The camps of chaos/A harvest of fur
A HARVEST OF FURS
FURTHER TALES OF "THE CAMPS OF CHAOS"
BY SAMUEL ALEXANDER WHITE
"WHAT you men poling so hard for?"
At the hail from the Tatonduk's bank Cronin Hess and Gayle Outremont looked up from their boat to see Rooney Ryan in company with Monte Marlin and Seattle Simons grinning at them off the top of a bluff which jutted out as a headland into the river a few miles over the Alaskan boundary.
"Oh, for exercise, sure!" replied ex-Marshal Hess. "We do it every other month in the dark of the moon. It speeds up the circulation, you know, and pries open the pores. Don't you ever think we tore down from Dawson City through Forty-mile, Eagle, and Seventy-mile and turned up here on the heels of an alleged stampede. Thunderation, no! Ours is just a physical culture stunt."
"Who put you on to the alleged stampede?" asked Ryan.
"Inspector Strickland. Stampedes have helped spring to pretty near deplete the population of Dawson, but Strickland, Gunderhein, and a few more's there in their lonely languor. We was stagnating round when Strickland sent us piking out with the news of this stampede."
"Then you pike right back and chastise Strickland as he ain't never been chastised before for starting you out on a constitutional."
"Why? Ain't the stampede any good?"
"A good race, Cronin, but all the entries beat the starter's pistol. In other words, a false alarm."
"Go on, Rooney!" exclaimed Outremont, in chagrin. "Is that straight? Have we ripped nearly a hundred miles to tatters all for practice?"
"You sure have," Ryan assured him, "but there's consolation in the deed. A hundred more men have done the very same thing, of which hundred Monte, Seattle, and me form one-thirty-third. Savvy?"
"We don't know whether to take your word for it or not," doubted the ex-marshal, dipping his pole again. "So Gayle and me'll just slide along and see for ourselves."
"No notion of buying up the creek, have you?" asked Ryan.
"We might have," returned Cronin. "Hard to say. Why?"
"Because if you have I'll sell it to you. The best part of it belongs to me."
Hess whirled round in the boat and shook his dripping pole at Ryan.
"Consarn you," he cried, "we never know when we've got you. First you tell us the stampede's strung on a false alarm, and then you say you've bought the creek."
"Both statements sworn testimony!" avowed Rooney. "Ain't they, pals?"
"Sure," supported Marlin and Simons. "And well sworn at that. We helped do some of it ourselves."
"Then what in thunder'd you buy it for, Rooney?" demanded Hess.
"I took a chance. Bought the rights of a hundred men for a hundred dollars apiece for fear there might be something under cover. They was sore on it from the start, but I was leery. Savvy? Now I'm stung to the total of ten thousand dollars. You can have the bunch for half."
"We'll look it over first," decided the ex-marshal. "Gayle has a wife to keep now, and we got to be cautious. We'll look it over. We're going up creek now."
"No, you won't look it over," dictated Ryan. "We're going down creek now. We're due in Eagle City to-night. Besides, we've slogged a dozen times already over the ten miles or so I bought, and we're not going to do it again. Five thousand she stands. Take it or leave it. What do you say?"
"What do you say, Gayle?" echoed Hess.
"It's like buying a dog curled up on a wolfskin coat," objected Outremont. "You can't see what you're getting. You don't know where the coat begins or the dog leaves off."
"Hear that, will you?" laughed Ryan, addressing his pals. "I knowed they hadn't the nerve."
THE ex-marshal wrinkled up his lips at the laugh. He stared hard at the Tatonduk's right limit, as if to read its possibilities of riches, but all he saw was three or four muskrats disporting themselves at the water line and gnawing succulent roots brought down and grounded by the spring freshets. He shifted his glance to the left limit, but its surface was likewise impenetrable and enlivened only by three or four more rats disporting like the others.
"Pikers!" jeered Ryan, turning off across the brow of the bluff. "Unless they hold four kings, they won't call. Come on, we got to get back to Eagle."
"Hold on," commanded Hess. "You can't bluff us. We call. Your holdings is ours at five thousand. Come down off that bluff, you grinning totem, and we'll write you the bill of sale."
Within three minutes, the bill of sale in his pocket, Ryan was again on his way to Eagle, while Cronin and Gayle continued their course upstream.
"Why'd you do that, Cronin?" chided Outremont, as he scanned claim after claim and saw no surface indications to show any gold concentration. "Just for spite? Gallery plays like that come pretty expensive, and, as you say, I've a wife to keep now. If I'd been doing it, I sure would have pocketed my pride and not paid out five thousand dollars to call a bluff. You know blame well the ground looks barren, and when an old-timer like Ryan passes it up with a loss of five thousand, you can count it well embalmed. Don't flatter yourself that you've bought a hundred creek claims. There's nothing here but the remnants of the ice run. You've simply bought ten miles of débris and desolation."
"No, Gayle, I haven't," returned Cronin. "I've bought a ten-mile muskrat ranch."
OUTREMONT gasped and nearly dropped his pole overboard. "Cronin, Cronin," he expostulated, "stop right there. Your senile dementia'll come soon enough. Don't take a step to meet it."
"Just the same my scheme is sane," declared Cronin. "I didn't tell Rooney what the game was, but if I'd liked I could have given him figures enough to stagger him. Yes, Gayle, and if you like I'll do the same for you."
"Don't, Cronin, don't," Gayle besought. "I'm staggered now. Give me something to steady me. I've kicked muskrats out of my way all my life. I never saw money in them. They're just vermin anyway, Cronin, overrunning the rivers as the house rats overrun houses. They're no good for anything."
"Ain't they? In the fur centers their pelts sell for as much as eighty cents. We can't strike eighty so far up here, but we can sure get fifty cents in Dawson. It's a fine, warm day, and the rats on the Tatonduk are all out. I counted them all along, and the seven just where we talked to Ryan decided me. They've been averaging fifty a mile."
"Well, figured out short, that's two hundred and fifty dollars."
"Bah, Gayle, we'll have to get Trudis here to figure for you. Them five hundred form only the nucleus of the ranch. When it comes to fur time, it's not hundreds but thousands we'll be skinning."
"Like thunder we will! I'm the man from Texas, Cronin, and you've got to put those thousands in my lap before I believe."
"Oh, I'll do it, Gayle! Don't you fluster yourself. We'll hit Eagle City ourselves, get what stuff we need for the ranch and hustle back. And, listen here, partner, I'll put rats in your lap so fast that you'll be a walking dispensary of pungent musk!"
And forthwith the ex-marshal proceeded to make good his boast.
At Eagle City he bought some big rolls of wire mesh with which the dealers were accustomed to net in their provisions against the thieving of prowling huskies. Also he acquired large quantities of sweet apples, imported on the Lower Yukon steamers, of carrots produced on the small farms scattered through the Klondike Valley, and of baled oat hay grown on the Mazie May Ranch up the Stewart River and shipped down for the use of freighters who were attempting to establish a new land trail from Eagle City across two summits into the Forty-mile country.
Of these three commodities Cronin cornered the supply and sent word up to Dawson to Thorpe Calgour to bring his sister Trudis, Gayle's wife, and ten workmen, together with .22-caliber rifles, ammunition, steel traps, and empty barrels, down on the Tatonduk at once.
THE oddity of the ex-marshal's purchases excited the curiosity of Eagle City and, most of all, the curiosity of Rooney Ryan.
"What you going to do down on the Tatonduk?" he asked as he watched Hess and Outremont load the miscellaneous assortment into their boat and two other boats attached to towlines. "Raise chickens?"
"No, Rooney, wire worms!" chaffed Cronin, and drifted out of Eagle without deigning to offer further enlightenment.
But back on the Tatonduk Cronin soon displayed the uses of these for the benefit of Outremont, who, though too sardonically polite to say so, was likewise curious. Across the river at the upper and lower boundaries of the ten-mile stretch the ex-marshal had bought he threw a screen of netting attached to high posts. The bottoms of the screens were heavily weighted with stones so as to sink them some distance into the mucky river bed; the tops rose several feet above the surface of the stream; and the ends, let into trenches in the banks for a rod or so, came finally to the top of the ground and extended out like the wings of a water fence. The lower screen was solid, to bar any exit. The upper one, to encourage entrance, was full of small mesh doors hinged at the top and cleverly constructed to swing but one way, down river. Thus with a little effort at the two strategic points Cronin had his elongated ranch inclosed. There was no need to fence the sides, for the creek claims, two thousand feet in width, sloped up on either limit to the natural barrier of the steep bench ground.
By the time this was finished Thorpe Calgour arrived with Trudis, the workmen, and the cargo from Dawson City, and Hess, putting by the cargo till fall, straightway sent Thorpe and the men forth into the northerly swamps and sloughs, to the head streamlets of other waterways to lay trails of oat hay and of apple and carrot fragments to the ranch, while he, Gayle, and Trudis looked after the ranch itself.
"You from Texas still, Gayle?" Hess grinned as he disclosed his methods. "Just watch me draw them. They're exactly like human beings in regard to their stomachs. They pike where the feed is good."
And of a truth they piked in on the Tatonduk River through the upper screen gateway of the ranch. Once in, they perforce remained, as the ex-marshal had planned. Nor, even if the way had been unbarred, would they have taken leave, for while the trail to the ranch ran thin here in the inclosed section, food was lavished with a prodigal hand, and they swam and burrowed in a ten-mile paradise.
Even Outremont's skepticism was shattered.
"Cronin wins, Tru," he admitted to his wife as he saw the increasing numbers in the river. "He will clear a dollar or two if he keeps on."
"Gayle, you're very dense," reproached Trudis. "You've altogether overlooked the possibilities of this ranch. If you'd ever indulged in nature study, you'd know that muskrats increase about as fast as rabbits, and you know how they thrive."
"Sure," enlarged Cronin, "they bring forth three or four families every season with six to nine kits in each family. One pair has on an average twenty descendants. That means our original five hundred'll be five thousand before fur time. Savvy?"
"Thunder!" exclaimed Gayle. "I savvy now, Cronin. They'll be worth two thousand five hundred dollars."
"Yes, exactly half what I paid for the limits. How long do you think it'll take me to make up the other half and pile on the profits? Say, Gayle, a pair of muskrats is as good as an ounce of gold dust any day, and you don't have to dig for them. And instead of every ostensible pair I'm enticing here I'm in reality getting twenty-two. That's why I've spread such a feast on the Tatonduk and pointed them the way. You just keep your eye on this amazing exodus."
IT WAS indeed an amazing exodus. Word of Hess's and Outremont's doings had traveled up the mail river, and men poled down from Seventy-mile, from Eagle, from Forty-mile, and from Dawson City to see. They beheld Cronin Hess as the god in the machine draw rats from every place where the animals congregated in sufficient numbers to repay the labor expended. He drew them off every side stream of the Tatonduk River. He drew them off the head waters of the Ogilvie River, which, like the Tatonduk but on the opposite slope, had its source in the range of hills lying along the 140th meridian and steepled by Mount Klotz and Mount King. And he did not stop at that. He sent Thorpe over on the upper reaches of the Porcupine River and drew them off its waters and from Upper Nahoni, Middle Nahoni and Lower Nahoni Lakes.
Some telepathic call circulated among the little fur-bearers, and they answered the call as surely as men answer one another's spoken summons. The call was a basic impulse, and each food trail to the ranch was only the fostering of the impulse, the crystallizing of the vague summons into a definite impression, the turning of it into a settled direction.
ITS exploitation brought the crowds from the river camps, and even Inspector Strickland and Gunderhein, who was a member of the Yukon Council, spared the time to come down and spend a day looking over the ranch. Strickland and Gunderhein, besides being the greatest fixtures in Dawson City were close friends of Hess and Outremont, and their visit was duly appreciated. "I never would have imagined it, Cronin," confessed Gunderhein, as he and Strickland left that night to catch an upbound steamer at the Tatonduk's mouth. "Why, your ten miles of river are teeming with rats."
"Yes, I have the miles marked and a tally kept on each mile," informed the ex-marshal. "Where they averaged only fifty to the mile when we took hold, they now average four hundred and fifty. That's as high as they'll go, though, because we've depleted the source of supply clean up to the Nahoni country. But we're satisfied. We can keep Thorpe and his men at home now. We want to build a bit of a dam to back up stagnant water for their houses. They can't all burrow in the bank."
"You'll have an awful haul in the autumn," Gunderhein observed. "And not a soul in the Yukon, except maybe a few Indians, ever saw coin in muskrats. They aren't even mentioned in the game laws."
"With the five hundred we started on and the four thousand we lured here, we'll have on a basis of twenty descendants to each pair just forty-nine thousand five hundred rats this fall," calculated Trudis, whose brain was quick at figures, "and they'll be worth at half a dollar apiece just twenty-four thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars. That's an immense profit on the original investment of five thousand."
"It certainly is," chuckled Strickland. "Rooney Ryan'll go crazy when he hears what he threw away. I'll take good care, Cronin, to see he gets all the statistics, and you'll see him down here on the jump."
"All right, send him along," grinned Cronin as he shook farewell. "He jeered at me for a piker when I considered whether to pay him five thousand for the outfit, and now I'll turn back the laugh. Sure, send him along."
IT was not long before Ryan came in company with Marlin and Simons. So scant was the Tatonduk's volume below the dam the men had put in that Rooney and his friends were obliged to leave their boat at the river's junction with the Yukon and walk up. From the top of the dam they saw the Tatonduk transformed into a shallow lake twisting between the high bench grounds flanking the creek limits. The watery waste was studded with the domed, rush-built houses of the muskrats, and religiously patrolled by ten of Thorpe's workmen in poling boats. There was a boat to every mile. Each workman had to feed and keep guard upon the rats which inhabited his mile, while Cronin, Gayle, Thorpe, and Trudis oversaw the whole estate. The ex-marshal was down at the dam with Thorpe and Gayle when Ryan and his pals topped the structure and gazed with jaundiced eyes across the sparkling waters. "Is my hearing good?" demanded Ryan with astonishing abruptness. "I'm hearing from Strickland in Dawson as you men didn't buy one hundred Tatonduk creek claims from me. Instead of that he says you bought a fur farm under false pretenses. He says as how you had five hundred muskrats spotted on the stream in the first place, as how you drawed in four thousand more from somebody else's hunting ground, and as how them four thousand five hundred rats'll increase to forty-nine thousand five hundred and clear you nineteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars. That's what I'm hearing from Strickland. Is my hearing good?"
"I can't say as there's anything very much amiss with your acoustics, Rooney," Cronin replied. "If you always listen that hard, there'll never be any shiny ear trumpet parting your hoary locks."
"You sassy rascal! You're admitting you took advantage of me?"
"Advantage nothing! You said the ground was no good. I didn't. You fixed the selling price. I didn't."
"But you never told me them ten miles of placer holdings averaged fifty muskrats to the mile, and you never told me them five hundred would increase to five thousand."
"Bah! Where were your eyes? Or your brains? Now I s'pose you'll have the gall to ask for some compensation."
"Ask!" sneered Ryan from his scornful height. "I'm asking nothing of you, not so much as a bedraggled muskrat hair or a scale from their slimy tails."
"Then come along and I'll show you over the ranch," invited Hess. "We sure take pride in this ranch."
"No, sir," Ryan refused. "On the ranch of any men so mean as to pick my pocket to the tune of nineteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars I'll never set foot. And that's straight."
"Now there's a riddle for you, Cronin," laughed Trudis, who had slipped down from the cabin in time to hear the fag end of the controversy and see Ryan go off in a rage. "What can he do to the ranch if he doesn't set foot on the ranch?"
"Lots of things, Tru," growled Hess. "He can dynamite the dam, go up to headwaters and start a run of logs, top a mountain lake and send us a tidal wave or divert the Tatonduk's source and drain us dry. Right here's where we'd better increase our vigilance. Thorpe'll have to get up more workmen from Dawson. We'll put on a night and day shift, guards at the dam and the upper gateway, and an outpost above that again to tell us if anything's coming. We have a valuable ranch here, and we ain't going to lose it through the ebullition of Ryan's spleen."
All these precautions and more were taken, but neither did Rooney visit them nor send them any sign. River draining, tidal wave, log run, dam dynamiting, and many other conjectured disasters failed to materialize. Through the sweet summer months when the crocus brimmed the cups of the hills, when daylight ran twenty- four hours long, when the exotic sun poured his fire alike into human and savage veins and filled them with delirious delight, the muskrat ranch rippled and sparkled and thrived as only that breed can thrive. Twenty-two hundred and fifty pairs with a celerity that borrowed something of the magic flung litter after litter of kits upon the thickly domed water, and the kits seemed hardly to have taken to swimming before they, with something of the same magic, leaped suddenly to maturity.
Through this period they were visible by the hundreds, but when autumn came, with real darkness in its nights, they were visible by the thousands, gliding from dome to dome and from shore to shore at the apex of a V-shaped ripple, their whiskered noses sniffing suspiciously and their yellow teeth flashing under the starlight at any who dared disturb them. During the summer and the early fall they consumed an enormous amount of food. Besides the natural water-plant food in the whole ten miles of ranch, the warders supplied them with several tons of oat hay and many boatloads of apples, carrots, cabbages, and parsnips. But the partners did not begrudge an outlay of a few hundred dollars' worth of food in the face of the myriads before them. They fed them conscientiously right up till the end of August before they gave the order to kill. Winter-killed or spring-killed pelts would have been worth more money, but it was necessary to reap the harvest of hides before frost could hamper them, because, as many of the Yukon streams habitually did, the Tatonduk would freeze to the bottom during the winter.
SO on September the first the harvest began. Traps were used to the utmost so as to take as much uninjured fur as possible. The steel ones were employed in various ways, set in notches cut in logs, between strips nailed on an 18-foot board, under baited sticks stuck in the banks, in their runways, feeding beds, burrows, and in the entrances to their houses, the traps in all cases being concealed with water-soaked leaves and grass. The wire-mesh box traps, 8 inches by 10 inches by 2 feet, with swing doors in the ends hinged at the top and opening only inward, were placed anywhere in the shallow water. Some of the barrel traps were used open-ended and staked all round with stakes and crosspieces over the tops which rose about 3 inches above water; others had 10-inch square holes cut in their sides, two slats nailed across each hole, and boards placed on the slats parallel with the barrel, the whole contrivance sunk so that the boards were even with the water; while still others were made with loose heads pivoted on a central rod to swing like a round damper in a stovepipe and weighted so as to come back automatically to position after each capture. The bait for all the styles of traps was oat hay, apples, carrots, or parsnips.
IN addition to the huge daily catch of all the traps, the .22-caliber rifles were continually used, the small ball, generally placed in the heads of the animals, practically leaving the fur unspoiled. For all the cunning old rats which succeeded in evading capture by any other means, this .22 bullet was the inevitable fate. Still, even with all these facilities for capture, the harvesting of the fur was a colossal undertaking, so colossal that it took every one of the twenty-three men, besides Cronin, Gayle, and Thorpe, working night and day for a full month, to clean out the ranch.
The cased pelts were stretched on shingles, several thousand of which the partners had bought in bunches from the sawmill at Dawson, and hung up in relays to dry on the roof beams of the whipsawed board building which housed the workmen.
"Ten thousand, Cronin," Gayle announced, consulting his tally book as the last relay went up on the first of October, "and thirty-eight thousand one hundred and twenty-four already off the shingles. That's forty-eight thousand one hundred and twenty-four altogether. And now, Tru, is your chance to help out in a pinch. You have charge of the dozen men that'll hike up to Dawson to bring down dog teams to move all this fur, and they'd better start at once. It's going to be an early freeze-up this year. There's ice in the river already, and she's closing fast."
In the face of the freeze-up Trudis sped off with her men in th# poling boats, fighting rim, skim, and mush ice as they sped, their toiling figures sheathed with the first driving snow of the season. They were to come back on the young ice as soon as it would bear, and while waiting for them through nights that grew longer, frosts that bit harder and snow that fell deeper the three partners and the rest of the men dried and removed the last lot of pelts from the shingles and turned and aired the catch of already dried skins hanging on all the walls and all the beams of the immense bunk house.
WHEN these were properly attended to and pronounced by Cronin in prime condition, fit to be baled, everybody rested from toil and yarned and smoked of nights in the partners' more comfortable cabin which they had thrown up but a dozen yards from the bunk house. They were smoking and yarning thus the night before the dog teams were expected from Dawson, and the eleven men whose duty it was to sleep on guard among the furs had not yet stepped across when without warning there came a tremendous crash on the side of the cabin. The cabin door bowed under some powerful outside thrust, split in the middle, and banged back against the wall, revealing in its place a big granite bowlder.
"Earthquakes! Eruptions! World's end!" exclaimed Cronin calmly and without moving from his seat.
But Gayle, exclaiming nothing, leaped upright. He jumped for the bowlder and attempted to squirm through a crevice between it and the door jamb, but a smaller bowlder trundling down struck him a glancing blow on the shoulder, pivoting him sharply about.
"Look out, Gayle!" admonished Hess, springing after him and pulling back. "You can't get through. You'll be brained and mashed to matter. What you so excited for, anyway? It's only a little landslide on the bench ground!"
"Only a landslide!" grated Gayle. "Sure, but somebody's sending her down. Listen! Don't you hear their bars?"
For a second the men in the cabin listened. Amid the rush of rock and frozen earth which was walling up the doorway with a 10-foot wall there came the clink of iron bars prying on stones.
"Ryan, the cad, sure as shooting!" ejaculated Gayle. "He's dumped the overhang of the bench ground on us! Just as we did to bury those muskrat carcasses!"
He sprang for his rifle, but cast it down again with a helpless gesture, for he saw in that moment that the 10-inch square window of the cabin did not face the bench ground but looked down-stream. "The ax, Cronin, the ax is what we want!" he shouted. "Where in thunder did you leave it?"
But Thorpe had dived for it under the Yukon stove, and it was he who swung it on the 10-inch window, cutting into the sill to enlarge the space. The cabin was of logs. The sill log was big and stubbornly knotty. Thorpe wrestled with it for ten long minutes, and during every one of those minutes the other men hung upon his blows, their shoulders involuntarily heaving with his, their lips mumbling imprecations with his, for in the whipsawed bunk house only a dozen yards away they could hear the hurried movements and the rustling of dried pelts. Presently sounded the crunching of many feet retreating to the river bank, but silence obtained before the chopped section of the sill log flew out. Swiftly the imprisoned men leaped through and rushed across the space which separated the two buildings. But they were minutes late. The bunk house was swept clean of furs, and a mile up the Tatonduk echoed the shrill whine of steel sled runners on the ice.
"Dog teams, Thorpe," reminded Hess as the former made a race for the river. "On the dead run, too. It's no good chasing them."
"I'm not chasing them," explained Thorpe over his shoulder. "I'm going to look at the tracks. You get the guns and we'll trail."
WHILE Gayle and Cronin armed themselves with their heavy sporting rifles and each workman took one of the light .22-caliber weapons which had been used on muskrats, Thorpe, making use of the searchlight flash of the aurora, examined the tracks on the bank.
"It isn't Ryan," he announced as the others came up. "No white man at all. They were all Indians."
"You sure?" asked the ex-marshal.
"Of course. Look at their toes." Thorpe pointed to the turned-in toe on each snowshoe imprint. "Maybe fifty or sixty Indians—likely Nahoni country Indians. We drew the rats off their hunting ground, and they came and took them back."
"Heavens!" blurted Hess. "That's one contingency I sure overlooked, boys—those bucks in the Nahoni District. Of course when they came back off the posts for their fall hunting they found the ground clean bare of fur, and here's the result. It ain't Ryan after all. I wish it was. I'd sooner handle a white man with injured feelings any minute than an Indian in the same mood. We'll meet trouble when we trail them down. But that doesn't matter. We still got to go on and trail."
All night they trailed, and just before dawn, when the aurora's blazing carnival ceased and the last deep obscurity, forerunner of the light, crept across the snows, they broke suddenly upon the Indian camp just over the divide between the Nahoni country and the Tatonduk's headwaters. It was a big camp, a huge, snow-walled rectangle scraped to earth, floored with spruce boughs and divided down the middle by a long stringer of fire. Beside the fire lay a muddle of dogs, sleds and bales of furs. Across the bales sprawled a mob of Indians, fifty-nine of them, carrying on some sort of tally with and receiving some sort of dividends from three white men squatted in the fire's glow.
AT the crunch of snowshoes on the slope the three white men raised their heads, and Hess, who was leading the file of pursuers down the divide, recognized Ryan, Marlin, and Simons.
"Hello, there!" saluted Ryan in polite surprise. "What you fellows doing up here?"
"What you doing yourself?" bellowed the ex-marshal.
"Buying furs."
"Buying!" Cronin's bellow subsided into an astonished gasp.
"Sure; I'm done now and all paid up. I got the Nahoni bucks' full catch at ten cents apiece. That's Indian laziness for you. They'd sooner sell for ten cents here than go to Dawson and get fifty. The middleman makes forty cents a pelt, and you bet I'm the busy middleman."
"Forty cents a pelt, eh?" growled Cronin. "That's some profit. How many did you buy?"
"Forty-eight thousand one hundred and twenty-four. I'll clear nineteen thousand two hundred and forty-nine dollars and sixty cents."
"Not by a thundering sight you won't! Blast your carcass, Rooney, you stole them furs, every stretched skin of them, out of our bunk house at the ranch."
"Go away, Cronin," pooh-poohed Ryan. "I ain't never been near your ranch since the day I stood on your dam and boycotted it at a glance. Have I, Monte? Have I, Seattle?"
"Not within miles of it," declared Monte.
"And neither has Monte nor me," supplemented Simons. "So if you're thinkin' of lawyers and courts, Hess, just remember we have an armor-plated alibi."
"But you fellows sent others to the ranch," accused Cronin—"them brazen bucks of Nahonis. They dropped a ton of bench ground in our doorway and cleaned up while we was chopping out. The bales there is ours, and we're going to take them."
"Cronin," warned Ryan solemnly, "you lay a hand on them furs and I'll go straight to Dawson and put the Mounted Police on to you. I've bought and paid for them furs. Where the bucks got them I couldn't be sure. I didn't see them get them. Neither did you. Even if they stole them, as you say, instead of caught them, as they say, you can't prove it. Even if you're morally certain them pelts by the fire is yours, you can't testify to it. All muskrat skins look alike. You can't swear they're yours. And Monte, Seattle, and me'll back the Indians to the limit. So if you're still convinced we're singly or jointly guilty and want to take it out of us, just go on and start something."
AT the challenge both Gayle and Thorpe leaped forward, but Hess grabbed them by the arms.
"Hold on, Gayle! Hold on, Thorpe! You don't want to see a massacre, do you? Them Nahoni bucks have cocked rifles in their hands. Don't you lift a finger."
"Heavens, Cronin," snarled Outremont, "I never took you for such a quitter! You're going to let him keep those furs?"
"What else can he do?" cut in Ryan, grinning ogrelike in his triumph. "I've got your goat staked fast."
"No, you haven't, Rooney," contradicted the ex-marshal, as he forcibly backed Thorpe and Gayle up the divide. "We're going up to Dawson to speak to the Mounted Police ourselves. You think you're going strong, but in the golden city you'll sure strike a snag."
"Go on then," jeered Ryan. "Get as many police as you like. I got a stand here that all the police in the country can't touch."
At top speed Cronin led the way down the southern slope of the divide and on down the Tatonduk Valley. They did not stop at the ranch but swung on at a lurching run over the Alaskan boundary to the Tatonduk's mouth.
ALL the way Gayle and Thorpe denounced Cronin for a quitter and darkly hinted at a dissolution of partnership. But Hess did not waste his wind in answering. He saved it to back his snowshoe stride. He turned at night from the Tatonduk's mouth up the Yukon, and shortly after, just below Seventy-mile, ran into Trudis and her men driving down their dogs and sleds from Dawson. "What's the matter?" demanded Trudis in amazement, "Why are you footing it in, and where are the furs?"
"Turn the huskies round, Tru," requested Gayle, slumping loosely on the sled beside her. "We won't need the sleds now. Ryan's kindly freighting in our furs for us.
"I'm going to ride and sleep as I ride," he further explained to her. "I've been swinging shoes for a day and a night steady. But don't you let the drivers stop except to breathe the huskies till you make Dawson. I don't know why, but Cronin Hess thinks he knows."
Through Eagle City and Forty-mile, sleeping darkly in the white waste beneath the flashing aurora and the pulsating stars, the teams pressed on. But a wind was drifting the Yukon's broken trail. The going was heavy, and it was an hour after noon of the next day before they swerved up the Dawson bank and turned into Main Street.
In the doorway of the Alaska Commercial Company's store fur-wrapped Gunderhein was idly gossiping with Inspector Strickland of the Mounted Police. At sight of Outremont on the foremost sled Gunderhein ran out.
"What's wrong, Gayle?" he asked. "I understood your wife took out the drivers and dog teams to bring in your furs. What's happened?"
"Ask Cronin Hess, Esquire, Champion Quitter, there!" returned Gayle.
"Yes," put in Thorpe Calgour, "ask him what's happened those forty-eight thousand one hundred and twenty-four pelts!"
HE pointed dramatically at the ex-marshal as he ran after the sled of Gayle and Trudis winding up the hill.
"Gayle and Thorpe both got a whale of a grouch, Gunderhein," smiled Hess, gazing after them a little wistfully. "But it ain't anything to get mad over. I'm only letting another fellow freight in our fur."
"Another fellow! Who?"
"Rooney Ryan."
"Calamities! He got back at you after all?"
"No, he only thinks he has. Don't you remember, Gunderhein, a private conversation we had one day several months ago, the day you and Strickland visited our ranch? Don't you recall the antidote I prescribed for this very crime if ever Ryan should commit it?"
Gunderhein's face lightened. His humorous eyes ridged deeply and a silent laugh heaved his big chest. "I do, Cronin," he answered. "Oh, I sure do!"
"Well, we got to swing it quick. Ryan'll be here before the evening shadows fall, and they fall in the middle of the afternoon now. Can you get to Strickland on the jump?"
"Sure, I was talking to him when you came up the river. The Yukon Council meets at half past two, and he has some reports of cases to present. He'll be gone over to the Legislative Building in a minute. I'll have to leg it to catch him and put him wise."
"All right, Gunderhein, but mind we got to swing it quick. Tell him to come back by the Barracks and get a squad of husky privates. I'll meet you at the river bank."
Meanwhile Gayle and Thorpe were grinding out their grouch by preparing to build a fire in the cold cabin on the hill. They were savagely splitting kindling on the doorstep when Trudis pointed out of the doorway.
"Look!" she exclaimed. "Mounted Police gathering on the river bank by the Barracks!"
Gayle and Thorpe stared thoughtfully at the flash of scarlet tunics on the Yukon's spotless shore, then went on and built their fire and came back to stare at them anew.
"Others are joining them," declared Tru. "I see Cronin there and Gunderhein and many more."
There was something significant in the attitude of the crowd. It was pointing at a long line of loaded dog teams toiling up the river, and the suspicion flickered through the minds of Thorpe and Gayle that perhaps Cronin hadn't altogether quit. So they throttled down the fire, closed the cabin door, and, hooking their arms within Trudis's, slid swiftly down the slope on their moccasins.
They plunged through the forefront of the crowd right under Cronin's nose, but Gayle and Thorpe never deigned to notice him. Their gaze went studiously past him and remained fixed upon the line of sleds on the river ice.
THERE were twelve sleds and an armed Indian driver for each sled, besides Ryan, Marlin, and Simons. It was evident that Rooney had been taking no chances of being ambushed on the trail. Halfway down the line he saw, even as Trudis, Gayle, and Thorpe had seen from the hill, the glow of red uniforms against the snow, and he ran forward to Marlin and Simons at the head.
"They're going to arrest us, but don't you resist," he warned. "Don't you raise an eyebrow, and don't you let them Indians do anything to prejudice our stand. I see Strickland and Gunderhein confabbing together, but let them do as they please. We got a stand here that all the Mounted Men in the country can't touch. If Strickland wants your guns and the bucks' guns, let him have them."
That was indeed Strickland's want.
He signed to his privates to gather in the firearms. "These are confiscated," he informed Ryan; "also the furs. And, you, Marlin, and Simons are under arrest."
"On Cronin Hess's warrant, eh?" demanded Ryan, sneering at the ex-marshal.
"No, on my own warrant," Strickland told him. "I'm game warden as well as police inspector, and I arrest you for infringement of the game laws."
"What in thunder do you mean?" roared Ryan. "I ain't broken no game law. Muskrats ain't even protected."
"Yes, they are too!" proclaimed Strickland, flourishing a typed document. "There's a closed season on muskrats in the Yukon from May the 14th to October the 2d. Here's the Order in Council applying it, and it's retroactive to May the 14th of this year."
"It's a brassy forgery," scoffed Rooney. "There ain't no such thing."
"Gunderhein!" exclaimed Strickland, turning in pained surprise to the Syndicate man. "Listen to that, will you!"
GUNDERHEIN puffed up his cheeks into an expression of severity and shook a belligerent fist between Ryan's eyes. "Don't you dare slander your legislators!" he blazed. "I moved that bylaw myself not half an hour ago. It was passed in accordance with legislative requirements, due readings and all. I can vouch for its legality. So go ahead, inspector, do your duty."
"Rooney Ryan," declaimed Strickland bombastically, "you are in possession of muskrat pelts taken in the closed season between the dates of May the 14th and October the 2d of this year! The pelts are confiscated and will be sold by auction, the proceeds going into the Fund for the Preservation of Fish and Game. The number of pelts, I am informed on the authority of Cronin Hess, Gayle Outremont, and Thorpe Calgour, is forty-eight thousand one hundred and twenty-four. The penalty for each infringement of the law is twenty dollars. So you are fined nine hundred and sixty-two thousand four hundred and eighty dollars, half of which fine goes to the said informers, Cronin Hess, Gayle Outremont, and Thorpe Calgour."
Ryan wilted suddenly and collapsed upon the sled behind him. "Oh, great Celestials!" he moaned. "Strickland that's nigh a million dollars. I'll never pay it. I'll never have it to pay it."
"Well," compromised Strickland with a grim smile, "though the option under the law is imprisonment, I don't want it said that during my term of office I ever incarcerated a financially helpless man. I think confiscation and the sale of the furs'll satisfy the law's demands, so I here and now remit the law's half of the fine. But, of course, the remitting of the informers' half rests with the informers, Hess, Outremont, and Calgour, themselves."
"By thunder, inspector," Cronin Hess spoke up, "you've set a noble example of lenience, and we'd be sordid skinflints not to emulate it. So if Gayle and Thorpe is satisfied, for my part you can cut our ten-dollar a skin reward down to, say, fifty cents. Are you satisfied, Thorpe? Satisfied, Gayle?"
"We're satisfied, Cronin," apologized Thorpe and Gayle, reaching their partner's humble hands. "Shake!"