Smoke Bellew by Jack London (chrome ebook reader txt) 📖

once in a while we forget about it and turn loose and do something without a thought of how much there is in it. And when we do that, Cultus George, watch out. What we want to know now is: Are you going to take out that team?”

Cultus George debated with himself. He was no coward. Perhaps this was the extent of their bluff, and if he gave in now he was a fool. And while he debated, Smoke suffered from secret worry lest this stubborn aborigine would persist in being hanged.

“How much?” said Cultus George.

Smoke started to raise his hand for the signal.

“Me go,” Cultus George said very quickly, before the rope could tighten.

“An’ when that rescue expedition found me,” Shorty told it in the Annie Mine, “that ornery Cultus George was the first in, beatin’ Smoke’s sled by three hours, an’ don’t you forget it, Smoke comes in second at that. Just the same, it was about time, when I heard Cultus George a-yellin’ at his dogs from the top of the divide, for those blamed Siwashes had ate my moccasins, my mitts, the leather lacin’s, my knife-sheath, an’ some of ‘em was beginnin’ to look mighty hungry at me—me bein’ better nourished, you see.

“An’ Smoke? He was near dead. He hustled around a while, helpin’ to start a meal for them two hundred sufferin’ Siwashes; an’ then he fell asleep, settin’ on his haunches, thinkin’ he was feedin’ snow into a thawin’-pail. I fixed him my bed, an’ dang me if I didn’t have to help him into it, he was that give out. Sure I win the toothpicks. Didn’t them dogs just naturally need the six salmon Smoke fed ‘em at the noonin’?”

 

IX. THE MISTAKE OF CREATION

 

“Whoa!” Smoke yelled at the dogs, throwing his weight back on the gee-pole to bring the sled to a halt.

“What’s eatin’ you now?” Shorty complained. “They ain’t no water under that footing.”

“No; but look at that trail cutting out to the right,” Smoke answered. “I thought nobody was wintering in this section.”

The dogs, on the moment they stopped, dropped in the snow and began biting out the particles of ice from between their toes. This ice had been water five minutes before. The animals had broken through a skein of ice, snow-powdered, which had hidden the spring water that oozed out of the bank and pooled on top of the three-foot winter crust of Nordbeska River.

“First I heard of anybody up the Nordbeska,” Shorty said, staring at the all but obliterated track covered by two feet of snow, that left the bed of the river at right angles and entered the mouth of a small stream flowing from the left. “Mebbe they’re hunters and pulled their freight long ago.”

Smoke, scooping the light snow away with mittened hands, paused to consider, scooped again, and again paused. “No,” he decided. “There’s been travel both ways, but the last travel was up that creek. Whoever they are, they’re there now—certain. There’s been no travel for weeks. Now what’s been keeping them there all the time? That’s what I want to know.”

“And what I want to know is where we’re going to camp tonight,” Shorty said, staring disconsolately at the skyline in the southwest, where the mid-afternoon twilight was darkening into night.

“Let’s follow the track up the creek,” was Smoke’s suggestion. “There’s plenty of dead timber. We can camp any time.”

“Sure we can camp any time, but we got to travel most of the time if we ain’t goin’ to starve, an’ we got to travel in the right direction.”

“We’re going to find something up that creek,” Smoke went on.

“But look at the grub! Look at them dogs!” Shorty cried. “Look at—oh, hell, all right. You will have your will.”

“It won’t make the trip a day longer,” Smoke urged. “Possibly no more than a mile longer.”

“Men has died for as little as a mile,” Shorty retorted, shaking his head with lugubrious resignation. “Come on for trouble. Get up, you poor sore-foots, you—get up! Haw! You Bright! Haw!”

The lead-dog obeyed, and the whole team strained weakly into the soft snow.

“Whoa!” Shorty yelled. “It’s pack trail.”

Smoke pulled his snowshoes from under the sled-lashings, bound them to his moccasined feet, and went to the fore to press and pack the light surface for the dogs.

It was heavy work. Dogs and men had been for days on short rations, and few and limited were the reserves of energy they could call upon. Though they followed the creek bed, so pronounced was its fall that they toiled on a stiff and unrelenting up-grade. The high rocky walls quickly drew near together, so that their way led up the bottom of a narrow gorge. The long lingering twilight, blocked by the high mountains, was no more than semi-darkness.

“It’s a trap,” Shorty said. “The whole look of it is rotten. It’s a hole in the ground. It’s the stampin’-ground of trouble.”

Smoke made no reply, and for half an hour they toiled on in silence—a silence that was again broken by Shorty.

“She’s a-workin’,” he grumbled. “She’s sure a-workin’, an’ I’ll tell you if you’re minded to hear an’ listen.”

“Go on,” Smoke answered.

“Well, she tells me, plain an’ simple, that we ain’t never goin’ to get out of this hole in the ground in days an’ days. We’re goin’ to find trouble an’ be stuck in here a long time an’ then some.”

“Does she say anything about grub?” Smoke queried unsympathetically. “For we haven’t grub for days and days and days and then some.”

“Nope. Nary whisper about grub. I guess we’ll manage to make out. But I tell you one thing, Smoke, straight an’ flat. I’ll eat any dog in the team exceptin’ Bright. I got to draw the line on Bright. I just couldn’t scoff him.”

“Cheer up,” Smoke girded. “My hunch is working overtime. She tells me there’ll be no dogs eaten, and, whether it’s moose or caribou or quail on toast, we’ll all fatten up.”

Shorty snorted his unutterable disgust, and silence obtained for another quarter of an hour.

“There’s the beginning of your trouble,” Smoke said, halting on his snowshoes and staring at an object that lay on one side of the old trail.

Shorty left the gee-pole and joined him, and together they gazed down on the body of a man beside the trail.

“Well fed,” said Smoke.

“Look at them lips,” said Shorty.

“Stiff as a poker,” said Smoke, lifting an arm, that, without moving, moved the whole body.

“Pick ‘m up an’ drop ‘m and he’d break to pieces,” was Shorty’s comment.

The man lay on his side, solidly frozen. From the fact that no snow powdered him, it was patent that he had lain there but a short time.

“There was a general fall of snow three days back,” said Shorty.

Smoke nodded, bending over the corpse, twisting it half up to face them, and pointing to a bullet wound in the temple. He glanced to the side and tilted his head at a revolver that lay on top of the snow.

A hundred yards farther on they came upon a second body that lay face downward in the trail. “Two things are pretty clear,” Smoke said. “They’re fat. That means no famine. They’ve not struck it rich, else they wouldn’t have committed suicide.”

“If they did,” Shorty objected.

“They certainly did. There are no tracks besides their own, and each is powder-burned.” Smoke dragged the corpse to one side and with the toe of his moccasin nosed a revolver out of the snow into which it had been pressed by the body. “That’s what did the work. I told you we’d find something.”

“From the looks of it we ain’t started yet. Now what’d two fat geezers want to kill theirselves for?”

“When we find that out we’ll have found the rest of your trouble,” Smoke answered. “Come on. It’s blowing dark.”

Quite dark it was when Smoke’s snowshoe tripped him over a body. He fell across a sled, on which lay another body. And when he had dug the snow out of his neck and struck a match, he and Shorty glimpsed a third body, wrapped in blankets, lying beside a partially dug grave. Also, ere the match flickered out, they caught sight of half a dozen additional graves.

“B-r-r-r,” Shorty shivered. “Suicide Camp. All fed up. I reckon they’re all dead.”

“No—peep at that.” Smoke was looking farther along at a dim glimmer of light. “And there’s another light—and a third one there. Come on. Let’s hike.”

No more corpses delayed them, and in several minutes, over a hard-packed trail, they were in the camp.

“It’s a city,” Shorty whispered. “There must be twenty cabins. An’ not a dog. Ain’t that funny!”

“And that explains it,” Smoke whispered back excitedly. “It’s the Laura Sibley outfit. Don’t you remember? Came up the Yukon last fall on the Port Townsend Number Six. Went right by Dawson without stopping. The steamer must have landed them at the mouth of the creek.”

“Sure. I remember. They was Mormons.”

“No—vegetarians.” Smoke grinned in the darkness. “They won’t eat meat and they won’t work dogs.”

“It’s all the same. I knowed they was something funny about ‘em. Had the allwise steer to the yellow. That Laura Sibley was goin’ to take ‘em right to the spot where they’d all be millionaires.”

“Yes; she was their seeress—had visions and that sort of stuff. I thought they went up the Nordensjold.”

“Huh! Listen to that!”

Shorty’s hand in the darkness went out warningly to Smoke’s chest, and together they listened to a groan, deep and long drawn, that came from one of the cabins. Ere it could die away it was taken up by another cabin, and another—a vast suspiration of human misery. The effect was monstrous and nightmarish.

“B-r-r-r,” Shorty shivered. “It’s gettin’ me goin’. Let’s break in an’ find what’s eatin’ ‘em.”

Smoke knocked at a lighted cabin, and was followed in by Shorty in answer to the “Come in” of the voice they heard groaning. It was a simple log cabin, the walls moss-chinked, the earth floor covered with sawdust and shavings. The light was a kerosene-lamp, and they could make out four bunks, three of which were occupied by men who ceased from groaning in order to stare.

“What’s the matter?” Smoke demanded of one whose blankets could not hide his broad shoulders and massively muscled body, whose eyes were pain-racked and whose cheeks were hollow. “Smallpox? What is it?”

In reply, the man pointed at his mouth, spreading black and swollen lips in the effort; and Smoke recoiled at the sight.

“Scurvy,” he muttered to Shorty; and the man confirmed the diagnosis with a nod of the head.

“Plenty of grub?” Shorty asked.

“Yep,” was the answer from a man in another bunk. “Help yourself. There’s slathers of it. The cabin next on the other side is empty. Cache is right alongside. Wade into it.”

In every cabin they visited that night they found a similar situation. Scurvy had smitten the whole camp. A dozen women were in the party, though the two men did not see all of them. Originally there had been ninety-three men and women. But ten had died, and two had recently disappeared. Smoke told of finding the two, and expressed surprise that none had gone that short distance down the trail to find out for themselves. What particularly struck him and Shorty was the helplessness of these people. Their cabins were littered and dirty. The dishes stood unwashed on the rough plank tables. There was no mutual aid. A cabin’s troubles were its own troubles, and already they had ceased from the exertion of burying their dead.

“It’s almost weird,” Smoke confided to Shorty. “I’ve met shirkers