures, roping them and leading them down to
the valleys. Again the sweat and dust of the branding pen stung his
eyes and bit his nostrils.

All his lusty, whole-bodied youth was his, until the sharp pangs of
impending dissolution brought him back. He lifted his monstrous
hands and gazed at them in wonder. But how? Why? Why should the
wholeness of that wild youth of his change to this? Then he
remembered, and once again, and for a moment, he was Koolau, the
leper. His eyelids fluttered wearily down and the drip of the rain
ceased in his ears. A prolonged trembling set up in his body.
This, too, ceased. He half-lifted his head, but it fell back. Then
his eyes opened, and did not close. His last thought was of his
Mauser, and he pressed it against his chest with his folded,
fingerless hands.

Big Alec had never been captured by the fish patrol. It was his
boast that no man could take him alive, and it was his history that
of the many men who had tried to take him dead none had succeeded.
It was also history that at least two patrolmen who had tried to
take him dead had died themselves. Further, no man violated the
fish laws more systematically and deliberately than Big Alec.

He was called “Big Alec” because of his gigantic stature. His
height was six feet three inches, and he was correspondingly broad-
shouldered and deep-chested. He was splendidly muscled and hard as
steel, and there were innumerable stories in circulation among the
fisher-folk concerning his prodigious strength. He was as bold and
dominant of spirit as he was strong of body, and because of this he
was widely known by another name, that of “The King of the Greeks.”
The fishing population was largely composed of Greeks, and they
looked up to him and obeyed him as their chief. And as their
chief, he fought their fights for them, saw that they were
protected, saved them from the law when they fell into its
clutches, and made them stand by one another and himself in time of
trouble.

In the old days, the fish patrol had attempted his capture many
disastrous times and had finally given it over, so that when the
word was out that he was coming to Benicia, I was most anxious to
see him. But I did not have to hunt him up. In his usual bold
way, the first thing he did on arriving was to hunt us up. Charley
Le Grant and I at the time were under a patrol-man named Carmintel,
and the three of us were on the Reindeer, preparing for a trip,
when Big Alec stepped aboard. Carmintel evidently knew him, for
they shook hands in recognition. Big Alec took no notice of
Charley or me.

“I’ve come down to fish sturgeon a couple of months,” he said to
Carmintel.

His eyes flashed with challenge as he spoke, and we noticed the
patrolman’s eyes drop before him.

“That’s all right, Alec,” Carmintel said in a low voice. “I’ll not
bother you. Come on into the cabin, and we’ll talk things over,”
he added.

When they had gone inside and shut the doors after them, Charley
winked with slow deliberation at me. But I was only a youngster,
and new to men and the ways of some men, so I did not understand.
Nor did Charley explain, though I felt there was something wrong
about the business.

Leaving them to their conference, at Charley’s suggestion we
boarded our skiff and pulled over to the Old Steamboat Wharf, where
Big Alec’s ark was lying. An ark is a house-boat of small though
comfortable dimensions, and is as necessary to the Upper Bay
fisherman as are nets and boats. We were both curious to see Big
Alec’s ark, for history said that it had been the scene of more
than one pitched battle, and that it was riddled with bullet-holes.

We found the holes (stopped with wooden plugs and painted over),
but there were not so many as I had expected. Charley noted my
look of disappointment, and laughed; and then to comfort me he gave
an authentic account of one expedition which had descended upon Big
Alec’s floating home to capture him, alive preferably, dead if
necessary. At the end of half a day’s fighting, the patrolmen had
drawn off in wrecked boats, with one of their number killed and
three wounded. And when they returned next morning with
reinforcements they found only the mooring-stakes of Big Alec’s
ark; the ark itself remained hidden for months in the fastnesses of
the Suisun tules.

“But why was he not hanged for murder?” I demanded. “Surely the
United States is powerful enough to bring such a man to justice.”

“He gave himself up and stood trial,” Charley answered. “It cost
him fifty thousand dollars to win the case, which he did on
technicalities and with the aid of the best lawyers in the state.
Every Greek fisherman on the river contributed to the sum. Big
Alec levied and collected the tax, for all the world like a king.
The United States may be all-powerful, my lad, but the fact remains
that Big Alec is a king inside the United States, with a country
and subjects all his own.”

“But what are you going to do about his fishing for sturgeon? He’s
bound to fish with a ‘Chinese line.’”

Charley shrugged his shoulders. “We’ll see what we will see,” he
said enigmatically.

Now a “Chinese line” is a cunning device invented by the people
whose name it bears. By a simple system of floats, weights, and
anchors, thousands of hooks, each on a separate leader, are
suspended at a distance of from six inches to a foot above the
bottom. The remarkable thing about such a line is the hook. It is
barbless, and in place of the barb, the hook is filed long and
tapering to a point as sharp as that of a needle. These hoods are
only a few inches apart, and when several thousand of them are
suspended just above the bottom, like a fringe, for a couple of
hundred fathoms, they present a formidable obstacle to the fish
that travel along the bottom.

Such a fish is the sturgeon, which goes rooting along like a pig,
and indeed is often called “pig-fish.” Pricked by the first hook
it touches, the sturgeon gives a startled leap and comes into
contact with half a dozen more hooks. Then it threshes about
wildly, until it receives hook after hook in its soft flesh; and
the hooks, straining from many different angles, hold the luckless
fish fast until it is drowned. Because no sturgeon can pass
through a Chinese line, the device is called a trap in the fish
laws; and because it bids fair to exterminate the sturgeon, it is
branded by the fish laws as illegal. And such a line, we were
confident, Big Alec intended setting, in open and flagrant
violation of the law.

Several days passed after the visit of Big Alec, during which
Charley and I kept a sharp watch on him. He towed his ark around
the Solano Wharf and into the big bight at Turner’s Shipyard. The
bight we knew to be good ground for sturgeon, and there we felt
sure the King of the Greeks intended to begin operations. The tide
circled like a mill-race in and out of this bight, and made it
possible to raise, lower, or set a Chinese line only at slack
water. So between the tides Charley and I made it a point for one
or the other of us to keep a lookout from the Solano Wharf.

On the fourth day I was lying in the sun behind the stringer-piece
of the wharf, when I saw a skiff leave the distant shore and pull
out into the bight. In an instant the glasses were at my eyes and
I was following every movement of the skiff. There were two men in
it, and though it was a good mile away, I made out one of them to
be Big Alec; and ere the skiff returned to shore I made out enough
more to know that the Greek had set his line.

“Big Alec has a Chinese line out in the bight off Turner’s
Shipyard,” Charley Le Grant said that afternoon to Carmintel.

A fleeting expression of annoyance passed over the patrolman’s
face, and then he said, “Yes?” in an absent way, and that was all.

Charley bit his lip with suppressed anger and turned on his heel.

“Are you game, my lad?” he said to me later on in the evening, just
as we finished washing down the Reindeer’s decks and were preparing
to turn in.

A lump came up in my throat, and I could only nod my head.

“Well, then,” and Charley’s eyes glittered in a determined way,
“we’ve got to capture Big Alec between us, you and I, and we’ve got
to do it in spite of Carmintel. Will you lend a hand?”

“It’s a hard proposition, but we can do it,” he added after a
pause.

“Of course we can,” I supplemented enthusiastically.

And then he said, “Of course we can,” and we shook hands on it and
went to bed.

But it was no easy task we had set ourselves. In order to convict
a man of illegal fishing, it was necessary to catch him in the act
with all the evidence of the crime about him – the hooks, the
lines, the fish, and the man himself. This meant that we must take
Big Alec on the open water, where he could see us coming and
prepare for us one of the warm receptions for which he was noted.

“There’s no getting around it,” Charley said one morning. “If we
can only get alongside it’s an even toss, and there’s nothing left
for us but to try and get alongside. Come on, lad.”

We were in the Columbia River salmon boat, the one we had used
against the Chinese shrimp-catchers. Slack water had come, and as
we dropped around the end of the Solano Wharf we saw Big Alec at
work, running his line and removing the fish.

“Change places,” Charley commanded, “and steer just astern of him
as though you’re going into the shipyard.”

I took the tiller, and Charley sat down on a thwart amidships,
placing his revolver handily beside him.

“If he begins to shoot,” he cautioned, “get down in the bottom and
steer from there, so that nothing more than your hand will be
exposed.”

I nodded, and we kept silent after that, the boat slipping gently
through the water and Big Alec growing nearer and nearer. We could
see him quite plainly, gaffing the sturgeon and throwing them into
the boat while his companion ran the line and cleared the hooks as
he dropped them back into the water. Nevertheless, we were five
hundred yards away when the big fisherman hailed us.

“Here! You! What do you want?” he shouted.

“Keep going,” Charley whispered, “just as though you didn’t hear
him.”

The next few moments were very anxious ones. The fisherman was
studying us sharply, while we were gliding up on him every second.

“You keep off if you know what’s good for you!” he called out
suddenly, as though he had made up his mind as to who and what we
were. “If you don’t, I’ll fix you!”

He brought a rifle to his shoulder and trained it on me.

“Now will you keep off?” he demanded.

I could hear Charley groan with disappointment. “Keep off,” he
whispered; “it’s all up for this time.”

I put up the tiller and eased the sheet, and the salmon boat ran
off five or six points. Big Alec watched us till we were out of
range, when he returned to his work.

“You’d better leave Big Alec alone,” Carmintel said, rather sourly,
to Charley that night.

“So he’s been complaining to you, has he?” Charley said
significantly.

Carmintel flushed painfully. “You’d better leave him alone, I tell
you,” he repeated. “He’s a dangerous man, and it won’t pay to fool
with him.”

“Yes,” Charley answered softly; “I’ve heard that it pays better to
leave him alone.”

This was a direct thrust at Carmintel, and we could see by the
expression of his face that it sank home. For it was common
knowledge that Big Alec was as willing to bribe as to fight, and
that of late years more than one patrolman had handled the
fisherman’s money.

“Do you mean to say – ” Carmintel began, in a bullying tone.

But Charley cut him off shortly. “I mean to say nothing,” he said.
“You heard what I said, and if the cap fits, why – “

He shrugged his shoulders, and Carmintel glowered at him,
speechless.

“What we want is imagination,” Charley said to me one day, when we
had attempted to creep upon Big Alec in the gray of dawn and had
been shot at for our trouble.

And thereafter, and for many days, I cudgelled my brains trying to
imagine some possible way by which two men, on an open stretch of
water, could capture another who knew how to use a rifle and was
never to be found without one. Regularly, every slack water,
without slyness, boldly and openly in the broad day, Big Alec was
to be seen running his line. And what made it particularly
exasperating was the fact that every fisherman, from Benicia to
Vallejo knew that he was successfully defying us. Carmintel also
bothered us, for he kept us busy among the shad-fishers of San
Pablo, so that we had little time to spare on the King of the
Greeks. But Charley’s wife and children lived at Benicia, and we
had made the place our headquarters, so that we always returned to
it.

“I’ll tell you what we can do,” I said, after several fruitless
weeks had passed; “we can wait some slack water till Big Alec has
run his line and gone ashore with the fish, and then we can go out
and capture the line. It will put him to time and expense to make
another, and then we’ll figure to capture that too. If we can’t
capture him, we can discourage him, you see.”

Charley saw, and said it wasn’t a bad idea. We watched our chance,
and the next low-water slack, after Big Alec had removed the fish
from the line and returned ashore, we went out in the salmon boat.
We had the bearings of the line from shore marks, and we knew we
would have no difficulty in locating it. The first of the flood
tide was setting in, when we ran below where we thought the line
was stretched and dropped over a fishing-boat anchor. Keeping a
short rope to the anchor, so that it barely touched the bottom, we
dragged it slowly along until it stuck and the boat fetched up hard
and fast.

“We’ve got it,” Charley cried. “Come on and lend a hand to get it
in.”

Together we hove up the rope till the anchor I came in sight with
the sturgeon line caught across one of the flukes. Scores of the
murderous-looking hooks flashed into sight as we cleared the
anchor, and we had just started to run along the line to the end
where we could begin to lift it, when a sharp thud in the boat
startled us. We looked about, but saw nothing and returned to our
work. An instant later there was a similar sharp thud and the
gunwale splintered between Charley’s body and mine.

“That’s remarkably like a bullet, lad,” he said reflectively. “And
it’s a long shot Big Alec’s making.”

“And he’s using smokeless powder,” he concluded, after an
examination of the mile-distant shore. “That’s why we can’t hear
the report.”

I looked at the shore, but could see no sign of Big Alec, who was
undoubtedly hidden in some rocky nook with us at his mercy. A
third bullet struck the water, glanced, passed singing over our
heads, and struck the water again beyond.

“I guess we’d better get out of this,” Charley remarked coolly.
“What do you think, lad?”

I thought so, too, and said we didn’t want the line anyway.
Whereupon we cast off and hoisted the spritsail. The bullets
ceased at once, and we sailed away, unpleasantly confident that Big
Alec was laughing at our discomfiture.

And more than that, the next day on the fishing wharf, where we
were inspecting nets, he saw fit to laugh and sneer at us, and this
before all the fishermen. Charley’s face went black with anger;
but beyond promising Big Alec that in the end he would surely land
him behind the bars, he controlled himself and said nothing. The
King of the Greeks made his boast that no fish patrol had ever
taken him or ever could take him, and the fishermen cheered him and
said it was true. They grew excited, and it looked like trouble
for a while; but Big Alec asserted his kingship and quelled them.

Carmintel also laughed at Charley, and dropped sarcastic remarks,
and made it hard for him. But Charley refused to be angered,
though he told me in confidence that he intended to capture Big
Alec if it took all the rest of his life to accomplish it.

“I don’t know how I’ll do it,” he said, “but do it I will, as sure
as I am Charley Le Grant. The idea will come to me at the right
and proper time, never fear.”

And at the right time it came, and most unexpectedly. Fully a
month had passed, and we were constantly up and down the river, and
down and up the bay, with no spare moments to devote to the
particular fisherman who ran a Chinese line in the bight of
Turner’s Shipyard. We had called in at Selby’s Smelter one
afternoon, while on patrol work, when all unknown to us our
opportunity happened along. It appeared in the guise of a helpless
yacht loaded with seasick people, so we could hardly be expected to
recognize it as the opportunity. It was a large sloop-yacht, and
it was helpless inasmuch as the trade-wind was blowing half a gale
and there were no capable sailors aboard.

From the wharf at Selby’s we watched with careless interest the
lubberly manoeuvre performed of bringing the yacht to anchor, and
the equally lubberly manoeuvre of sending the small boat ashore. A
very miserable-looking man in draggled ducks, after nearly swamping
the boat in the heavy seas, passed us the painter and climbed out.
He staggered about as though the wharf were rolling, and told us
his troubles, which were the troubles of the yacht. The only
rough-weather sailor aboard, the man on whom they all depended, had
been called back to San Francisco by a telegram, and they had
attempted to continue the cruise alone. The high wind and big seas
of San Pablo Bay had been too much for them; all hands were sick,
nobody knew anything or could do anything; and so they had run in
to the smelter either to desert the yacht or to get somebody to
bring it to Benicia. In short, did we know of any sailors who
would bring the yacht into Benicia?

Charley looked at me. The Reindeer was lying in a snug place. We
had nothing on hand in the way of patrol work till midnight. With
the wind then blowing, we could sail the yacht into Benicia in a
couple of hours, have several more hours ashore, and come back to
the smelter on the evening train.

“All right, captain,” Charley said to the disconsolate yachtsman,
who smiled in sickly fashion at the title.

“I’m only the owner,” he explained.

We rowed him aboard in much better style than he had come ashore,
and saw for ourselves the helplessness of the passengers. There
were a dozen men and women, and all of them too sick even to appear
grateful at our coming. The yacht was rolling savagely, broad on,
and no sooner had the owner’s feet touched the deck than he
collapsed and joined, the others. Not one was able to bear a hand,
so Charley and I between us cleared the badly tangled running gear,
got up sail, and hoisted anchor.

It was a rough trip, though a swift one. The Carquinez Straits
were a welter of foam and smother, and we came through them wildly
before the wind, the big mainsail alternately dipping and flinging
its boom skyward as we tore along. But the people did not mind.
They did not mind anything. Two or three, including the owner,
sprawled in the cockpit, shuddering when the yacht lifted and raced
and sank dizzily into the trough, and between-whiles regarding the
shore with yearning eyes. The rest were huddled on the cabin floor
among the cushions. Now and again some one groaned, but for the
most part they were as limp as so many dead persons.

As the bight at Turner’s Shipyard opened out, Charley edged into it
to get the smoother water. Benicia was in view, and we were
bowling along over comparatively easy water, when a speck of a boat
danced up ahead of us, directly in our course. It was low-water
slack. Charley and I looked at each other. No word was spoken,
but at once the yacht began a most astonishing performance, veering
and yawing as though the greenest of amateurs was at the wheel. It
was a sight for sailormen to see. To all appearances, a runaway
yacht was careering madly over the bight, and now and again
yielding a little bit to control in a desperate effort to make
Benicia.

The owner forgot his seasickness long enough to look anxious. The
speck of a boat grew larger and larger, till we could see Big Alec
and his partner, with a turn of the sturgeon line around a cleat,
resting from their labor to laugh at us. Charley pulled his
sou’wester over his eyes, and I followed his example, though I
could not guess the idea he evidently had in mind and intended to
carry into execution.

We came foaming down abreast of the skiff, so close that we could
hear above the wind the voices of Big Alec and his mate as they
shouted at us with all the scorn that professional watermen feel
for amateurs, especially when amateurs are making fools of
themselves.

We thundered on past the fishermen, and nothing had happened.
Charley grinned at the disappointment he saw in my face, and then
shouted:

“Stand by the main-sheet to jibe!”

He put the wheel hard over, and the yacht whirled around
obediently. The main-sheet slacked and dipped, then shot over our
heads after the boom and tautened with a crash on the traveller.
The yacht heeled over almost on her beam ends, and a great wail
went up from the seasick passengers as they swept across the cabin
floor in a tangled mass and piled into a heap in the starboard
bunks.

But we had no time for them. The yacht, completing the manoeuvre,
headed into the wind with slatting canvas, and righted to an even
keel. We were still plunging ahead, and directly in our path was
the skiff. I saw Big Alec dive overboard and his mate leap for our
bowsprit. Then came the crash as we struck the boat, and a series
of grinding bumps as it passed under our bottom.

“That fixes his rifle,” I heard Charley mutter, as he sprang upon
the deck to look for Big Alec somewhere astern.

The wind and sea quickly stopped our forward movement, and we began
to drift backward over the spot where the skiff had been. Big
Alec’s black head and swarthy face popped up within arm’s reach;
and all unsuspecting and very angry with what he took to be the
clumsiness of amateur sailors, he was hauled aboard. Also he was
out of breath, for he had dived deep and stayed down long to escape
our keel.

The next instant, to the perplexity and consternation of the owner,
Charley was on top of Big Alec in the cockpit, and I was helping
bind him with gaskets. The owner was dancing excitedly about and
demanding an explanation, but by that time Big Alec’s partner had
crawled aft from the bowsprit and was peering apprehensively over
the rail into the cockpit. Charley’s arm shot around his neck and
the man landed on his back beside Big Alec.

“More gaskets!” Charley shouted, and I made haste to supply them.

The wrecked skiff was rolling sluggishly a short distance to
windward, and I trimmed the sheets while Charley took the wheel and
steered for it.

“These two men are old offenders,” he explained to the angry owner;
“and they are most persistent violators of the fish and game laws.
You have seen them caught in the act, and you may expect to be
subpoenaed as witness for the state when the trial comes off.”

As he spoke he rounded alongside the skiff. It had been torn from
the line, a section of which was dragging to it. He hauled in
forty or fifty feet with a young sturgeon still fast in a tangle of
barbless hooks, slashed that much of the line free with his knife,
and tossed it into the cockpit beside the prisoners.

“And there’s the evidence, Exhibit A, for the people,” Charley
continued. “Look it over carefully so that you may identify it in
the court-room with the time and place of capture.”

And then, in triumph, with no more veering and yawing, we sailed
into Benicia, the King of the Greeks bound hard and fast in the
cockpit, and for the first time in his life a prisoner of the fish
patrol.

The tourist women, under the hau tree arbour that lines the Moana
hotel beach, gasped when Lee Barton and his wife Ida emerged from
the bath-house. And as the pair walked past them and down to the
sand, they continued to gasp. Not that there was anything about
Lee Barton provocative of gasps. The tourist women were not of the
sort to gasp at sight of a mere man’s swimming-suited body, no
matter with what swelling splendour of line and muscle such body
was invested. Nevertheless, trainers and conditioners of men would
have drawn deep breaths of satisfaction at contemplation of the
physical spectacle of him. But they would not have gasped in the
way the women did, whose gasps were indicative of moral shock.

Ida Barton was the cause of their perturbation and disapproval.
They disapproved, seriously so, at the first instant’s glimpse of
her. They thought–such ardent self-deceivers were they–that they
were shocked by her swimming suit. But Freud has pointed out how
persons, where sex is involved, are prone sincerely to substitute
one thing for another thing, and to agonize over the substituted
thing as strenuously as if it were the real thing.

Ida Barton’s swimming suit was a very nice one, as women’s suits
go. Of thinnest of firm-woven black wool, with white trimmings and
a white belt-line, it was high-throated, short-sleeved, and brief-
skirted. Brief as was the skirt, the leg-tights were no less
brief. Yet on the beach in front of the adjacent Outrigger Club,
and entering and leaving the water, a score of women, not provoking
gasping notice, were more daringly garbed. Their men’s suits, as
brief of leg-tights and skirts, fitted them as snugly, but were
sleeveless after the way of men’s suits, the arm-holes deeply low-
cut and in-cut, and, by the exposed armpits, advertiseful that the
wearers were accustomed to 1916 decollete.

So it was not Ida Barton’s suit, although the women deceived
themselves into thinking it was. It was, first of all, say her
legs; or, first of all, say the totality of her, the sweet and
brilliant jewel of her femininity bursting upon them. Dowager,
matron, and maid, conserving their soft-fat muscles or protecting
their hot-house complexions in the shade of the hau-tree arbour,
felt the immediate challenge of her. She was menace as well, an
affront of superiority in their own chosen and variously successful
game of life.

But they did not say it. They did not permit themselves to think
it. They thought it was the suit, and said so to one another,
ignoring the twenty women more daringly clad but less perilously
beautiful. Could one have winnowed out of the souls of these
disapproving ones what lay at bottom of their condemnation of her
suit, it would have been found to be the sex-jealous thought: THAT
NO WOMAN, SO BEAUTIFUL AS THIS ONE, SHOULD BE PERMITTED TO SHOW HER
BEAUTY. It was not fair to them. What chance had they in the
conquering of males with so dangerous a rival in the foreground?

They were justified. As Stanley Patterson said to his wife, where
the two of them lolled wet in the sand by the tiny fresh-water
stream that the Bartons waded in order to gain the Outrigger Club
beach:

“Lord god of models and marvels, behold them! My dear, did you
ever see two such legs on one small woman! Look at the roundness
and taperingness. They’re boy’s legs. I’ve seen featherweights go
into the ring with legs like those. And they’re all-woman’s legs,
too. Never mistake them in the world. The arc of the front line
of that upper leg! And the balanced adequate fullness at the back!
And the way the opposing curves slender in to the knee that IS a
knee! Makes my fingers itch. Wish I had some clay right now.”

“It’s a true human knee,” his wife concurred, no less breathlessly;
for, like her husband, she was a sculptor. “Look at the joint of
it working under the skin. It’s got form, and blessedly is not
covered by a bag of fat.” She paused to sigh, thinking of her own
knees. “It’s correct, and beautiful, and dainty. Charm! If ever
I beheld the charm of flesh, it is now. I wonder who she is.”

Stanley Patterson, gazing ardently, took up his half of the chorus.

“Notice that the round muscle-pads on the inner sides that make
most women appear knock-kneed are missing. They’re boy’s legs,
firm and sure–”

“And sweet woman’s legs, soft and round,” his wife hastened to
balance. “And look, Stanley! See how she walks on the balls of
her feet. It makes her seem light as swan’s down. Each step seems
just a little above the earth, and each other step seems just a
little higher above until you get the impression she is flying, or
just about to rise and begin flying . . . “

So Stanley and Mrs. Patterson. But they were artists, with eyes
therefore unlike the next batteries of human eyes Ida Barton was
compelled to run, and that laired on the Outrigger lanais
(verandas) and in the hau-tree shade of the closely adjoining
seaside. The majority of the Outrigger audience was composed, not
of tourist guests, but of club members and old-timers in Hawaii.
And even the old-times women gasped.

“It’s positively indecent,” said Mrs. Hanley Black to her husband,
herself a too-stout-in-the-middle matron of forty-five, who had
been born in the Hawaiian islands, and who had never heard of
Ostend.

Hanley Black surveyed his wife’s criminal shapelessness and
voluminousness of antediluvian, New-England swimming dress with a
withering, contemplative eye. They had been married a sufficient
number of years for him frankly to utter his judgment.

“That strange woman’s suit makes your own look indecent. You
appear as a creature shameful, under a grotesqueness of apparel
striving to hide some secret awfulness.”

“She carries her body like a Spanish dancer,” Mrs. Patterson said
to her husband, for the pair of them had waded the little stream in
pursuit of the vision.

“By George, she does,” Stanley Patterson concurred. “Reminds me of
Estrellita. Torso just well enough forward, slender waist, not too
lean in the stomach, and with muscles like some lad boxer’s
armouring that stomach to fearlessness. She has to have them to
carry herself that way and to balance the back muscles. See that
muscled curve of the back! It’s Estrellita’s.”

“How tall would you say?” his wife queried.

“There she deceives,” was the appraised answer. “She might be
five-feet-one, or five-feet-three or four. It’s that way she has
of walking that you described as almost about to fly.”

“Yes, that’s it,” Mrs. Patterson concurred. “It’s her energy, her
seemingness of being on tip toe with rising vitality.”

Stanley Patterson considered for a space.

“That’s it,” he enounced. “She IS a little thing. I’ll give her
five-two in her stockings. And I’ll weigh her a mere one hundred
and ten, or eight, or fifteen at the outside.”

“She won’t weigh a hundred and ten,” his wife declared with
conviction.

“And with her clothes on, plus her carriage (which is builded of
her vitality and will), I’ll wager she’d never impress any one with
her smallness.”

“I know her type,” his wife nodded. “You meet her out, and you
have the sense that, while not exactly a fine large woman, she’s a
whole lot larger than the average. And now, age?”

“I’ll give you best there,” he parried.

“She might be twenty-five, she might be twenty-eight . . . “

But Stanley Patterson had impolitely forgotten to listen.

“It’s not her legs alone,” he cried on enthusiastically. “It’s the
all of her. Look at the delicacy of that forearm. And the swell
of line to the shoulder. And that biceps! It’s alive. Dollars to
drowned kittens she can flex a respectable knot of it . . . “

No woman, much less an Ida Barton, could have been unconscious of
the effect she was producing along Waikiki Beach. Instead of
making her happy in the small vanity way, it irritated her.

“The cats,” she laughed to her husband. “And to think I was born
here an almost even third of a century ago! But they weren’t nasty
then. Maybe because there weren’t any tourists. Why, Lee, I
learned to swim right here on this beach in front of the Outrigger.
We used to come out with daddy for vacations and for week-ends and
sort of camp out in a grass house that stood right where the
Outrigger ladies serve tea now. And centipedes fell out of the
thatch on us, while we slept, and we all ate poi and opihis and raw
aku, and nobody wore much of anything for the swimming and
squidding, and there was no real road to town. I remember times of
big rain when it was so flooded we had to go in by canoe, out
through the reef and in by Honolulu Harbour.”

“Remember,” Lee Barton added, “it was just about that time that the
youngster that became me arrived here for a few weeks’ stay on our
way around. I must have seen you on the beach at that very time–
one of the kiddies that swam like fishes. Why, merciful me, the
women here were all riding cross-saddle, and that was long before
the rest of the social female world outgrew its immodesty and came
around to sitting simultaneously on both sides of a horse. I
learned to swim on the beach here at that time myself. You and I
may even have tried body-surfing on the same waves, or I may have
splashed a handful of water into your mouth and been rewarded by
your sticking out your tongue at me–”

Interrupted by an audible gasp of shock from a spinster-appearing
female sunning herself hard by and angularly in the sand in a
swimming suit monstrously unbeautiful, Lee Barton was aware of an
involuntary and almost perceptible stiffening on the part of his
wife.

“I smile with pleasure,” he told her. “It serves only to make your
valiant little shoulders the more valiant. It may make you self-
conscious, but it likewise makes you absurdly self-confident.”

For, be it known in advance, Lee Barton was a super-man and Ida
Barton a super-woman–or at least they were personalities so
designated by the cub book-reviewers, flat-floor men and women, and
scholastically emasculated critics, who from across the dreary
levels of their living can descry no glorious humans over-topping
their horizons. These dreary folk, echoes of the dead past and
importunate and self-elected pall-bearers for the present and
future, proxy-livers of life and vicarious sensualists that they
are in a eunuch sort of way, insist, since their own selves,
environments, and narrow agitations of the quick are mediocre and
commonplace, that no man or woman can rise above the mediocre and
commonplace.

Lacking gloriousness in themselves, they deny gloriousness to all
mankind; too cowardly for whimsy and derring-do, they assert whimsy
and derring-do ceased at the very latest no later than the middle
ages; flickering little tapers themselves, their feeble eyes are
dazzled to unseeingness of the flaming conflagrations of other
souls that illumine their skies. Possessing power in no greater
quantity than is the just due of pygmies, they cannot conceive of
power greater in others than in themselves. In those days there
were giants; but, as their mouldy books tell them, the giants are
long since passed, and only the bones of them remain. Never having
seen the mountains, there are no mountains.

In the mud of their complacently perpetuated barnyard pond, they
assert that no bright-browed, bright-apparelled shining figures can
be outside of fairy books, old histories, and ancient
superstitions. Never having seen the stars, they deny the stars.
Never having glimpsed the shining ways nor the mortals that tread
them, they deny the existence of the shinning ways as well as the
existence of the high-bright mortals who adventure along the
shining ways. The narrow pupils of their eyes the centre of the
universe, they image the universe in terms of themselves, of their
meagre personalities make pitiful yardsticks with which to measure
the high-bright souls, saying: “Thus long are all souls, and no
longer; it is impossible that there should exist greater-statured
souls than we are, and our gods know that we are great of stature.”

But all, or nearly all on the beach, forgave Ida Barton her suit
and form when she took the water. A touch of her hand on her
husband’s arm, indication and challenge in her laughing face, and
the two ran as one for half a dozen paces and leapt as one from the
hard-wet sand of the beach, their bodies describing flat arches of
flight ere the water was entered.

There are two surfs at Waikiki: the big, bearded man surf that
roars far out beyond the diving-stage; the smaller, gentler,
wahine, or woman, surf that breaks upon the shore itself. Here is
a great shallowness, where one may wade a hundred or several
hundred feet to get beyond depth. Yet, with a good surf on
outside, the wahine surf can break three or four feet, so that,
close in against the shore, the hard-sand bottom may be three feet
or three inches under the welter of surface foam. To dive from the
beach into this, to fly into the air off racing feet, turn in mid-
flight so that heels are up and head is down, and, so to enter the
water head-first, requires wisdom of waves, timing of waves, and a
trained deftness in entering such unstable depths of water with
pretty, unapprehensive, head-first cleavage, while at the same time
making the shallowest possible of dives.

It is a sweet, and pretty, and daring trick, not learned in a day,
nor learned at all without many a milder bump on the bottom or
close shave of fractured skull or broken neck. Here, on the spot
where the Bartons so beautifully dived, two days before a Stanford
track athlete had broken his neck. His had been an error in timing
the rise and subsidence of a wahine wave.

“A professional,” Mrs. Hanley Black sneered to her husband at Ida
Barton’s feat.

“Some vaudeville tank girl,” was one of the similar remarks with
which the women in the shade complacently reassured one another–
finding, by way of the weird mental processes of self-illusion, a
great satisfaction in the money caste-distinction between one who
worked for what she ate and themselves who did not work for what
they ate.

It was a day of heavy surf on Waikiki. In the wahine surf it was
boisterous enough for good swimmers. But out beyond, in the
kanaka, or man, surf, no one ventured. Not that the score or more
of young surf-riders loafing on the beach could not venture there,
or were afraid to venture there; but because their biggest
outrigger canoes would have been swamped, and their surf-boards
would have been overwhelmed in the too-immense over-topple and
down-fall of the thundering monsters. They themselves, most of
them, could have swum, for man can swim through breakers which
canoes and surf-boards cannot surmount; but to ride the backs of
the waves, rise out of the foam to stand full length in the air
above, and with heels winged with the swiftness of horses to fly
shoreward, was what made sport for them and brought them out from
Honolulu to Waikiki.

The captain of Number Nine canoe, himself a charter member of the
Outrigger and a many-times medallist in long-distance swimming, had
missed seeing the Bartons take the water, and first glimpsed them
beyond the last festoon of bathers clinging to the life-lines.
From then on, from his vantage of the upstairs lanai, he kept his
eyes on them. When they continued out past the steel diving-stage
where a few of the hardiest divers disported, he muttered vexedly
under his breath “damned malahinis!”

Now malahini means new-comer, tender-foot; and, despite the
prettiness of their stroke, he knew that none except malahinis
would venture into the racing channel beyond the diving-stage.
Hence the vexation of the captain of Number Nine. He descended to
the beach, with a low word here and there picked a crew of the
strongest surfers, and returned to the lanai with a pair of
binoculars. Quite casually, the crew, six of them, carried Number
Nine to the water’s edge, saw paddles and everything in order for a
quick launching, and lolled about carelessly on the sand. They
were guilty of not advertising that anything untoward was afoot,
although they did steal glances up to their captain straining
through the binoculars.

What made the channel was the fresh-water stream. Coral cannot
abide fresh water. What made the channel race was the immense
shoreward surf-fling of the sea. Unable to remain flung up on the
beach, pounded ever back toward the beach by the perpetual
shoreward rush of the kanaka surf, the up-piled water escaped to
the sea by way of the channel and in the form of under-tow along
the bottom under the breakers. Even in the channel the waves broke
big, but not with the magnificent bigness of terror as to right and
left. So it was that a canoe or a comparatively strong swimmer
could dare the channel. But the swimmer must be a strong swimmer
indeed, who could successfully buck the current in. Wherefore the
captain of Number Nine continued his vigil and his muttered
damnation of malahinis, disgustedly sure that these two malahinis
would compel him to launch Number Nine and go after them when they
found the current too strong to swim in against. As for himself,
caught in their predicament, he would have veered to the left
toward Diamond Head and come in on the shoreward fling of the
kanaka surf. But then, he was no one other than himself, a bronze.
Hercules of twenty-two, the whitest blond man ever burned to
mahogany brown by a sub-tropic sun, with body and lines and muscles
very much resembling the wonderful ones of Duke Kahanamoku. In a
hundred yards the world champion could invariably beat him a second
flat; but over a distance of miles he could swim circles around the
champion.

No one of the many hundreds on the beach, with the exception of
till captain and his crew, knew that the Bartons had passed beyond
the diving-stage. All who had watched them start to swim out had
taken for granted that they had joined the others on the stage.

The captain suddenly sprang upon the railing of the lanai, held on
to a pillar with one hand, and again picked up the two specks of
heads through the glasses. His surprise was verified. The two
fools had veered out of the channel toward Diamond Head, and were
directly seaward of the kanaka surf. Worse, as he looked, they
were starting to come in through the kanaka surf.

He glanced down quickly to the canoe, and even as he glanced, and
as the apparently loafing members quietly arose and took their
places by the canoe for the launching, he achieved judgment.
Before the canoe could get abreast in the channel, all would be
over with the man and woman. And, granted that it could get
abreast of them, the moment it ventured into the kanaka surf it
would be swamped, and a sorry chance would the strongest swimmer of
them have of rescuing a person pounding to pulp on the bottom under
the smashes of the great bearded ones.

The captain saw the first kanaka wave, large of itself, but small
among its fellows, lift seaward behind the two speck-swimmers.
Then he saw them strike a crawl-stroke, side by side, faces
downward, full-lengths out-stretched on surface, their feet
sculling like propellers and their arms flailing in rapid over-hand
strokes, as they spurted speed to approximate the speed of the
overtaking wave, so that, when overtaken, they would become part of
the wave, and travel with it instead of being left behind it.
Thus, if they were coolly skilled enough to ride outstretched on
the surface and the forward face of the crest instead of being
flung and crumpled or driven head-first to bottom, they would dash
shoreward, not propelled by their own energy, but by the energy of
the wave into which they had become incorporated.

And they did it! “SOME swimmers!” the captain of Number Nine made
announcement to himself under his breath. He continued to gaze
eagerly. The best of swimmers could hold such a wave for several
hundred feet. But could they? If they did, they would be a third
of the way through the perils they had challenged. But, not
unexpected by him, the woman failed first, her body not presenting
the larger surfaces that her husband’s did. At the end of seventy
feet she was overwhelmed, being driven downward and out of sight by
the tons of water in the over-topple. Her husband followed and
both appeared swimming beyond the wave they had lost.

The captain saw the next wave first. “If they try to body-surf on
that, good night,” he muttered; for he knew the swimmer did not
live who would tackle it. Beardless itself, it was father of all
bearded ones, a mile long, rising up far out beyond where the
others rose, towering its solid bulk higher and higher till it
blotted out the horizon, and was a giant among its fellows ere its
beard began to grow as it thinned its crest to the over-curl.

But it was evident that the man and woman knew big water. No
racing stroke did they make in advance of the wave. The captain
inwardly applauded as he saw them turn and face the wave and wait
for it. It was a picture that of all on the beach he alone saw,
wonderfully distinct and vivid in the magnification of the
binoculars. The wall of the wave was truly a wall, mounting, ever
mounting, and thinning, far up, to a transparency of the colours of
the setting sun shooting athwart all the green and blue of it. The
green thinned to lighter green that merged blue even as he looked.
But it was a blue gem-brilliant with innumerable sparkle-points of
rose and gold flashed through it by the sun. On and up, to the
sprouting beard of growing crest, the colour orgy increased until
it was a kaleidoscopic effervescence of transfusing rainbows.

Against the face of the wave showed the heads of the man and woman
like two sheer specks. Specks they were, of the quick, adventuring
among the blind elemental forces, daring the titanic buffets of the
sea. The weight of the down-fall of that father of waves, even
then imminent above their heads, could stun a man or break the
fragile bones of a woman. The captain of Number Nine was
unconscious that he was holding his breath. He was oblivious of
the man. It was the woman. Did she lose her head or courage, or
misplay her muscular part for a moment, she could be hurled a
hundred feet by that giant buffet and left wrenched, helpless, and
breathless to be pulped on the coral bottom and sucked out by the
undertow to be battened on by the fish-sharks too cowardly to take
their human meat alive.

Why didn’t they dive deep, and with plenty of time, the captain
wanted to know, instead of waiting till the last tick of safety and
the first tick of peril were one? He saw the woman turn her head
and laugh to the man, and his head turn in response. Above them,
overhanging them, as they mounted the body of the wave, the beard,
creaming white, then frothing into rose and gold, tossed upward
into a spray of jewels. The crisp off-shore trade-wind caught the
beard’s fringes and blew them backward and upward yards and yards
into the air. It was then, side by side, and six feet apart, that
they dived straight under the over-curl even then disintegrating to
chaos and falling. Like insects disappearing into the convolutions
of some gorgeous gigantic orchid, so they disappeared, as beard and
crest and spray and jewels, in many tons, crashed and thundered
down just where they had disappeared the moment before, but where
they were no longer.

Beyond the wave they had gone through, they finally showed, side by
side, still six feet apart, swimming shoreward with a steady stroke
until the next wave should make them body-surf it or face and
pierce it. The captain of Number Nine waved his hand to his crew
in dismissal, and sat down on the lanai railing, feeling vaguely
tired and still watching the swimmers through his glasses.

“Whoever and whatever they are,” he murmured, “they aren’t
malahinis. They simply can’t be malahinis.”

Not all days, and only on rare days, is the surf heavy at Waikiki;
and, in the days that followed, Ida and Lee Barton, much in
evidence on the beach and in the water, continued to arouse
disparaging interest in the breasts of the tourist ladies, although
the Outrigger captains ceased from worrying about them in the
water. They would watch the pair swim out and disappear in the
blue distance, and they might, or might not, chance to see them
return hours afterward. The point was that the captains did not
bother about their returning, because they knew they would return.

The reason for this was that they were not malahinis. They
belonged. In other words, or, rather, in the potent Islands-word,
they were kamaaina. Kamaaina men and women of forty remembered Lee
Barton from their childhood days, when, in truth, he had been a
malahini, though a very young specimen. Since that time, in the
course of various long stays, he had earned the kamaaina
distinction.

As for Ida Barton, young matrons of her own age (privily wondering
how she managed to keep her figure) met her with arms around and
hearty Hawaiian kisses. Grandmothers must have her to tea and
reminiscence in old gardens of forgotten houses which the tourist
never sees. Less than a week after her arrival, the aged Queen
Liliuokalani must send for her and chide her for neglect. And old
men, on cool and balmy lanais, toothlessly maundered to her about
Grandpa Captain Wilton, of before their time, but whose wild and
lusty deeds and pranks, told them by their fathers, they remembered
with gusto–Grandpa Captain Wilton, or David Wilton, or “All Hands”
as the Hawaiians of that remote day had affectionately renamed him.
All Hands, ex-Northwest trader, the godless, beach-combing,
clipper-shipless and ship-wrecked skipper who had stood on the
beach at Kailua and welcomed the very first of missionaries, off
the brig Thaddeus, in the year 1820, and who, not many years later,
made a scandalous runaway marriage with one of their daughters,
quieted down and served the Kamehamehas long and conservatively as
Minister of the Treasury and Chief of the Customs, and acted as
intercessor and mediator between the missionaries on one side and
the beach-combing crowd, the trading crowd, and the Hawaiian chiefs
on the variously shifting other side.

Nor was Lee Barton neglected. In the midst of the dinners and
lunches, the luaus (Hawaiian feasts) and poi-suppers, and swims and
dances in aloha (love) to both of them, his time and inclination
were claimed by the crowd of lively youngsters of old Kohala days
who had come to know that they possessed digestions and various
other internal functions, and who had settled down to somewhat of
sedateness, who roistered less, and who played bridge much, and
went to baseball often. Also, similarly oriented, was the old
poker crowd of Lee Barton’s younger days, which crowd played for
more consistent stakes and limits, while it drank mineral water and
orange juice and timed the final round of “Jacks” never later than
midnight.

Appeared, through all the rout of entertainment, Sonny Grandison,
Hawaii-born, Hawaii-prominent, who, despite his youthful forty-one
years, had declined the proffered governorship of the Territory.
Also, he had ducked Ida Barton in the surf at Waikiki a quarter of
a century before, and, still earlier, vacationing on his father’s
great Lakanaii cattle ranch, had hair-raisingly initiated her, and
various other tender tots of five to seven years of age, into his
boys’ band, “The Cannibal Head-Hunters” or “The Terrors of
Lakanaii.” Still farther, his Grandpa Grandison and her Grandpa
Wilton had been business and political comrades in the old days.

Educated at Harvard, he had become for a time a world-wandering
scientist and social favourite. After serving in the Philippines,
he had accompanied various expeditions through Malaysia, South
America, and Africa in the post of official entomologist. At
forty-one he still retained his travelling commission from the
Smithsonian Institution, while his friends insisted that he knew
more about sugar “bugs” than the expert entomologists employed by
him and his fellow sugar planters in the Experiment Station.
Bulking large at home, he was the best-known representative of
Hawaii abroad. It was the axiom among travelled Hawaii folk, that
wherever over the world they might mention they were from Hawaii,
the invariable first question asked of them was: “And do you know
Sonny Grandison?”

In brief, he was a wealthy man’s son who had made good. His
father’s million he inherited he had increased to ten millions, at
the same time keeping up his father’s benefactions and endowments
and overshadowing them with his own.

But there was still more to him. A ten years’ widower, without
issue, he was the most eligible and most pathetically sought-after
marriageable man in all Hawaii. A clean-and-strong-featured
brunette, tall, slenderly graceful, with the lean runner’s stomach,
always fit as a fiddle, a distinguished figure in any group, the
greying of hair over his temples (in juxtaposition to his young-
textured skin and bright vital eyes) made him appear even more
distinguished. Despite the social demands upon his time, and
despite his many committee meetings, and meetings of boards of
directors and political conferences, he yet found time and space to
captain the Lakanaii polo team to more than occasional victory, and
on his own island of Lakanaii vied with the Baldwins of Maui in the
breeding and importing of polo ponies.

Given a markedly strong and vital man and woman, when a second
equally markedly strong and vital man enters the scene, the peril
of a markedly strong and vital triangle of tragedy becomes
imminent. Indeed, such a triangle of tragedy may be described, in
the terminology of the flat-floor folk, as “super” and
“impossible.” Perhaps, since within himself originated the desire
and the daring, it was Sonny Grandison who first was conscious of
the situation, although he had to be quick to anticipate the
sensing intuition of a woman like Ida Barton. At any rate, and
undebatable, the last of the three to attain awareness was Lee
Barton, who promptly laughed away what was impossible to laugh
away.

His first awareness, he quickly saw, was so belated that half his
hosts and hostesses were already aware. Casting back, he realized
that for some time any affair to which he and his wife were invited
found Sonny Grandison likewise invited. Wherever the two had been,
the three had been. To Kahuku or to Haleiwa, to Ahuimanu, or to
Kaneohe for the coral gardens, or to Koko Head for a picnicking and
a swimming, somehow it invariably happened that Ida rode in Sonny’s
car or that both rode in somebody’s car. Dances, luaus, dinners,
and outings were all one; the three of them were there.

Having become aware, Lee Barton could not fail to register Ida’s
note of happiness ever rising when in the same company with Sonny
Grandison, and her willingness to ride in the same cars with him,
to dance with him, or to sit out dances with him. Most convincing
of all, was Sonny Grandison himself. Forty-one, strong,
experienced, his face could no more conceal what he felt than could
be concealed a lad of twenty’s ordinary lad’s love. Despite the
control and restraint of forty years, he could no more mask his
soul with his face than could Lee Barton, of equal years, fail to
read that soul through so transparent a face. And often, to other
women, talking, when the topic of Sonny came up, Lee Barton heard
Ida express her fondness for Sonny, or her almost too-eloquent
appreciation of his polo-playing, his work in the world, and his
general all-rightness of achievement.

About Sonny’s state of mind and heart Lee had no doubt. It was
patent enough for the world to read. But how about Ida, his own
dozen-years’ wife of a glorious love-match? He knew that woman,
ever the mysterious sex, was capable any time of unguessed mystery.
Did her frank comradeliness with Grandison token merely frank
comradeliness and childhood contacts continued and recrudesced into
adult years? or did it hide, in woman’s subtler and more secretive
ways, a beat of heart and return of feeling that might even out-
balance what Sonny’s face advertised?

Lee Barton was not happy. A dozen years of utmost and post-nuptial
possession of his wife had proved to him, so far as he was
concerned, that she was his one woman in the world, and that the
woman was unborn, much less unglimpsed, who could for a moment
compete with her in his heart, his soul, and his brain. Impossible
of existence was the woman who could lure him away from her, much
less over-bid her in the myriad, continual satisfactions she
rendered him.

Was this, then, he asked himself, the dreaded contingency of all
fond Benedicts, to be her first “affair?” He tormented himself
with the ever iterant query, and, to the astonishment of the
reformed Kohala poker crowd of wise and middle-aged youngsters as
well as to the reward of the keen scrutiny of the dinner-giving and
dinner-attending women, he began to drink King William instead of
orange juice, to bully up the poker limit, to drive of nights his
own car more than rather recklessly over the Pali and Diamond Head
roads, and, ere dinner or lunch or after, to take more than an
average man’s due of old-fashioned cocktails and Scotch highs.

All the years of their marriage she had been ever complaisant
toward him in his card-playing. This complaisance, to him, had
become habitual. But now that doubt had arisen, it seemed to him
that he noted an eagerness in her countenancing of his poker
parties. Another point he could not avoid noting was that Sonny
Grandison was missed by the poker and bridge crowds. He seemed to
be too busy. Now where was Sonny, while he, Lee Barton, was
playing? Surely not always at committee and boards of directors
meetings. Lee Barton made sure of this. He easily learned that at
such times Sonny was more than usually wherever Ida chanced to be–
at dances, or dinners, or moonlight swimming parties, or, the very
afternoon he had flatly pleaded rush of affairs as an excuse not to
join Lee and Langhorne Jones and Jack Holstein in a bridge battle
at the Pacific Club–that afternoon he had played bridge at Dora
Niles’ home with three women, one of whom was Ida.

Returning, once, from an afternoon’s inspection of the great dry-
dock building at Pearl Harbour, Lee Barton, driving his machine
against time, in order to have time to dress for dinner, passed
Sonny’s car; and Sonny’s one passenger, whom he was taking home,
was Ida. One night, a week later, during which interval he had
played no cards, he came home at eleven from a stag dinner at the
University Club, just preceding Ida’s return from the Alstone poi
supper and dance. And Sonny had driven her home. Major Fanklin
and his wife had first been dropped off by them, they mentioned, at
Fort Shafter, on the other side of town and miles away from the
beach.

Lee Barton, after all mere human man, as a human man unfailingly
meeting Sonny in all friendliness, suffered poignantly in secret.
Not even Ida dreamed that he suffered; and she went her merry,
careless, laughing way, secure in her own heart, although a trifle
perplexed at her husband’s increase in number of pre-dinner
cocktails.

Apparently, as always, she had access to almost all of him; but now
she did not have access to his unguessable torment, nor to the long
parallel columns of mental book-keeping running their totalling
balances from moment to moment, day and night, in his brain. In
one column were her undoubtable spontaneous expressions of her
usual love and care for him, her many acts of comfort-serving and
of advice-asking and advice-obeying. In another column, in which
the items increasingly were entered, were her expressions and acts
which he could not but classify as dubious. Were they what they
seemed? Or were they of duplicity compounded, whether deliberately
or unconsciously? The third column, longest of all, totalling most
in human heart-appraisements, was filled with items relating
directly or indirectly to her and Sonny Grandison. Lee Barton did
not deliberately do this book-keeping. He could not help it. He
would have liked to avoid it. But in his fairly ordered mind the
items of entry, of themselves and quite beyond will on his part,
took their places automatically in their respective columns.

In his distortion of vision, magnifying apparently trivial detail
which half the time he felt he magnified, he had recourse to
MacIlwaine, to whom he had once rendered a very considerable
service. MacIlwaine was chief of detectives. “Is Sonny Grandison
a womaning man?” Barton had demanded. MacIlwaine had said nothing.
“Then he is a womaning man,” had been Barton’s declaration. And
still the chief of detectives had said nothing.

Briefly afterward, ere he destroyed it as so much dynamite, Lee
Barton went over the written report. Not bad, not really bad, was
the summarization; but not too good after the death of his wife ten
years before. That had been a love-match almost notorious in
Honolulu society, because of the completeness of infatuation, not
only before, but after marriage, and up to her tragic death when
her horse fell with her a thousand feet off Nahiku Trail. And not
for a long time afterward, MacIlwaine stated, had Grandison been
guilty of interest in any woman. And whatever it was, it had been
unvaryingly decent. Never a hint of gossip or scandal; and the
entire community had come to accept that he was a one-woman man,
and would never marry again. What small affairs MacIlwaine had
jotted down he insisted that Sonny Grandison did not dream were
known by another person outside the principals themselves.

Barton glanced hurriedly, almost shamedly, at the several names and
incidents, and knew surprise ere he committed the document to the
flames. At any rate, Sonny had been most discreet. As he stared
at the ashes, Barton pondered how much of his own younger life,
from his bachelor days, resided in old MacIlwaine’s keeping. Next,
Barton found himself blushing, to himself, at himself. If
MacIlwaine knew so much of the private lives of community figures,
then had not he, her husband and protector and shielder, planted in
MacIlwaine’s brain a suspicion of Ida?

“Anything on your mind?” Lee asked his wife that evening, as he
stood holding her wrap while she put the last touches to her
dressing.

This was in line with their old and successful compact of
frankness, and he wondered, while he waited her answer, why he had
refrained so long from asking her.

“No,” she smiled. “Nothing particular. Afterwards . . . perhaps .
. . “

She became absorbed in gazing at herself in the mirror, while she
dabbed some powder on her nose and dabbed it off again.

“You know my way, Lee,” she added, after the pause. “It takes me
time to gather things together in my own way–when there are things
to gather; but when I do, you always get them. And often there’s
nothing in them after all, I find, and so you are saved the
nuisance of them.”

She held out her arms for him to place the wrap about her–her
valiant little arms that were so wise and steel-like in battling
with the breakers, and that yet were such just mere-woman’s arms,
round and warm and white, delicious as a woman’s arms should be,
with the canny muscles, masking under soft-roundness of contour and
fine smooth skin, capable of being flexed at will by the will of
her.

He pondered her, with a grievous hurt and yearning of appreciation-
-so delicate she seemed, so porcelain-fragile that a strong man
could snap her in the crook of his arm.

“We must hurry!” she cried, as he lingered in the adjustment of the
flimsy wrap over her flimsy-prettiness of gown. “We’ll be late.
And if it showers up Nuuanu, putting the curtains up will make us
miss the second dance.”

He made a note to observe with whom she danced that second dance,
as she preceded him across the room to the door; while at the same
time he pleasured his eye in what he had so often named to himself
as the spirit-proud flesh-proud walk of her.

“You don’t feel I’m neglecting you in my too-much poker?” he tried
again, by indirection.

“Mercy, no! You know I just love you to have your card orgies.
They’re tonic for you. And you’re so much nicer about them, so
much more middle-aged. Why, it’s almost years since you sat up
later than one.”

It did not shower up Nuuanu, and every overhead star was out in a
clear trade-wind sky. In time at the Inchkeeps’ for the second
dance, Lee Barton observed that his wife danced it with Grandison–
which, of itself, was nothing unusual, but which became immediately
a registered item in Barton’s mental books.

An hour later, depressed and restless, declining to make one of a
bridge foursome in the library and escaping from a few young
matrons, he strolled out into the generous grounds. Across the
lawn, at the far edge, he came upon the hedge of night-blooming
cereus. To each flower, opening after dark and fading, wilting,
perishing with the dawn, this was its one night of life. The
great, cream-white blooms, a foot in diameter and more, lily-like
and wax-like, white beacons of attraction in the dark, penetrating
and seducing the night with their perfume, were busy and beautiful
with their brief glory of living.

But the way along the hedge was populous with humans, two by two,
male and female, stealing out between the dances or strolling the
dances out, while they talked in low soft voices and gazed upon the
wonder of flower-love. From the lanai drifted the love-caressing
strains of “Hanalei” sung by the singing boys. Vaguely Lee Barton
remembered–perhaps it was from some Maupassant story–the abbe,
obsessed by the theory that behind all things were the purposes of
God and perplexed so to interpret the night, who discovered at the
last that the night was ordained for love.

The unanimity of the night as betrayed by flowers and humans was a
hurt to Barton. He circled back toward the house along a winding
path that skirted within the edge of shadow of the monkey-pods and
algaroba trees. In the obscurity, where his path curved away into
the open again, he looked across a space of a few feet where, on
another path in the shadow, stood a pair in each other’s arms. The
impassioned low tones of the man had caught his ear and drawn his
eyes, and at the moment of his glance, aware of his presence, the
voice ceased, and the two remained immobile, furtive, in each
other’s arms.

He continued his walk, sombred by the thought that in the gloom of
the trees was the next progression from the openness of the sky
over those who strolled the night-flower hedge. Oh, he knew the
game when of old no shadow was too deep, no ruse of concealment too
furtive, to veil a love moment. After all, humans were like
flowers, he meditated. Under the radiance from the lighted lanai,
ere entering the irritating movement of life again to which he
belonged, he paused to stare, scarcely seeing, at a flaunt of
display of scarlet double-hibiscus blooms. And abruptly all that
he was suffering, all that he had just observed, from the night-
blooming hedge and the two-by-two love-murmuring humans to the pair
like thieves in each other’s arms, crystallized into a parable of
life enunciated by the day-blooming hibiscus upon which he gazed,
now at the end of its day. Bursting into its bloom after the dawn,
snow-white, warming to pink under the hours of sun, and quickening
to scarlet with the dark from which its beauty and its being would
never emerge, it seemed to him that it epitomized man’s life and
passion.

What further connotations he might have drawn he was never to know;
for from behind, in the direction of the algarobas and monkey-pods,
came Ida’s unmistakable serene and merry laugh. He did not look,
being too afraid of what he knew he would see, but retreated
hastily, almost stumbling, up the steps to the lanai. Despite that
he knew what he was to see, when he did turn his head and beheld
his wife and Sonny, the pair he had seen thieving in the dark, he
went suddenly dizzy, and paused, supporting himself with a hand
against a pillar, and smiling vacuously at the grouped singing boys
who were pulsing the sensuous night into richer sensuousness with
their honi kaua wiki-wiki refrain.

The next moment he had wet his lips with his tongue, controlled his
face and flesh, and was bantering with Mrs. Inchkeep. But he could
not waste time, or he would have to encounter the pair he could
hear coming up the steps behind him.

“I feel as if I had just crossed the Great Thirst,” he told his
hostess, “and that nothing less than a high-ball will preserve me.”

She smiled permission and nodded toward the smoking lanai, where
they found him talking sugar politics with the oldsters when the
dance began to break up.

Quite a party of half a dozen machines were starting for Waikiki,
and he found himself billeted to drive the Leslies and Burnstons
home, though he did not fail to note that Ida sat in the driver’s
seat with Sonny in Sonny’s car. Thus, she was home ahead of him
and brushing her hair when he arrived. The parting of bed-going
was usual, on the face of it, although he was almost rigid in his
successful effort for casualness as he remembered whose lips had
pressed hers last before his.

Was, then, woman the utterly unmoral creature as depicted by the
German pessimists? he asked himself, as he tossed under his reading
lamp, unable to sleep or read. At the end of an hour he was out of
bed, and into his medicine case. Five grains of opium he took
straight. An hour later, afraid of his thoughts and the prospect
of a sleepless night, he took another grain. At one-hour intervals
he twice repeated the grain dosage. But so slow was the action of
the drug that dawn had broken ere his eyes closed.

At seven he was awake again, dry-mouthed, feeling stupid and
drowsy, yet incapable of dozing off for more than several minutes
at a time. He abandoned the idea of sleep, ate breakfast in bed,
and devoted himself to the morning papers and the magazines. But
the drug effect held, and he continued briefly to doze through his
eating and reading. It was the same when he showered and dressed,
and, though the drug had brought him little forgetfulness during
the night, he felt grateful for the dreaming lethargy with which it
possessed him through the morning.

It was when his wife arose, her serene and usual self, and came in
to him, smiling and roguish, delectable in her kimono, that the
whim-madness of the opium in his system seized upon him. When she
had clearly and simply shown that she had nothing to tell him under
their ancient compact of frankness, he began building his opium
lie. Asked how he had slept, he replied:

“Miserably. Twice I was routed wide awake with cramps in my feet.
I was almost too afraid to sleep again. But they didn’t come back,
though my feet are sorer than blazes.”

“Last year you had them,” she reminded him.

“Maybe it’s going to become a seasonal affliction,” he smiled.
“They’re not serious, but they’re horrible to wake up to. They
won’t come again till to-night, if they come at all, but in the
meantime I feel as if I had been bastinadoed.”

In the afternoon of the same day, Lee and Ida Barton made their
shallow dive from the Outrigger beach, and went on, at a steady
stroke, past the diving-stage to the big water beyond the Kanaka
Surf. So quiet was the sea that when, after a couple of hours,
they turned and lazily started shoreward through the Kanaka Surf
they had it all to themselves. The breakers were not large enough
to be exciting, and the last languid surf-boarders and canoeists
had gone in to shore. Suddenly, Lee turned over on his back.

“What is it?” Ida called from twenty feet away.

“My foot–cramp,” he answered calmly, though the words were twisted
out through clenched jaws of control.

The opium still had its dreamy way with him, and he was without
excitement. He watched her swimming toward him with so steady and
unperturbed a stroke that he admired her own self-control, although
at the same time doubt stabbed him with the thought that it was
because she cared so little for him, or, rather, so much
immediately more for Grandison.

“Which foot?” she asked, as she dropped her legs down and began
treading water beside him.

“The left one–ouch! Now it’s both of them.”

He doubled his knees, as if involuntarily raised his head and chest
forward out of the water, and sank out of sight in the down-wash of
a scarcely cresting breaker. Under no more than a brief several
seconds, he emerged spluttering and stretched out on his back
again.

Almost he grinned, although he managed to turn the grin into a
pain-grimace, for his simulated cramp had become real. At least in
one foot it had, and the muscles convulsed painfully.

“The right is the worst,” he muttered, as she evinced her intention
of laying hands on his cramp and rubbing it out. “But you’d better
keep away. I’ve had cramps before, and I know I’m liable to grab
you if these get any worse.”

Instead, she laid her hands on the hard-knotted muscles, and began
to rub and press and bend.

“Please,” he gritted through his teeth. “You must keep away. Just
let me lie out here–I’ll bend the ankle and toe-joints in the
opposite ways and make it pass. I’ve done it before and know how
to work it.”

She released him, remaining close beside him and easily treading
water, her eyes upon his face to judge the progress of his own
attempt at remedy. But Lee Barton deliberately bent joints and
tensed muscles in the directions that would increase the cramp. In
his bout the preceding year with the affliction, he had learned,
lying in bed and reading when seized, to relax and bend the cramps
away without even disturbing his reading. But now he did the thing
in reverse, intensifying the cramp, and, to his startled delight,
causing it to leap into his right calf. He cried out with anguish,
apparently lost control of himself, attempted to sit up, and was
washed under by the next wave.

He came up, spluttered, spread-eagled on the surface, and had his
knotted calf gripped by the strong fingers of both Ida’s small
hands.

“It’s all right,” she said, while she worked. “No cramp like this
lasts very long.”

“I didn’t know it could be so savage,” he groaned. “If only it
doesn’t go higher! It makes one feel so helpless.”

He gripped the biceps of both her arms in a sudden spasm,
attempting to climb out upon her as a drowning man might try to
climb out on an oar and sinking her down under him. In the
struggle under water, before he permitted her to wrench clear, her
rubber cap was torn off, and her hairpins pulled out, so that she
came up gasping for air and half-blinded by her wet-clinging hair.
Also, he was certain he had surprised her into taking in a quantity
of water.

“Keep away!” he warned, as he spread-eagled with acted
desperateness.

But her fingers were deep into the honest pain-wrack of his calf,
and in her he could observe no reluctance of fear.

“It’s creeping up,” he grunted through tight teeth, the grunt
itself a half-controlled groan.

He stiffened his whole right leg, as with another spasm, hurting
his real minor cramps, but flexing the muscles of his upper leg
into the seeming hardness of cramp.

The opium still worked in his brain, so that he could play-act
cruelly, while at the same time he appraised and appreciated her
stress of control and will that showed in her drawn face, and the
terror of death in her eyes, with beyond it and behind it, in her
eyes and through her eyes, the something more of the spirit of
courage, and higher thought, and resolution.

Still further, she did not enunciate so cheap a surrender as, “I’ll
die with you.” Instead, provoking his admiration, she did say,
quietly: “Relax. Sink until only your lips are out. I’ll support
your head. There must be a limit to cramp. No man ever died of
cramp on land. Then in the water no strong swimmer should die of
cramp. It’s bound to reach its worst and pass. We’re both strong
swimmers and cool-headed–”

He distorted his face and deliberately dragged her under. But when
they emerged, still beside him, supporting his head as she
continued to tread water, she was saying:

“Relax. Take it easy. I’ll hold your head up. Endure it. Live
through it. Don’t fight it. Make yourself slack–slack in your
mind; and your body will slack. Yield. Remember how you taught me
to yield to the undertow.”

An unusually large breaker for so mild a surf curled overhead, and
he climbed out on her again, sinking both of them under as the
wave-crest over-fell and smashed down.

“Forgive me,” he mumbled through pain clenched teeth, as they drew
in their first air again. “And leave me.” He spoke jerkily, with
pain-filled pauses between his sentences. “There is no need for
both of us to drown. I’ve got to go. It will be in my stomach, at
any moment, and then I’ll drag you under, and be unable to let go
of you. Please, please, dear, keep away. One of us is enough.
You’ve plenty to live for.”

She looked at him in reproach so deep that the last vestige of the
terror of death was gone from her eyes. It was as if she had said,
and more than if she had said: “I have only you to live for.”

Then Sonny did not count with her as much as he did!–was Barton’s
exultant conclusion. But he remembered her in Sonny’s arms under
the monkey-pods and determined on further cruelty. Besides, it was
the lingering opium in him that suggested this cruelty. Since he
had undertaken this acid test, urged the poppy juice, then let it
be a real acid test.

He doubled up and went down, emerged, and apparently strove
frantically to stretch out in the floating position. And she did
not keep away from him.

“It’s too much!” he groaned, almost screamed. “I’m losing my grip.
I’ve got to go. You can’t save me. Keep away and save yourself.”

But she was to him, striving to float his mouth clear of the salt,
saying: “It’s all right. It’s all right. The worst is right now.
Just endure it a minute more, and it will begin to ease.”

He screamed out, doubled, seized her, and took her down with him.
And he nearly did drown her, so well did he play-act his own
drowning. But never did she lose her head nor succumb to the fear
of death so dreadfully imminent. Always, when she got her head
out, she strove to support him while she panted and gasped
encouragement in terms of: “Relax . . . Relax . . . Slack . . .
Slack out . . . At any time . . . now . . . you’ll pass . . . the
worst . . . No matter how much it hurts . . . it will pass . . .
You’re easier now . . . aren’t you?”

And then he would put her down again, going from bad to worse–in
his ill-treatment of her; making her swallow pints of salt water,
secure in the knowledge that it would not definitely hurt her.
Sometimes they came up for brief emergences, for gasping seconds in
the sunshine on the surface, and then were under again, dragged
under by him, rolled and tumbled under by the curling breakers.

Although she struggled and tore herself from his grips, in the
times he permitted her freedom she did not attempt to swim away
from him, but, with fading strength and reeling consciousness,
invariably came to him to try to save him. When it was enough, in
his judgment, and more than enough, he grew quieter, left her
released, and stretched out on the surface.

“A-a-h,” he sighed long, almost luxuriously, and spoke with pauses
for breath. “It is passing. It seems like heaven. My dear, I’m
water-logged, yet the mere absence of that frightful agony makes my
present state sheerest bliss.”

She tried to gasp a reply, but could not.

“I’m all right,” he assured her. “Let us float and rest up.
Stretch out, yourself, and get your wind back.”

And for half an hour, side by side, on their backs, they floated in
the fairly placid Kanaka Surf. Ida Barton was the first to
announce recovery by speaking first.

“And how do you feel now, man of mine?” she asked.

“I feel as if I’d been run over by a steam-roller,” he replied.
“And you, poor darling?”

“I feel I’m the happiest woman in the world. I’m so happy I could
almost cry, but I’m too happy even for that. You had me horribly
frightened for a time. I thought I was to lose you.”

Lee Barton’s heart pounded up. Never a mention of losing herself.
This, then, was love, and all real love, proved true–the great
love that forgot self in the loved one.

“And I’m the proudest man in the world,” he told her; “because my
wife is the bravest woman in the world.”

“Brave!” she repudiated. “I love you. I never knew how much, how
really much, I loved you as when I was losing you. And now let’s
work for shore. I want you all alone with me, your arms around me,
while I tell you all you are to me and shall always be to me.”

In another half-hour, swimming strong and steadily, they landed on
the beach and walked up the hard wet sand among the sand-loafers
and sun-baskers.

“What were the two of you doing out there?” queried one of the
Outrigger captains. “Cutting up?”

“Cutting up,” Ida Barton answered with a smile.

“We’re the village cut-ups, you know,” was Lee Barton’s assurance.

That evening, the evening’s engagement cancelled, found the two, in
a big chair, in each other’s arms.

“Sonny sails to-morrow noon,” she announced casually and irrelevant
to anything in the conversation. “He’s going out to the Malay
Coast to inspect what’s been done with that lumber and rubber
company of his.”

“First I’ve heard of his leaving us,” Lee managed to say, despite
his surprise.

“I was the first to hear of it,” she added. “He told me only last
night.”

“At the dance?”

She nodded.

“Rather sudden, wasn’t it?”

“Very sudden.” Ida withdrew herself from her husband’s arms and
sat up. “And I want to talk to you about Sonny. I’ve never had a
real secret from you before. I didn’t intend ever to tell you.
But it came to me to-day, out in the Kanaka Surf, that if we passed
out, it would be something left behind us unsaid.”

She paused, and Lee, half-anticipating what was coming, did nothing
to help her, save to girdle and press her hand in his.

“Sonny rather lost his . . . his head over me,” she faltered. “Of
course, you mus

He strolled to the corner and glanced up and down the intersecting street,
but saw nothing save the oases of light shed by the street lamps at the
successive crossings. Then he strolled back the way he had come. He was a
shadow of a man, sliding noiselessly and without undue movement through the
semi-darkness. Also he was very alert, like a wild animal in the jungle,
keenly perceptive and receptive. The movement of another in the darkness
about him would need to have been more shadowy than he to have escaped him.

In addition to the running advertisement of the state of affairs carried to
him by his senses, he had a subtler perception, a FEEL, of the atmosphere
around him. He knew that the house in front of which he paused for a
moment, contained children. Yet by no willed effort of perception did he
have this knowledge. For that matter, he was not even aware that he knew,
so occult was the impression. Yet, did a moment arise in which action, in
relation to that house, were imperative, he would have acted on the
assumption that it contained children. He was not aware of all that he
knew about the neighbourhood.

In the same way, he knew not how, he knew that no danger threatened in the
footfalls that came up the cross street. Before he saw the walker, he knew
him for a belated pedestrian hurrying home. The walker came into view at
the crossing and disappeared on up the street. The man that watched, noted
a light that flared up in the window of a house on the corner, and as it
died down he knew it for an expiring match. This was conscious
identification of familiar phenomena, and through his mind flitted the
thought, “Wanted to know what time.” In another house one room was
lighted. The light burned dimly and steadily, and he had the feel that it
was a sick-room.

He was especially interested in a house across the street in the middle of
the block. To this house he paid most attention. No matter what way he
looked, nor what way he walked, his looks and his steps always returned to
it. Except for an open window above the porch, there was nothing unusual
about the house. Nothing came in nor out. Nothing happened. There were
no lighted windows, nor had lights appeared and disappeared in any of the
windows. Yet it was the central point of his consideration. He rallied to
it each time after a divination of the state of the neighbourhood.

Despite his feel of things, he was not confident. He was supremely
conscious of the precariousness of his situation. Though unperturbed by
the footfalls of the chance pedestrian, he was as keyed up and sensitive
and ready to be startled as any timorous deer. He was aware of the
possibility of other intelligences prowling about in the darkness–
intelligences similar to his own in movement, perception, and divination.

Far down the street he caught a glimpse of something that moved. And he
knew it was no late home-goer, but menace and danger. He whistled twice to
the house across the street, then faded away shadow-like to the corner and
around the corner. Here he paused and looked about him carefully.
Reassured, he peered back around the corner and studied the object that
moved and that was coming nearer. He had divined aright. It was a
policeman.

The man went down the cross street to the next corner, from the shelter of
which he watched the corner he had just left. He saw the policeman pass
by, going straight on up the street. He paralleled the policeman’s course,
and from the next corner again watched him go by; then he returned the way
he had come. He whistled once to the house across the street, and after a
time whistled once again. There was reassurance in the whistle, just as
there had been warning in the previous double whistle.

He saw a dark bulk outline itself on the roof of the porch and slowly
descend a pillar. Then it came down the steps, passed through the small
iron gate, and went down the sidewalk, taking on the form of a man. He
that watched kept on his own side of the street and moved on abreast to the
corner, where he crossed over and joined the other. He was quite small
alongside the man he accosted.

“How’d you make out, Matt?” he asked.

The other grunted indistinctly, and walked on in silence a few steps.

“I reckon I landed the goods,” he said.

Jim chuckled in the darkness, and waited for further information. The
blocks passed by under their feet, and he grew impatient.

“Well, how about them goods?” he asked. “What kind of a haul did you make,
anyway?”

“I was too busy to figger it out, but it’s fat. I can tell you that much,
Jim, it’s fat. I don’t dast to think how fat it is. Wait till we get to
the room.”

Jim looked at him keenly under the street lamp of the next crossing, and
saw that his face was a trifle grim and that he carried his left arm
peculiarly.

“What’s the matter with your arm?” he demanded.

“The little cuss bit me. Hope I don’t get hydrophoby. Folks gets
hydrophoby from manbite sometimes, don’t they?”

“Gave you fight, eh?” Jim asked encouragingly.

The other grunted.

“You’re harder’n hell to get information from,” Jim burst out irritably.
“Tell us about it. You ain’t goin’ to lose money just a-tellin’ a guy.”

“I guess I choked him some,” came the answer. Then, by way of explanation,
“He woke up on me.”

“You did it neat. I never heard a sound.”

“Jim,” the other said with seriousness, “it’s a hangin’ matter. I fixed
‘m. I had to. He woke up on me. You an’ me’s got to do some layin’ low
for a spell.”

Jim gave a low whistle of comprehension.

“Did you hear me whistle?” he asked suddenly.

“Sure. I was all done. I was just comin’ out.”

“It was a bull. But he wasn’t on a little bit. Went right by an’ kept a-
paddin’ the hoof out a sight. Then I come back an’ gave you the whistle.
What made you take so long after that?”

“I was waitin’ to make sure,” Matt explained. “I was mighty glad when I
heard you whistle again. It’s hard work waitin’. I just sat there an’
thought an’ thought . . . oh, all kinds’ of things. It’s remarkable what a
fellow’ll think about. And then there was a darn cat that kept movin’
around the house all’ botherin’ me with its noises.”

“An’ it’s fat!” Jim exclaimed irrelevantly and with joy.

“I’m sure tellin’ you, Jim, it’s fat. I’m plum’ anxious for another look
at ‘em.”

Unconsciously the two men quickened their pace. Yet they did not relax
from their caution. Twice they changed their course in order to avoid
policemen, and they made very sure that they were not observed when they
dived into the dark hallway of a cheap rooming house down town.

Not until they had gained their own room on the top floor, did they scratch
a match. While Jim lighted a lamp, Matt locked the door and threw the
bolts into place. As he turned, he noticed that his partner was waiting
expectantly. Matt smiled to himself at the other’s eagerness.

“Them search-lights is all right,” he said, drawing forth a small pocket
electric lamp and examining it. “But we got to get a new battery. It’s
runnin’ pretty weak. I thought once or twice it’d leave me in the dark.
Funny arrangements in that house. I near got lost. His room was on the
left, an’ that fooled me some.”

“I told you it was on the left,” Jim interrupted.

“You told me it was on the right,” Matt went on. “I guess I know what you
told me, an’ there’s the map you drew.”

Fumbling in his vest pocket, he drew out a folded slip of paper. As he
unfolded it, Jim bent over and looked.

“I did make a mistake,” he confessed.

“You sure did. It got me guessin’ some for a while.”

“But it don’t matter now,” Jim cried. “Let’s see what you got.”

“It does matter,” Matt retorted. “It matters a lot . . . to me. I’ve got
to run all the risk. I put my head in the trap while you stay on the
street. You got to get on to yourself an’ be more careful. All right,
I’ll show you.”

He dipped loosely into his trousers pocket and brought out a handful of
small diamonds. He spilled them out in a blazing stream on the greasy
table. Jim let out a great oath.

“That’s nothing,” Matt said with triumphant complacence. “I ain’t begun
yet.”

From one pocket after another he continued bringing forth the spoil. There
were many diamonds wrapped in chamois skin that were larger than those in
the first handful. From one pocket he brought out a handful of very small
cut gems.

“Sun dust,” he remarked, as he spilled them on the table in a space by
themselves.

Jim examined them.

“Just the same, they retail for a couple of dollars each,” he said. “Is
that all?”

“Ain’t it enough?” the other demanded in an aggrieved tone.

“Sure it is,” Jim answered with unqualified approval. “Better’n I
expected. I wouldn’t take a cent less than ten thousan’ for the bunch.”

“Ten thousan’,” Matt sneered. “They’re worth twic’t that, an’ I don’t know
anything about joolery, either. Look at that big boy!”

He picked it out from the sparkling heap and held it near to the lamp with
the air of an expert, weighing and judging.

“Worth a thousan’ all by its lonely,” was Jim’s quicker judgment.

“A thousan’ your grandmother,” was Matt’s scornful rejoinder. “You
couldn’t buy it for three.”

“Wake me up! I’m dreamin’!” The sparkle of the gems was in Jim’s eyes, and
he began sorting out the larger diamonds and examining them. “We’re rich
men, Matt–we’ll be regular swells.”

“It’ll take years to get rid of ‘em,” was Matt’s more practical thought.

“But think how we’ll live! Nothin’ to do but spend the money an’ go on
gettin’ rid of em.”

Matt’s eyes were beginning to sparkle, though sombrely, as his phlegmatic
nature woke up.

“I told you I didn’t dast think how fat it was,” he murmured in a low
voice.

“What a killin’! What a killin’!” was the other’s more ecstatic utterance.

“I almost forgot,” Matt said, thrusting his hand into his inside coat
pocket.

A string of large pearls emerged from wrappings of tissue paper and chamois
skin. Jim scarcely glanced at them.

“They’re worth money,” he said, and returned to the diamonds.

A silence fell on the two men. Jim played with the gems, running them
through his fingers, sorting them into piles, and spreading them out flat
and wide. He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable, high-strung,
and anaemic–a typical child of the gutter, with unbeautiful twisted
features, small-eyed, with face and mouth perpetually and feverishly
hungry, brutish in a cat-like way, stamped to the core with degeneracy.

Matt did not finger the diamonds. He sat with chin on hands and elbows on
table, blinking heavily at the blazing array. He was in every way a
contrast to the other. No city had bred him. He was heavy-muscled and
hairy, gorilla-like in strength and aspect. For him there was no unseen
world. His eyes were full and wide apart, and there seemed in them a
certain bold brotherliness. They inspired confidence. But a closer
inspection would have shown that his eyes were just a trifle too full, just
a shade too wide apart. He exceeded, spilled over the limits of normality,
and his features told lies about the man beneath.

“The bunch is worth fifty thousan’,” Jim remarked suddenly.

“A hundred thousan’,” Matt said.

The silence returned and endured a long time, to be broken again by Jim.

“What in hell was he doin’ with ‘em all at the house?–that’s what I want
to know. I’d a-thought he’d kept ‘em in the safe down at the store.”

Matt had just been considering the vision of the throttled man as he had
last looked upon him in the dim light of the electric lantern; but he did
not start at the mention of him.

“There’s no tellin’,” he answered. “He might a-ben gettin’ ready to chuck
his pardner. He might a-pulled out in the mornin’ for parts unknown, if we
hadn’t happened along. I guess there’s just as many thieves among honest
men as there is among thieves. You read about such things in the papers,
Jim. Pardners is always knifin’ each other.”

A queer, nervous look came into the other’s eyes. Matt did not betray that
he noted it, though he said–

“What was you thinkin’ about, Jim?”

Jim was a trifle awkward for the moment.

“Nothin’,” he answered. “Only I was thinkin’ just how funny it was–all
them jools at his house. What made you ask?”

“Nothin’. I was just wonderin’, that was all.”

The silence settled down, broken by an occasional low and nervous giggle on
the part of Jim. He was overcome by the spread of gems. It was not that
he felt their beauty. He was unaware that they were beautiful in
themselves. But in them his swift imagination visioned the joys of life
they would buy, and all the desires and appetites of his diseased mind and
sickly flesh were tickled by the promise they extended. He builded
wondrous, orgy-haunted castles out of their brilliant fires, and was
appalled at what he builded. Then it was that he giggled. It was all too
impossible to be real. And yet there they blazed on the table before him,
fanning the flame of the lust of him, and he giggled again.

“I guess we might as well count ‘em,” Matt said suddenly, tearing himself
away from his own visions. “You watch me an’ see that it’s square, because
you an’ me has got to be on the square, Jim. Understand?”

Jim did not like this, and betrayed it in his eyes, while Matt did not like
what he saw in his partner’s eyes.

“Understand?” Matt repeated, almost menacingly.

“Ain’t we always ben square?” the other replied, on the defensive because
of the treachery already whispering in him.

“It don’t cost nothin’, bein’ square in hard times,” Matt retorted. “It’s
bein’ square in prosperity that counts. When we ain’t got nothin’, we
can’t help bein’ square. We’re prosperous now, an’ we’ve got to be
business men–honest business men. Understand?”

“That’s the talk for me,” Jim approved, but deep down in the meagre soul of
him,–and in spite of him,–wanton and lawless thoughts were stirring like
chained beasts.

Matt stepped to the food shelf behind the two-burner kerosene cooking
stove. He emptied the tea from a paper bag, and from a second bag emptied
some red peppers. Returning to the table with the bags, he put into them
the two sizes of small diamonds. Then he counted the large gems and
wrapped them in their tissue paper and chamois skin.

“Hundred an’ forty-seven good-sized ones,” was his inventory; “twenty real
big ones; two big boys and one whopper; an’ a couple of fistfuls of teeny
ones an’ dust.”

He looked at Jim.

“Correct,” was the response.

He wrote the count out on a slip of memorandum paper, and made a copy of
it, giving one slip to his partner and retaining the other.

“Just for reference,” he said.

Again he had recourse to the food shelf, where he emptied the sugar from a
large paper bag. Into this he thrust the diamonds, large and small,
wrapped it up in a bandanna handkerchief, and stowed it away under his
pillow. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes.

“An’ you think they’re worth a hundred thousan’?” Jim asked, pausing and
looking up from the unlacing of his shoe.

“Sure,” was the answer. “I seen a dance-house girl down in Arizona once,
with some big sparklers on her. They wasn’t real. She said if they was
she wouldn’t be dancin’. Said they’d be worth all of fifty thousan’, an’
she didn’t have a dozen of ‘em all told.”

“Who’d work for a livin’?” Jim triumphantly demanded. “Pick an’ shovel
work!” he sneered. “Work like a dog all my life, an’ save all my wages,
an’ I wouldn’t have half as much as we got tonight.”

“Dish washin’s about your measure, an’ you couldn’t get more’n twenty a
month an’ board. Your figgers is ‘way off, but your point is well taken.
Let them that likes it, work. I rode range for thirty a month when I was
young an’ foolish. Well, I’m older, an’ I ain’t ridin’ range.”

He got into bed on one side. Jim put out the light and followed him in on
the other side.

“How’s your arm feel?” Jim queried amiably.

Such concern was unusual, and Matt noted it, and replied–

“I guess there’s no danger of hydrophoby. What made you ask?”

Jim felt in himself a guilty stir, and under his breath he cursed the
other’s way of asking disagreeable questions; but aloud he answered–

“Nothin’, only you seemed scared of it at first. What are you goin’ to do
with your share, Matt?”

“Buy a cattle ranch in Arizona an’ set down an’ pay other men to ride range
for me. There’s some several I’d like to see askin’ a job from me, damn
them! An’ now you shut your face, Jim. It’ll be some time before I buy
that ranch. Just now I’m goin’ to sleep.”

But Jim lay long awake, nervous and twitching, rolling about restlessly and
rolling himself wide awake every time he dozed. The diamonds still blazed
under his eyelids, and the fire of them hurt. Matt, in spite of his heavy
nature, slept lightly, like a wild animal alert in its sleep; and Jim
noticed, every time he moved, that his partner’s body moved sufficiently to
show that it had received the impression and that it was trembling on the
verge of awakening. For that matter, Jim did not know whether or not,
frequently, the other was awake. Once, quietly, betokening complete
consciousness, Matt said to him: “Aw, go to sleep, Jim. Don’t worry about
them jools. They’ll keep.” And Jim had thought that at that particular
moment Matt had been surely asleep.

In the late morning Matt was awake with Jim’s first movement, and
thereafter he awoke and dozed with him until midday, when they got up
together and began dressing.

“I’m goin’ out to get a paper an’ some bread,” Matt said. “You boil the
coffee.”

As Jim listened, unconsciously his gaze left Matt’s face and roved to the
pillow, beneath which was the bundle wrapped in the bandanna handkerchief.
On the instant Matt’s face became like a wild beast’s.

“Look here, Jim,” he snarled. “You’ve got to play square. If you do me
dirt, I’ll fix you. Understand? I’d eat you, Jim. You know that. I’d
bite right into your throat an’ eat you like that much beefsteak.”

His sunburned skin was black with the surge of blood in it, and his
tobacco-stained teeth were exposed by the snarling lips. Jim shivered and
involuntarily cowered. There was death in the man he looked at. Only the
night before that black-faced man had killed another with his hands, and it
had not hurt his sleep. And in his own heart Jim was aware of a sneaking
guilt, of a train of thought that merited all that was threatened.

Matt passed out, leaving him still shivering. Then a hatred twisted his
own face, and he softly hurled savage curses at the door. He remembered
the jewels, and hastened to the bed, feeling under the pillow for the
bandanna bundle. He crushed it with his fingers to make certain that it
still contained the diamonds. Assured that Matt had not carried them away,
he looked toward the kerosene stove with a guilty start. Then he hurriedly
lighted it, filled the coffee-pot at the sink, and put it over the flame.

The coffee was boiling when Matt returned, and while the latter cut the
bread and put a slice of butter on the table, Jim poured out the coffee.
It was not until he sat down and had taken a few sips of the coffee, that
Matt pulled out the morning paper from his pocket.

“We was way off,” he said. “I told you I didn’t dast figger out how fat it
was. Look at that.”

He pointed to the head-lines on the first page.

“SWIFT NEMESIS ON BUJANNOFF’S TRACK,” they read. “MURDERED IN HIS SLEEP
AFTER ROBBING HIS PARTNER.”

“There you have it!” Matt cried. “He robbed his partner–robbed him like a
dirty thief.”

“Half a million of jewels missin’,” Jim read aloud. He put the paper down
and stared at Matt.

“That’s what I told you,” the latter said. “What in hell do we know about
jools? Half a million!–an’ the best I could figger it was a hundred
thousan’. Go on an’ read the rest of it.”

They read on silently, their heads side by side, the untouched coffee
growing cold; and ever and anon one or the other burst forth with some
salient printed fact.

“I’d like to seen Metzner’s face when he opened the safe at the store this
mornin’,” Jim gloated.

“He hit the high places right away for Bujannoff’s house,” Matt explained.
“Go on an’ read.”

“Was to have sailed last night at ten on the Sajoda for the South Seas–
steamship delayed by extra freight–”

“That’s why we caught ‘m in bed,” Matt interrupted. “It was just luck–
like pickin’ a fifty-to-one winner.”

“Sajoda sailed at six this mornin’–”

“He didn’t catch her,” Matt said. “I saw his alarm-clock was set at five.
That’d given ‘m plenty of time . . . only I come along an’ put the kibosh
on his time. Go on.”

“Adolph Metzner in despair–the famous Haythorne pearl necklace–
magnificently assorted pearls–valued by experts at from fifty to seventy
thousan’ dollars.”

Jim broke off to swear vilely and solemnly, concluding with, “Those damn
oyster-eggs worth all that money!”

He licked his lips and added, “They was beauties an’ no mistake.”

“Big Brazilian gem,” he read on. “Eighty thousan’ dollars–many valuable
gems of the first water–several thousan’ small diamonds well worth forty
thousan’.”

“What you don’t know about jools is worth knowin’,” Matt smiled good-
humouredly.

“Theory of the sleuths,” Jim read. “Thieves must have known–cleverly kept
watch on Bujannoff’s actions–must have learned his plan and trailed him to
his house with the fruits of his robbery–”

“Clever–hell!” Matt broke out. “That’s the way reputations is made . . .
in the noospapers. How’d we know he was robbin’ his pardner?”

“Anyway, we’ve got the goods,” Jim grinned. “Let’s look at ‘em again.”

He assured himself that the door was locked and bolted, while Matt brought
out the bundle in the bandanna and opened it on the table.

“Ain’t they beauties, though!” Jim exclaimed at sight of the pearls; and
for a time he had eyes only for them. “Accordin’ to the experts, worth
from fifty to seventy thousan’ dollars.”

“An’ women like them things,” Matt commented. “An’ they’ll do everything
to get ‘em–sell themselves, commit murder, anything.”

“Just like you an’ me.”

“Not on your life,” Matt retorted. “I’ll commit murder for ‘em, but not
for their own sakes, but for sake of what they’ll get me. That’s the
difference. Women want the jools for themselves, an’ I want the jools for
the women an’ such things they’ll get me.”

“Lucky that men an’ women don’t want the same things,” Jim remarked.

“That’s what makes commerce,” Matt agreed; “people wantin’ different
things.”

In the middle of the afternoon Jim went out to buy food. While he was
gone, Matt cleared the table of the jewels, wrapping them up as before and
putting them under the pillow. Then he lighted the kerosene stove and
started to boil water for coffee. A few minutes later, Jim returned.

“Most surprising,” he remarked. “Streets, an’ stores, an’ people just like
they always was. Nothin’ changed. An’ me walking along through it all a
millionaire. Nobody looked at me an’ guessed it.”

Matt grunted unsympathetically. He had little comprehension of the lighter
whims and fancies of his partner’s imagination.

“Did you get a porterhouse?” he demanded.

“Sure, an’ an inch thick. It’s a peach. Look at it.”

He unwrapped the steak and held it up for the other’s inspection. Then he
made the coffee and set the table, while Matt fried the steak.

“Don’t put on too much of them red peppers,” Jim warned. “I ain’t used to
your Mexican cookin’. You always season too hot.”

Matt grunted a laugh and went on with his cooking. Jim poured out the
coffee, but first, into the nicked china cup, he emptied a powder he had
carried in his vest pocket wrapped in a rice-paper. He had turned his back
for the moment on his partner, but he did not dare to glance around at him.
Matt placed a newspaper on the table, and on the newspaper set the hot
frying-pan. He cut the steak in half, and served Jim and himself.

“Eat her while she’s hot,” he counselled, and with knife and fork set the
example.

“She’s a dandy,” was Jim’s judgment, after his first mouthful. “But I tell
you one thing straight. I’m never goin’ to visit you on that Arizona
ranch, so you needn’t ask me.”

“What’s the matter now?” Matt asked.

“Hell’s the matter,” was the answer. “The Mexican cookin’ on your ranch’d
be too much for me. If I’ve got hell a-comin’ in the next life, I’m not
goin’ to torment my insides in this one. Damned peppers!”

He smiled, expelled his breath forcibly to cool his burning mouth, drank
some coffee, and went on eating the steak.

“What do you think about the next life anyway, Matt?” he asked a little
later, while secretly he wondered why the other had not yet touched his
coffee.

“Ain’t no next life,” Matt answered, pausing from the steak to take his
first sip of coffee. “Nor heaven nor hell, nor nothin’. You get all
that’s comin’ right here in this life.”

“An’ afterward?” Jim queried out of his morbid curiosity, for he knew that
he looked upon a man that was soon to die. “An’ afterward?” he repeated.

“Did you ever see a man two weeks dead?” the other asked.

Jim shook his head.

“Well, I have. He was like this beefsteak you an’ me is eatin’. It was
once steer cavortin’ over the landscape. But now it’s just meat. That’s
all, just meat. An’ that’s what you an’ me an’ all people come to–meat.”

Matt gulped down the whole cup of coffee, and refilled the cup.

“Are you scared to die?” he asked.

Jim shook his head. “What’s the use? I don’t die anyway. I pass on an’
live again–”

“To go stealin’, an’ lyin’ an’ snivellin’ through another life, an’ go on
that way forever an’ ever an’ ever?” Matt sneered.

“Maybe I’ll improve,” Jim suggested hopefully. “Maybe stealin’ won’t be
necessary in the life to come.”

He ceased abruptly, and stared straight before him, a frightened expression
on his face.

“What’s the matter!” Matt demanded.

“Nothin’. I was just wonderin’”–Jim returned to himself with an effort–
“about this dyin’, that was all.”

But he could not shake off the fright that had startled him. It was as if
an unseen thing of gloom had passed him by, casting upon him the intangible
shadow of its presence. He was aware of a feeling of foreboding.
Something ominous was about to happen. Calamity hovered in the air. He
gazed fixedly across the table at the other man. He could not understand.
Was it that he had blundered and poisoned himself? No, Matt had the nicked
cup, and he had certainly put the poison in the nicked cup.

It was all his own imagination, was his next thought. It had played him
tricks before. Fool! Of course it was. Of course something was about to
happen, but it was about to happen to Matt. Had not Matt drunk the whole
cup of coffee?

Jim brightened up and finished his steak, sopping bread in the gravy when
the meat was gone.

“When I was a kid–” he began, but broke off abruptly.

Again the unseen thing of gloom had fluttered, and his being was vibrant
with premonition of impending misfortune. He felt a disruptive influence
at work in the flesh of him, and in all his muscles there was a seeming
that they were about to begin to twitch. He sat back suddenly, and as
suddenly leaned forward with his elbows on the table. A tremor ran dimly
through the muscles of his body. It was like the first rustling of leaves
before the oncoming of wind. He clenched his teeth. It came again, a
spasmodic tensing of his muscles. He knew panic at the revolt within his
being. His muscles no longer recognized his mastery over them. Again they
spasmodically tensed, despite the will of him, for he had willed that they
should not tense. This was revolution within himself, this was anarchy;
and the terror of impotence rushed up in him as his flesh gripped and
seemed to seize him in a clutch, chills running up and down his back and
sweat starting on his brow. He glanced about the room, and all the details
of it smote him with a strange sense of familiarity. It was as though he
had just returned from a long journey. He looked across the table at his
partner. Matt was watching him and smiling. An expression of horror
spread over Jim’s face.

“My God, Matt!” he screamed. “You ain’t doped me?”

Matt smiled and continued to watch him. In the paroxysm that followed, Jim
did not become unconscious. His muscles tensed and twitched and knotted,
hurting him and crushing him in their savage grip. And in the midst of it
all, it came to him that Matt was acting queerly. He was travelling the
same road. The smile had gone from his face, and there was on it an intent
expression, as if he were listening to some inner tale of himself and
trying to divine the message. Matt got up and walked across the room and
back again, then sat down.

“You did this, Jim,” he said quietly.

“But I didn’t think you’d try to fix ME,” Jim answered reproachfully.

“Oh, I fixed you all right,” Matt said, with teeth close together and
shivering body. “What did you give me?”

“Strychnine.”

“Same as I gave you,” Matt volunteered. “It’s a hell of a mess, ain’t it?”

“You’re lyin’, Matt,” Jim pleaded. “You ain’t doped me, have you?”

“I sure did, Jim; an’ I didn’t overdose you, neither. I cooked it in as
neat as you please in your half the porterhouse.–Hold on! Where’re you
goin’?”

Jim had made a dash for the door, and was throwing back the bolts. Matt
sprang in between and shoved him away.

“Drug store,” Jim panted. “Drug store.”

“No you don’t. You’ll stay right here. There ain’t goin’ to be any
runnin’ out an’ makin’ a poison play on the street–not with all them jools
reposin’ under the pillow. Savve? Even if you didn’t die, you’d be in the
hands of the police with a whole lot of explanations comin’. Emetics is
the stuff for poison. I’m just as bad bit as you, an’ I’m goin’ to take a
emetic. That’s all they’d give you at a drug store, anyway.”

He thrust Jim back into the middle of the room and shot the bolts into
place. As he went across the floor to the food shelf, he passed one hand
over his brow and flung off the beaded sweat. It spattered audibly on the
floor. Jim watched agonizedly as Matt got the mustard-can and a cup and
ran for the sink. He stirred a cupful of mustard and water and drank it
down. Jim had followed him and was reaching with trembling hands for the
empty cup. Again Matt shoved him away. As he mixed a second cupful, he
demanded–

“D’you think one cup’ll do for me? You can wait till I’m done.”

Jim started to totter toward the door, but Matt checked him.

“If you monkey with that door, I’ll twist your neck. Savve? You can take
yours when I’m done. An’ if it saves you, I’ll twist your neck, anyway.
You ain’t got no chance, nohow. I told you many times what you’d get if
you did me dirt.”

“But you did me dirt, too,” Jim articulated with an effort.

Matt was drinking the second cupful, and did not answer. The sweat had got
into Jim’s eyes, and he could scarcely see his way to the table, where he
got a cup for himself. But Matt was mixing a third cupful, and, as before,
thrust him away.

“I told you to wait till I was done,” Matt growled. “Get outa my way.”

And Jim supported his twitching body by holding on to the sink, the while
he yearned toward the yellowish concoction that stood for life. It was by
sheer will that he stood and clung to the sink. His flesh strove to double
him up and bring him to the floor. Matt drank the third cupful, and with
difficulty managed to get to a chair and sit down. His first paroxysm was
passing. The spasms that afflicted him were dying away. This good effect
he ascribed to the mustard and water. He was safe, at any rate. He wiped
the sweat from his face, and, in the interval of calm, found room for
curiosity. He looked at his partner.

A spasm had shaken the mustard can out of Jim’s hands, and the contents
were spilled upon the floor. He stooped to scoop some of the mustard into
the cup, and the succeeding spasm doubled him upon the floor. Matt smiled.

“Stay with it,” he encouraged. “It’s the stuff all right. It’s fixed me
up.”

Jim heard him and turned toward him a stricken face, twisted with suffering
and pleading. Spasm now followed spasm till he was in convulsions, rolling
on the floor and yellowing his face and hair in the mustard.

Matt laughed hoarsely at the sight, but the laugh broke midway. A tremor
had run through his body. A new paroxysm was beginning. He arose and
staggered across to the sink, where, with probing forefinger, he vainly
strove to assist the action of the emetic. In the end, he clung to the
sink as Jim had clung, filled with the horror of going down to the floor.

The other’s paroxysm had passed, and he sat up, weak and fainting, too weak
to rise, his forehead dripping, his lips flecked with a foam made yellow by
the mustard in which he had rolled. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles,
and groans that were like whines came from his throat.

“What are you snifflin’ about?” Matt demanded out of his agony. “All you
got to do is die. An’ when you die you’re dead.”

“I . . . ain’t . . . snifflin’ . . . it’s . . . the . . . mustard . . .
stingin’ . . . my . . . eyes,” Jim panted with desperate slowness.

It was his last successful attempt at speech. Thereafter he babbled
incoherently, pawing the air with shaking arms till a fresh convulsion
stretched him on the floor.

Matt struggled back to the chair, and, doubled up on it, with his arms
clasped about his knees, he fought with his disintegrating flesh. He came
out of the convulsion cool and weak. He looked to see how it went with the
other, and saw him lying motionless.

He tried to soliloquize, to be facetious, to have his last grim laugh at
life, but his lips made only incoherent sounds. The thought came to him
that the emetic had failed, and that nothing remained but the drug store.
He looked toward the door and drew himself to his feet. There he saved
himself from falling by clutching the chair. Another paroxysm had begun.
And in the midst of the paroxysm, with his body and all the parts of it
flying apart and writhing and twisting back again into knots, he clung to
the chair and shoved it before him across the floor. The last shreds of
his will were leaving him when he gained the door. He turned the key and
shot back one bolt. He fumbled for the second bolt, but failed. Then he
leaned his weight against the door and slid down gently to the floor.

“For there’s never a law of God or man
Runs north of Fifty-three.”

Jan rolled over, clawing and kicking. He was fighting hand and
foot now, and he fought grimly, silently. Two of the three men
who hung upon him, shouted directions to each other, and strove to
curb the short, hairy devil who would not curb. The third man
howled. His finger was between Jan’s teeth.

“Quit yer tantrums, Jan, an’ ease up!” panted Red Bill, getting a
strangle-hold on Jan’s neck. “Why on earth can’t yeh hang decent
and peaceable?”

But Jan kept his grip on the third man’s finger, and squirmed over
the floor of the tent, into the pots and pans.

“Youah no gentleman, suh,” reproved Mr. Taylor, his body following
his finger, and endeavoring to accommodate itself to every jerk of
Jan’s head. “You hev killed Mistah Gordon, as brave and honorable
a gentleman as ever hit the trail aftah the dogs. Youah a
murderah, suh, and without honah.”

“An’ yer no comrade,” broke in Red Bill. “If you was, you’d hang
‘thout rampin’ around an’ roarin’. Come on, Jan, there’s a good
fellow. Don’t give us no more trouble. Jes’ quit, an’ we’ll hang
yeh neat and handy, an’ be done with it.”

“Steady, all!” Lawson, the sailorman, bawled. “Jam his head into
the bean pot and batten down.”

“But my fingah, suh,” Mr. Taylor protested.

“Leggo with y’r finger, then! Always in the way!”

“But I can’t, Mistah Lawson. It’s in the critter’s gullet, and
nigh chewed off as ‘t is.”

“Stand by for stays!” As Lawson gave the warning, Jan half lifted
himself, and the struggling quartet floundered across the tent
into a muddle of furs and blankets. In its passage it cleared the
body of a man, who lay motionless, bleeding from a bullet-wound in
the neck.

All this was because of the madness which had come upon Jan–the
madness which comes upon a man who has stripped off the raw skin
of earth and grovelled long in primal nakedness, and before whose
eyes rises the fat vales of the homeland, and into whose nostrils
steals the whiff of bay, and grass, and flower, and new-turned
soil. Through five frigid years Jan had sown the seed. Stuart
River, Forty Mile, Circle City, Koyokuk, Kotzebue, had marked his
bleak and strenuous agriculture, and now it was Nome that bore the
harvest,–not the Nome of golden beaches and ruby sands, but the
Nome of ‘97, before Anvil City was located, or Eldorado District
organized. John Gordon was a Yankee, and should have known
better. But he passed the sharp word at a time when Jan’s blood-
shot eyes blazed and his teeth gritted in torment. And because of
this, there was a smell of saltpetre in the tent, and one lay
quietly, while the other fought like a cornered rat, and refused
to hang in the decent and peacable manner suggested by his
comrades.

“If you will allow me, Mistah Lawson, befoah we go further in this
rumpus, I would say it wah a good idea to pry this hyer varmint’s
teeth apart. Neither will he bite off, nor will he let go. He
has the wisdom of the sarpint, suh, the wisdom of the sarpint.”

“Lemme get the hatchet to him!” vociferated the sailor. “Lemme
get the hatchet!” He shoved the steel edge close to Mr. Taylor’s
finger and used the man’s teeth as a fulcrum. Jan held on and
breathed through his nose, snorting like a grampus. “Steady, all!
Now she takes it!”

“Thank you, suh; it is a powerful relief.” And Mr. Taylor
proceeded to gather into his arms the victim’s wildly waving legs.

But Jan upreared in his Berserker rage; bleeding, frothing,
cursing; five frozen years thawing into sudden hell. They swayed
backward and forward, panted, sweated, like some cyclopean, many-
legged monster rising from the lower deeps. The slush-lamp went
over, drowned in its own fat, while the midday twilight scarce
percolated through the dirty canvas of the tent.

“For the love of Gawd, Jan, get yer senses back!” pleaded Red
Bill. “We ain’t goin’ to hurt yeh, ‘r kill yeh, ‘r anythin’ of
that sort. Jes’ want to hang yeh, that’s all, an’ you a-messin’
round an’ rampagin’ somethin’ terrible. To think of travellin’
trail together an’ then bein’ treated this-a way. Wouldn’t
‘bleeved it of yeh, Jan!”

“He’s got too much steerage-way. Grab holt his legs, Taylor, and
heave’m over!”

“Yes, suh, Mistah Lawson. Do you press youah weight above, after
I give the word.” The Kentuckian groped about him in the murky
darkness. “Now, suh, now is the accepted time!”

There was a great surge, and a quarter of a ton of human flesh
tottered and crashed to its fall against the side-wall. Pegs drew
and guy-ropes parted, and the tent, collapsing, wrapped the battle
in its greasy folds.

“Yer only makin’ it harder fer yerself,” Red Bill continued, at
the same time driving both his thumbs into a hairy throat, the
possessor of which he had pinned down. “You’ve made nuisance
enough a’ ready, an’ it’ll take half the day to get things
straightened when we’ve strung yeh up.”

“I’ll thank you to leave go, suh,” spluttered Mr. Taylor.

Red Bill grunted and loosed his grip, and the twain crawled out
into the open. At the same instant Jan kicked clear of the
sailor, and took to his heels across the snow.

“Hi! you lazy devils! Buck! Bright! Sic’m! Pull ‘m down!” sang
out Lawson, lunging through the snow after the fleeing man. Buck
and Bright, followed by the rest of the dogs, outstripped him and
rapidly overhauled the murderer.

There was no reason that these men should do this; no reason for
Jan to run away; no reason for them to attempt to prevent him. On
the one hand stretched the barren snow-land; on the other, the
frozen sea. With neither food nor shelter, he could not run far.
All they had to do was to wait till he wandered back to the tent,
as he inevitably must, when the frost and hunger laid hold of him.
But these men did not stop to think. There was a certain taint of
madness running in the veins of all of them. Besides, blood had
been spilled, and upon them was the blood-lust, thick and hot.
“Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, and He saith it in temperate
climes where the warm sun steals away the energies of men. But in
the Northland they have discovered that prayer is only efficacious
when backed by muscle, and they are accustomed to doing things for
themselves. God is everywhere, they have heard, but he flings a
shadow over the land for half the year that they may not find him;
so they grope in darkness, and it is not to be wondered that they
often doubt, and deem the Decalogue out of gear.

Jan ran blindly, reckoning not of the way of his feet, for he was
mastered by the verb “to live.” To live! To exist! Buck flashed
gray through the air, but missed. The man struck madly at him,
and stumbled. Then the white teeth of Bright closed on his
mackinaw jacket, and he pitched into the snow. To live! To
exist! He fought wildly as ever, the centre of a tossing heap of
men and dogs. His left hand gripped a wolf-dog by the scruff of
the back, while the arm was passed around the neck of Lawson.
Every struggle of the dog helped to throttle the hapless sailor.
Jan’s right hand was buried deep in the curling tendrils of Red
Bill’s shaggy head, and beneath all, Mr. Taylor lay pinned and
helpless. It was a deadlock, for the strength of his madness was
prodigious; but suddenly, without apparent reason, Jan loosed his
various grips and rolled over quietly on his back. His
adversaries drew away a little, dubious and disconcerted. Jan
grinned viciously.

“Mine friends,” he said, still grinning, “you haf asked me to be
politeful, und now I am politeful. Vot piziness vood you do mit
me?”

“That’s right, Jan. Be ca’m,” soothed Red Bill. “I knowed you’d
come to yer senses afore long. Jes’ be ca’m now, an’ we’ll do the
trick with neatness and despatch.”

“Vot piziness? Vot trick?”

“The hangin’. An’ yeh oughter thank yer lucky stars for havin’ a
man what knows his business. I’ve did it afore now, more’n once,
down in the States, an’ I can do it to a T.”

“Hang who? Me?”

“Yep.”

“Ha! ha! Shust hear der man speak foolishness! Gif me a hand,
Bill, und I vill get up und be hung.” He crawled stiffly to his
feet and looked about him. “Herr Gott! listen to der man! He
vood hang me! Ho! ho! ho! I tank not! Yes, I tank not!”

“And I tank yes, you swab,” Lawson spoke up mockingly, at the same
time cutting a sled-lashing and coiling it up with ominous care.
“Judge Lynch holds court this day.”

“Von liddle while.” Jan stepped back from the proffered noose.
“I haf somedings to ask und to make der great proposition.
Kentucky, you know about der Shudge Lynch?”

“Yes, suh. It is an institution of free men and of gentlemen, and
it is an ole one and time-honored. Corruption may wear the robe
of magistracy, suh, but Judge Lynch can always be relied upon to
give justice without court fees. I repeat, suh, without court
fees. Law may be bought and sold, but in this enlightened land
justice is free as the air we breathe, strong as the licker we
drink, prompt as–”

“Cut it short! Find out what the beggar wants,” interrupted
Lawson, spoiling the peroration.

“Vell, Kentucky, tell me dis: von man kill von odder man, Shudge
Lynch hang dot man?”

“If the evidence is strong enough–yes, suh.”

“An’ the evidence in this here case is strong enough to hang a
dozen men, Jan,” broke in Red Bill.

“Nefer you mind, Bill. I talk mit you next. Now von anodder ding
I ask Kentucky. If Shudge Lynch hang not der man, vot den?”

“If Judge Lynch does not hang the man, then the man goes free, and
his hands are washed clean of blood. And further, suh, our great
and glorious constitution has said, to wit: that no man may twice
be placed in jeopardy of his life for one and the same crime, or
words to that effect.”

“Unt dey can’t shoot him, or hit him mit a club over der head
alongside, or do nodings more mit him?”

“No, suh.”

“Goot! You hear vot Kentucky speaks, all you noddleheads? Now I
talk mit Bill. You know der piziness, Bill, und you hang me up
brown, eh? Vot you say?”

“‘Betcher life, an’, Jan, if yeh don’t give no more trouble ye’ll
be almighty proud of the job. I’m a connesoor.”

“You haf der great head, Bill, und know somedings or two. Und you
know two und one makes tree–ain’t it?”

Bill nodded.

“Und when you haf two dings, you haf not tree dings–ain’t it?
Now you follow mit me close und I show you. It takes tree dings
to hang. First ding, you haf to haf der man. Goot! I am der
man. Second ding, you haf to haf der rope. Lawson haf der rope.
Goot! Und tird ding, you haf to haf someding to tie der rope to.
Sling your eyes over der landscape und find der tird ding to tie
der rope to? Eh? Vot you say?”

Mechanically they swept the ice and snow with their eyes. It was
a homogeneous scene, devoid of contrasts or bold contours, dreary,
desolate, and monotonous,–the ice-packed sea, the slow slope of
the beach, the background of low-lying hills, and over all thrown
the endless mantle of snow. “No trees, no bluffs, no cabins, no
telegraph poles, nothin’,” moaned Red Bill; “nothin’ respectable
enough nor big enough to swing the toes of a five-foot man clear
o’ the ground. I give it up.” He looked yearningly at that
portion of Jan’s anatomy which joins the head and shoulders.
“Give it up,” he repeated sadly to Lawson. “Throw the rope down.
Gawd never intended this here country for livin’ purposes, an’
that’s a cold frozen fact.”

Jan grinned triumphantly. “I tank I go mit der tent und haf a
smoke.”

“Ostensiblee y’r correct, Bill, me son,” spoke up Lawson; “but y’r
a dummy, and you can lay to that for another cold frozen fact.
Takes a sea farmer to learn you landsmen things. Ever hear of a
pair of shears? Then clap y’r eyes to this.”

The sailor worked rapidly. From the pile of dunnage where they
had pulled up the boat the preceding fall, he unearthed a pair of
long oars. These he lashed together, at nearly right angles,
close to the ends of the blades. Where the handles rested he
kicked holes through the snow to the sand. At the point of
intersection he attached two guy-ropes, making the end of one fast
to a cake of beach-ice. The other guy he passed over to Red Bill.
“Here, me son, lay holt o’ that and run it out.”

And to his horror, Jan saw his gallows rise in the air. “No! no!”
he cried, recoiling and putting up his fists. “It is not goot! I
vill not hang! Come, you noddleheads! I vill lick you, all
together, von after der odder! I vill blay hell! I vill do
eferydings! Und I vill die pefore I hang!”

The sailor permitted the two other men to clinch with the mad
creature. They rolled and tossed about furiously, tearing up snow
and tundra, their fierce struggle writing a tragedy of human
passion on the white sheet spread by nature. And ever and anon a
hand or foot of Jan emerged from the tangle, to be gripped by
Lawson and lashed fast with rope-yarns. Pawing, clawing,
blaspheming, he was conquered and bound, inch by inch, and drawn
to where the inexorable shears lay like a pair of gigantic
dividers on the snow. Red Bill adjusted the noose, placing the
hangman’s knot properly under the left ear. Mr. Taylor and Lawson
tailed onto the running-guy, ready at the word to elevate the
gallows. Bill lingered, contemplating his work with artistic
appreciation.

“Herr Gott! Vood you look at it!”

The horror in Jan’s voice caused the rest to desist. The fallen
tent had uprisen, and in the gathering twilight it flapped ghostly
arms about and titubated toward them drunkenly. But the next
instant John Gordon found the opening and crawled forth.

“What the flaming–!” For the moment his voice died away in his
throat as his eyes took in the tableau. “Hold on! I’m not dead!”
he cried out, coming up to the group with stormy countenance.

“Allow me, Mistah Gordon, to congratulate you upon youah escape,”
Mr. Taylor ventured. “A close shave, suh, a powahful close
shave.”

“ Congratulate hell! I might have been dead and rotten and no
thanks to you, you–!” And thereat John Gordon delivered himself
of a vigorous flood of English, terse, intensive, denunciative,
and composed solely of expletives and adjectives.

“Simply creased me,” he went on when he had eased himself
sufficiently. “Ever crease cattle, Taylor?”

“Yes, suh, many a time down in God’s country.”

“Just so. That’s what happened to me. Bullet just grazed the
base of my skull at the top of the neck. Stunned me but no harm
done.” He turned to the bound man. “Get up, Jan. I’m going to
lick you to a standstill or you’re going to apologize. The rest
of you lads stand clear.”

“I tank not. Shust tie me loose und you see,” replied Jan, the
Unrepentant, the devil within him still unconquered. “Und after
as I lick you, I take der rest of der noddleheads, von after der
odder, altogedder!”

I was born in San Francisco in 1876. At fifteen I was a man among
men, and if I had a spare nickel I spent it on beer instead of
candy, because I thought it was more manly to buy beer. Now, when
my years are nearly doubled, I am out on a hunt for the boyhood
which I never had, and I am less serious than at any other time of
my life. Guess I’ll find that boyhood! Almost the first things I
realized were responsibilities. I have no recollection of being
taught to read or write–I could do both at the age of five–but I
know that my first school was in Alameda before I went out on a
ranch with my folks and as a ranch boy worked hard from my eighth
year.

The second school were I tried to pick up a little learning was an
irregular hit or miss affair at San Mateo. Each class sat in a
separate desk, but there were days when we did not sit at all, for
the master used to get drunk very often, and then one of the elder
boys would thrash him. To even things up, the master would then
thrash the younger lads, so you can think what sort of school it
was. There was no one belonging to me, or associated with me in any
way, who had literary tastes or ideas, the nearest I can make to it
is that my great-grandfather was a circuit writer, a Welshman, known
as “Priest” Jones in the backwoods, where his enthusiasm led him to
scatter the Gospel.

One of my earliest and strongest impressions was of the ignorance of
other people. I had read and absorbed Washington Irving’s
“Alhambra” before I was nine, but could never understand how it was
that the other ranchers knew nothing about it. Later I concluded
that this ignorance was peculiar to the country, and felt that those
who lived in cities would not be so dense. One day a man from the
city came to the ranch. He wore shiny shoes and a cloth coat, and I
felt that here was a good chance for me to exchange thoughts with an
enlightened mind. From the bricks of an old fallen chimney I had
built an Alhambra of my own; towers, terraces, and all were
complete, and chalk inscriptions marked the different sections.
Here I led the city man and questioned him about “The Alhambra,” but
he was as ignorant as the man on the ranch, and then I consoled
myself with the thought that there were only two clever people in
the world–Washington Irving and myself.

My other reading-matter at that time consisted mainly of dime
novels, borrowed from the hired men, and newspapers in which the
servants gloated over the adventures of poor but virtuous shop-
girls.

Through reading such stuff my mind was necessarily ridiculously
conventional, but being very lonely I read everything that came my
way, and was greatly impressed by Ouida’s story “Signa,” which I
devoured regularly for a couple of years. I never knew the finish
until I grew up, for the closing chapters were missing from my copy,
so I kept on dreaming with the hero, and, like him, unable to see
Nemesis, at the end. My work on the ranch at one time was to watch
the bees, and as I sat under a tree from sunrise till late in the
afternoon, waiting for the swarming, I had plenty of time to read
and dream. Livermore Valley was very flat, and even the hills
around were then to me devoid of interest, and the only incident to
break in on my visions was when I gave the alarm of swarming, and
the ranch folks rushed out with pots, pans, and buckets of water. I
think the opening line of “Signa” was “It was only a little lad,”
yet he had dreams of becoming a great musician, and having all
Europe at his feet. Well, I was only a little lad, too, but why
could not I become what “Signa” dreamed of being?

Life on a Californian ranch was then to me the dullest possible
existence, and every day I thought of going out beyond the sky-line
to see the world. Even then there were whispers, promptings; my
mind inclined to things beautiful, although my environment was
unbeautiful. The hills and valleys around were eyesores and aching
pits, and I never loved them till I left them.

Before I was eleven I left the ranch and came to Oakland, where I
spent so much of my time in the Free Public Library, eagerly reading
everything that came to hand, that I developed the first stages of
St. Vitus’ dance from lack of exercise. Disillusions quickly
followed, as I learned more of the world. At this time I made my
living as a newsboy, selling papers in the streets; and from then on
until I was sixteen I had a thousand and one different occupations–
work and school, school and work–and so it ran.

* * *

Then the adventure-lust was strong within me, and I left home. I
didn’t run, I just left–went out in the bay, and joined the oyster
pirates. The days of the oyster pirates are now past, and if I had
got my dues for piracy, I would have been given five hundred years
in prison. Later, I shipped as a sailor on a schooner, and also
took a turn at salmon fishing. Oddly enough, my next occupation was
on a fish-patrol, where I was entrusted with the arrest of any
violators of the fishing laws. Numbers of lawless Chinese, Greeks,
and Italians were at that time engaged in illegal fishing, and many
a patrolman paid his life for his interference. My only weapon on
duty was a steel table-fork, but I felt fearless and a man when I
climbed over the side of a boat to arrest some marauder.

Subsequently I shipped before the mast and sailed for the Japanese
coast on a seal-hunting expedition, later going to Behring Sea.
After sealing for seven months I came back to California and took
odd jobs at coal shovelling and longshoring and also in a jute
factory, where I worked from six in the morning until seven at
night. I had planned to join the same lot for another sealing trip
the following year, but somehow I missed them. They sailed away on
the Mary Thomas, which was lost with all hands.

In my fitful school-days I had written the usual compositions, which
had been praised in the usual way, and while working in the jute
mills I still made an occasional try. The factory occupied thirteen
hours of my day, and being young and husky, I wanted a little time
for myself, so there was little left for composition. The San
Francisco Call offered a prize for a descriptive article. My mother
urged me to try for it, and I did, taking for my subject “Typhoon
off the Coast of Japan.” Very tired and sleepy, knowing I had to be
up at half-past five, I began the article at midnight and worked
straight on until I had written two thousand words, the limit of the
article, but with my idea only half worked out. The next night,
under the same conditions, I continued, adding another two thousand
words before I finished, and then the third night I spent in cutting
out the excess, so as to bring the article within the conditions of
the contest. The first prize came to me, and the second and third
went to students of the Stanford and Berkeley Universities.

My success in the San Francisco Call competition seriously turned my
thoughts to writing, but my blood was still too hot for a settled
routine, so I practically deferred literature, beyond writing a
little gush for the Call, which that journal promptly rejected.

I tramped all through the United States, from California to Boston,
and up and down, returning to the Pacific coast by way of Canada,
where I got into jail and served a term for vagrancy, and the whole
tramping experience made me become a Socialist. Previously I had
been impressed by the dignity of labour, and, without having read
Carlyle or Kipling, I had formulated a gospel of work which put
theirs in the shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification
and salvation. The pride I took in a hard day’s work well done
would be inconceivable to you. I was as faithful a wage-slave as
ever a capitalist exploited. In short, my joyous individualism was
dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics. I had fought my way
from the open west, where men bucked big and the job hunted the man,
to the congested labour centres of the eastern states, where men
were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they were worth, and
I found myself looking upon life from a new and totally different
angle. I saw the workers in the shambles at the bottom of the
Social Pit. I swore I would never again do a hard day’s work with
my body except where absolutely compelled to, and I have been busy
ever since running away from hard bodily labour.

In my nineteenth year I returned to Oakland and started at the High
School, which ran the usual school magazine. This publication was a
weekly–no, I guess a monthly–one, and I wrote stories for it, very
little imaginary, just recitals of my sea and tramping experiences.
I remained there a year, doing janitor work as a means of
livelihood, and leaving eventually because the strain was more than
I could bear. At this time my socialistic utterances had attracted
considerable attention, and I was known as the “Boy Socialist,” a
distinction that brought about my arrest for street-talking. After
leaving the High School, in three months cramming by myself, I took
the three years’ work for that time and entered the University of
California. I hated to give up the hope of a University education
and worked in a laundry and with my pen to help me keep on. This
was the only time I worked because I loved it, but the task was too
much, and when half-way through my Freshman year I had to quit.

I worked away ironing shirts and other things in the laundry, and
wrote in all my spare time. I tried to keep on at both, but often
fell asleep with the pen in my hand. Then I left the laundry and
wrote all the time, and lived and dreamed again. After three
months’ trial I gave up writing, having decided that I was a
failure, and left for the Klondike to prospect for gold. At the end
of the year, owing to the outbreak of scurvy, I was compelled to
come out, and on the homeward journey of 1,900 miles in an open boat
made the only notes of the trip. It was in the Klondike I found
myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. You get your true
perspective. I got mine.

While I was in the Klondike my father died, and the burden of the
family fell on my shoulders. Times were bad in California, and I
could get no work. While trying for it I wrote “Down the River,”
which was rejected. During the wait for this rejection I wrote a
twenty-thousand word serial for a news company, which was also
rejected. Pending each rejection I still kept on writing fresh
stuff. I did not know what an editor looked like. I did not know a
soul who had ever published anything. Finally a story was accepted
by a Californian magazine, for which I received five dollars. Soon
afterwards “The Black Cat” offered me forty dollars for a story.

Then things took a turn, and I shall probably not have to shovel
coal for a living for some time to come, although I have done it,
and could do it again.

My first book was published in 1900. I could have made a good deal
at newspaper work; but I had sufficient sense to refuse to be a
slave to that man-killing machine, for such I held a newspaper to be
to a young man in his forming period. Not until I was well on my
feet as a magazine-writer did I do much work for newspapers. I am a
believer in regular work, and never wait for an inspiration.
Temperamentally I am not only careless and irregular, but
melancholy; still I have fought both down. The discipline I had as
a sailor had full effect on me. Perhaps my old sea days are also
responsible for the regularity and limitations of my sleep. Five
and a half hours is the precise average I allow myself, and no
circumstance has yet arisen in my life that could keep me awake when
the time comes to “turn in.”

I am very fond of sport, and delight in boxing, fencing, swimming,
riding, yachting, and even kite-flying. Although primarily of the
city, I like to be near it rather than in it. The country, though,
is the best, the only natural life. In my grown-up years the
writers who have influenced me most are Karl Marx in a particular,
and Spencer in a general, way. In the days of my barren boyhood, if
I had had a chance, I would have gone in for music; now, in what are
more genuinely the days of my youth, if I had a million or two I
would devote myself to writing poetry and pamphlets. I think the
best work I have done is in the “League of the Old Men,” and parts
of “The Kempton-Wace Letters.” Other people don’t like the former.
They prefer brighter and more cheerful things. Perhaps I shall feel
like that, too, when the days of my youth are behind me.

“The black will never understand the white, nor the white the black, as long
as black is black and white is white.”

So said Captain Woodward. We sat in the parlor of Charley Roberts’ pub in
Apia, drinking long Abu Hameds compounded and shared with us by the aforesaid
Charley Roberts, who claimed the recipe direct from Stevens, famous for having
invented the Abu Hamed at a time when he was spurred on by Nile thirst–the
Stevens who was responsible for “With Kitchener to Kartoun,” and who passed
out at the siege of Ladysmith.

Captain Woodward, short and squat, elderly, burned by forty years of tropic
sun, and with the most beautiful liquid brown eyes I ever saw in a man, spoke
from a vast experience. The crisscross of scars on his bald pate bespoke a
tomahawk intimacy with the black, and of equal intimacy was the advertisement,
front and rear, on the right side of his neck, where an arrow had at one time
entered and been pulled clean through. As he explained, he had been in a hurry
on that occasion–the arrow impeded his running–and he felt that he could not
take the time to break off the head and pull out the shaft the way it had come
in. At the present moment he was commander of the Savaii, the big steamer that
recruited labor from the westward for the German plantations on Samoa.

“Half the trouble is the stupidity of the whites,” said Roberts, pausing to
take a swig from his glass and to curse the Samoan bar-boy in affectionate
terms. “If the white man would lay himself out a bit to understand the
workings of the black man’s mind, most of the messes would be avoided.”

“I’ve seen a few who claimed they understood niggers,” Captain Woodward
retorted, “and I always took notice that they were the first to be kai-kai’d
(eaten). Look at the missionaries in New Guinea and the New Hebrides–the
martyr isle of Erromanga and all the rest. Look at the Austrian expedition
that was cut to pieces in the Solomons, in the bush of Guadalcanar. And look
at the traders themselves, with a score of years’ experience, making their
brag that no nigger would ever get them, and whose heads to this day are
ornamenting the rafters of the canoe houses. There was old Johnny
Simons–twenty-six years on the raw edges of Melanesia, swore he knew the
niggers like a book and that they’d never do for him, and he passed out at
Marovo Lagoon, New Georgia, had his head sawed off by a black Mary (woman) and
an old nigger with only one leg, having left the other leg in the mouth of a
shark while diving for dynamited fish. There was Billy Watts, horrible
reputation as a nigger killer, a man to scare the devil. I remember lying at
Cape Little, New Ireland you know, when the niggers stole half a case of
trade-tobacco–cost him about three dollars and a half. In retaliation he
turned out, shot six niggers, smashed up their war canoes and burned two
villages. And it was at Cape Little, four years afterward, that he was jumped
along with fifty Buku boys he had with him fishing beche-de-mer. In five
minutes they were all dead, with the exception of three boys who got away in a
canoe. Don’t talk to me about understanding the nigger. The white man’s
mission is to farm the world, and it’s a big enough job cut out for him. What
time has he got left to understand niggers anyway?”

“Just so,” said Roberts. “And somehow it doesn’t seem necessary, after all, to
understand the niggers. In direct proportion to the white man’s stupidity is
his success in farming the world–”

“And putting the fear of God into the nigger’s heart,” Captain Woodward
blurted out. “Perhaps you’re right, Roberts. Perhaps it’s his stupidity that
makes him succeed, and surely one phase of his stupidity is his inability to
understand the niggers. But there’s one thing sure, the white has to run the
niggers whether he understands them or not. It’s inevitable. It’s fate.”

“And of course the white man is inevitable–it’s the niggers’ fate,” Roberts
broke in. “Tell the white man there’s pearl shell in some lagoon infested by
ten-thousand howling cannibals, and he’ll head there all by his lonely, with
half a dozen kanaka divers and a tin alarm clock for chronometer, all packed
like sardines on a commodious, five-ton ketch. Whisper that there’s a gold
strike at the North Pole, and that same inevitable white-skinned creature will
set out at once, armed with pick and shovel, a side of bacon, and the latest
patent rocker–and what’s more, he’ll get there. Tip it off to him that
there’s diamonds on the red-hot ramparts of hell, and Mr. White Man will storm
the ramparts and set old Satan himself to pick-and-shovel work. That’s what
comes of being stupid and inevitable.”

“But I wonder what the black man must think of the–the inevitableness,” I
said.

Captain Woodward broke into quiet laughter. His eyes had a reminiscent gleam.

“I’m just wondering what the niggers of Malu thought and still must be
thinking of the one inevitable white man we had on board when we visited them
in the Duchess,” he explained.

Roberts mixed three more Abu Hameds.

“That was twenty years ago. Saxtorph was his name. He was certainly the most
stupid man I ever saw, but he was as inevitable as death. There was only one
thing that chap could do, and that was shoot. I remember the first time I ran
into him–right here in Apia, twenty years ago. That was before your time,
Roberts. I was sleeping at Dutch Henry’s hotel, down where the market is now.
Ever heard of him? He made a tidy stake smuggling arms in to the rebels, sold
out his hotel, and was killed in Sydney just six weeks afterward in a saloon
row.

“But Saxtorph. One night I’d just got to sleep, when a couple of cats began to
sing in the courtyard. It was out of bed and up window, water jug in hand. But
just then I heard the window of the next room go up. Two shots were fired, and
the window was closed. I fail to impress you with the celerity of the
transaction. Ten seconds at the outside. Up went the window, bang bang went
the revolver, and down went the window. Whoever it was, he had never stopped
to see the effect of his shots. He knew. Do you follow me?–he knew. There was
no more cat concert, and in the morning there lay the two offenders, stone
dead. It was marvelous to me. It still is marvelous. First, it was starlight,
and Saxtorph shot without drawing a bead; next, he shot so rapidly that the
two reports were like a double report; and finally, he knew he had hit his
marks without looking to see.

“Two days afterward he came on board to see me. I was mate, then, on the
Duchess, a whacking big one-hundred-and fifty-ton schooner, a blackbirder. And
let me tell you that blackbirders were blackbirders in those days. There
weren’t any government protection for us, either. It was rough work, give and
take, if we were finished, and nothing said, and we ran niggers from every
south sea island they didn’t kick us off from. Well, Saxtorph came on board,
John Saxtorph was the name he gave. He was a sandy little man, hair sandy,
complexion sandy, and eyes sandy, too. Nothing striking about him. His soul
was as neutral as his color scheme. He said he was strapped and wanted to ship
on board. Would go cabin boy, cook, supercargo, or common sailor. Didn’t know
anything about any of the billets, but said that he was willing to learn. I
didn’t want him, but his shooting had so impressed me that I took him as
common sailor, wages three pounds per month.

“He was willing to learn all right, I’ll say that much. But he was
constitutionally unable to learn anything. He could no more box the compass
than I could mix drinks like Roberts here. And as for steering, he gave me my
first gray hairs. I never dared risk him at the wheel when we were running in
a big sea, while full-and-by and close-and-by were insoluble mysteries.
Couldn’t ever tell the difference between a sheet and a tackle, simply
couldn’t. The fore-throat-jig and the jib-jig were all one to him. Tell him to
slack off the mainsheet, and before you know it, he’d drop the peak. He fell
overboard three times, and he couldn’t swim. But he was always cheerful, never
seasick, and he was the most willing man I ever knew. He was an
uncommunicative soul. Never talked about himself. His history, so far as we
were concerned, began the day he signed on the Duchess. Where he learned to
shoot, the stars alone can tell. He was a Yankee–that much we knew from the
twang in his speech. And that was all we ever did know.

“And now we begin to get to the point. We had bad luck in the New Hebrides,
only fourteen boys for five weeks, and we ran up before the southeast for the
Solomons. ‘malaita, then as now, was good recruiting ground, and we ran into
Malu, on the northwestern corner. There’s a shore reef and an outer reef, and
a mighty nervous anchorage; but we made it all right and fired off our
dynamite as a signal to the niggers to come down and be recruited. In three
days we got not a boy. The niggers came off to us in their canoes by hundreds,
but they only laughed when we showed them beads and calico and hatchets and
talked of the delights of plantation work in Samoa.

“On the fourth day there came a change. Fifty-odd boys signed on and were
billeted in the main-hold, with the freedom of the deck, of course. And of
course, looking back, this wholesale signing on was suspicious, but at the
time we thought some powerful chief had removed the ban against recruiting.
The morning of the fifth day our two boats went ashore as usual–one to cover
the other, you know, in case of trouble. And, as usual, the fifty niggers on
board were on deck, loafing, talking, smoking, and sleeping. Saxtorph and
myself, along with four other sailors, were all that were left on board. The
two boats were manned with Gilbert Islanders. In the one were the captain, the
supercargo, and the recruiter. In the other, which was the covering boat and
which lay off shore a hundred yards, was the second mate. Both boats were
well-armed, though trouble was little expected.

“Four of the sailors, including Saxtorph, were scraping the poop rail. The
fifth sailor, rifle in hand, was standing guard by the water-tank just for’ard
of the mainmast. I was for’ard, putting in the finishing licks on a new jaw
for the fore-gaff. I was just reaching for my pipe where I had laid it down,
when I heard a shot from shore. I straightened up to look. Something struck me
on the back of the head, partially stunning me and knocking me to the deck.
‘my first thought was that something had carried away aloft; but even as I
went down, and before I struck the deck, I heard the devil’s own tattoo of
rifles from the boats, and twisting sidewise, I caught a glimpse of the sailor
who was standing guard. Two big niggers were holding his arms, and a third
nigger from behind was braining him with a tomahawk.

“I can see it now, the water-tank, the mainmast, the gang hanging on to him,
the hatchet descending on the back of his head, and all under the blazing
sunlight. I was fascinated by that growing vision of death. The tomahawk
seemed to take a horribly long time to come down. I saw it land, and the man’s
legs give under him as he crumpled. The niggers held him up by sheer strength
while he was hacked a couple of times more. Then I got two more hacks on the
head and decided that I was dead. So did the brute that was hacking me. I was
too helpless to move, and I lay there and watched them removing the sentry’s
head. I must say they did it slick enough. They were old hands at the
business.

“The rifle firing from the boats had ceased, and I made no doubt that they
were finished off and that the end had come to everything. It was only a
matter of moments when they would return for my head. They were evidently
taking the heads from the sailors aft. Heads are valuable on Malaita,
especially white heads. They have the place of honor in the canoe houses of
the salt-water natives. What particular decorative effect the bushmen get out
of them I didn’t know, but they prize them just as much as the salt-water
crowd.

“I had a dim notion of escaping, and I crawled on hands and knees to the
winch, where I managed to drag myself to my feet. From there I could look aft
and see three heads on top the cabin–the heads of three sailors I had given
orders to for months. The niggers saw me standing, and started for me. I
reached for my revolver, and found they had taken it. I can’t say that I was
scared. I’ve been near to death several times, but it never seemed easier than
right then. I was half-stunned, and nothing seemed to matter.

“The leading nigger had armed himself with a cleaver from the galley, and he
grimaced like an ape as he prepared to slice me down. But the slice was never
made. He went down on the deck all of a heap, and I saw the blood gush from
his mouth. In a dim way I heard a rifle go off and continue to go off. Nigger
after nigger went down. ‘my senses began to clear, and I noted that there was
never a miss. Every time that the rifle went off a nigger dropped. I sat down
on deck beside the winch and looked up. Perched in the crosstrees was
Saxtorph. How he had managed it I can’t imagine, for he had carried up with
him two Winchesters and I don’t know how many bandoliers of ammunition; and he
was now doing the one only thing in this world that he was fitted to do.

“I’ve seen shooting and slaughter, but I never saw anything like that. I sat
by the winch and watched the show. I was weak and faint, and it seemed to be
all a dream. Bang, bang, bang, bang, went his rifle, and thud, thud, thud,
thud, went the niggers to the deck. It was amazing to see them go down. After
their first rush to get me, when about a dozen had dropped, they seemed
paralyzed; but he never left off pumping his gun. By this time canoes and the
two boats arrived from shore, armed with Sniders, and with Winchesters which
they had captured in the boats. The fusillade they let loose on Saxtorph was
tremendous. Luckily for him the niggers are only good at close range. They are
not used to putting the gun to their shoulders. They wait until they are right
on top of a man, and then they shoot from the hip. When his rifle got too hot,
Saxtorph changed off. That had been his idea when he carried two rifles up
with him.

“The astounding thing was the rapidity of his fire. Also, he never made a
miss. If ever anything was inevitable, that man was. It was the swiftness of
it that made the slaughter so appalling. The niggers did not have time to
think. When they did manage to think, they went over the side in a rush,
capsizing the canoes of course. Saxtorph never let up. The water was covered
with them, and plump, plump, plump, he dropped his bullets into them. Not a
single miss, and I could hear distinctly the thud of every bullet as it buried
in human flesh.

“The niggers spread out and headed for the shore, swimming. The water was
carpeted with bobbing heads, and I stood up, as in a dream, and watched it
all–the bobbing heads and the heads that ceased to bob. Some of the long
shots were magnificent. Only one man reached the beach, but as he stood up to
wade ashore, Saxtorph got him. It was beautiful. And when a couple of niggers
ran down to drag him out of the water, Saxtorph got them, too.

“I thought everything was over then, when I heard the rifle go off again. A
nigger had come out of the cabin companion on the run for the rail and gone
down in the middle of it. The cabin must have been full of them. I counted
twenty. They came up one at a time and jumped for the rail. But they never got
there. It reminded me of trapshooting. A black body would pop out of the
companion, bang would go Saxtorph’s rifle, and down would go the black body.
Of course, those below did not know what was happening on deck, so they
continued to pop out until the last one was finished off.

“Saxtorph waited a while to make sure, and then came down on deck. He and I
were all that were left of the Duchess’s complement, and I was pretty well to
the bad, while he was helpless now that the shooting was over. Under my
direction he washed out my scalp wounds and sewed them up. A big drink of
whiskey braced me to make an effort to get out. There was nothing else to do.
All the rest were dead. We tried to get up sail, Saxtorph hoisting and I
holding the turn. He was once more the stupid lubber. He couldn’t hoist worth
a cent, and when I fell in a faint, it looked all up with us.

“When I came to, Saxtorph was sitting helplessly on the rail, waiting to ask
me what he should do. I told him to overhaul the wounded and see if there were
any able to crawl. He gathered together six. One, I remember, had a broken
leg; but Saxtorph said his arms were all right. I lay in the shade, brushing
the flies off and directing operations, while Saxtorph bossed his hospital
gang. I’ll be blessed if he didn’t make those poor niggers heave at every rope
on the pin-rails before he found the halyards. One of them let go the rope in
the midst of the hoisting and slipped down to the deck dead; but Saxtorph
hammered the others and made them stick by the job. When the fore and main
were up, I told him to knock the shackle out of the anchor chain and let her
go. I had had myself helped aft to the wheel, where I was going to make a
shift at steering. I can’t guess how he did it, but instead of knocking the
shackle out, down went the second anchor, and there we were doubly moored.

“In the end he managed to knock both shackles out and raise the staysail and
jib, and the Duchess filled away for the entrance. Our decks were a
spectacle. Dead and dying niggers were everywhere. They were wedged away some
of them in the most inconceivable places. The cabin was full of them where
they had crawled off the deck and cashed in. I put Saxtorph and his graveyard
gang to work heaving them overside, and over they went, the living and the
dead. The sharks had fat pickings that day. Of course our four murdered
sailors went the same way. Their heads, however, we put in a sack with
weights, so that by no chance should they drift on the beach and fall into the
hands of the niggers.

“Our five prisoners I decided to use as crew, but they decided otherwise. They
watched their opportunity and went over the side. Saxtorph got two in mid-air
with his revolver, and would have shot the other three in the water if I
hadn’t stopped him. I was sick of the slaughter, you see, and besides, they’d
helped work the schooner out. But it was mercy thrown away, for the sharks got
the three of them.

“I had brain fever or something after we got clear of the land. Anyway, the
Duchess lay hove to for three weeks, when I pulled myself together and we
jogged on with her to Sydney. Anyway those niggers of Malu learned the
everlasting lesson that it is not good to monkey with a white man. In their
case, Saxtorph was certainly inevitable.”

Charley Roberts emitted a long whistle and said:

“Well I should say so. But whatever became of Saxtorph?”

“He drifted into seal hunting and became a crackerjack. For six years he was
high line of both the Victoria and San Francisco fleets. The seventh year his
schooner was seized in Bering Sea by a Russian cruiser, and all hands, so the
talk went, were slammed into the Siberian salt mines. At least I’ve never
heard of him since.”

“Farming the world,” Roberts muttered. “Farming the world. Well here’s to
them. Somebody’s got to do it–farm the world, I mean.”

Captain Woodward rubbed the criss-crosses on his bald head.

“I’ve done my share of it,” he said. “Forty years now. This will be my last
trip. Then I’m going home to stay.”

“I’ll wager the wine you don’t,” Roberts challenged. “You’ll die in the
harness, not at home.”

Captain Woodward promptly accepted the bet, but personally I think Charley
Roberts has the best of it.

When a man journeys into a far country, he must
be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to
acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new
land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and
oftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct
has hitherto been shaped. To those who have the protean faculty
of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source
of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts
in which they were created, the pressure of the altered
environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spirit
under the new restrictions which they do not understand. This
chafing is bound to act and react, producing divers evils and
leading to various misfortunes. It were better for the man who
cannot fit himself to the new groove to return to his own
country; if he delay too long, he will surely die.

The man who turns his back upon the comforts of an elder
civilization, to face the savage youth, the primordial simplicity
of the North, may estimate success at an inverse ratio to the
quantity and quality of his hopelessly fixed habits. He will
soon discover, if he be a fit candidate, that the material habits
are the less important. The exchange of such things as a dainty
menu for rough fare, of the stiff leather shoe for the soft,
shapeless moccasin, of the feather bed for a couch in the snow,
is after all a very easy matter. But his pinch will come in
learning properly to shape his mind’s attitude toward all
things, and especially toward his fellow man. For the courtesies
of ordinary life, he must substitute unselfishness, forbearance,
and tolerance. Thus, and thus only, can he gain that pearl of
great price–true comradeship. He must not say ‘thank you’; he
must mean it without opening his mouth, and prove it by
responding in kind. In short, he must substitute the deed for the
word, the spirit for the letter.

When the world rang with the tale of Arctic gold, and the lure of
the North gripped the heartstrings of men, Carter Weatherbee
threw up his snug clerkship, turned the half of his savings over
to his wife, and with the remainder bought an outfit. There was
no romance in his nature–the bondage of commerce had crushed all
that; he was simply tired of the ceaseless grind, and wished to
risk great hazards in view of corresponding returns. Like many
another fool, disdaining the old trails used by the Northland
pioneers for a score of years, he hurried to Edmonton in the
spring of the year; and there, unluckily for his soul’s welfare,
he allied himself with a party of men.

There was nothing unusual about this party, except its plans.
Even its goal, like that of all the other parties, was the
Klondike. But the route it had mapped out to attain that goal
took away the breath of the hardiest native, born and bred to the
vicissitudes of the Northwest. Even Jacques Baptiste, born of a
Chippewa woman and a renegade voyageur (having raised his first
whimpers in a deerskin lodge north of the sixty-fifth parallel,
and had the same hushed by blissful sucks of raw tallow), was
surprised. Though he sold his services to them and agreed to
travel even to the never-opening ice, he shook his head ominously
whenever his advice was asked.

Percy Cuthfert’s evil star must have been in the ascendant, for
he, too, joined this company of argonauts. He was an ordinary
man, with a bank account as deep as his culture, which is saying
a good deal. He had no reason to embark on such a venture–no
reason in the world save that he suffered from an abnormal
development of sentimentality. He mistook this for the true
spirit of romance and adventure. Many another man has done the
like, and made as fatal a mistake.

The first break-up of spring found the party following the
ice-run of Elk River. It was an imposing fleet, for the outfit
was large, and they were accompanied by a disreputable contingent
of half-breed voyageurs with their women and children. Day in and
day out, they labored with the bateaux and canoes, fought
mosquitoes and other kindred pests, or sweated and swore at the
portages. Severe toil like this lays a man naked to the very
roots of his soul, and ere Lake Athabasca was lost in the south,
each member of the party had hoisted his true colors.

The two shirks and chronic grumblers were Carter Weatherbee and
Percy Cuthfert. The whole party complained less of its aches and
pains than did either of them. Not once did they volunteer for
the thousand and one petty duties of the camp. A bucket of water
to be brought, an extra armful of wood to be chopped, the dishes
to be washed and wiped, a search to be made through the outfit
for some suddenly indispensable article–and these two effete
scions of civilization discovered sprains or blisters requiring
instant attention.

They were the first to turn in at night, with score of tasks yet
undone; the last to turn out in the morning, when the start
should be in readiness before the breakfast was begun.

They were the first to fall to at mealtime, the last to have a
hand in the cooking; the first to dive for a slim delicacy, the
last to discover they had added to their own another man’s share.
If they toiled at the oars, they slyly cut the water at each
stroke and allowed the boat’s momentum to float up the blade.
They thought nobody noticed; but their comrades swore under their
breaths and grew to hate them, while Jacques Baptiste sneered
openly and damned them from morning till night. But Jacques
Baptiste was no gentleman.

At the Great Slave, Hudson Bay dogs were purchased, and the fleet
sank to the guards with its added burden of dried fish and
pemican. Then canoe and bateau answered to the swift current of
the Mackenzie, and they plunged into the Great Barren Ground.
Every likely-looking ‘feeder’ was prospected, but the elusive
‘pay-dirt’ danced ever to the north. At the Great Bear, overcome
by the common dread of the Unknown Lands, their voyageurs began
to desert, and Fort of Good Hope saw the last and bravest bending
to the towlines as they bucked the current down which they had so
treacherously glided.

Jacques Baptiste alone remained. Had he not sworn to travel even
to the never-opening ice? The lying charts, compiled in main from
hearsay, were now constantly consulted.

And they felt the need of hurry, for the sun had already passed
its northern solstice and was leading the winter south again.
Skirting the shores of the bay, where the Mackenzie disembogues
into the Arctic Ocean, they entered the mouth of the Little Peel
River. Then began the arduous up-stream toil, and the two
Incapables fared worse than ever. Towline and pole, paddle and
tumpline, rapids and portages–such tortures served to give the
one a deep disgust for great hazards, and printed for the other a
fiery text on the true romance of adventure. One day they waxed
mutinous, and being vilely cursed by Jacques Baptiste, turned, as
worms sometimes will. But the half-breed thrashed the twain, and
sent them, bruised and bleeding, about their work. It was the
first time either had been manhandled.

Abandoning their river craft at the headwaters of the Little
Peel, they consumed the rest of the summer in the great portage
over the Mackenzie watershed to the West Rat. This little stream
fed the Porcupine, which in turn joined the Yukon where that
mighty highway of the North countermarches on the Arctic Circle.

But they had lost in the race with winter, and one day they tied
their rafts to the thick eddy-ice and hurried their goods ashore.
That night the river jammed and broke several times; the
following morning it had fallen asleep for good. ‘We can’t be
more’n four hundred miles from the Yukon,’ concluded Sloper,
multiplying his thumb nails by the scale of the map. The
council, in which the two Incapables had whined to excellent
disadvantage, was drawing to a close.

‘Hudson Bay Post, long time ago. No use um now.’ Jacques
Baptiste’s father had made the trip for the Fur Company in the
old days, incidentally marking the trail with a couple of frozen
toes.

Sufferin’ cracky!’ cried another of the party. ‘No whites?’ ‘Nary
white,’ Sloper sententiously affirmed; ‘but it’s only five
hundred more up the Yukon to Dawson. Call it a rough thousand
from here.’ Weatherbee and Cuthfert groaned in chorus.

‘How long’ll that take, Baptiste?’ The half-breed figured for a
moment. ‘Workum like hell, no man play out,
tentwenty–forty–fifty days. Um babies come’ (designating the
Incapables), ‘no can tell. Mebbe when hell freeze over; mebbe not
then.’ The manufacture of snowshoes and moccasins ceased.
Somebody called the name of an absent member, who came out of an
ancient cabin at the edge of the campfire and joined them. The
cabin was one of the many mysteries which lurk in the vast
recesses of the North. Built when and by whom, no man could tell.

Two graves in the open, piled high with stones, perhaps contained
the secret of those early wanderers. But whose hand had piled the
stones? The moment had come. Jacques Baptiste paused in the
fitting of a harness and pinned the struggling dog in the snow.
The cook made mute protest for delay, threw a handful of bacon
into a noisy pot of beans, then came to attention. Sloper rose to
his feet. His body was a ludicrous contrast to the healthy
physiques of the Incapables. Yellow and weak, fleeing from a
South American fever-hole, he had not broken his flight across
the zones, and was still able to toil with men. His weight was
probably ninety pounds, with the heavy hunting knife thrown in,
and his grizzled hair told of a prime which had ceased to be. The
fresh young muscles of either Weatherbee or Cuthfert were equal
to ten times the endeavor of his; yet he could walk them into the
earth in a day’s journey. And all this day he had whipped his
stronger comrades into venturing a thousand miles of the stiffest
hardship man can conceive. He was the incarnation of the unrest
of his race, and the old Teutonic stubbornness, dashed with the
quick grasp and action of the Yankee, held the flesh in the
bondage of the spirit.

‘All those in favor of going on with the dogs as soon as the ice
sets, say ay.’ ‘Ay!’ rang out eight voices–voices destined to
string a trail of oaths along many a hundred miles of pain.

‘Contrary minded?’ ‘No!’ For the first time the Incapables were
united without some compromise of personal interests.

‘And what are you going to do about it?’ Weatherbee added
belligerently.

‘Majority rule! Majority rule!’ clamored the rest of the party.

‘I know the expedition is liable to fall through if you don’t
come,’ Sloper replied sweetly; ‘but I guess, if we try real hard,
we can manage to do without you.

What do you say, boys?’ The sentiment was cheered to the echo.

‘But I say, you know,’ Cuthfert ventured apprehensively; ‘what’s
a chap like me to do?’

‘Ain’t you coming with us.’ ‘No–o.’ ‘Then do as you damn well
please. We won’t have nothing to say.’ ‘Kind o’ calkilate yuh
might settle it with that canoodlin’ pardner of yourn,’ suggested
a heavy-going Westerner from the Dakotas, at the same time
pointing out Weatherbee. ‘He’ll be shore to ask yuh what yur
a-goin’ to do when it comes to cookin’ an’ gatherin’ the wood.’
‘Then we’ll consider it all arranged,’ concluded Sloper.

‘We’ll pull out tomorrow, if we camp within five miles–just to
get everything in running order and remember if we’ve forgotten
anything.’ The sleds groaned by on their steel- shod runners, and
the dogs strained low in the harnesses in which they were born to
die.

Jacques Baptiste paused by the side of Sloper to get a last
glimpse of the cabin. The smoke curled up pathetically from the
Yukon stovepipe. The two Incapables were watching them from the
doorway.

Sloper laid his hand on the other’s shoulder.

‘Jacques Baptiste, did you ever hear of the Kilkenny cats?’ The
half-breed shook his head.

‘Well, my friend and good comrade, the Kilkenny cats fought till
neither hide, nor hair, nor yowl, was left. You understand?–till
nothing was left. Very good.

Now, these two men don’t like work. They’ll be all alone in that
cabin all wintera mighty long, dark winter. Kilkenny cats–well?’
The Frenchman in Baptiste shrugged his shoulders, but the Indian
in him was silent. Nevertheless, it was an eloquent shrug,
pregnant with prophecy. Things prospered in the little cabin at
first. The rough badinage of their comrades had made Weatherbee
and Cuthfert conscious of the mutual responsibility which had
devolved upon them; besides, there was not so much work after all
for two healthy men. And the removal of the cruel whiphand, or in
other words the bulldozing half-breed, had brought with it a
joyous reaction. At first, each strove to outdo the other, and
they performed petty tasks with an unction which would have
opened the eyes of their comrades who were now wearing out bodies
and souls on the Long Trail.

All care was banished. The forest, which shouldered in upon them
from three sides, was an inexhaustible woodyard. A few yards from
their door slept the Porcupine, and a hole through its winter
robe formed a bubbling spring of water, crystal clear and
painfully cold. But they soon grew to find fault with even that.
The hole would persist in freezing up, and thus gave them many a
miserable hour of ice-chopping. The unknown builders of the cabin
had extended the sidelogs so as to support a cache at the rear.
In this was stored the bulk of the party’s provisions.

Food there was, without stint, for three times the men who were
fated to live upon it. But the most of it was the kind which
built up brawn and sinew, but did not tickle the palate.

True, there was sugar in plenty for two ordinary men; but these
two were little else than children. They early discovered the
virtues of hot water judiciously saturated with sugar, and they
prodigally swam their flapjacks and soaked their crusts in the
rich, white syrup.

Then coffee and tea, and especially the dried fruits, made
disastrous inroads upon it. The first words they had were over
the sugar question. And it is a really serious thing when two
men, wholly dependent upon each other for company, begin to
quarrel.

Weatherbee loved to discourse blatantly on politics, while
Cuthfert, who had been prone to clip his coupons and let the
commonwealth jog on as best it might, either ignored the subject
or delivered himself of startling epigrams. But the clerk was too
obtuse to appreciate the clever shaping of thought, and this
waste of ammunition irritated Cuthfert.

He had been used to blinding people by his brilliancy, and it
worked him quite a hardship, this loss of an audience. He felt
personally aggrieved and unconsciously held his muttonhead
companion responsible for it.

Save existence, they had nothing in common–came in touch on no
single point.

Weatherbee was a clerk who had known naught but clerking all his
life; Cuthfert was a master of arts, a dabbler in oils, and had
written not a little. The one was a lower-class man who
considered himself a gentleman, and the other was a gentleman who
knew himself to be such. From this it may be remarked that a man
can be a gentleman without possessing the first instinct of true
comradeship. The clerk was as sensuous as the other was
aesthetic, and his love adventures, told at great length and
chiefly coined from his imagination, affected the supersensitive
master of arts in the same way as so many whiffs of sewer gas. He
deemed the clerk a filthy, uncultured brute, whose place was in
the muck with the swine, and told him so; and he was reciprocally
informed that he was a milk-andwater sissy and a cad. Weatherbee
could not have defined ‘cad’ for his life; but it satisfied its
purpose, which after all seems the main point in life.

Weatherbee flatted every third note and sang such songs as ‘The
Boston Burglar’ and ‘the Handsome Cabin Boy,’ for hours at a
time, while Cuthfert wept with rage, till he could stand it no
longer and fled into the outer cold. But there was no escape. The
intense frost could not be endured for long at a time, and the
little cabin crowded them–beds, stove, table, and all–into a
space of ten by twelve. The very presence of either became a
personal affront to the other, and they lapsed into sullen
silences which increased in length and strength as the days went
by. Occasionally, the flash of an eye or the curl of a lip got
the better of them, though they strove to wholly ignore each
other during these mute periods.

And a great wonder sprang up in the breast of each, as to how God
had ever come to create the other.

With little to do, time became an intolerable burden to them.
This naturally made them still lazier. They sank into a physical
lethargy which there was no escaping, and which made them rebel
at the performance of the smallest chore. One morning when it was
his turn to cook the common breakfast, Weatherbee rolled out of
his blankets, and to the snoring of his companion, lighted first
the slush lamp and then the fire. The kettles were frozen hard,
and there was no water in the cabin with which to wash. But he
did not mind that. Waiting for it to thaw, he sliced the bacon
and plunged into the hateful task of bread-making. Cuthfert had
been slyly watching through his half-closed lids.

Consequently there was a scene, in which they fervently blessed
each other, and agreed, henceforth, that each do his own
cooking. A week later, Cuthfert neglected his morning ablutions,
but none the less complacently ate the meal which he had cooked.
Weatherbee grinned. After that the foolish custom of washing
passed out of their lives.

As the sugar-pile and other little luxuries dwindled, they began
to be afraid they were not getting their proper shares, and in
order that they might not be robbed, they fell to gorging
themselves. The luxuries suffered in this gluttonous contest, as
did also the men.

In the absence of fresh vegetables and exercise, their blood
became impoverished, and a loathsome, purplish rash crept over
their bodies. Yet they refused to heed the warning.

Next, their muscles and joints began to swell, the flesh turning
black, while their mouths, gums, and lips took on the color of
rich cream. Instead of being drawn together by their misery, each
gloated over the other’s symptoms as the scurvy took its course.

They lost all regard for personal appearance, and for that
matter, common decency. The cabin became a pigpen, and never once
were the beds made or fresh pine boughs laid underneath. Yet they
could not keep to their blankets, as they would have wished; for
the frost was inexorable, and the fire box consumed much fuel.
The hair of their heads and faces grew long and shaggy, while
their garments would have disgusted a ragpicker. But they did not
care. They were sick, and there was no one to see; besides, it
was very painful to move about.

To all this was added a new trouble–the Fear of the North. This
Fear was the joint child of the Great Cold and the Great Silence,
and was born in the darkness of December, when the sun dipped
below the horizon for good. It affected them according to their
natures.

Weatherbee fell prey to the grosser superstitions, and did his
best to resurrect the spirits which slept in the forgotten
graves. It was a fascinating thing, and in his dreams they came
to him from out of the cold, and snuggled into his blankets, and
told him of their toils and troubles ere they died. He shrank
away from the clammy contact as they drew closer and twined their
frozen limbs about him, and when they whispered in his ear of
things to come, the cabin rang with his frightened shrieks.
Cuthfert did not understand- for they no longer spoke–and when
thus awakened he invariably grabbed for his revolver. Then he
would sit up in bed, shivering nervously, with the weapon trained
on the unconscious dreamer. Cuthfert deemed the man going mad,
and so came to fear for his life.

His own malady assumed a less concrete form. The mysterious
artisan who had laid the cabin, log by log, had pegged a
wind-vane to the ridgepole. Cuthfert noticed it always pointed
south, and one day, irritated by its steadfastness of purpose, he
turned it toward the east. He watched eagerly, but never a breath
came by to disturb it. Then he turned the vane to the north,
swearing never again to touch it till the wind did blow. But the
air frightened him with its unearthly calm, and he often rose in
the middle of the night to see if the vane had veered–ten
degrees would have satisfied him. But no, it poised above him as
unchangeable as fate.

His imagination ran riot, till it became to him a fetish.
Sometimes he followed the path it pointed across the dismal
dominions, and allowed his soul to become saturated with the
Fear. He dwelt upon the unseen and the unknown till the burden of
eternity appeared to be crushing him. Everything in the
Northland had that crushing effect–the absence of life and
motion; the darkness; the infinite peace of the brooding land;
the ghastly silence, which made the echo of each heartbeat a
sacrilege; the solemn forest which seemed to guard an awful,
inexpressible something, which neither word nor thought could
compass.

The world he had so recently left, with its busy nations and
great enterprises, seemed very far away. Recollections
occasionally obtruded–recollections of marts and galleries and
crowded thoroughfares, of evening dress and social functions, of
good men and dear women he had known–but they were dim memories
of a life he had lived long centuries agone, on some other
planet. This phantasm was the Reality. Standing beneath the
wind- vane, his eyes fixed on the polar skies, he could not bring
himself to realize that the Southland really existed, that at
that very moment it was a-roar with life and action.

There was no Southland, no men being born of women, no giving and
taking in marriage.

Beyond his bleak skyline there stretched vast solitudes, and
beyond these still vaster solitudes.

There were no lands of sunshine, heavy with the perfume of
flowers. Such things were only old dreams of paradise. The
sunlands of the West and the spicelands of the East, the smiling
Arcadias and blissful Islands of the Blest–ha! ha! His laughter
split the void and shocked him with its unwonted sound. There was
no sun.

This was the Universe, dead and cold and dark, and he its only
citizen. Weatherbee? At such moments Weatherbee did not count. He
was a Caliban, a monstrous phantom, fettered to him for untold
ages, the penalty of some forgotten crime.

He lived with Death among the dead, emasculated by the sense of
his own insignificance, crushed by the passive mastery of the
slumbering ages. The magnitude of all things appalled him.
Everything partook of the superlative save himself–the perfect
cessation of wind and motion, the immensity of the snow-covered
wildness, the height of the sky and the depth of the silence.
That wind-vaneif it would only move. If a thunderbolt would fall,
or the forest flare up in flame.

The rolling up of the heavens as a scroll, the crash of
Doom–anything, anything! But no, nothing moved; the Silence
crowded in, and the Fear of the North laid icy fingers on his
heart.

Once, like another Crusoe, by the edge of the river he came upon
a track–the faint tracery of a snowshoe rabbit on the delicate
snow-crust. It was a revelation.

There was life in the Northland. He would follow it, look upon
it, gloat over it.

He forgot his swollen muscles, plunging through the deep snow in
an ecstasy of anticipation. The forest swallowed him up, and the
brief midday twilight vanished; but he pursued his quest till
exhausted nature asserted itself and laid him helpless in the
snow.

There he groaned and cursed his folly, and knew the track to be
the fancy of his brain; and late that night he dragged himself
into the cabin on hands and knees, his cheeks frozen and a
strange numbness about his feet. Weatherbee grinned
malevolently, but made no offer to help him. He thrust needles
into his toes and thawed them out by the stove. A week later
mortification set in.

But the clerk had his own troubles. The dead men came out of
their graves more frequently now, and rarely left him, waking or
sleeping. He grew to wait and dread their coming, never passing
the twin cairns without a shudder. One night they came to him in
his sleep and led him forth to an appointed task. Frightened into
inarticulate horror, he awoke between the heaps of stones and
fled wildly to the cabin. But he had lain there for some time,
for his feet and cheeks were also frozen.

Sometimes he became frantic at their insistent presence, and
danced about the cabin, cutting the empty air with an axe, and
smashing everything within reach.

During these ghostly encounters, Cuthfert huddled into his
blankets and followed the madman about with a cocked revolver,
ready to shoot him if he came too near.

But, recovering from one of these spells, the clerk noticed the
weapon trained upon him.

His suspicions were aroused, and thenceforth he, too, lived in
fear of his life. They watched each other closely after that, and
faced about in startled fright whenever either passed behind the
other’s back. The apprehensiveness became a mania which
controlled them even in their sleep. Through mutual fear they
tacitly let the slush-lamp burn all night, and saw to a plentiful
supply of bacon-grease before retiring. The slightest movement on
the part of one was sufficient to arouse the other, and many a
still watch their gazes countered as they shook beneath their
blankets with fingers on the trigger- guards.

What with the Fear of the North, the mental strain, and the
ravages of the disease, they lost all semblance of humanity,
taking on the appearance of wild beasts, hunted and desperate.
Their cheeks and noses, as an aftermath of the freezing, had
turned black.

Their frozen toes had begun to drop away at the first and second
joints. Every movement brought pain, but the fire box was
insatiable, wringing a ransom of torture from their miserable
bodies. Day in, day out, it demanded its food–a veritable pound
of flesh–and they dragged themselves into the forest to chop
wood on their knees. Once, crawling thus in search of dry sticks,
unknown to each other they entered a thicket from opposite sides.

Suddenly, without warning, two peering death’s-heads confronted
each other. Suffering had so transformed them that recognition
was impossible. They sprang to their feet, shrieking with terror,
and dashed away on their mangled stumps; and falling at the
cabin’s door, they clawed and scratched like demons till they
discovered their mistake.

Occasionally they lapsed normal, and during one of these sane
intervals, the chief bone of contention, the sugar, had been
divided equally between them. They guarded their separate sacks,
stored up in the cache, with jealous eyes; for there were but a
few cupfuls left, and they were totally devoid of faith in each
other.

But one day Cuthfert made a mistake. Hardly able to move, sick
with pain, with his head swimming and eyes blinded, he crept into
the cache, sugar canister in hand, and mistook Weatherbee’s sack
for his own.

January had been born but a few days when this occurred. The sun
had some time since passed its lowest southern declination, and
at meridian now threw flaunting streaks of yellow light upon the
northern sky. On the day following his mistake with the sugarbag,
Cuthfert found himself feeling better, both in body and in
spirit. As noontime drew near and the day brightened, he dragged
himself outside to feast on the evanescent glow, which was to him
an earnest of the sun’s future intentions. Weatherbee was also
feeling somewhat better, and crawled out beside him. They propped
themselves in the snow beneath the moveless windvane, and waited.

The stillness of death was about them. In other climes, when
nature falls into such moods, there is a subdued air of
expectancy, a waiting for some small voice to take up the broken
strain. Not so in the North. The two men had lived seeming eons
in this ghostly peace.

They could remember no song of the past; they could conjure no
song of the future. This unearthly calm had always been–the
tranquil silence of eternity.

Their eyes were fixed upon the north. Unseen, behind their backs,
behind the towering mountains to the south, the sun swept toward
the zenith of another sky than theirs. Sole spectators of the
mighty canvas, they watched the false dawn slowly grow. A faint
flame began to glow and smoulder. It deepened in intensity,
ringing the changes of reddish- yellow, purple, and saffron. So
bright did it become that Cuthfert thought the sun must surely be
behind it–a miracle, the sun rising in the north! Suddenly,
without warning and without fading, the canvas was swept clean.
There was no color in the sky. The light had gone out of the day.

They caught their breaths in half-sobs. But lo! the air was
aglint with particles of scintillating frost, and there, to the
north, the wind-vane lay in vague outline of the snow.

A shadow! A shadow! It was exactly midday. They jerked their
heads hurriedly to the south. A golden rim peeped over the
mountain’s snowy shoulder, smiled upon them an instant, then
dipped from sight again.

There were tears in their eyes as they sought each other. A
strange softening came over them. They felt irresistibly drawn
toward each other. The sun was coming back again. It would be
with them tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

And it would stay longer every visit, and a time would come when
it would ride their heaven day and night, never once dropping
below the skyline. There would be no night.

The ice-locked winter would be broken; the winds would blow and
the forests answer; the land would bathe in the blessed sunshine,
and life renew.

Hand in hand, they would quit this horrid dream and journey back
to the Southland. They lurched blindly forward, and their hands
met–their poor maimed hands, swollen and distorted beneath their
mittens.

But the promise was destined to remain unfulfilled. The
Northland is the Northland, and men work out their souls by
strange rules, which other men, who have not journeyed into far
countries, cannot come to understand.

An hour later, Cuthfert put a pan of bread into the oven, and
fell to speculating on what the surgeons could do with his feet
when he got back. Home did not seem so very far away now.
Weatherbee was rummaging in the cache. Of a sudden, he raised a
whirlwind of blasphemy, which in turn ceased with startling
abruptness. The other man had robbed his sugar-sack. Still,
things might have happened differently, had not the two dead men
come out from under the stones and hushed the hot words in his
throat. They led him quite gently from the cache, which he forgot
to close. That consummation was reached; that something they had
whispered to him in his dreams was about to happen. They guided
him gently, very gently, to the woodpile, where they put the axe
in his hands.

Then they helped him shove open the cabin door, and he felt sure
they shut it after him- at least he heard it slam and the latch
fall sharply into place. And he knew they were waiting just
without, waiting for him to do his task.

‘Carter! I say, Carter!’ Percy Cuthfert was frightened at the
look on the clerk’s face, and he made haste to put the table
between them.

Carter Weatherbee followed, without haste and without enthusiasm.
There was neither pity nor passion in his face, but rather the
patient, stolid look of one who has certain work to do and goes
about it methodically.

‘I say, what’s the matter?’

The clerk dodged back, cutting off his retreat to the door, but
never opening his mouth.

‘I say, Carter, I say; let’s talk. There’s a good chap.’ The
master of arts was thinking rapidly, now, shaping a skillful
flank movement on the bed where his Smith & Wesson lay. Keeping
his eyes on the madman, he rolled backward on the bunk, at the
same time clutching the pistol.

‘Carter!’ The powder flashed full in Weatherbee’s face, but he
swung his weapon and leaped forward. The axe bit deeply at the
base of the spine, and Percy Cuthfert felt all consciousness of
his lower limbs leave him. Then the clerk fell heavily upon him,
clutching him by the throat with feeble fingers. The sharp bite
of the axe had caused Cuthfert to drop the pistol, and as his
lungs panted for release, he fumbled aimlessly for it among the
blankets. Then he remembered. He slid a hand up the clerk’s belt
to the sheath-knife; and they drew very close to each other in
that last clinch.

Percy Cuthfert felt his strength leave him. The lower portion of
his body was useless, The inert weight of Weatherbee crushed
him–crushed him and pinned him there like a bear under a trap.
The cabin became filled with a familiar odor, and he knew the
bread to be burning. Yet what did it matter? He would never need
it. And there were all of six cupfuls of sugar in the cache–if
he had foreseen this he would not have been so saving the last
several days. Would the wind-vane ever move? Why not’ Had he not
seen the sun today? He would go and see. No; it was impossible to
move. He had not thought the clerk so heavy a man.

How quickly the cabin cooled! The fire must be out. The cold was
forcing in.

It must be below zero already, and the ice creeping up the inside
of the door. He could not see it, but his past experience enabled
him to gauge its progress by the cabin’s temperature. The lower
hinge must be white ere now. Would the tale of this ever reach
the world? How would his friends take it? They would read it over
their coffee, most likely, and talk it over at the clubs. He
could see them very clearly, ‘Poor Old Cuthfert,’

they murmured; ‘not such a bad sort of a chap, after all.’ He
smiled at their eulogies, and passed on in search of a Turkish
bath. It was the same old crowd upon the streets.

Strange, they did not notice his moosehide moccasins and tattered
German socks! He would take a cab. And after the bath a shave
would not be bad. No; he would eat first.

Steak, and potatoes, and green things how fresh it all was! And
what was that? Squares of honey, streaming liquid amber! But why
did they bring so much? Ha! ha! he could never eat it all.

Shine! Why certainly. He put his foot on the box. The bootblack
looked curiously up at him, and he remembered his moosehide
moccasins and went away hastily.

Hark! The wind-vane must be surely spinning. No; a mere singing
in his ears.

That was all–a mere singing. The ice must have passed the latch
by now. More likely the upper hinge was covered. Between the
moss-chinked roof-poles, little points of frost began to appear.
How slowly they grew! No; not so slowly. There was a new one, and
there another. Two–three–four; they were coming too fast to
count. There were two growing together. And there, a third had
joined them.

Why, there were no more spots. They had run together and formed a
sheet.

Well, he would have company. If Gabriel ever broke the silence of
the North, they would stand together, hand in hand, before the
great White Throne. And God would judge them, God would judge
them!

Then Percy Cuthfert closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep.