The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
IN A FAR WILDERNESS.
Bruce Waring delivered Joan to her father, but not in Nome.
The Indian pilot of the Michael Cudahy, sent upriver by the master, brought the news to Nulato of the freezing in of that vessel. Thereafter, in the course of time, the names of its passengers were wired to the various settlements along the line of the government telegraph, and to Nome, at the end of the line.
Judge Manners set his calendar two weeks ahead, and got a friendly mail carrier to take him as a passenger with the first outgoing mail. Ten miles out of Nome, he encountered a dog team with an Indian running ahead and a man and a woman jauntily perched on the load. As he approached this young woman, she bounded clear of her sled and landed plump in the arms of Judge Manners, who found that he was her father. After disengaging Joan from his neck, he transferred his luggage to the sled of Bruce Waring—whom he eyed searchingly, as he crushed his hand—and returning to Nome with the young people, turned back his calendar and reconvened his court.
Waring would have liked to stay in Nome, a month or two; nor would Joan Manners have been displeased. But the dismal thought of the time and expense that had already been sacrificed to his illness urged him away. He engaged, for the price of all the pelts they should take for a year, the services of Koyukuk Charley, born Ak Tuk: he added a few extra dogs to that Eskimo's team, and loaded both sleds to the rails.
Manners, a thorough Alaskan of the more intelligent and cultivated type, thanked Waring warmly for his service; and Joan parted from him with all of the frank regret of a sister, rosily tinctured with an affection of a different sort, which she was too womanly to wholly conceal.
“Some day, perhaps, when you have time, we'll mush to the north pole together,” she said, while he held her hand. His teams were ready, out in the crackling air of the November night.
Gravely he replied: “Some day, perhaps, we'll go everywhere together.”
She hardly knew whether he meant it sentimentally, or only in the way of the perfect comrade.
Back to Norton Sound he and Ak Tuk took their grinding way; and at the head of the bay the slow work began of breaking trail for heavy loads through raw and rolling tundra. For the rest, he was, at last, set to a task for which he was made and for which he had hungered—a naked pioneering in a virgin wild. His happiness knew but one alloy—his short-skirted little pal was gone.
At Eskimo villages they had traded in dried salmon to conserve their dog feed, and themselves lived largely on the country, taking toll of every gossiping covey of ptarmigan, invisible but for the movement of their gray shadows among the snow-enameled willows of the creek beds. Swinging around the head streams of the Koyuk, the Buckland, and finally the Selawik, they crossed to the country of the Koyukuk over a low pass of the Brooks divide, and descended an unknown tributary of that great branch of the Yukon, which drains the entire subarctic region of central Alaska.
They made a cache at the mouth of the first considerable confluent stream; and used it as a base for expeditions, part hunting, part prospecting, into the surrounding wilderness of wooded streams. The river itself, the winding, tortuous Koyukuk, lay in a shallow trench, a day's journey eastward from the main camp.
Very early in the spring, at some distance up the confluent stream from their main camp, Waring came upon an extensive exposure of creek gravel, kept bare by the percolating waters of a series of warm, perennial springs. Naturally he prospected this gravel, and finding among the fine flakes called “colors”—common to nearly all the streams of Alaska—an occasional granular bit of gold, he pitched a camp on the creek, and in May began a systematic prospecting of it, as fast as its banks thawed. It was open-cut work, in which he needed no assistance. He, therefore, kept Ak Tuk hunting; and, when the salmon ran, catching and drying the fish for their dogs, for the ensuing autumn and winter.
The prospects continuing to be fair, in the early summer he started two shafts in the center of the creek valley, but seepage, that bane of the miner, baffled his search just when the colors became coarse enough to be weighed in his small prospector's balances. There was no help for it—he must wait till autumn, when he could “freeze down.” For the remainder of the summer they cut and stacked wood and built a good cabin.
Late in September, when the seepage froze in the shafts, making their walls impervious, Waring got down to bed rock, and found two feet of gravel and one foot of soft bed rock, that carried fair values. The gravel went from two to six cents, and the disintegrated bed rock as high as twenty. The average seemed to be about six or seven cents, in one shaft, and in the other, which was half a mile below, a little better than eight cents. Between the two shafts he put down another hole, which showed about the same prospects. This was not “pay,” in so far a country as the Koyukuk, but the creek was decidedly worth careful prospecting, and the obvious thing to do was to communicate with Ticely and get this advice and instructions.
His “partner” had, of course, given him a cipher code. You could trust Ticely for that! So Bruce made up a telegram, wrote a letter, and inclosed both with a note to the trading-post manager at Nutalo, on the Yukon. There was no reason to waste the precious days of early winter by going himself, so he sent Ak Tuk. The distance, figured from the United States Geological Survey map, was not over one hundred and fifty miles, and he decided that, barring early blizzards, the native ought to be back in three weeks, or early in November. But it was nearly Christmas before the grate of Ak Tuk's sled broke the stillness that brooded over that far, white solitude where Bruce Waring had been alone with his work and his thoughts. Then a great surprise met the eyes of the young miner.
In the year that had gone, since Mrs. Ticely returned from Kusko City, Seattle realties had taken something of a slump. Values had been baseless, fictitious; and what now seemed shrinkage and torpor was really only the resolution of a boom into normal and logical conditions.
The Ticely Realty-Corporation would still have held its own, with here and there a loss, easily met from its steady, legitimate earnings, had not Ticely but lately taken over, for subdivision, a tract which began to “act up” in a very alarming way. A nephew of the decedent of the estate, which had been cut up, complained to his lawyer about some transaction, concerning the property, which antedated Ticely's purchase. It came to Ticely's ears just as he was launching his big selling campaign, but he went right on, confident that he could talk the nephew out of the idea, and mollify him by selling him a choice piece of his own land, at a shade under the regular price. But the nephew proved to be that hundredth man immune to Ticely's salesmanship; and he filed a little paper which so clouded the title that the realty company's lawyer, whom Ticely had magnificently ignored, exclaimed: “Hang me if I don't hope you lose every sou markee you've got! I've howled at you to be careful of your titles, till my throat's raw!”
The Ticely Realty Corporation found itself confronted by a demand to make good the price paid for its warranty deeds; Ticely had spent all the first proceeds for final payments on the property and expensive advertising; and the company, perforce, went into a receivership—very privately, of course, in order to avoid a further shrinkage of its assets. And this was Frederick Ransom Ticely's alarming situation, when a telegram came to him from his grubstaked man in the Far North.
Decoded, it read:
- Western branch of lower Koyukuk River, two hundred miles by channel from nearest supply points, shows, in three widely separated shafts, three feet of six-to-nine-cent dirt. Have seen no white man for a year. Native messenger awaits telegraphic reply. Letter mailed.
Ticely locked himself in his private office, killed his phone, laid three long cigars on his desk, placed his feet alongside of them, and, tilting back in his chair, cogitated.
He had obtained, by perspiring persuasion, an extension of six months for the payment of the twenty thousand dollars that would square the last of the holders of the worthless warranty deeds. The rest had been satisfied by funds raised on mortgages, plastered to the limit of his bank's endurance, upon the remaining properties of the company, after every liquid asset had gone. It was a case of obtaining twenty thousand dollars within six months or—an ugly-looking failure that would bow Cecelia Ticely's head!
Ticely wondered at that telegram—and admired it. It gave him every fact he needed to know. The country was untouched, unprospected. No one could say, “Oh, I know that eight-cent dirt over there. That's all there is, and, at that, it's spotted as a leopard!” If Waring had seen no white man in a year, the find, such as it was, was safe. With only three holes down, its prospecting had only begun, and the chances of real pay were good.
Recollection of the fevered days of his old Klondike exploits flooded his brain. He was thirty-five, healthy, and—if he had just made the blunder of his life—an engine of dynamic energy and resource. He called his house, and Cecelia answered. He said, “Wait for me;” and jumped into his car.
He put it to her plainly and with transparent honesty. She knew, in a very general way, of his situation. Well, he could extricate himself, perhaps, with what Bruce Waring had discovered. Bruce was a tyro; he himself was an experienced miner. He thought he'd better go. After deep thought, she gave him her consent and her blessing. Without leaving the house, he called up the telegraph office and dictated offhand this message to the agent at Nulato:
- Hold at my expense native messenger of Bruce Waring until I arrive.
Then he borrowed twenty-five hundred dollars from his wife, who, ten days before, had offered him all she had, and went back to town to cash the check and arrange for an all-night session with his lawyer and the subordinate officers of the Ticely Realty Corporation—and a stenographer. A boat for Valdez, the salt-water terminus of the winter trail to the Tanana and Yukon, was to leave, providentially enough, at noon next day, and he was there—quietly, with his wife only. Not a soul, outside of his own office, knew that Frederick Ransom Ticely had exchanged serge for Mackinaw, tan shoes for moosehide moccasins, and was off in mid-winter for the frozen North.
At Valdez, by a ruse, he beat the others ashore and procured the best dog team available. On the trail he hardened gradually, and, while December was still young, he arrived at Nulato, with his seven Malemutes waving their tail plumes over their backs—than which there is no better certificate of exemplary dogmanship.
“This the man?” he asked the unshaved, happy-go-lucky trading company agent, who had brought a native to him—a kind he had never seen in Alaska. “He must be an Eskimo.”
“Guess he is,” said the agent indifferently. “Injuns round here pertend they don't see him.”
Ticely made friends with Ak 'Tuk, at once, by presenting him with the best jackknife that money could buy in Seattle.
They started out next day in the misty, snapping cold; and once across the ice of the Yukon and the near-by delta of the Koyukuk, Fred Ticely thanked his stars he was still young enough to have hardened well under his four weeks' mush from salt water. For now it was turn about, with the iron-legged Eskimo, in breaking trail on a drifted river, and its brush and sedge-grown portages, till his thigh muscles numbed and almost paralyzed under the strain. He froze his cheeks the third day out, and, on the seventh, they lay for eighteen hours in their bags, under a partly collapsed and drifted-over tent. The Eskimo took it as one takes mosquitos—a nuisance; but Ticely, from his long interlude of “civilized” living, nearly lost his nerve.
Stillness succeeded the hum of the blizzard, they worked themselves free of their bed; which was part of a new and very compact mantle of the river itself—and resumed their journey, with the weak rays of the low, noon-day sun playing once more on their enameled backs.
“Here go,” said Ak Tuk the second hour of a morning of their last week. And Ticely's frost-fringed eyes, looking through the tunnel of his projecting parka hood, knew that the tributary must be the creek, or its parent. Turning into it, they found the going exceptionally good—smooth ice, evenly drifted. After nearly a day of this, the native led up a right limit branch and an hour after noon, next day, Ak Tuk's dogs smelled spruce smoke, and with straightened necks, and muzzles howling welcome, swerved sharply up the steep bank. Ticely, drawn swiftly up by his own closely following team, beheld, in that remote, tenantless world, the miracle of human habitancy—a camp lay before him! The door of a well-chinked cabin was ajar, and through it stalked the familiar figure, in unfamiliar raiment, of his partner—his partner now in very truth—Bruce Waring.