The Faith of Men Page 4

  “‘O Angeit, thou hast done well,’ I commanded. ‘Go now, taking this empty sled and the lean dogs, and ride fast to the igloo of Moosu; and before the people, who are drunken, are aware, throw him quick upon the sled and bring him to me.’

  “I waited and gave good advice to the faithful ones till Angeit returned. Moosu was on the sled, and I saw by the fingermarks on his face that his womankind had done well by him. But he tumbled off and fell in the snow at my feet, crying: ‘O master, thou wilt forgive Moosu, thy servant, for the wrong things he has done! Thou art a great man! Surely wilt thou forgive!’

  “‘Call me “brother,” Moosu-call me “brother,”’ I chided, lifting him to his feet with the toe of my moccasin. ‘Wilt thou evermore obey?’

  “‘Yea, master,’ he whimpered, ‘evermore.’

  “‘Then dispose thy body, so, across the sled,’ I shifted the dogwhip to my right hand. ‘And direct thy face downwards, toward the snow. And make haste, for we journey south this day.’ And when he was well fixed I laid the lash upon him, reciting, at every stroke, the wrongs he had done me. ‘This for thy disobedience in general-whack! And this for thy disobedience in particular-whack! whack! And this for Esanetuk! And this for thy soul’s welfare! And this for the grace of thy authority! And this for Kluktu! And this for thy rights God-given! And this for thy fat firstlings! And this and this for thy income-tax and thy loaves and fishes! And this for all thy disobedience! And this, finally, that thou mayest henceforth walk softly and with understanding! Now cease thy sniffling and get up! Gird on thy snowshoes and go to the fore and break trail for the dogs. Chook! Mush-on! Git!’”

  Thomas Stevens smiled quietly to himself as he lighted his fifth cigar and sent curling smoke-rings ceilingward.

  “But how about the people of Tattarat?” I asked. “Kind of rough, wasn’t it, to leave them flat with famine?”

  And he answered, laughing, between two smoke-rings, “Were there not the fat dogs?”

  THE FAITH OF MEN

  “Tell you what we’ll do; we’ll shake for it.”

  “That suits me,” said the second man, turning, as he spoke, to the Indian that was mending snowshoes in a corner of the cabin. “Here, you Billebedam, take a run down to Oleson’s cabin like a good fellow, and tell him we want to borrow his dice box.”

  This sudden request in the midst of a council on wages of men, wood, and grub surprised Billebedam. Besides, it was early in the day, and he had never known white men of the calibre of Pentfield and Hutchinson to dice and play till the day’s work was done. But his face was impassive as a Yukon Indian’s should be, as he pulled on his mittens and went out the door.

  Though eight o’clock, it was still dark outside, and the cabin was lighted by a tallow candle thrust into an empty whisky bottle. It stood on the pine-board table in the middle of a disarray of dirty tin dishes. Tallow from innumerable candles had dripped down the long neck of the bottle and hardened into a miniature glacier. The small room, which composed the entire cabin, was as badly littered as the table; while at one end, against the wall, were two bunks, one above the other, with the blankets turned down just as the two men had crawled out in the morning.

  Lawrence Pentfield and Corry Hutchinson were millionaires, though they did not look it. There seemed nothing unusual about them, while they would have passed muster as fair specimens of lumbermen in any Michigan camp. But outside, in the darkness, where holes yawned in the ground, were many men engaged in windlassing muck and gravel and gold from the bottoms of the holes where other men received fifteen dollars per day for scraping it from off the bedrock. Each day thousands of dollars’ worth of gold were scraped from bedrock and windlassed to the surface, and it all belonged to Pentfield and Hutchinson, who took their rank among the richest kings of Bonanza.

  Pentfield broke the silence that followed on Billebedam’s departure by heaping the dirty plates higher on the table and drumming a tattoo on the cleared space with his knuckles. Hutchinson snuffed the smoky candle and reflectively rubbed the soot from the wick between thumb and forefinger.

  “By Jove, I wish we could both go out!” he abruptly exclaimed. “That would settle it all.”

  Pentfield looked at him darkly.

  “If it weren’t for your cursed obstinacy, it’d be settled anyway. All you have to do is get up and go. I’ll look after things, and next year I can go out.”

  “Why should I go? I’ve no one waiting for me-”

  “Your people,” Pentfield broke in roughly.

  “Like you have,” Hutchinson went on. “A girl, I mean, and you know it.”

  Pentfield shrugged his shoulders gloomily. “She can wait, I guess.”

  “But she’s been waiting two years now.”

  “And another won’t age her beyond recognition.”

  “That’d be three years. Think of it, old man, three years in this end of the earth, this falling-off place for the damned!” Hutchinson threw up his arm in an almost articulate groan.

  He was several years younger than his partner, not more than twenty-six, and there was a certain wistfulness in his face that comes into the faces of men when they yearn vainly for the things they have been long denied. This same wistfulness was in Pentfield’s face, and the groan of it was articulate in the heave of his shoulders.

  “I dreamed last night I was in Zinkand’s,” he said. “The music playing, glasses clinking, voices humming, women laughing, and I was ordering eggs-yes, sir, eggs, fried and boiled and poached and scrambled, and in all sorts of ways, and downing them as fast as they arrived.”

  “I’d have ordered salads and green things,” Hutchinson criticized hungrily, “with a big, rare, Porterhouse, and young onions and radishes,-the kind your teeth sink into with a crunch.”

  “I’d have followed the eggs with them, I guess, if I hadn’t awakened,” Pentfield replied.

  He picked up a trail-scarred banjo from the floor and began to strum a few wandering notes. Hutchinson winced and breathed heavily.

  “Quit it!” he burst out with sudden fury, as the other struck into a gaily lifting swing. “It drives me mad. I can’t stand it”

  Pentfield tossed the banjo into a bunk and quoted:-

  “Hear me babble what the weakest won’t confess-

  I am Memory and Torment-I am Town!

  I am all that ever went with evening dress!”

  The other man winced where he sat and dropped his head forward on the table. Pentfield resumed the monotonous drumming with his knuckles. A loud snap from the door attracted his attention. The frost was creeping up the inside in a white sheet, and he began to hum:-

  “The flocks are folded, boughs are bare,

  The salmon takes the sea;

  And oh, my fair, would I somewhere

  Might house my heart with thee.”

  Silence fell and was not again broken till Billebedam arrived and threw the dice box on the table.

  “Um much cold,” he said. “Oleson um speak to me, um say um Yukon freeze last night.”

  “Hear that, old man!” Pentfield cried, slapping Hutchinson on the shoulder. “Whoever wins can be hitting the trail for God’s country this time tomorrow morning!”

  He picked up the box, briskly rattling the dice.

  “What’ll it be?”

  “Straight poker dice,” Hutchinson answered. “Go on and roll them out.”

  Pentfield swept the dishes from the table with a crash and rolled out the five dice. Both looked tragedy. The shake was without a pair and five-spot high.

  “A stiff!” Pentfield groaned.

  After much deliberating Pentfield picked up all the five dice and put them in the box.

  “I’d shake to the five if I were you,” Hutchinson suggested.

  “No, you wouldn’t, not when you see this,” Pentfield replied, shaking out the dice.

  Again they were without a pair, running this time in unbroken sequence from two to six.

  “A second stiff!” he groaned. “No use your s
haking, Corry. You can’t lose.”

  The other man gathered up the dice without a word, rattled them, rolled them out on the table with a flourish, and saw that he had likewise shaken a six-high stiff.

  “Tied you, anyway, but I’ll have to do better than that,” he said, gathering in four of them and shaking to the six. “And here’s what beats you!”

  But they rolled out deuce, tray, four, and five-a stiff still and no better nor worse than Pentfield’s throw.

  Hutchinson sighed.

  “Couldn’t happen once in a million times,” said.

  “Nor in a million lives,” Pentfield added, catching up the dice and quickly throwing them out. Three fives appeared, and, after much delay, he was rewarded by a fourth five on the second shake. Hutchinson seemed to have lost his last hope.

  But three sixes turned up on his first shake. A great doubt rose in the other’s eyes, and hope returned into his. He had one more shake. Another six and he would go over the ice to salt water and the States.

  He rattled the dice in the box, made as though to cast them, hesitated, and continued rattle them.

  “Go on! Go on! Don’t take all night about it!” Pentfield cried sharply, bending his nails on the table, so tight was the clutch with which he strove to control himself.

  The dice rolled forth, an upturned six meeting their eyes. Both men sat staring at it. There was a long silence. Hutchinson shot a covert glance at his partner, who, still more covertly, caught it, and pursed up his lips in an attempt to advertise his unconcern.

  Hutchinson laughed as he got up on his feet. It was a nervous, apprehensive laugh. It was a case where it was more awkward to win than lose. He walked over to his partner, who whirled upon him fiercely:-

  “Now you just shut up, Corry! I know all you’re going to say-that you’d rather stay in and let me go, and all that; so don’t say it. You’ve your own people in Detroit to see, and that’s enough. Besides, you can do for me the very thing I expected to do if I went out.”

  “And that is-?”

  Pentfield read the full question in his partner’s eyes, and answered:-

  “Yes, that very thing. You can bring her in to me. The only difference will be a Dawson wedding instead of a San Franciscan one.”

  “But, man alike!” Corry Hutchinson objected “how under the sun can I bring her in? We’re not exactly brother and sister, seeing that I have not even met her, and it wouldn’t be just the proper thing, you know, for us to travel together. Of course, it would be all right-you and I know that; but think of the looks of it, man!”

  Pentfield swore under his breath, consigning the looks of it to a less frigid region than Alaska.

  “Now, if you’ll just listen and not get astride that high horse of yours so blamed quick,” his partner went on, “you’ll see that the only fair thing under the circumstances is for me to let you go out this year. Next year is only a year away, and then I can take my fling.”

  Pentfield shook his head, though visibly swayed by the temptation.

  “It won’t do, Corry, old man. I appreciate your kindness and all that, but it won’t do. I’d be ashamed every time I thought of you slaving away in here in my place.”

  A thought seemed suddenly to strike him. Burrowing into his bunk and disrupting it in his eagerness, he secured a writing-pad and pencil, and sitting down at the table, began to write with swiftness and certitude.

  “Here,” he said, thrusting the scrawled letter into his partner’s hand. “You just deliver that and everything’ll be all right.”

  Hutchinson ran his eye over it and laid it down.

  “How do you know the brother will be willing to make that beastly trip in here?” he demanded.

  “Oh, he’ll do it for me-and for his sister,” Pentfield replied. “You see, he’s tenderfoot, and I wouldn’t trust her with him alone. But with you along it will be an easy trip and a safe one. As soon as you get out, you’ll go to her and prepare her. Then you can take your run east to your own people, and in the spring she and her brother’ll be ready to start with you. You’ll like her, I know, right from the jump; and from that, you’ll know her as soon as you lay eyes on her.”

  So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl’s photograph pasted on the inside of the case. Corry Hutchinson gazed at it with admiration welling up in his eyes.

  “Mabel is her name,” Pentfield went on. “And it’s just as well you should know how to find the house. Soon as you strike ’Frisco, take a cab, and just say, ‘Holmes’s place, Myrdon Avenue ’-I doubt if the Myrdon Avenue is necessary. The cabby’ll know where Judge Holmes lives.

  “And say,” Pentfield continued, after a pause, “it won’t be a bad idea for you to get me a few little things which a-er-”

  “A married man should have in his business,” Hutchinson blurted out with a grin.

  Pentfield grinned back.

  “Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and such things. And you might get a good set of china. You know it’ll come hard for her to settle down to this sort of thing. You can freight them in by steamer around by Bering Sea. And, I say, what’s the matter with a piano?”

  Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily. His reluctance had vanished, and he was warming up to his mission.

  “By Jove! Lawrence,” he said at the conclusion of the council, as they both rose to their feet, “I’ll bring back that girl of yours in style. I’ll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all that brother’ll have to do will be to see to her comfort and do for her whatever I’ve forgotten. And I’ll forget damn little, I can tell you.”

  The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last time and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the frozen Yukon on his way to salt water and the world. Pentfield went back to his Bonanza mine, which was many times more dreary than before, and faced resolutely into the long winter. There was work to be done, men to superintend, and operations to direct in burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his heart was not in the work. Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered logs of a new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine. It was a grand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms. Each log was hand-hewed and squared-an expensive whim when the axemen received a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing could be too costly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live.

  So he went about with the building of the cabin, singing, “And oh, my fair, would I somewhere might house my heart with thee!” Also, he had a calendar pinned on the wall above the table, and his first act each morning was to check off the day and to count the days that were left ere his partner would come booming down the Yukon ice in the spring. Another whim of his was to permit no one to sleep in the new cabin on the hill. It must be as fresh for her occupancy as the square-hewed wood was fresh; and when it stood complete, he put a padlock on the door. No one entered save himself, and he was wont to spend long hours there, and to come forth with his face strangely radiant and in his eyes a glad, warm light.

  In December he received a letter from Corry Hutchinson. He had just seen Mabel Holmes. She was all she ought to be, to be Lawrence Pentfield’s wife, he wrote. He was enthusiastic, and his letter sent the blood tingling through Pentfield’s veins. Other letters followed, one on the heels of another, and sometimes two or three together when the mail lumped up. And they were all in the same tenor. Corry had just come from Myrdon Avenue; Corry was just going to Myrdon Avenue; or Corry was at Myrdon Avenue. And he lingered on and on in San Francisco, nor even mentioned his trip to Detroit.

  Lawrence Pentfield began to think that his partner was a great deal in the company of Mabel Holmes for a fellow who was going east to see his people. He even caught himself worrying about it at times, though he would have worried more had he not known Mabel and Corry so well. Mabel’s letters, on the other hand, had a great deal to say about Corry. Also, a thread of timidity that was near to disinclination ran through them concerning t
he trip in over the ice and the Dawson marriage. Pentfield wrote back heartily, laughing at her fears, which he took to be the mere physical ones of danger and hardship rather than those bred of maidenly reserve.

  But the long winter and tedious wait, following upon the two previous long winters, were telling upon him. The superintendence of the men and the pursuit of the pay streak could not break the irk of the daily round, and the end of January found him making occasional trips to Dawson, where he could forget his identity for a space at the gambling tables. Because he could afford to lose, he won, and “Pentfield’s luck” became a stock phrase among the faro players.

  His luck ran with him till the second week in February. How much farther it might have run is conjectural; for, after one big game, he never played again.

  It was in the Opera House that it occurred, and for an hour it had seemed that he could not place his money on a card without making the card a winner. In the lull at the end of a deal, while the game-keeper was shuffling the deck, Nick Inwood the owner of the game, remarked, apropos of nothing:-

  “I say, Pentfield, I see that partner of yours has been cutting up monkey-shines on the outside.”

  “Trust Corry to have a good time,” Pentfield had answered; “especially when he has earned it.”

  “Every man to his taste,” Nick Inwood laughed; “but I should scarcely call getting married a good time.”

  “Corry married!” Pentfield cried, incredulous and yet surprised out of himself for the moment.