# The hunt-pack

"What happened to a man and woman to whom all doors on the Dawson Trail were barred, though Winter was on the North."
The Hunt-Pack
Samuel Alexander White
Author of "The Ocean Borne," "The Spoilsman," etc.
IN HILARIOUS Happy Camp, on the north side of Chilkoot Pass, inbound stampeders traveling laden and outbound packers traveling light, rested by night from the toil of the trail. Foregathered in the Saxon Saloon they relaxed their muscles, their throats and their poke-strings.
Motley crowds haunted the bar on one side of the huge canvas room, surrounded the gaming-tables on the other side, clogged the central space where, within a circle of chairs, a red-hot stove throbbed like a giant engine and overflowed upon the dancing-floor at the rear.
A haze of smoke invested everything, blurring the oil-lamps swung from the ridge-pole, and softening the uncouth garments and rough faces of the men.
In all quarters, except in the immediate vicinity of the tables, where a businesslike quiet reigned, was laughter, song and badinage; was clamor, jest and camaraderie; was open hand, open heart and a devil-take-to-morrow's-worry atmosphere. Old-timers, hailing from opposite ends of the earth, called one another friend and swapped harsh experiences, vile tobacco and colossal lies; while chechakos, to whom these seared adventurers were little less than gods, worshiped meekly at their feet, imbibing among other things instruction in the ways and wiles of the land.
And with the noise of the main room of the Saxon at its height, into it swept like a flood the babel of the dance-hall. Blended music of violin and piano stopped. Two- score couples circling the floor whirled about and made a concentrated rush for refreshments. In a shrieking, giggling, shoving mass they surged forth, the women in satins and pumps, the men in moccasins and mukluks and fur or mackinaw coats, shaking the oil-lamps on the ridge-pole with their raucous laughter, swirling the haze of the place into strange eddies with the violence of their charge.
For this was a night of rejoicing. This was Happy Camp! The Titanic climb of storm-harried Chilkoot was past, and the trend of the gold-trail now led down the mountain and onward by ice-bound lake and river to desired Dawson. That many who had started up the Pass from Dyea had never crossed the Summit, had drowned in Dyea River, broken their necks in the Cañon, got caught near the Scales by shoving glacier or thundering avalanche, or fallen to frost and blizzard upon the Palisades, was not a thing to be remembered at this hour. The rest were here, the survivors, the fit, the strong, in whom life flowed fiercely with its primordial pulse, and they were reveling in triumph and shouting toasts to the trough roof, when the door of the Saxon opened and the frost puffed in a fog-bank into the superheated room.
OUT of the fog-bank stepped two figures, a man and a woman, fresh from the trail. Their parkas where they clung tightly over their backs and sagged on their hips were rimmed with hoarfrost, advertising body-sweat congealed, and about the close-drawn puckers of their hoods icicles hung like tusks.
Upon the two were the unmistakable signs of the Chilkoot climb. New recruits to the ranks of the strong they seemed, and the triumphant army in the Saxon acclaimed them with a thunderous cheer.
The man and the woman held their heads over the heat. The icy tusks thawed and fell to sizzle and steam upon the glowing stove-top. The two shoved back the parka hoods and nodded genially to their welcomers.
But the moment the newcomers' faces were bared, a thick-set man in moccasins, German socks and bearskin coat stagged off at the hips, rose up on the other side of the stove and peered sharply through the steam. Next, an unspoken question in his eyes, he gazed significantly at his six companions around the fire. They likewise scrutinized the late arrivals for a keen second, looked back at the thick-set man in the stagged-off bearskin and nodded grimly.
Whereupon the bearskin-clad one raised an authoritative hand amid the bedlam of the Saxon.
At once the din lessened.
"What's up, Bassett?" yelled an irrepressible member of the dance crowd. "Relatives of yours?"
"Maybe they come through the Chilkoot by tunnel and ain't had the third degree of the Pass!" hazarded another facetiously. "Tom's going to find out."
But Tom Bassett had stepped swiftly round the stove and laid a hand upon the shoulder of the man in the parka.
"What might your name be, stranger?"
"Karle Lott."
"Lie number one! It's Jose Cantine. And who's the woman with you?"
"My wife!" He resentfully shook off Bassett's hand.
"Lie number two, you hound! It's Eric Sark's wife—vamoosed with in White Pass City months and months back! Aw, hold up!" Bassett seized the hand that dived under the parka and jerked it forth again. "You don't go gunnin' with me. If you was fair game I'd sure let you, but you ain't. My pardner Sark's got a mortgage on you. And if I was over in his place establishin' relay camps on another trail and he was here in mine you'd pay right now. I'm sufferin' sorry he ain't here, but all the same it's a bloody short morator-ee-um you're gittin', Cantine. Savvy? That's why I'm lettin' you stay hull-skinned."
"Well, if you're lettin' me stay whole-skinned what you crossin' me for then?" fiercely demanded the man in the parka, anger darkening his already dark eyes, tensing sharper his already sharp features. "Mind, I ain't admittin' I'm Cantine either. But if I was Cantine, and you ain't goin' to perforate Cantine on sight, what in Hades do you mean?"
"Mean?" echoed Bassett. "Your gall is sure chilled steel and case-hardened on top. Do you think as me or any other white man's goin' to eat, drink or sleep with or breathe the same air as you? You as broke the bond of bread and blanket, the Northland law as no man ever breaks, and lives to boast of it! Days on end I seen you sit at table with my pardner Sark under his own roof in White Pass City. Nights on end I seen you smoke by his fireside and bed down in his blankets. And with the guile of your stinkin' soul you was plannin' and executin' his betrayal every blasted minute of the time!
"Then ag'in, do you think as any woman in this camp's goin' to suffer the companionship of yon female you call your wife who's ten times guiltier'n you? The girls of Happy Camp is slightly frivolous and not what you'd term pernickety, but they draw the line at her. And I tell you, Cantine, I draw the line at you. I wouldn't deserve to be called Sark's pardner if I didn't. I wouldn't deserve to be called a white man if I didn't. I'm strong for sanitation here. The likes of you two is stench and putrefaction in a healthy place. Savvy what I mean? You git to blazes outa Happy Camp!"
Bassett released the other's wrist as he spoke, and the man, his lips drawn up in a wolf-dog's snarl, stepped back a yard.
"I'll be bludgeoned if we do!" he snapped. "You ain't proved anything yet. Anyway there ain't anything to prove."
Tom Bassett gazed at him with a wearied air and resignedly waved a hand to his companions.
"Who is he, men?" he asked.
As one man, six of them took pipes out of their mouths, lowered their feet from the guard-rail of the stove, and spat toward the damper.
"Jose Cantine!" they chorused.
Immediately their feet went up to the guard-rail again, and their pipes went back to their mouths.
"And about the woman!" Bassett paused and scanned the throng of dancers. "Where's White-Pass-City Winnie?" he asked. "Ain't she here tonight? I thought I seen her yeller dress somewhar. Oh, she's at the back, eh? Well, trot her forrard."
The throng shifted, leaving an irregular lane in its center.
Through this lane a fresh-faced girl of twenty-four or -five pushed from the rear, the rustle of her canary-satin dress and the tap-tap of her dainty pumps falling with strange distinctness across the silence of the Saxon.
"Winnie, shake hands with an old friend of yours!" yawned Bassett.
White-Pass-City Winnie gave one swift, curious glance at the woman by the stove and recoiled, her nose in the air.
"Me? Shake with Blera Sark? Not much! And if I'd shamed as good a man as Eric Sark for a cur like Jose Cantine I'd spare my old friends the sight of my face!"
Winnie, arms folded so tight as to lock her hands away from any possible contamination, flounced back into the front rank of the dance-crowd and remained there standing on her dignity and her high heels.
For a little the other woman gazed fixedly at her scorner. Then her flushed face, still handsome in spite of the marring frontier life, began to quiver and work. Her hands clenched upon the breast of her parka, and tears splashed down and hissed upon the stove.
"You—you—vixen!" she choked.
For revelation as well as inexpressible hurt was White-Pass-City Winnie's opinion of her social status.
Yet her shame and her tears had no weakening effect upon those about her. Bassett was gazing significantly at Cantine.
"No good, Jose!" he shrugged. "Seein' as I'm an all-fired, welded and cemented pardner of Sark's, I figgered you wouldn't be anyways partial to my views; I figgered you'd be hard-bent on disputin' my identification if ever I spotted you. So I ain't standin' on my own identification. I'm standin' on the identification of these here six men as knowed you along the White Pass Trail. I'm standin' on the identification of White-Pass-City Winnie, who was a close friend of Blera Sark's. What's more, I'll bet a thousand ounces thar ain't a person present as doubts yon evidence. If thar is let him speak up for you!"
Bassett's challenging glance traveled swiftly round the Saxon. The dancing-floor was empty, the bar deserted, every faro, stud-poker, draw-poker, crap and roulette table idle. To a man the stakers had left their stiffest games to hear the controversy in the middle of the room. And to a man they stood with Tom Bassett. No one spoke for Cantine.
"It's settled!" decided Bassett, whirling upon Jose. "And lemme tell you you're gittin' outa Happy Camp pretty safe. I know many's the camp as would give you twenty lashes for stealin' a rind of bacon. And for stealin' a man's wife and home and hopes and honor—say, Cantine, liquid hellfire ain't a squirt on what they'd do to you. You're lucky to be goin' so safe. Now git!"
"We won't!" defied Jose recklessly. "We've come twenty-odd miles, climbed nigh four thousand feet, and it's forty-one below zero by the thermometer on the door. You can't turn us out on a night like this."
"Kin't?" growled Bassett. With a quick jerk he flipped his watch from his pocket on to his open palm. "Sixty seconds I'm givin' you," he announced. "Walk through that door before then or git thrown through arter!"
The Saxon was very still. Bristling like a malemiut at bay, Jose Cantine half-crouched in front of Bassett, who intently held the watch on him.
"One, two, three, four, five—ten—fifteen—" rasped Bassett's deep voice monotonously counting off the seconds.
Cantine's coal-black eyes shifted appealingly round the room, but the crowd of men gazed back at him stolidly.
"Twenty—thirty—forty—fifty—sixty!"
Bassett flipped his watch into his pocket and jumped.
As he jumped, Cantine's hand again dived under his parka. He had the Colt out this time before Tom grasped his arm. Two shots went wild through the stovepipe, but, his wrist twisted with a violent wrench, Cantine felt the weapon slipping from his fingers, felt himself lifted like a doll in Bassett's powerful hands and bundled to the door.
In the doorway Bassett poised a second. Suddenly he kicked. Cantine hurtled down the slope like a football, gaining momentum every second, and plunged into a snowdrift one hundred yards below.
"Now, missus——"
But the woman who had been Blera Sark fled past Bassett after Jose.
"Mebbe you think you've run ag'in a pretty hard snag in me!" Bassett called down the slope to them. "You haven't. I'm a gentle, ministerin', velvet-fingered angel of mercy to what you'll strike before you make Dawson City!"
He closed the Saxon door against the boring frost.
"The air sure smells better," he observed, sniffing with relief.
"Sure does," nodded the old-timers by the stove. "But what trail's your pardner plantin' relay camps on?"
"The Nordenskold Trail," answered Bassett. "That's the same trail yon two skunks is takin' on from Whitehorse, only they dunno it yit. But, ladies and gentlemen," apologizing to the crowd, "I'm sure sufferin' sorry to be the cause of the delay in your fun. Don't let her delay any longer. Go cavortin' to it!"
Immediately clamor broke out again.
Violin and piano struck up.
The click of the ivory roulette-ball and the rattle of dealt cases arose from the tables.
Happy Camp was Happy Camp once more, and for it the incident was closed.
BUT not for Cantine and the woman.
She helped the cursing Jose to pull himself out of the drift, and, together they floundered back to the beaten trail.
In the snow-walled defile they stood a moment, gazing upward at the glowing lights of Happy Camp and the stark outline of Chilcoot Mountain etched against a green night sky.
With a string of muffled imprecations Jose made a move as if to go back up the slope, but Blera put her hands on his shoulders and checked him.
"Don't, Jose, don't!" she besought. "They'll maim and manhandle you till you're a proper cripple. And the word'll go round like a plague. There isn't any tent there for us tonight."
"I ain't seein' any here either, then," snarled Jose. "You know how light we come over the Pass to make it in a day. Grub enough for one stop, and no blankets!"
"Well," shivered Blera petulantly, "there's lots of fire, isn't there? What's the use of lamenting in the frost?"
Happy Camp marked the edge of timberline after the nakedness of the glacier-scoured rocks and volcanic slag about Crater Lake and the steeps above, and into the first scrubby pines Cantine and the woman turned.
Here was a chaos of dead and splintered trunks as thick as a man's arm, and piling these up they kindled a giant fire. Food was lacking. Yet they melted snow in a drinking-cup that Cantine carried in his pocket and swallowed great drafts of hot water.
Blankets they were likewise powerless to improvise. They simply threw big heaps of green spruce boughs beside the fire and, lying upon them close to the coals, basked and drowsed, warming back and breast alternately in the terrific cold, and alternately rising to drag on fresh fuel.
Above them in the January night the aurora flashed and dimmed, and the sapphire stars leaped with dire prophecy of still intenser cold. And the January day, when it came, was as the night, except that the stars vanished and the aurora ceased to play. The jagged, sunless world was frigid, stiff and white, and the green night sky had changed to muddy gray.
Cantine and Blera arose early, drank more hot water and plowed down the ice-trail across Deep Lake and Long Lake, ancient volcano pits that with Crater linked Lake Linderman to the mountains.
All about them the stampede was on the move, hurrying along the deep trench of trampled snow which constituted the trail. The throng hauled loaded hand-sleds, drove dogs attached to loaded dog-sleds or went by man-power under enormous packs. Ever these packs were cast down without care at the side of the trail while the owners back-tripped for more till the side snows were heaped with bags, boxes and rope-lashed bundles of all descriptions.
On the right of Cantine and Blera, on their left, ahead of them, behind them were tons upon tons of provisions, yet they dared not put forth their hands to lift a morsel. Well they knew the Northland law concerning wayside caches, and well they knew the punishment that fell upon him who broke the law. The bitter resentment they nursed against Bassett who had ejected them from Happy Camp and against all the rest who had consented to that ejection blazed into a sort of savagery, a hatred of their own breed which mocked and tantalized and ostracized them.
Every man of that breed bound inward had a vision before his eyes and a hope in his heart. Each worked in a frenzy and performed prodigies of toil for the attainment of his vision and the realizing of his high ambition, but the jaded souls of Cantine and Blera did not respond to any such spur.
From the start they had been under no spell but the spell of shallow, garish enticements; and the unlooked-for collision with Tom Bassett and the specter of another day had seared them into callousness. Without lifting eyes to their companions of the trail who passed, met, repassed and oftentimes jostled them, they plodded, pariahs of their race, down the frozen surface of Long Lake.
Near Long Lake's foot a string of seven sleds drawn by swift dog-teams, and going light, overtook them. They drove down upon the two without the customary warning hail.
Cantine and the woman had barely time to throw themselves prone into the side snow before the lead-dog of the first team, ripping at them with vicious fangs, flashed past. The other teams flashed after, each dog taking the chance to snap futilely at their moccasined heels and the drivers with raucous laughter flicking their whiplashes like long, black snakes into the drifts around the heads of the fallen pair.
Although no blow had been landed on them, the demonstration rankled in the hearts of Jose and Blera. Blera knew that had it not been for the fact that she was a woman the blows would surely have been sent home and perhaps the wolf-dogs swerved from their course to rend them as they ran. More bitter still her anger flared, and Jose himself quivered with passion as he clambered out of the side snow back into the trail and reviled the disappearing seven. He could not fully identify the befurred and parka-clad drivers, but he had a suspicion that they were Tom Bassett and the six men who had sat around the stove the night before in the Saxon Saloon.
On down to Lake Linderman, the end of the twenty-eight-mile portage over Chilcoot from Dyea Beach, he carried his suspicion, and there at Linderman Landing he found his suspicions justified.
The shore of the lake was dotted with log-cabins, half-log and half-canvas cabins and flimsy tents, standing where the whipsaws had swept the trees away. On the edge of the main trail just at the dip to the ice bulked the Linderman Restaurant run by Flambald. It flaunted a huge cotton sign painted with pies and prices and advertised a satiating meal for ten dollars in gold. Instinctively Cantine and Blera increased their pace as they made for it.
There was a crowd about the door. Cantine went to push through and suddenly recoiled. Tom Bassett lounged on one end of the log door-step with his back against the log wall.
"What's the matter, Cantine?" grinned Tom derisively. "Ain't you hungry?"
Cantine put out a hand for his companion and gingerly, his eyes watching Bassett for an untoward action, moved over the door-step. He seemed astounded that he got across untouched. He looked back over his shoulder uncertainly, half paused and went on again toward the tables. Bassett had never moved a muscle. Only Cantine could see the derisive profile of his nose, cheek and mouth as he leaned against the outside wall, and the sight awoke in Jose queer premonitions.
Nevertheless he boldly handed Blera into a chair and waited for some one to take his order. No one came. Jose beckoned madly, but the waiters were always busy. They nodded, but they never came. In the fury of his hunger Jose leaped up and rushed over to the plank desk where Flambald took the money for the waiters' checks.
"Look here!" he flared. "We're famished, and your waiters are a lot of dummies. Send some one round with grub."
Flambald, a man of colossal and unhealthy girth, looked at him over the plank desk.
"You go to condemnation!" he bellowed. "You aren't eating here."
"Why? What in——"
"Stop!" roared Flambald. "This is my house. I feed who I like, but you I don't like. Savvy?"
Jose savvied.
Flambald's hand was on a huge iron paper-weight that held his bills upon the plank desk, and there was no arguing. Jose silently beckoned Blera and slunk out again.
On the door-step lounged Bassett, and Jose turned in the trail to curse him futilely. He knew better than to try any other restaurant. Bassett had passed the word. His receptions would be all the same. Also he knew better than to try force. He had had his lesson from that up by timberline. Besides, Blera's hand was on his arm, fearfully dragging him on down Linderman's frozen bosom.
Thus began a grim game in which Bassett was persecution personified, a Nemesis unshakable. He passed them on Lake Linderman, welcomed them at Bennett Post, and once more showed them the tail of his sled halfway down to West Arm on Bennett Lake.
That night they spent much like the preceding one, feeding a gigantic fire, drinking inconceivable quantities of hot water and gnawing mangy dried salmon purchased at a Stick Indian teepee on Lake Bennett's shore.
Thenceforward Bassett's hand as well as the hand of every other man was against them up the chain of lakes. The white breed of the land was a hunt-pack turned upon them, and though by virtue of stray Indian camps they survived through Caribou Crossing, Tagish Post and McClintock Post to Whitehorse, Bassett beat them in the end.
For on the Fifty-mile River beyond the Whitehorse camp his dog-sled passed them once again, and the next far post was Selkirk at the Pelly's mouth.
"Jose, how many miles to Selkirk?" asked Blera as they stared after the vanishing outfit.
"More'n two hundred and fifty," answered Jose dejectedly. "Bassett's got us, sure."
"No, he hasn't, then!" Blera's blue eyes flashed in the frost, and she shook her fur-gantleted hand in Bassett's wake. "He's aiming to starve us out on the river-stretch and make us quit it again, but it'll take a sore sight more than him to do it!"
"How you meaning? We can't make Selkirk on hot water and dog-feed."
"I know that, but there's the Dalton Trail."
"By thunder! Say, I hadn't figured on that track! But it'll do. Blera, you're sure a—a—a winner. I know there's a Stick village at the mouth of the Klokhok—old Tutchi's Village. I've been in it often. The beggars is rich. They're lousy with dogs, and we'll dicker for some and go down the Middle Fork of the Nordenskold. After that, Dawson's dead easy with dogs. And in Dawson we'll lie low till we get a chance to square up with Mister Bassett. Come on!"
Endowed with redoubled energy at his bettered prospects, Jose turned and sped off in a long lurching snowshoe stride for the mouth of the Takhini River which emptied into the Fifty-mile halfway between White-horse and Lake Laberge.
They turned up the Takhini, sometimes called the Mendenhall since both these rivers joined to form the larger stream which emptied into the Fifty-mile, the Mendenhall draining Taye Lake lying to the westward on the Dalton Trail and the Takhini flowing north by east from Kusawa Lake between the Yukon River and the Dezadeash country.
Cantine and Blera were traveling almost due westward. On their left to the south lay Haeckel Hill. On their right to the north loomed the Miner's Range, and on the far horizon beyond the valley of the tributary Klokhok jutted higher, nameless peaks. In interminable vastness the land spread before them, virgin ground of| from the main-traveled trail to Dawson City, and the stupendous extent of it was enough to strike fear into the human heart.
But Cantine had no fear. In the lonely expanse he knew the spot where was life and warm teepees and food. Tutchi was a chief, and he kept his village in a fairly sanitary condition, a condition immeasurably superior to that of the squalid teepees to be found along the Yukon basin. Cantine had been there and he knew, and up the Takhini's smooth ice he pressed at a furious pace, the beast instinct of him yearning for food and the human side of him yearning for a place where he might without dread of contumely take on again the status of the white.
Jose's sentiments were in a degree reflected in his companion. She ran at his heels with the swing of the Northwoman trained to the trails, and she seemed to have no difficulty in keeping his pace.
{[em]}THE Klokhok River they sought flowed south along the base of the Miner' s Range into the Takhini. All afternoon they held on for it and at night swung suddenly to the right into its spruce- fringed mouth. Yonder by the fringe of spruce on the low bench-land was the site of Tutchi's Village, but to Cantine's astonished eyes there glowed no teepee fires between the black trunks.
"Blazes!" he exclaimed in alarm as he surveyed the bare bench-land. "She's gone, Blera. And how in tarnation's that? It wasn't just a camping-ground. It was a permanent village. But maybe they've shifted up-stream or back in the range. Let's see if there's a trail."
With a swift pang of fear and loneliness caused by she knew not what, Blera mechanically followed Cantine as he skimmed up the snow-sheeted ice alongside the Klokhok's left limit. In that moment of non-discovery of the village the inimical wild crept close to her. She saw it as a concrete force, strong, sure, ruthless as the persecuting Bassett or the avenging hand of Eric Sark.
Her fear grew upon her so that she drew near to Jose in his search, her hand on his elbow, and skimmed with him stride by stride. Her eyes were furtively turned to the dark spruce forests crowding on either side, while the eyes of her companion scrutinized the snowy bank. That was why neither of them marked the scum ice, fragile mask of an unfrozen spring, straight ahead.
They did not mark it, but the moment it rattled and shaled off against the frames of their shoes their trained ears telegraphed the danger. Instinctively both made a violent half-turn in mid-stride, but the movement was not enough to carry them clear. It served only to jerk them against each other, and together they sank to their shoulders through the scum ice.
The Klokhok's waters were as cold as the vault of death.
For an instant the contact paralyzed the two. Then their arms fell like flails upon the rotten shell about them. For yards they broke their way to shore and pulled themselves like leaden-footed divers up the bank.
A clump of blasted spruce stood on the shore, and, struggling against the clog of their garments which were setting as hard as armor, they madly tore down armfuls of the boughs.
"Jose, the matches!" gasped Blera, dropping on her knees beside the pile. "Give them to me. I'll light it. You pile on more. Don't stop piling!"
Jose snatched up the stiff, crackling front of his parka and dabbed his numbing fingers into the pocket of his vest where he kept his matches in a little bottle tightly corked, the best waterproof match-safe the Northman knows.
Even as he jabbed his fingers in he uttered a cry of pain and jerked them out again.
The ends showed all bloody and studded with bits of broken glass.
Pallor swept Cantine's swarthy face till he looked like a statue in bronze as he stood staring stupidly at his finger-ends and watching the hot blood freeze.
"Jose! Jose!"
Blera's voice rang thin as a wail in the frosty stillness.
She sprang to Jose, seized on the cloth of his vest and pushed the pocket inside out from the bottom so that the contents fell into the palm of her left gantlet.
Mingled with the broken glass of the bottle was a muddled mass of splintered match-stumps and sodden heads.
"Must have done it in the fall!" quavered Jose, still staring stupidly. "I felt your snowshoe take me hard in the ribs when we went down."
But Blera did not heed.
She was kneeling again by the pile of spruce branches, scratching match-head after match-head.
None of them would light despite her frantic and repeated trials. In despair she threw the sodden mass into the unlit pile of twigs and turned again to Cantine.
"Your Colt, Jose!" she appealed, rising stiffly. "Your Colt! You can start it with a shot!"
"My Colt?" Cantine looked bewildered. The frost seemed to be deadening his senses already. "My Colt, Blera? Oh, yes. Bassett took it, 'way back at Happy Camp!"
"Good God!" screamed Blera, remembering.
She threw out her arms, weakly trying to fight up circulation, and a second time the ruthless spirit of the wild came very close.
To her terrified eyes it seemed to leap out of the darkness of the spruce, a material presence, and mock her with a shout that reverberated across the tireless land.
It rushed upon her. She could hear the crunch-crunch of its footsteps in the crust. Its grip fell upon her shoulder, and she shrieked insanely.
"Steady, missus, steady!" soothed a mumbling, half-articulate voice.
And not till the spoken words smote on her consciousness could she realize that the material presence was a humble man. Then she gave a little moan of relief and put out a hand for Jose to share in her discovery.
In the arctic gloom they could not see the man's face at all, but they gathered that he had been disturbed at supper by their cries, for he was capless and coatless. Also he held in his hand a generous slab of pilot-bread, and this it was which, cramming his mouth, rendered his speech so inarticulate. Wildly leading the race, the bread in his left hand and Blera's frozen gantlet in his right, he hurtled them over the snows between the spruce trees and banged them into his cabin doorway.
At their advent five wolf-dogs leaped up snarling from their rest beside the stove.
"Lie down!" gurgled Cantine's and Blera's rescuer.
He kicked the dogs soundly in the ribs till they retreated into the huge empty wood-box that stood behind the stove.
"I don't like the brutes inside," he mumbled, still wrestling convulsively to get rid of the gagging pilot-bread, "but it's a case of have to keep them inside or get them eaten whole. Tutchi's Village is full of savage semi-wolves, and they run the river in a hunt-pack every night."
"Tutchi's Village!" exclaimed Cantine, his teeth clicking incessantly as he whacked the ice from his garments. "Where's it moved to? It was hunting sign of it we fell in."
"Moved five miles up the Klokhok," spluttered the other, setting the stove-door ajar to obtain a floor-streamer of light in the gloomy cabin. "But you better strip quick. Use that back room there to change. You'll find a dunnage-bag full of clothes—some of them woman's things—under the bunk. While you throw them on, I'll rustle more wood to stoke up the stove. I used all I had in to cook supper. And you can light the candle on the shelf there to see by. I was just getting up to reach for it when I heard your yells!"
Gulping down the last of his pilot-bread, the owner of the cabin was gone while he spoke.
Cantine reached up to the shelf, took off the tallow candle stuck in a wide-necked pickle-bottle, reached a box of matches from the same shelf and lighted the wick.
From force of habit he fingered up a small bunch of matches out of the box and went to shove them into his vest pocket.
"Wait, Jose, wait!" cautioned Blera. "They'll be as bad as the others if you put them there. Put them in the dry clothes, and after this don't trust a bottle any more. Get one of those rubber match-safes with the screw top. And now for the dry clothes! I feel as if I can work my arms and legs once more."
Taking the candle from Jose, she moved across the cabin toward the door of the back room. The yellow light flooding the main room showed it to be built of the customary spruce logs chinked with moss and plastered with mud.
The floor was of rough-hewn slabs. Of slabs, too, but a little better smoothed, was the rude table upon which supper was spread. The table stood under the window which instead of glass for a light boasted a square of golden-brown moose-skin rubbed so smooth as to be almost transparent.
Upon the opposite wall was a bunk also formed of slabs. The Yukon stove stood at the end, and it, with the wood-box behind, completed the furnishings of the cabin.
Out of the empty wood-box the huskies raised their heads and growled so ominously at Blera's and Jose's movements that the two ran the last few steps across the floor and shut the door of the back room with a bang.
The back room was but a logged-in annex to the main room and without window or door. A bunk constituted its only furnishing, and it appeared to be used as a store-room, for grub-bags and odds and ends were piled neatly in its corners.
Blera set the candle on a pile of sacks and ferreted out the dunnage-bag from under the bunk. Its lashings were loose, and she tumbled the contents out on the floor where each could pick what was needed.
The rapid run from the river to the cabin and the genial atmosphere of the cabin itself had somewhat warmed their blood as well as partly thawed their mail-like garments. Hastily they ripped off the clammy parkas, mackinaws and woolens and began the process of replacing them with dry ones.
For the most part Blera dressed like Jose in arctic underwear, flannel shirt, German socks and moccasins, but when it came to outer garments she searched in the heart of the disorderly pile on the floor for the woman's things the owner of the cabin had mentioned.
Finally she fished them out, a buckskin waist and a mackinaw skirt with a pronounced plaid pattern.
The waist went on like any waist, but at sight of the skirt Blera's breath whistled in her throat. Her face convulsed in an appalling discovery. She held the plaid mackinaw close to the candle, examining the band and the vent at the back.
"What's wrong with it?" asked Cantine, looking up from his own dressing. "Lousy?"
"Jose, it's the same! Here's the band leather sewn on to keep the sheath-knife from wearing it and the hooks and eyes of copper wire on the vent. Jose, it's my skirt! And he's—"
"Sark!" roared Jose.
Terror transformed Cantine's features. He wildly scanned the walls of the back room for window or door, but, as he remembered now, there was no window or door.
"Blera, we're trapped!" he faltered with a great revelation. "We're trapped, and Bassett's done it. This is the trail his partner was putting relay camps on, the Nordenskold Trail. The road down the Middle Fork runs right here. Why in Hades didn't we watch where we were going?"
Blera, unanswering, held the mackinaw skirt spread out in her hands. She was trembling from head to foot, and her eyes stared wide under the surge of emotion, jumbled emotion, fear, remorse, anxiety, longing, despair.
"Bassett's done it!" repeated Jose. "Curse his bloody heart, he knew where his partner was. He knew if he closed the Yukon against us we'd have to travel the Nordenskold. I wish, to blue brimstoned blazes, I'd been quicker with my Colt that night up at—but what in thunder's the use of raving?" He stopped short in his furious passion. "We got to do something. We got to do it mighty sudden. Blera, what in tarnation can we do without dogs, arms or grub?"
"I don't know what we can do," answered Blera, breathing as if she were sobbing, "but we got to get out of here. Put on dry parkas and draw the hoods close and beat it. Maybe we can get out before he comes in. If we don't, tell him—tell—him we got to keep right on. Tell him your brother's sick up in the Miner's Range. Here's a bullet knocking around in the dunnage-bag. Put it in your mouth, and it'll help change your voice some. And for God's sake let's keep our parka hoods drawn tight."
BLERA dropped the plaid mackinaw skirt and, contorting feverishly, they both donned parkas and pulled open the door.
But as they stepped out into the main room of the cabin the door of it rattled, was kicked back, and both his arms full, Sark staggered in with the wood.
Instantly, as before, the five huskies leaped viciously across the floor at Jose and Blera.
Sark let fall his load, caught up a single billet and belabored the beasts over the heads.
"Down, Skookum! Down, Culuk!" he yelled. "Get to blazes behind the stove!" He overcame their stubborn resistance and hammered them into submission. "Now stay behind it, you savages!"
He turned apologetically to his guests.
"But hold on!" he exclaimed, noting the drawn parka hoods which allowed only their eyes to be seen. "You're not for hitting the trail again tonight, eh?"
"We got to," twanged Jose, the bullet in his mouth altering his voice and causing him to enunciate through his nose. "We got to get along on the jump. My brother's sick up in the Miner's Range, up on the headwaters of the Klokhok. We got to keep going tonight, for I sent him word I'd reach him tomorrow."
"Thunder!" exclaimed Sark. "That's different. And I'm sorry. But you eat before you travel. You and your missus need solid grub and steaming drink after yon bath. I was just taking the last bite myself. There's lots of pilot-bread and moose meat and hot coffee on the stove. Dig in!"
Sark waved a hand toward the laden table.
Blera who, although the parka hood concealed every part of her face but her eyes, could not forbear averting her head, turned slightly and took a sidelong glance at Eric Sark. As she viewed the familiar figure so clear in the candlelight, big of limb and of chest, blue-eyed, granite-featured, with the raven-black in his beard and hair, she had an almost unconquerable desire to cry out or to run.
Yet she did neither.
She remained stone-still till her eyes encountered those of Cantine and strayed with them to the food upon the table.
After their days of hunger it was a great temptation, and they fell. Flight delayed, and still trusting to the masks of their parka hoods, they stretched out ravenous hands and munched fiercely upon the bread and meat and gulped the steaming coffee.
Jose removed the bullet from his mouth while he ate, but both he and Blera were careful to sit backing the tallow-candle which Sark placed upon its shelf again, so that their faces were cast in gloom.
Sark, to maintain the part of host, picked up the remainder of the slab of pilot-bread he had carried when he rescued them and poured himself another cup of coffee.
"What might your name be, stranger?" he asked.
Blera started, the piece of moose-shoulder she was munching slipping to the floor.
"Karle Lott!" coughed Jose through the drink he snatched.
"Mine's Eric Sark."
Dreading another personal question, Blera bent low by the table-edge to pick up the meat.
But Skookum, the most cunning as well as the most evil of the wolf-dogs, had seen it fall and stolen from behind the stove. He leaped as Blera reached for it and, losing it by the fraction of a second, slashed with his chisel-sharp fangs at her face.
The fangs fell short of the flesh, but met in the parka hood and tore it from her head.
Unmasked, the woman sprang away from the brute with a violent scream.
"Blera!" Sark's vicious voice thundered in the cabin.
Swift as his wolf-dog he sprang up.
For a moment he stared at her as across a gulf, his blue eyes blazing. Then the lightning-fire of his glance struck her companion.
"You can drop your hood, too, Cantine!"
With the ultimatum Sark's fingers slid back and seized the rifle lying in his bunk on the wall, for he looked to see a weapon flash in Cantine's hand and guessed that one of them had traveled his last trail.
But Blera was upon him on the instant, pressing down the gun.
"You can't harm us, Eric! You can't harm us!" she declared hysterically. "You can't touch us here, people you've broken bread with under your own roof. You know that's the Northland law!"
Again Sark stared at her as across a gulf and dropped the rifle on the bunk.
"You're right," he admitted slowly, nodding his head as if she had expounded some all-powerful decree. "Though laws aren't worth a Siwash curse to you two, they are to me. You're safe—for the night. Because now I savvy that 'brother in the Miner's Range' was only lyin' bluff."
"But look here, Sark," whined Jose, "we——"
"Stop right up! I'd sure palaver with a murdering Sundowner. I'd sure palaver with a cannibal Hoonah. But I won't palaver with you. I'm telling you you're safe under this roof. Out from under it you take your chance. I'll give you an hour's clear start in the morning, and then, by thunder, look out for me! Now jump into that back room quick, the both of you. Jump in, I say, for fear I forget I've broken bread under my own roof with you!"
The intensity of Sark's passion heaved and tore at his mighty chest and vibrated in his smashing voice.
They did not want him to forget. They had the temporary saving grace of the night hours. Much might perhaps be accomplished in those hours, and with that idea in their degenerate minds Cantine and the woman slunk into the logged-in annex and shut the door.
As if he were already slamming lead into Cantine's body, Sark slammed stick after stick into the stove.
Then, although it was still early in the evening, he blew out the candle and threw himself upon his bunk, lying on hip and elbow, resting his head on his hand and staring like a graven image at the flame-dance on the darkened walls of the cabin.
Blera, peering through a chink in the back-room door, watched him thus hour by hour. It was a strange and weary vigil, but on after midnight his head slipped down from his hand.
"Jose," she breathed, "he's asleep. Now's our chance. But we have to have the rifle to make our get-away good. Then you can stand him off. I'll take the gun. I'm lighter than you, and the slab floor's awful creaky."
Cautiously she slipped out of the back room and as cautiously, inch by inch, edged across the main room toward Sark's bunk.
Her figure as she crept was now lost in shadow, now etched out faintly by the leaping flamelight. She moved apparently without stepping, with the peculiar gliding grace that is the inheritance of North-born people.
The irregularities of the slab floor seemed to lose stability, to become fluid and flow under her feet like waves in a rapid. Not once did her moccasined toes strike knot or seam. Not once did the limber slabs shriek as they bowed and sprung. Not once did the sleeping huskies stir from their dreams by the stove. She reached the bunk, and her mobile fingers closed on the weapon.
Sark faced outward as he slept.
The rifle lay on the blankets between his back and the wall, free of his touch except where his shoe-packed foot curled over the heel of the stock.
Blera had the rifle by the barrel, and slowly, with a motion so gentle as to be scarcely perceptible, she began to twist loose the butt.
She had nearly succeeded when she saw the twitching of muscles round Sark's closed eyes.
Swiftly she released the weapon and with a lithe swing of her body stretched herself along the outer edge of the bunk. Her arms were about Sark's neck, and her voice was whispering in his ear when he half awoke.
"Eric," she whispered hurriedly, hysterically, "I've come back—stolen out of there while he slept. We got to go away—together. He was never——"
But Sark awakened fully.
"You cursed vampire!" he gritted. "Get off. Get away from me. I don't want the touch of your hands. Aren't you seeing you're poison and pollution to me?"
He half arose on one knee, roughly thrusting her from the bunk, and even as he repulsed her, the touch of her arms brought the thrill of another day, a day when his hours had been full of dream and desire, of marvel and of miracle, when Blera had been a splendor and a vision to him and lain in honor by his side.
For a reeling moment he saw not this woman who was poison and pollution to him. His eyes were fixed, seer-like, upon the panels of those vanished days, upon the words and smiles and deeds and delights of another woman tapestried in golden story upon the snow-white curtain of the North, days before he had come into the companionship of Tom Bassett and discovered the love that passeth the love of woman.
And that short moment of Sark's unwariness was his undoing and Blera's opportunity. Right before his unseeing eyes her swift hands grasped the rifle, and like another Delilah, turned Philistine against her Samson, she crashed the butt across his temple.
Sark's face turned blank. He quivered a little, poised on one knee, and collapsed in the bunk.
"Jose, quick!"
But she did not need to cry. Cantine had seen from the chink in the back-room door and run as she struck.
"Blera, you didn't——"
"No, no! Only stunned! And he's stirring already. Be sharp! Get the dog-harness. Down, you brutes!"
The awakened dogs had sprung up snarling, but Blera had a formidable weapon in the rifle, and she bludgeoned them on the heads with the butt. Jose, too, sprang for the long-lashed dog-whip, coiled on pegs on the wall, and flayed them into subjection.
"Now the harness, quick, Jose!"
Still using the butt of his whip to keep the victory already gained, Cantine threw the harness on the ugly beasts and haled them out into the piercing cold. Blera tossed down the sled up-ended by the door. Rapidly they traced in the huskies, whining resentfully at being lashed and dragged from the warmth of the cabin out into a temperature of fifty-five below, and cast themselves on the sled.
"Mush!" roared Cantine, bringing down the whip.
Under the dreaded lash the shivering team dashed down the bank and headed up the ice of the Klokhok. The steel-shod sled-runners shrieked a shrill tune. The ice boomed to their flying passage.
High in the heavens overhead flashed the brilliant stars and the mid-Winter aurora. There was in the hearts of Blera and Jose no remorse, no regret, not even pity. There was only devilish recklessness and the sheer exultation of escape. Continually they urged on the dogs to greater speed, lashing them till Skookum the leader flung up his nose as he galloped and howled a protest.
And challenging Skookum's howl, from around the abrupt bend they were taking at express-train speed broke the tumultuous cry of many wolf-dogs on the arctic night.
As if suddenly revealed by a lightning flash Jose and Blera glimpsed them right ahead, the murderous hunt-pack from Tutchi's Village sweeping the river-ice one hundred strong with one lone cross-fox straining from their jaws. An instant they glimpsed them, then in the belly of the bend, fox, team, sled and hunt-pack collided in a heap.
Cantine had loosened his grip on the sled to grasp the rifle in defense, and the smashing impact catapulted him clear into the heart of the horde.
One moment Blera watched him sink in a sea of bristling fur and slavering fangs before she beheld the same sea surging upon her, the sea which was the concrete force of the inimical wild, strong, sure, more ruthless even than the persecuting Bassett or the avenging hand of Eric Sark.
TWO weeks later, Tom Bassett, returning from Dawson City up the Nordenskold River and swinging through the night down the Klokhok River to his partner's cabin on the Nordenskold Trail, drove over a rattling heap of débris at the first bend above the Klokhok's mouth. Curiously he swerved his sled back to investigate, and one brief look before he whipped on showed the remnants of a broken sled mingled with gnawed husky and human bones glistening white under a rising moon.
He whipped on fast and burst into the cabin upon Sark who with a bandage over a deep cut on his temple was forking bacon from a frying-pan on the stove on to a plate.
"Eric," Tom greeted with a tremor of relief in his voice, "I struck somethin' up-river, and I wasn't—well, sure, you know!"
"I've had visitors since you left," replied Sark grimly.
"Eh?" Bassett put out a sympathetic hand. "But Eric, you didn't——"
"No," returned his partner, gripping the extended hand, "the hunt-pack saved me the trouble. Sit in and have supper!"
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1956, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 67 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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