章节正文
"What's a hog-walloping snooper, Shorty?" Kit asked.
"Blamed if I know," was the answer; "but he's one just the same."
The gale, which had been dying quickly, ceased at nightfall, and it
came on clear and cold. A cup of coffee, set aside to cool and
forgotten, a few minutes later was found coated with half an inch of
ice. At eight o'clock, when Sprague and Stine, already rolled in
their blankets, were sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, Kit came back
from a look at the boat.
"It's the freeze-up, Shorty," he announced. "There's a skin of ice
over the whole pond already."
"What are you going to do?"
"There's only one thing. The lake of course freezes first. The
rapid current of the river may keep it open for days. This time to-
morrow any boat caught in Lake Le Barge remains there until next
year."
"You mean we got to get out to-night? Now?"
Kit nodded.
"Tumble out, you sleepers!" was Shorty's answer, couched in a roar,
as he began casting off the guy-ropes of the tent.
The other two awoke, groaning with the pain of stiffened muscles and
the pain of rousing from exhausted sleep.
"What time is it?" Stine asked.
"Half-past eight."
"It's dark yet," was the objection.
Shorty jerked out a couple of guy-ropes, and the tent began to sag.
"It's not morning," he said. "It's evening. Come on. The lake's
freezin'. We got to get acrost."
Stine sat up, his face bitter and wrathful.
"Let it freeze. We're not going to stir."
"All right," said Shorty. "We're goin' on with the boat."
"You were engaged--"
"To take you to Dawson," Shorty caught him up. "Well, we're takin'
you, ain't we?"
He punctuated his query by bringing half the tent down on top of
them.
They broke their way through the thin ice in the little harbour, and
came out on the lake, where the water, heavy and glassy, froze on
their oars with every stroke. The water soon became like mush,
clogging the stroke of the oars and freezing in the air even as it
dripped. Later the surface began to form a skin, and the boat
proceeded slower and slower.
Often, afterwards, when Kit tried to remember that night and failed
to bring up aught but nightmare recollections, he wondered what must
have been the sufferings of Stine and Sprague. His one impression
of himself was that he struggled through biting frost and
intolerable exertion for a thousand years more or less.
Morning found them stationary. Stine complained of frosted fingers,
and Sprague of his nose, while the pain in Kit's cheeks and nose
told him that he, too, had been touched. With each accretion of
daylight they could see farther, and far as they could see was icy
surface. The water of the lake was gone. A hundred yards away was
the shore of the north end. Shorty insisted that it was the opening
of the river and that he could see water. He and Kit alone were
able to work, and with their oars they broke the ice and forced the
boat along. And at the last gasp of their strength they made the
suck of the rapid river. One look back showed them several boats
which had fought through the night and were hopelesslyfrozen in;
then they whirled around a bend in a current running six miles an
hour.
VI.
Day by day they floated down the swift river, and day by day the
shore-ice extended farther out. When they made camp at nightfall,
they chopped a space in the ice in which to lay the boat, and
carried the camp outfit hundreds of feet to shore. In the morning,
they chopped the boat out through the new ice and caught the
current. Shorty set up the sheet-iron stove in the boat, and over
this Stine and Sprague hung through the long, drifting hours. They
had surrendered, no longer gave orders, and their one desire was to
gain Dawson. Shorty, pessimistic, indefatigable, and joyous, at
frequent intervals roared out the three lines of the first four-line
stanza of a song he had forgotten. The colder it got the oftener he
sang:
"Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this Modern Greece;
Tum-tum, tum-tum; tum-tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece."
As they passed the mouths of the Hootalinqua and the Big and Little
Salmon, they found these streams throwing mush-ice into the main
Yukon. This gathered about the boat and attached itself, and at
night they found themselves compelled to chop the boat out of the
current. In the morning they chopped the boat back into the
current.
The last night ashore was spent between the mouths of the White
River and the Stewart. At daylight they found the Yukon, half a
mile wide, running white from ice-rimmed bank to ice-rimmed bank.
Shorty cursed the universe with less geniality than usual, and
looked at Kit.
"We'll be the last boat this year to make Dawson," Kit said.
"But they ain't no water, Smoke."
"Then we'll ride the ice down. Come on."
Futilely protesting, Sprague and Stine were bundled on board. For
half an hour, with axes, Kit and Shorty struggled to cut a way into
the swift but solid stream. When they did succeed in clearing the
shore-ice, the floating ice forced the boat along the edge for a
hundred yards, tearing away half of one gunwale and making a partial
wreck of it. Then they caught the current at the lower end of the
bend that flung off-shore. They proceeded to work farther toward
the middle. The stream was no longer composed of mush-ice but of
hard cakes. In between the cakes only was mush-ice, that froze
solidly as they looked at it. Shoving with the oars against the
cakes, sometimes climbing out on the cakes in order to force the
boat along, after an hour they gained the middle. Five minutes
after they ceased their exertions, the boat was frozen in. The
whole river was coagulating as it ran. Cake froze to cake, until at
last the boat was the centre of a cake seventy-five feet in
diameter. Sometimes they floated sidewise, sometimes stern-first,
while gravity tore asunder the forming fetters in the moving mass,
only to be manacled by faster-forming ones. While the hours passed,
Shorty stoked the stove, cooked meals, and chanted his war song.
Night came, and after many efforts, they gave up the attempt to
force the boat to shore, and through the darkness they swept
helplessly onward.
"What if we pass Dawson?" Shorty queried.
"We'll walk back," Kit answered, "if we're not crushed in a jam."
The sky was clear, and in the light of the cold leaping stars they
caught occasional glimpses of the loom of mountains on either hand.
At eleven o'clock, from below, came a dull, grinding roar. Their
speed began to diminish, and cakes of ice to up-end and crash and
smash about them. The river was jamming. One cake, forced upward,
slid across their cake and carried one side of the boat away. It
did not sink, for its own cake still upbore it, but in a whirl they
saw dark water show for an instant within a foot of them. Then all
movement ceased. At the end of half an hour the whole river picked
itself up and began to move. This continued for an hour, when again
it was brought to rest by a jam. Once again it started, running
swiftly and savagely, with a great grinding. Then they saw lights
ashore, and, when abreast, gravity and the Yukon surrendered, and
the river ceased for six months.
On the shore at Dawson, curious ones gathered to watch the river
freeze, heard from out of the darkness the war-song of Shorty:
"Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this Modern Greece;
Tum-tum, tum-tum; tum-tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece."
VII.
For three days Kit and Shorty laboured, carrying the ton and a half
of outfit from the middle of the river to the log-cabin Stine and
Sprague had bought on the hill overlooking Dawson. This work
finished, in the warm cabin, as twilight was falling, Sprague
motioned Kit to him. Outside the thermometer registered sixty-five
below zero.
"Your full month isn't up, Smoke," Sprague said. "But here it is in
full. I wish you luck."
"How about the agreement?" Kit asked. "You know there's a famine
here. A man can't get work in the mines even, unless he has his own
grub. You agreed--"
"I know of no agreement," Sprague interrupted. "Do you, Stine? We
engaged you by the month. There's your pay. Will you sign the
receipt?"
Kit's hands clenched, and for the moment he saw red. Both men
shrank away from him. He had never struck a man in anger in his
life, and he felt so certain of his ability to thrash Sprague that
he could not bring himself to do it.
Shorty saw his trouble and interposed.
"Look here, Smoke, I ain't travelin' no more with a ornery outfit
like this. Right here's where I sure jump it. You an' me stick
together. Savve? Now, you take your blankets an' hike down to the
Elkhorn. Wait for me. I'll settle up, collect what's comin', an'
give them what's comin'. I ain't no good on the water, but my
feet's on terry-fermy now an' I'm sure goin' to make smoke."
. . . . .
Half an hour afterwards Shorty appeared at the Elkhorn. From his
bleeding knuckles and the skin off one cheek, it was evident that he
had given Stine and Sprague what was coming.
"You ought to see that cabin," he chuckled, as they stood at the
bar. "Rough-house ain't no name for it. Dollars to doughnuts nary
one of 'em shows up on the street for a week. An' now it's all
figgered out for you an' me. Grub's a dollar an' a half a pound.
They ain't no work for wages without you have your own grub. Moose-
meat's sellin' for two dollars a pound an' they ain't none. We got
enough money for a month's grub an' ammunition, an' we hike up the
Klondike to the back country. If they ain't no moose, we go an'
live with the Indians. But if we ain't got five thousand pounds of
meat six weeks from now, I'll--I'll sure go back an' apologize to
our bosses. Is it a go?"
Kit's hand went out and they shook. Then he faltered.
"I don't know anything about hunting," he said.
Shorty lifted his glass.
"But you're a sure meat-eater, an' I'll learn you."
THE STAMPEDE TO SQUAW CREEK.
I.
Two months after Smoke Bellew and Shorty went after moose for a
grubstake, they were back in the Elkhorn saloon at Dawson. The
hunting was done, the meat hauled in and sold for two dollars and a
half a pound, and between them they possessed three thousand dollars
in gold dust and a good team of dogs. They had played in luck.
Despite the fact that the gold rush had driven the game a hundred
miles or more into the mountains, they had, within half that
distance, bagged four moose in a narrow canyon.
The mystery of the strayed animals was no greater than the luck of
their killers, for within the day four famished Indian families
reporting no game in three days' journey back, camped beside them.
Meat was traded for starving dogs, and after a week of feeding,
Smoke and Shorty harnessed the animals and began freighting the meat
to the eager Dawson market.
The problem of the two men now, was to turn their gold-dust into
food. The current price for flour and beans was a dollar and a half
a pound, but the difficulty was to find a seller. Dawson was in the
throes of famine. Hundreds of men, with money but no food, had been
compelled to leave the country. Many had gone down the river on the
last water, and many more with barely enough food to last, had
"Blamed if I know," was the answer; "but he's one just the same."
The gale, which had been dying quickly, ceased at nightfall, and it
came on clear and cold. A cup of coffee, set aside to cool and
forgotten, a few minutes later was found coated with half an inch of
ice. At eight o'clock, when Sprague and Stine, already rolled in
their blankets, were sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, Kit came back
from a look at the boat.
"It's the freeze-up, Shorty," he announced. "There's a skin of ice
over the whole pond already."
"What are you going to do?"
"There's only one thing. The lake of course freezes first. The
rapid current of the river may keep it open for days. This time to-
morrow any boat caught in Lake Le Barge remains there until next
year."
"You mean we got to get out to-night? Now?"
Kit nodded.
"Tumble out, you sleepers!" was Shorty's answer, couched in a roar,
as he began casting off the guy-ropes of the tent.
The other two awoke, groaning with the pain of stiffened muscles and
the pain of rousing from exhausted sleep.
"What time is it?" Stine asked.
"Half-past eight."
"It's dark yet," was the objection.
Shorty jerked out a couple of guy-ropes, and the tent began to sag.
"It's not morning," he said. "It's evening. Come on. The lake's
freezin'. We got to get acrost."
Stine sat up, his face bitter and wrathful.
"Let it freeze. We're not going to stir."
"All right," said Shorty. "We're goin' on with the boat."
"You were engaged--"
"To take you to Dawson," Shorty caught him up. "Well, we're takin'
you, ain't we?"
He punctuated his query by bringing half the tent down on top of
them.
They broke their way through the thin ice in the little harbour, and
came out on the lake, where the water, heavy and glassy, froze on
their oars with every stroke. The water soon became like mush,
clogging the stroke of the oars and freezing in the air even as it
dripped. Later the surface began to form a skin, and the boat
proceeded slower and slower.
Often, afterwards, when Kit tried to remember that night and failed
to bring up aught but nightmare recollections, he wondered what must
have been the sufferings of Stine and Sprague. His one impression
of himself was that he struggled through biting frost and
intolerable exertion for a thousand years more or less.
Morning found them stationary. Stine complained of frosted fingers,
and Sprague of his nose, while the pain in Kit's cheeks and nose
told him that he, too, had been touched. With each accretion of
daylight they could see farther, and far as they could see was icy
surface. The water of the lake was gone. A hundred yards away was
the shore of the north end. Shorty insisted that it was the opening
of the river and that he could see water. He and Kit alone were
able to work, and with their oars they broke the ice and forced the
boat along. And at the last gasp of their strength they made the
suck of the rapid river. One look back showed them several boats
which had fought through the night and were hopelesslyfrozen in;
then they whirled around a bend in a current running six miles an
hour.
VI.
Day by day they floated down the swift river, and day by day the
shore-ice extended farther out. When they made camp at nightfall,
they chopped a space in the ice in which to lay the boat, and
carried the camp outfit hundreds of feet to shore. In the morning,
they chopped the boat out through the new ice and caught the
current. Shorty set up the sheet-iron stove in the boat, and over
this Stine and Sprague hung through the long, drifting hours. They
had surrendered, no longer gave orders, and their one desire was to
gain Dawson. Shorty, pessimistic, indefatigable, and joyous, at
frequent intervals roared out the three lines of the first four-line
stanza of a song he had forgotten. The colder it got the oftener he
sang:
"Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this Modern Greece;
Tum-tum, tum-tum; tum-tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece."
As they passed the mouths of the Hootalinqua and the Big and Little
Salmon, they found these streams throwing mush-ice into the main
Yukon. This gathered about the boat and attached itself, and at
night they found themselves compelled to chop the boat out of the
current. In the morning they chopped the boat back into the
current.
The last night ashore was spent between the mouths of the White
River and the Stewart. At daylight they found the Yukon, half a
mile wide, running white from ice-rimmed bank to ice-rimmed bank.
Shorty cursed the universe with less geniality than usual, and
looked at Kit.
"We'll be the last boat this year to make Dawson," Kit said.
"But they ain't no water, Smoke."
"Then we'll ride the ice down. Come on."
Futilely protesting, Sprague and Stine were bundled on board. For
half an hour, with axes, Kit and Shorty struggled to cut a way into
the swift but solid stream. When they did succeed in clearing the
shore-ice, the floating ice forced the boat along the edge for a
hundred yards, tearing away half of one gunwale and making a partial
wreck of it. Then they caught the current at the lower end of the
bend that flung off-shore. They proceeded to work farther toward
the middle. The stream was no longer composed of mush-ice but of
hard cakes. In between the cakes only was mush-ice, that froze
solidly as they looked at it. Shoving with the oars against the
cakes, sometimes climbing out on the cakes in order to force the
boat along, after an hour they gained the middle. Five minutes
after they ceased their exertions, the boat was frozen in. The
whole river was coagulating as it ran. Cake froze to cake, until at
last the boat was the centre of a cake seventy-five feet in
diameter. Sometimes they floated sidewise, sometimes stern-first,
while gravity tore asunder the forming fetters in the moving mass,
only to be manacled by faster-forming ones. While the hours passed,
Shorty stoked the stove, cooked meals, and chanted his war song.
Night came, and after many efforts, they gave up the attempt to
force the boat to shore, and through the darkness they swept
helplessly onward.
"What if we pass Dawson?" Shorty queried.
"We'll walk back," Kit answered, "if we're not crushed in a jam."
The sky was clear, and in the light of the cold leaping stars they
caught occasional glimpses of the loom of mountains on either hand.
At eleven o'clock, from below, came a dull, grinding roar. Their
speed began to diminish, and cakes of ice to up-end and crash and
smash about them. The river was jamming. One cake, forced upward,
slid across their cake and carried one side of the boat away. It
did not sink, for its own cake still upbore it, but in a whirl they
saw dark water show for an instant within a foot of them. Then all
movement ceased. At the end of half an hour the whole river picked
itself up and began to move. This continued for an hour, when again
it was brought to rest by a jam. Once again it started, running
swiftly and savagely, with a great grinding. Then they saw lights
ashore, and, when abreast, gravity and the Yukon surrendered, and
the river ceased for six months.
On the shore at Dawson, curious ones gathered to watch the river
freeze, heard from out of the darkness the war-song of Shorty:
"Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this Modern Greece;
Tum-tum, tum-tum; tum-tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece."
VII.
For three days Kit and Shorty laboured, carrying the ton and a half
of outfit from the middle of the river to the log-cabin Stine and
Sprague had bought on the hill overlooking Dawson. This work
finished, in the warm cabin, as twilight was falling, Sprague
motioned Kit to him. Outside the thermometer registered sixty-five
below zero.
"Your full month isn't up, Smoke," Sprague said. "But here it is in
full. I wish you luck."
"How about the agreement?" Kit asked. "You know there's a famine
here. A man can't get work in the mines even, unless he has his own
grub. You agreed--"
"I know of no agreement," Sprague interrupted. "Do you, Stine? We
engaged you by the month. There's your pay. Will you sign the
receipt?"
Kit's hands clenched, and for the moment he saw red. Both men
shrank away from him. He had never struck a man in anger in his
life, and he felt so certain of his ability to thrash Sprague that
he could not bring himself to do it.
Shorty saw his trouble and interposed.
"Look here, Smoke, I ain't travelin' no more with a ornery outfit
like this. Right here's where I sure jump it. You an' me stick
together. Savve? Now, you take your blankets an' hike down to the
Elkhorn. Wait for me. I'll settle up, collect what's comin', an'
give them what's comin'. I ain't no good on the water, but my
feet's on terry-fermy now an' I'm sure goin' to make smoke."
. . . . .
Half an hour afterwards Shorty appeared at the Elkhorn. From his
bleeding knuckles and the skin off one cheek, it was evident that he
had given Stine and Sprague what was coming.
"You ought to see that cabin," he chuckled, as they stood at the
bar. "Rough-house ain't no name for it. Dollars to doughnuts nary
one of 'em shows up on the street for a week. An' now it's all
figgered out for you an' me. Grub's a dollar an' a half a pound.
They ain't no work for wages without you have your own grub. Moose-
meat's sellin' for two dollars a pound an' they ain't none. We got
enough money for a month's grub an' ammunition, an' we hike up the
Klondike to the back country. If they ain't no moose, we go an'
live with the Indians. But if we ain't got five thousand pounds of
meat six weeks from now, I'll--I'll sure go back an' apologize to
our bosses. Is it a go?"
Kit's hand went out and they shook. Then he faltered.
"I don't know anything about hunting," he said.
Shorty lifted his glass.
"But you're a sure meat-eater, an' I'll learn you."
THE STAMPEDE TO SQUAW CREEK.
I.
Two months after Smoke Bellew and Shorty went after moose for a
grubstake, they were back in the Elkhorn saloon at Dawson. The
hunting was done, the meat hauled in and sold for two dollars and a
half a pound, and between them they possessed three thousand dollars
in gold dust and a good team of dogs. They had played in luck.
Despite the fact that the gold rush had driven the game a hundred
miles or more into the mountains, they had, within half that
distance, bagged four moose in a narrow canyon.
The mystery of the strayed animals was no greater than the luck of
their killers, for within the day four famished Indian families
reporting no game in three days' journey back, camped beside them.
Meat was traded for starving dogs, and after a week of feeding,
Smoke and Shorty harnessed the animals and began freighting the meat
to the eager Dawson market.
The problem of the two men now, was to turn their gold-dust into
food. The current price for flour and beans was a dollar and a half
a pound, but the difficulty was to find a seller. Dawson was in the
throes of famine. Hundreds of men, with money but no food, had been
compelled to leave the country. Many had gone down the river on the
last water, and many more with barely enough food to last, had
- sleeping [´sli:piŋ]
n.&a.睡着(的) (初中英语单词) - freeze [fri:z] v.结冰；凝固；冷淡 (初中英语单词)
- frozen [´frəuzn] freeze 的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
- running [´rʌniŋ] a.奔跑的；流动的 (初中英语单词)
- ashore [ə´ʃɔ:] ad.向岸上 (初中英语单词)
- daylight [´deilait] n.日光；黎明 (初中英语单词)
- stream [stri:m] n.河 vi.流出；飘扬 (初中英语单词)
- occasional [ə´keiʒənəl] a.偶然的；临时的 (初中英语单词)
- diminish [di´miniʃ] v.减小，缩小 (初中英语单词)
- instant [´instənt] a.立即的 n.紧迫；瞬间 (初中英语单词)
- twilight [´twailait] n.黎明；黄昏 (初中英语单词)
- ability [ə´biliti] n.(办事)能力；才干 (初中英语单词)
- evident [´evidənt] a.明显的，明白的 (初中英语单词)
- driven [´driv(ə)n] drive 的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
- mystery [´mistəri] n.神秘；秘密；故弄玄虚 (初中英语单词)
- indian [´indiən] a.印度的 n.印度人 (初中英语单词)
- barely [´beəli] ad.公开地；仅仅 (初中英语单词)
- outfit [´aut,fit] n.装备 vt.供给；装备 (高中英语单词)
- joyous [´dʒɔiəs] a.充满快乐的 (高中英语单词)
- universe [´ju:nivə:s] n.天地；全人类；银河系 (高中英语单词)
- gravity [´græviti] n.严肃；严重；重力 (高中英语单词)
- abreast [ə´brest] ad.并排，并肩 (高中英语单词)
- thermometer [θə´mɔmitə] n.温度计；寒暑表 (高中英语单词)
- thrash [θræʃ] v.打(谷)；(用棍)痛打 (高中英语单词)
- saloon [sə´lu:n] n.大厅；餐车 (高中英语单词)
- seller [´selə] n.销售者；行销货 (高中英语单词)
- famine [´fæmin] n.饥荒 (高中英语单词)
- exhaustion [ig´zɔ:stʃən] n.用完；精疲力尽 (英语四级单词)
- nightmare [´naitmeə] n.梦魇；恶梦 (英语四级单词)
- exertion [ig´zə:ʃən] n.努力；行使；活动 (英语四级单词)
- stationary [´steiʃənəri, -neri] a.固定的；稳定的 (英语四级单词)
- hopelessly [´həuplisli] ad.无希望地，绝望地 (英语四级单词)
- clearing [´kliəriŋ] n.(森林中的)空旷地 (英语四级单词)
- composed [kəm´pəuzd] a.镇静自若的 (英语四级单词)
- asunder [ə´sʌndə] a.分开地；零散地 (英语四级单词)
- savagely [´sævidʒli] ad.野蛮地；原始地 (英语四级单词)
- ammunition [,æmju´niʃən] n.军火，弹药 (英语四级单词)
- nightfall [´nait,fɔ:l] n.黄昏；傍晚 (英语六级单词)
- glassy [´glɑ:si] a.光滑的；无神的 (英语六级单词)
- biting [´baitiŋ] a.刺痛的；尖利的 (英语六级单词)
- extended [iks´tendid] a.伸长的；广大的 (英语六级单词)
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