THE HUNT-PACK

by Samuel Alexander White

Author of “The Ocean Born,” “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 ridgepole, 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-tomorrow’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 hell-fire 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 malamute 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 timber-line 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 alter,
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, fear
fully 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 tee-pee 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
Whitehorse 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 oft 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.

                   *       *       *       *       *

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.

Tailor 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 snow-shoe 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 fireless 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 bis garments. “Where’s it
moved to? It was hunting sign of it we fell in.”

“Moved five miles up the Klokliok,” 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 lingers 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 moccasincd toes strike knot or scam. 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 debris 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’ upriver, 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!”


                               THE END