point was the five thousand dollars, the consummation of the idea
and the point of
departure for
whatever new idea might present
itself. For the rest, he was a mere automaton. He was
unaware of
other things,
seeing them as through a glass
darkly, and giving
them no thought. The work of his hands he did with machine-like
wisdom;
likewise the work of his head. So the look on his face
grew very tense, till even the Indians were afraid of it, and
marvelled at the strange white man who had made them slaves and
forced them to toil with such foolishness.
Then came a snap on Lake Le Barge, when the cold of outer space
smote the tip of the
planet, and the force ranged sixty and odd
degrees below zero. Here, labouring with open mouth that he might
breathe more
freely, he chilled his lungs, and for the rest of the
trip he was troubled with a dry, hacking cough, especially
irritable in smoke of camp or under
stress of undue
exertion. On
the Thirty Mile river he found much open water, spanned by
precarious ice
bridges and fringed with narrow rim ice, tricky and
uncertain. The rim ice was impossible to
reckon on, and he dared
it without
reckoning, falling back on his
revolver when his drivers
demurred. But on the ice
bridges, covered with snow though they
were, precautions could be taken. These they crossed on their
snowshoes, with long poles, held crosswise in their hands, to which
to cling in case of accident. Once over, the dogs were called to
follow. And on such a
bridge, where the
absence of the centre ice
was masked by the snow, one of the Indians met his end. He went
through as quickly and neatly as a knife through thin cream, and
the current swept him from view down under the
stream ice.
That night his mate fled away through the pale
moonlight, Rasmunsen
futilely puncturing the silence with his
revolver--a thing that he
handled with more celerity than cleverness. Thirty-six hours later
the Indian made a police camp on the Big Salmon.
"Um--um--um funny mans--what you call?--top um head all loose," the
interpreter explained to the puzzled captain. "Eh? Yep, clazy,
much clazy mans. Eggs, eggs, all a time eggs--savvy? Come bime-
by."
It was several days before Rasmunsen arrived, the three sleds
lashed together, and all the dogs in a single team. It was
awkward, and where the going was bad he was compelled to back-trip
it sled by sled, though he managed most of the time, through
herculean efforts, to bring all along on the one haul. He did not
seem moved when the captain of police told him his man was hitting
the high places for Dawson, and was by that time, probably, half-
way between Selkirk and Stewart. Nor did he appear interested when
informed that the police had broken the trail as far as Pelly; for
he had attained to a fatalistic
acceptance of all natural
dispensations, good or ill. But when they told him that Dawson was
in the bitter
clutch of
famine, he smiled, threw the
harness on his
dogs, and pulled out.
But it was at his next halt that the
mystery of the smoke was
explained. With the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken
to Pelly, there was no longer any need for the smoke
wreath to
linger in his wake; and Rasmunsen, crouching over
lonely fire, saw
a motley string of sleds go by. First came the
courier and the
half-breed who had hauled him out from Bennett; then mail-carriers
for Circle City, two sleds of them, and a mixed following of
ingoing Klondikers. Dogs and men were fresh and fat, while
Rasmunsen and his brutes were jaded and worn down to the skin and
bone. They of the smoke
wreath had travelled one day in three,
resting and reserving their strength for the dash to come when
broken trail was met with; while each day he had plunged and
floundered forward, breaking the spirit of his dogs and robbing
them of their mettle.
As for himself, he was unbreakable. They thanked him kindly for
his efforts in their
behalf, those fat, fresh men,--thanked him
kindly, with broad grins and ribald
laughter; and now, when he
understood, he made no answer. Nor did he
cherish silent
bitterness. It was immaterial. The idea--the fact behind the
idea--was not changed. Here he was and his thousand dozen; there
was Dawson; the problem was unaltered.
At the Little Salmon, being short of dog food, the dogs got into
his grub, and from there to Selkirk he lived on beans--coarse,
brown beans, big beans, grossly nutritive, which griped his
stomachand doubled him up at two-hour intervals. But the Factor at
Selkirk had a notice on the door of the Post to the effect that no
steamer had been up the Yukon for two years, and in consequence
grub was beyond price. He offered to swap flour, however, at the
rate of a
cupful of each egg, but Rasmunsen shook his head and hit
the trail. Below the Post he managed to buy
frozen horse hide for
the dogs, the horses having been slain by the Chilkat cattle men,
and the scraps and offal preserved by the Indians. He tackled the
hide himself, but the hair worked into the bean sores of his mouth,
and was beyond endurance.
Here at Selkirk he met the forerunners of the hungry exodus of
Dawson, and from there on they crept over the trail, a dismal
throng. "No grub!" was the song they sang. "No grub, and had to
go." "Everybody
holding candles for a rise in the spring." "Flour
dollar 'n a half a pound, and no sellers."
"Eggs?" one of them answered. "Dollar
apiece, but there ain't
none."
Rasmunsen made a rapid
calculation. "Twelve thousand dollars," he
said aloud.
"Hey?" the man asked.
"Nothing," he answered, and MUSHED the dogs along.
When he arrived at Stewart River, seventy from Dawson, five of his
dogs were gone, and the
remainder were falling in the traces. He,
also, was in the traces, hauling with what little strength was left
in him. Even then he was
barely crawling along ten miles a day.
His cheek-bones and nose, frost-bitten again and again, were turned
bloody-black and
hideous. The thumb, which was separated from the
fingers by the gee-pole, had
likewise been nipped and gave him
great pain. The
monstrousmoccasin still incased his foot, and
strange pains were
beginning to rack the leg. At Sixty Mile, the
last beans, which he had been rationing for some time, were
finished; yet he steadfastly refused to touch the eggs. He could
not
reconcile his mind to the legitimacy of it, and staggered and
fell along the way to Indian River. Here a fresh-killed moose and
an open-handed old-timer gave him and his dogs new strength, and at
Ainslie's he felt repaid for it all when a stampede, ripe from
Dawson in five hours, was sure he could get a dollar and a quarter
for every egg he possessed.
He came up the steep bank by the Dawson barracks with fluttering
heart and shaking knees. The dogs were so weak that he was forced
to rest them, and,
waiting, he leaned limply against the gee-pole.
A man, an eminently decorous-looking man, came sauntering by in a
great bearskin coat. He glanced at Rasmunsen
curiously, then
stopped and ran a
speculative eye over the dogs and the three
lashed sleds.
"What you got?" he asked.
"Eggs," Rasmunsen answered huskily, hardly able to pitch his voice
above a whisper.
"Eggs! Whoopee! Whoopee!" He
sprang up into the air, gyrated
madly, and finished with half-a-dozen war steps. "You don't say--
all of 'em?"
"All of 'em."
"Say, you must be the Egg Man." He walked around and viewed
Rasmunsen from the other side. "Come, now, ain't you the Egg Man?"
Rasmunsen didn't know, but
supposed he was, and the man sobered
down a bit.
"What d'ye expect to get for 'em?" he asked cautiously.
Rasmunsen became audacious. "Dollar 'n a half," he said.
"Done!" the man came back
promptly. "Gimme a dozen."
"I--I mean a dollar 'n a half
apiece," Rasmunsen hesitatingly
explained.
"Sure. I heard you. Make it two dozen. Here's the dust."
The man pulled out a
healthy gold sack the size of a small sausage
and knocked it negligently against the gee-pole. Rasmunsen felt a
strange trembling in the pit of his
stomach, a tickling of the
nostrils, and an almost
overwhelming desire to sit down and cry.
But a curious, wide-eyed crowd was
beginning to collect, and man
after man was
calling out for eggs. He was without scales, but the
man with the bearskin coat fetched a pair and obligingly weighed in
the dust while Rasmunsen passed out the goods. Soon there was a
pushing and shoving and shouldering, and a great clamour.
Everybody wanted to buy and to be served first. And as the
excitement grew, Rasmunsen cooled down. This would never do.
There must be something behind the fact of their buying so eagerly.
It would be wiser if he rested first and sized up the market.
Perhaps eggs were worth two dollars
apiece. Anyway,
whenever he
wished to sell, he was sure of a dollar and a half. "Stop!" he
cried, when a couple of hundred had been sold. "No more now. I'm
played out. I've got to get a cabin, and then you can come and see
me."
A groan went up at this, but the man with the bearskin coat
approved. Twenty-four of the
frozen eggs went rattling in his
capacious pockets, and he didn't care whether the rest of the town
ate or not. Besides, he could see Rasmunsen was on his last legs.
"There's a cabin right around the second corner from the Monte
Carlo," he told him--"the one with the sody-bottle window. It
ain't mine, but I've got
charge of it. Rents for ten a day and
cheap for the money. You move right in, and I'll see you later.
Don't forget the sody-bottle window."
"Tra-la-loo!" he called back a moment later. "I'm goin' up the
hill to eat eggs and dream of home."
On his way to the cabin, Rasmunsen recollected he was hungry and
bought a small supply of provisions at the N. A. T. & T. store--
also a beefsteak at the
butcher shop and dried
salmon for the dogs.
He found the cabin without difficulty, and left the dogs in the
harness while he started the fire and got the coffee under way.
A dollar 'n a half
apiece--one thousand dozen--eighteen thousand
dollars!" he kept muttering it to himself, over and over, as he
went about his work.
As he flopped the steak into the frying-pan the door opened. He
turned. It was the man with the bearskin coat. He seemed to come
in with
determination, as though bound on some explicit
errand, but
as he looked at Rasmunsen an expression of
perplexity came into his
face.
"I say--now I say--" he began, then halted.
Rasmunsen wondered if he wanted the rent.
"I say, damn it, you know, them eggs is bad."
Rasmunsen staggered. He felt as though some one had struck him an
astounding blow between the eyes. The walls of the cabin reeled
and tilted up. He put out his hand to steady himself and rested it
on the stove. The sharp pain and the smell of the burning flesh
brought him back to himself.
"I see," he said slowly, fumbling in his pocket for the sack. "You
want your money back."
"It ain't the money," the man said, "but hain't you got any eggs--
good?"
Rasmunsen shook his head. "You'd better take the money."
But the man refused and backed away. "I'll come back," he said,
"when you've taken stock, and get what's comin'."
Rasmunsen rolled the chopping-block into the cabin and carried in
the eggs. He went about it quite
calmly. He took up the hand-axe,
and, one by one, chopped the eggs in half. These halves he
examined carefully and let fall to the floor. At first he sampled
from the different cases, then
deliberately emptied one case at a
time. The heap on the floor grew larger. The coffee boiled over
and the smoke of the burning beefsteak filled the cabin. He
chopped steadfastly and monotonously till the last case was
finished.
Somebody knocked at the door, knocked again, and let himself in.