King Cophetua of Klondyke

by Roy Norton

 

King Cophetua
of Klondyke

By Roy Norton

Illustrated by P. V. E. Ivory

I never heard that yarn about King Cophetua, or whatever his name was, until last night; you remember, it was about the rich old boy who had no use for women until he fell in love with a beggar girl. It struck me as a right smart story and someway reminded me of the summer-garden girl and Bill McLean, although he was n't much of a king to look at and had n't much to recommend him when it came to this graceful, fol-de-rol-de-da love-making stuff. you read about but never find. I knew him out on the Big Divide so long ago I'm ashamed to tell the year for fear you 'll wonder how I've wasted so much time. However, we tied up together on a dead one for a season, drifted apart, forgot each other, and then met again on Chilkoot Pass, where men were thicker than fleas on a dog and not half as well satisfied; but this is n't one of those eat-em-up-quick Alaska tales, so that part don't amount to anything.

It's enough that we helped each other along in that summer of '97, whipsawed together, put our outfit in a boat together, shot the rapids together, and after much poling, paddling, and swearing landed in Dawson together to find that about everything that looked good had been plastered so thick with location notices that a man wondered where all the paper came from. Bill was n't the kind to be down on his luck very long and I was n't either. I got a lay—yes, that's it, a share lease—on a piece of likely lookin' ground and went to work. Lost track of Bill. Did n't see him for a few weeks. Then one night, just about the time the sun ought to have set but hadn't, I climbed over a row of dumps on the creek I was workin' on and saw a six foot two man, a little gray around the temples and wearin' an old white hat, stickin' stakes on the hillside, and says I to myself, “that's Billy McLean and he's gone loco.” Naturally I stopped and yelled at him.

“Anything the matter with your head?” I said.

He looked around at me as if he was ready to fight, his eyebrows pulled into a straight line and his jaw poked out. When he saw it was me he grinned, pushed in another stake, pounded it down with a boulder, shoved his hat back, wiped off his forehead, and climbed down into the gulch. It took about five minutes.

“Nope,” he said, as if it had taken all that time to make up his mind. “Nope, nothin 's the matter with me, old pard; only I'm so plumb disgusted at not ownin' anything in this ole blasted country that I 've staked the first piece of ground that didn't have nothin' on it, and I'm callin' it a bench claim.”

“Humph!” I answered; that being all I thought.

We kind of looked at each other a while and then I gave him a sack of tobacco—he had papers—and we smoked some.

“Anything in it?” I asked him, more by way of encouragement than curiousness, being sure beforehand there was n't.

“Don't know,” he said, staring at the ash on his cigarette and then up at me, his gray eyes blank as a goat's.

And again I said “Humph!” not caring to say more because I did n't want to discourage him. I'm telling you this part so's you can see how a smart man like me can be a fool once in a while, when everything don't look just the way he's been used to.

“You don't think much of it, Hank?” he asked, soft like, and I said I did n't think it was worth anything; that the willows down in the creek did n't grow the right way to suit me, and that I never saw a bench claim in my life with pieces of hungry quartz float that was n't hoodoed. But he did n't seem to mind. I tried to get him to come and work with me but he said he had n't worked much for other men and was too old to learn—a sentiment which I understood and liked him for. Besides, I did n't need any help anyhow just then.

“All right,” I says; “All right!”—and having wasted so much time in genteel conversation, shook his hand, after he'd wiped the clay off on his overalls, and humped it on down into Dawson.

That was the last time I saw him for about two months—until the winter had settled in, with the rains falling, and undecided half the time whether to be sleet, snow, or water. I was down at the A. C. trading-post one day, laying in some more grub stuff I wanted, when a feller came in and sat down on a canned-goods' box and began to talk. Said he was representing outside capital. Most every feller up there was, and there were so many capitalists with patched overalls who could n't get money enough to take the last boat out that I calculated about all the money in the world was represented right there in Klondyke; but this man didn't look like most of 'em. He was from Chicago all right—you can tell 'em by their whiskers and fetlocks. I sat around without sayin' anything till he opened up on me.

“They say you and Bill McLean are old-time partners.”

I said “Yes,” and went on smoking.

Well, it turned out that this tenderfoot had real money in his pocket, instead of seventeen billons of dollars “back in the States,” and that he was thinking of buying Number Four. When I heard that, I sicked him on to Bill McLean and hurried away for fear I couldn't keep my face straight. And all the way back to my shack and for days afterwards, I kept thinking of Bill's good luck and hoping he had soaked that checbaco hard.

Before I saw Bill again the winter had cinched up, frozen the pine-trees to the heart, made the birches so icy that they would snap an ax-blade, and the mercury bottle hanging outside my cabin door looked as if it would never thaw again. Everything was so dead still that you could hear your own thoughts talking loud like an excited man's voice. Then one day, in all this white stillness, after I'd windlassed more than a hundred buckets and piled them on the dump, Bill McLean came climbing over its frosted edge.

“Hank,” he said, “I've sold my claim and I'm goin' out on the first boat unless I can get away sooner.”

“Where did you find your victim?” I asked, pretending not to know.

He looked kind of ashamed and leaned on the off standard of the windlass. Just then the feller down in the shaft yells “All clear,” so I called back for him to jimmy up the ladder, put in another fire, and Bill and me went up to my cabin, where he sat down and began to look more contented.

“I sold to the cbecbaco,” he says. “But beforehand I showed him all I'd taken out, told him I had n't found pay, that there might be nothin' in it, and that he was probably losin' money.”

I sat with my mouth open and said to myself, “Here's an infant that needs somebody to give him advice.”

“But he wanted it just the same,” Bill went on, “and offered me ten thousand cash.”

“You took it?” I asked, jumping up and throwing my hat on the bunk. “Of course you took it?” I was so elated over his good luck I was prepared to yell.

“No,” he said after a while, “I did n't. I did n't want to bunco him.”

I got my hat and put it back on my head. I could n't say a word. I was so mad I could n't speak. For a whole minute I had to hold myself to keep from being the fool-killer and starting in on William McLean.

“But you said you sold!” I found breath to say after I'd kind of recovered my senses.

“Yes, I sold to him. Told him if he wanted to give me two thousand cash—knowing all there was to know—he could take the claim, and pay me forty-eight thousand more next August if he decided by that time he wanted it. And he took me up.”

I leaned over and laughed—one of those kind of laughs a man gives when he's so mad he can't laugh any deeper than his collar-band and does it to show his contempt for the feller he's laughing at. Bill sat and looked at me with an unwrinkled face.

“Hank,” he said, very sober, “you would n't have done different, would you? You would n't have told him you knew there was pay in the claim when after several months' work you had n't found any and had half made up your mind there was n't? You would n't have taken all his money and given him no chance—would you?”

That was getting a little might too close to home. I know it seems foolish, but I had to admit to myself I did n't think I would. I did n't tell him so, though I said, “Bet vour mukluks I would!” He only laughed and said, “Bet your mukluks you would n't.

So we dropped it and Billy McLean stayed in my cabin all night, me giving him my bunk because he'd walked so far and not because I really wanted to, and then he went away. He did n't wait for the boat, and a note told me he'd mushed out with the mail-carrier, so I did n't get to see him again. I kept putting in fires and windlassing, tallying the buckets on the pay-dump, and waiting for spring to come. It came at last, and all the snow-banks on the hillside gurgled and googled underneath the crust, and the sun got hotter and the days longer, and the buds came out and the camp-robbers had lots of other birds for company, and everything was jumping with life. The water began to run in the creeks, the old Yukon to grumble and groan, and the dumps to thaw, and I was too busy to think much about Bill McLean or Number Four on the bench.

I had a big clean-up. When I lifted the riffles from the sluice-boxes they would be full of gold. I filled moose hide bags with it. I got nervous when I thought how much I'd taken out. I buried it under the slabs of the cabin floor. I piled it in the fir boughs of my bunk. And most of all I thanked the Lord I'd made enough to put in a plant on a little property I had down in California, where the mercury don't freeze and I could make a living with less work—something my old rheumatic bones had cried for for more than fifteen years. I got my claim-owner up and we together weighed the dust on the gold scales, giving him good weight and wanting him to take a little more, which he refused. So the winter was over and my lay closed.

Well, I got the first boat out. Went down to St. Michaels, where there were more than a thousand chechacos coming in—and all wanting me to tell them where they could go and dig out a few thousand pounds of gold in a few thousand minutes—ducked clear of them, slept with Billy Blatchford in his room behind the A. C. post, and then caught the St. Paul down to Seattle, where I saw my boxes up to the United States Assay Office, got the money in the bank, stopped at a hotel that had gilt stuff all around the grub room—where gents with full-dress suits stood in rows behind me, waiting to see if they could brush a fly off my back—and met real-estate agents who explained to me how I ought to invest my money, and then—I met Bill again.

I came down into the big place they called the rotunda one evening after supper and there saw something that looked familiar. It was settled down sort of awkwardly into one of those big, deep, leather arrangements with polished arms. It had on a black slouch hat and a red necktie that was of that sensible kind tied by the man that makes 'em and all you have to do is to slip a metal thing into place and hook her on—you know the kind? Handy, ain't they? What was I saying? Oh, yes!—and a pair of store-made boots with the trousers pulled down over them and—you've guessed it—that was Bill.

“Hello,” he says with a grin.

Being polite and not having seen him for a long time, I said “Hello” too.

“Been waiting for you,” he says, after we'd sat quiet for a while, because we did n't either of us have anything to say after that first trade of “hellos.”

“So?” I says. “What's up?”

I was interested. I didn't know but what he was broke and began to wonder how I could give him money without hurting his feelings.

“Bill wasn't the kind to be down on his luck very long.”

“Want to show you something,” he goes ahead, stumbling over his words like a boy speaking a piece at school when his daddy's ridden four miles over the range to hear him. “Want your advice—want you to come along with me.”

It was evening and the electric lights were shining outside. I don't like to run around a great big city like Seattle after sundown. I ain't afraid out on the range, even if there's a million Sioux on the war-path; but I do get gun-shy when I'm in a place where everything, from a sandbagger to a street-car, sneaks up and tries to kill you whenever you step outside after dark. Once there was a policeman told me I'd better hire a nurse and—but that's another story. Anyhow, I could n't get out of going with Bill McLean that night.

We acted like a pair of stage-robbers. We pulled our hats down over our eyes and I went up-stairs and examined my Colts before I started. He took me around and around through streets until I was all tangled up and had crossed my trail a hundred times; and then we went into a summer-garden sort of place, where there were lots of lights, a stage at the end, palm-trees in pots, little arbors and tables, and a night-shift of plug-uglys serving things to drink to men in swallow-tailed coats and more shirt-front than I've ever worn. Mighty pretty woman in there too. Bill said there'd be more after the shows let out. Anyway, it looked pretty topnotchy to a feller just out of Alaska—something like the pictures in magazines where all the men folks look very clean and strong and all the women very beautiful and happy. We slid into one of the arbor places, in the darkest corner we could find, so people would n't be ashamed to be seen with us.

“Well?” I says—because he hadn't told me nothin' on the way. “Well?”

A waiter cantered up and bowed to him.

“Hello, boy,” Bill said—just like that—and the waiter seemed right glad to meet him. He laughed. Bill slipped him a silver dollar. The waiter was more interested than ever. I could see without spectacles that Bill looked right good to him.

“I 'll see,” he said, as if they'd been talking all the time, “I think the orchestra is coming pretty soon.” He looked at a big tin watch. “Half an hour before the overture, sir.

And then he went away. Bill laughed at me, because I suppose I looked like a man that had lost his way and forgotten his name. Pretty soon a freckle-faced girl of about twenty-five, hand made, copper plated, a timber-set high and clean looking, came in and then I knew all about it. I'm old but it did n't give me much pain to look at her. She called Bill “Willy!” What do you think of that! I laughed. she looked at me as if wondering what reservation I'd broken loose from and whether the Indian agents were after me. He introduced me.

“I'm real pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Marguerite Smith,” I said, feeling the necessity for being polite, and to show her that even if I was from the backwoods I knew what was what and how to meet a lady. I knocked my chair over with my boot-heel when I sat down, and the waiter picked it up—me, too! Hang it all!—I can't see why I always tangle my feet and hands when 1'm around women folks.

Bill—“Willy”—grinned at her like a baboon in a circus, and they kind of lost me in the shuffle, for which I did n't pine away so's you could notice. They talked till a feller came along and said she must go. I did n't say anything when she left and Bill—“Willy—watched her go with a self-satisfied look, as much as to say—“Ain't I in society all right? Ain't I the flossy old sour dough?”

The orchestra struck up and she was part of it. It was all made up of ladies—twenty of 'em—all dressed in white just like she was. She played the piano—and, I want to tell you right here, she could beat it to a bunch of scrap ivory and a few kindlings for a camp-fire. But there was another girl that had black hair—done up like this—who looked like heaven to me, and who stood up in front and played the fiddle—but that ain't got anything to do with the story either.

“Well?” I said, after a time, when the music had stopped and there was nothin' doing except another girl giving those little high, trilly-illy yelps that some folks call singing, but which ain't in it with real music like “My Mother Was a Lady,” or some of those things like “Dad's the Engineer.” “Well?” I says.

Bill looked at me quite thoughtfully and leaned his arm on the table. There was a puddle of lemonade on it and I told him he'd have to get his elbow scoured.

“What do you think of her?” he says.

“She's a nineteen-ounce nugget in the bottom of the pan,” I answered trying to look enthusiastic.

“She's going to marry me,” he announced in the tone of voice a man uses when he speaks of his dead mother or the sister he has n't seen in twenty years.

“The devil she is!” I said, wanting to be sympathetic and genteel.

“Yes,” he said, still softer, “she has promised.”

I thought it over for a while and although, as I say, I'm an old man, and don't know much about women, and am afraid of 'em, I thought I ought to caution him, and that I'd do it in a way that would n't leave him any undue suspicions or be unkind to Miss Marguerite Smith. So I told him what happened to Kentucky Jones, who made a stake, married a girl in a variety show in Juneau, and then, after she'd left and carelessly taken all his money with her, found out she had seventeen other husbands all alive, all from the mining-camps, and all busted when she got through with them. I say I did n't want to hurt his affections or be unfair to Marguerite, so I merely told him about Kentucky Jones.

We sat for a long time and he did n't say much. We ate ice-cream because we were n't used to it. I bought two cigars that cost a quarter each. And then after a while we went back to the hotel.

Bill's voice was a little soft when we settled down for a talk. There was no one to hear except a clerk who was sticking things on a board, and Bill sat for several minutes before he opened up and told me all about her. You see he had got a letter which made it look as if Number Four would be taken and he had told Marguerite all about it. Oh, yes, the whole thing! How when he got it he'd give most of it to her, together with a home and a horse and buggy and himself; what a fine husband he was going to make, and all that sort of rot! Of course she'd done considerable in the explanation line too—they always do. Told him she'd come West to meet her brother, who died before she got there, and so had to play in an orchestra to make an honest living. Same old story, you know—same old brother—same old honest living.

The lights were so low that he couldn't see my face to know that I thought he was a bigger sucker than the man that had bought his claim; but I was too tired to say much.

“A nineteen-ounce nugget in the bottom of the pan”

“Bill,” I said, when he stopped talking after an hour or so, “I ain't got nothin' against her except that she's got blonde hair. That's the same for lookings that Kentucky drew a blank on. Just think it over before you get your forty-eight thousand, because I 've noticed that blonde hair and money are a bad combination, and the whole West is full of men who are broke now because sometime or another they 've been a trifle color-blind.””

Then I went to bed, hoping he'd wake up before choosing a running mate from a summer-garden orchestra. And he did wake up all right—when the next boat came in from the North, bringing the capitalist that had taken Number Four. Bill meets him in the biggest hotel in Seattle and is told that after working six men all winter they 've decided not to take the claim—so sorry, and so forth—and they give back the deeds.

And Bill? Bill comes out into the sunlight and things don't look right. He don't look right. I'm waitin' outside to meet him. His hands tremble when he tears up the useless scraps of paper. He can't see well and pulls his hat down over his eyes so people won't know he's a man whose dreams have become—just dreams. Won't know there's no more Marguerite Smith, nor lights, nor music, and nothin' left but to go back to the mines and try again. That's the way it looks to him; and I, being old, am sorry. I can't talk for a while, then I offer him half of what I've got—not because I'm a liberal man, because I ain't—but for the reason that you can't go back on old pardners. He refuses, and I stand on the street corner and watch him go away in the crowd with his hat still over his eyes.

Two nights later he came to me and I 'll swear I never saw a game man, such as I knew Bill McLean to be, look more down and out. He was a rag. He looked like the fag end of a desert trip where grub and water had both run shy.

“Hank,” he says, “I 've been a fool. I 've spent most of the two thousand I had. Sent a thousand to a sister that fell when she was little and—well—that don't matter—but—I ain't got money enough left to go back to Number Four, which is all I have. The other day you—you—What I'd like is to borrow enough to—”

I didn't let him finish. I could n't—his voice hurt me. I'm not a sympathetic man, so I can't stand such things. I hate people that feel blubbery, so I had to shut him off to keep from feeling that way myself.

“Shut up,” I said. “Your jaw wags all the time when you know it ain't no use,” and then I went over to the desk and got an envelope I had in the safe. He would n't take no more than fifteen hundred dollars. Wanted to give me a note, which, being a good business man, I would n't take because I don't take no chances of having fool pieces of paper around that you lose or forget. I told him to take all he wanted and forget all about it or never pay me back till he struck it rich.

Well, he took the long smoke trail the next morning. I went down to see him off and felt lonesome there on Schwabacher's Wharf, when the steamer swung out into the sound with him leaning over the stern rail, his hat still jammed over his eyes, and his cigar clinched between his teeth and gone out until it was just a black stub held tight as if it was the last hope. I was sorry I had n't gone along because somehow it all called to me again—that North where there's so much to do and so much to fight against and so much that is honest and to be loved.

I found the way to the concert garden, or whatever you call it, that night, and sneaked off into the same corner where we'd sat the other time I'd been there. She was playing the piano as usual, all the girls in white as usual, and came down to where I sat when they hung up the card that said “Intermission.” She was white faced and dry eyed. She moistened her lips before she spoke. “Hates to lose the money,” I said to myself. She leaned over toward me, her blonde hair catching the light from outside and her hands clutched together. I sat stiff and straight with my new Stetson pulled low and watched her, hating her and most everything else all the time.

“He's gone. He's gone!” she said.

I nodded my head and folded my arms, still looking at her. She went on without stopping.

“Gone without seeing me and without saying good-by. He wrote me a note that they had not taken his claim, that he was broke, that he could n't reasonably expect me to remember all that had been said, and that I was released. And to-night I found out that he had gone!”

I leaned over the edge of the table and looked at her and somehow thought she was n't quite what I had taken her for. I started to say something but my tongue felt thick and I gulped. I banged my fist on the table to hide what I was feeling and yelled to a passing waiter—“Here, boy! Bring me something to drink and be alive about it!”

Then I felt better. She sat and stared at me and I noticed she had drawn back and was twisting a little white handkerchief she had between her fingers to a bunch of rags.

“Ah!” she said—“you are so brutal—so unfeeling! How can I tell you! Yet I have no other hope.”

Once more she stooped over toward me. The lights in front brightened and the orchestra, tired of waiting for her, began again—some soft thing that sounded like the wail of an Inuit widow on fields of cold, hard snow. A party from a theater close by came in—women with rustling silken things, swan bordered, over half-bared shoulders, and men who looked more in place there than I, who am old, weather-beaten, awkward, and rough. They glanced at her, careless like, as if she were n't worth noticing; but I, old, weather-beaten, awkward, and rough, began to think she was. I looked at her again and waited for her to speak.

“He did n't tell me where he was going,” she said. “He kept even that from me because—because—he loved me.”

I would have said something but she laid her hand across on my outstretched arm.

“I must know where he has gone!”

It jarred me. It muddled me. I began to see things different. I began to wonder what made this yellow-headed girl of a concert garden so different from those other women with the swan-bordered cloaks and the one who had gone away with Kentucky Jones's money. I knew all of a sudden that I did n't know anything after all, and that my greatest ignorance was of hearts.

“But you know he's busted?” I said, shoving my face over till it was almost in front of hers. “You know he ain't got a chance in a thousand to make a stake? You don't know—but I 'll tell you—that I lent him money to pay his way back up there where it's cold and hard; where there is n't much to eat and the nights are long; where the Malmutes howl to the stars because they're cold and hungry, and where hundreds of good men are lost because they think that even God's forgotten them. You know that?”

“Yes, I know it all!” Her eyes met mine as squarely as if she were a man and unafraid.

“Then why do you want to know? What do you care? Is Billy McLean, busted, as much to you as Billy McLean who expected to be rich and was happy in thinking of the things he would do for you?”

She stood up and glared at me and I think it was with contempt. She had stopped twisting her handkerchief and the shreds dropped from her fingers.

“More,” she said, “a thousand times more! Did you believe I ever thought of his money? Did you think that of me?—of me? Are you a blackguard—like so many others who come into this garden—who believe all women gage men by what their pockets hold?”

I felt ashamed. I asked her to sit down again; and then when she suddenly gave in and leaned her head over on her arms and sobbed, I could have killed the party outside the arbor place that gawped at us as if no old man with a white hat had ever sat before a crying woman with a blonde head before. A waiter looked at us and hurried away. I knew without seeing that he was whispering to the manager, who came a moment later.

“Miss Marguerite Smith,” I said, “has chucked up her job. She ain't goin' to play in your orchestra no more. She's startin' North to-morrow with me, because I'm goin' to take her to the man she's goin' to marry and who 'll be waitin' for her. And by the way—if you don't like it, you can go plumb straight to that other place, for all I care!”

And that's how I happened to go back, although it ain't much to do with Number Four's provin' to be the richest bench claim on the creek. King Cophetua? What's that got to do with the story? Why, can't you see he was richer 'n Cophetua all the time, and she did n't have nothin', but it cut no ice with either of 'em and both made good! Some men are such fools they can't see nothin' nohow!