Part 2

It was not the fear of enmities that kept us away from the camp on the banks of the Yukon in the weeks that followed that night, but the demands of work. Slowly the disappointment had come to us that our claims were not of the best, and that only by continuous effort could we hope to make them pay scant profit. Save on occasions when some of them passed on the trail we saw nothing of the men of Marook or Laughing Jim. Once we heard that the latter had complained that George had kept him from reaping the profits of the camp, and again that, loafing on the outer edge of his gambling world, he had angrily sworn that if he had been left undisturbed he would have made his fortune. I suppose there was some truth in his statement. Yet he held to his word, this unmoral, reckless vagabond who laughed. They said that he was still there, wearing, despite derision, his pointed-toed shoes, and manicuring his nails; but gambling not at all.

And so, at last, the sun found us, and burst glaring upon our activities, and thawed the huge black dumps, and melted the snow, devoting all his energy of the high latitudes throughout the long days. Water streamed from the hillsides. Every brook was a torrent, every snow bank the repository for the continuous, melodious chorus of tinkling water drops as they dripped and dripped, and sang their little good-by songs. The dams were built, the gates swung up and down, the shovels tore into the pay dumps, and the sluice boxes roared as we men of Little Marook strove, and cleaned up our winter’s profit, be it large or small. Gone was the whine of the windlass in the frosty air, gone the sound of belabored arms beating heavy chests in the struggle to keep warm. Gone was the ring of the ax, the clatter of buckets emptying their contents on the apex of pyramids. The air was redolent with the call of wild fowl come to the breeding ground, the chirping of migratory birds, and the noiseless hum of insects.

“Boys,” said Bill Davis on the night we cleaned up the last of our pay dirt, “I figure that she runs about fifteen thousand dollars, at eighteen an ounce. Not much, but a mighty sight better than nothing.”

As he talked, he poured the dust into one of our half-filled buckskin sacks, and dropped it into our safe deposit--an empty oil can. Then, heaving a tired sigh, he slid the can under the bunk. On the morrow we would pick up the last scant remnants, pull the sluices, and divide this mass of gold into packs for the next day’s journey to the post trader at the camp. Our season’s work was done. As claims went in that country, and in proportion to the cost of living, we had not prospered; but we had more than paid our way and were glad; for, long before, we had decided to sell the claim and go “outside”--to the real United States--for the summer season. We went to sleep with the cabin door open, now that spring had come, and I remember that the last feature I observed was the lengthening of the daylight.

Full of the desire of youth for rest, I awoke only when Tim shouted his call for breakfast, and tumbled sleepily to my clothing, to the washbasin outside the door, and my seat at the table. Then, a gallant company, we sallied down for our last day’s work on the claim. And we made merry over it, this last day, and played pranks, and loitered, and threw the last shovelfuls with something of regret, for we were leaving the ground that had promised much, paid something, and was to be bartered. It was like bidding good-by to a friend, when we took the last pan of dust we would ever “clean up” from it, and filed toward the homely cabin on the mountainside. George put the pan on top of the stove to dry, for we used no amalgam; and Tim, whose week it was to cook, put the supper before us. We ate with something of melancholy, some queer mingling of good-by regret and satisfaction that at least we had worked as men. Tim got up at last and caught the pan in his hands with a strip of cloth, and reached under the bunk for the can. We heard an exclamation, first of surprise, and then alarm, as he pulled it out from beneath the bunk, clattering hollowly.

“Robbed! By heavens! Some one’s looted us!”

His voice arose in a queer crescendo of astonishment and indignation. Stools were thrust back and our feet trampled heavily over the floor as we bent above him and stared down at the empty can, disbelieving him and our senses. It was true. The can was empty, and the profits of our year’s toil had vanished as if by malignant magic. We started toward the door foolishly intent on plunging out into the night, but Bill Davis, veteran of the trails, leaped in front of us and threw up a restraining hand.

“Easy, boys! Easy does it,” he said quietly, and we paused, looking at him expectantly, and wondering what he had in mind.

“Our only chance,” he said, “of learning how, or by whom it was taken, is the sign out here in the mud. Whoever got it left a track. If we run over it in the night, it will be wiped out. If we wait until morning the sign will be there, some place; unless the man that robbed us had wings.”

“Right for you!” was a chorus, growled in unison.

And so we all remained in the cabin, and sat and talked, and waited for daybreak, and indulged in idle speculation, but there was no lamentation.

It was George’s wholesome, kindly hand that crept over on mine, as we sat there in the gloom, and it was his kindly voice that said: “Don’t worry, boy! It hits you harder than us, because we’ve money outside. Alaska to us was an adventure. To you it was the first step on the big stairs of life, for you are young, but we’ll get him yet. It’s part of the game that we should.”

And I was comforted thereby, and asleep when some one aroused us in the morning. I tumbled from my bunk, astonished by the sudden knowledge that I had slept in all my clothing, and that I had not suffered a wickedly troublesome dream. Tim was up and pouring coffee, hot and steaming, into the tin cups, and the day was breaking over the eastern hills in the early hour of the morning, so swift is the sun’s reappearance in that high clime. We ate and drank sparsely, quietly, each intent on what the signs might show, and deliberately, nay, almost leisurely, tightened our belts and went out of the door, George in the lead, Tim, short and stocky, bending behind him like an unleashed hound, and Bill, huge and grim, following.

It was a foregone conclusion that the robber had done one of two things--approached from behind the cabin in the daylight, while we were working, or crept stealthily in at night while we were asleep. In the latter case he had doubtless fled down the trail. In the former he would have retreated by the rear of the cabin, and out into the screen of the forest on the mountainside above. So, first, we inspected the trail. Veterans in reading signs were these men who had permitted me to share their lot, and they walked forward with keen eyes sweeping this way and that--eyes which nothing could escape. A broken twig, a patch of crushed, indented moss, anything unusual, would be observed and noted. They bade me walk behind, and scanned the ground for a hundred yards before one of them uttered a sound. Then George straightened up, and I saw the hurt look on his face give way to an angry scowl, and saw him swing one ponderous fist into a palm.

“Come here,” he said, with strange repression, and we joined him.

There, plainly imprinted in the mud, where some one had entered the trail from a moss-carpeted side, were tracks, and they were those of one who wore shoes--shoes of civilization, such as but few men wore in our outskirt of a rough world, and the shoes were pointed, delicately, foppishly, almost daintily.

We lifted our heads and stared at one another, with the same unvoiced comment leaping from our eyes. We looked again at the telltale tracks in the mud, clearly leading down the hillside to the gulch below, and thus off toward the camp. We lifted our heads once more and George spoke.

“Laughing Jim!” he said.

“No other man in all the country wore such shoes!” Tim added.

“And no one but an expert crook would have taken a chance in coming into our cabin night before last,” suggested Bill.

“That’s when the trick was turned,” declared George. “And he has paid me--gratitude!”

We passed, peering, down the trail and out into the gulch. Straight down it we went, finding here and there, in the slow miles, that unusual mark, the mark of a toothpick shoe in a country where all men wore rubber boots or mukluks in the wet and soggy spring. There could have been but one destination for those feet, so, at last, we wasted no more time on signs, but strode hurriedly and angrily away toward Marook. We gained the top of the hill in the pass above the town and looked down. Where last we had seen the ribbon of white, was now open water. The river had broken and cleared itself of ice while we toiled over our dumps. It ran below us, a turgid flood. Down in front of the A. C. Trading Post men were assembled, and they fired guns and shouted, while dogs ran hither and yon, howling a chorus of excitement and salute for the first steamboat of the year. It was coming slowly toward the bank, a tiny, rough affair that had wintered in a slough up the river. We hurried onward toward the water front, and had small need to ask questions, inasmuch as the first one was answered.

“Has any one seen Laughing Jim lately?” demanded George of the group in front of the Hang-out.

“If you’re looking for him, you’re a trifle late,” jocularly asserted the nearest man. “He pulled out yesterday mornin’ in a boat, goin’ down the river. And he seemed in a hurry; but he stopped to laugh and twiddle his thumb at his nose to the boys who saw him go, and said he was right sorry he hadn’t had a chance to skin the whole blamed camp before he set sail. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

He laughed boisterously at his own joke, a laugh in which we did not join, for now we knew, indubitably, that Jim had sufficient reason for haste. It was Bill, slow and cautious, who asked another question, pertinent to our quest.

“Any one else gone from the camp?” he asked.

“Nope! No one else had any reason to be in a rush,” was the response.

“What makes you think Jim was in a hurry?” asked George, frowning at the man.

“Because he just dumped himself, and some blankets, and grub into a canoe that belonged to an Injun, and paddled away as if he was out to break records,” asserted our informant. “Somebody asked him what was his rush, and he said he had a new job that he must move fast to grab. Cute of him, wasn’t it? He was a smart son of a gun, all right, and would have his little joke, right up to the last.”

Again the man laughed, and then, as the steamboat was about to land, hurriedly left us and started toward the river bank.

Bill beckoned us to one side.

“Boys,” he said, “we’ve got just one chance, and that is to get to St. Michaels as soon as he does. Unimak Pass probably isn’t clear of ice yet, and he will have to lay there until the steamer can get in from outside to take him away. We’ve got to try to catch him between here and there, and we’ve got several hundred miles to do it in. Two of us better rustle a boat. The others arrange for some one to keep an eye on our cabin up in the gulch, and buy grub for a cruise. Then it’s a case of work at the oars and make time. Let’s get a move on ourselves.”

We did, most effectually, and in just two hours’ time were shoving a crude, whipsawed skiff out into the river, and feeling the current catch us and sweep us toward the Ramparts below. We had begun the grim chase to overtake the one man who had paid his toll of gratitude by robbing the man who had twice saved his life, and it was certain that, did we overtake him, this time there would be no escape; for we would bring him back for trial.

The current helped us, and, to our satisfaction, we discovered that the apparently clumsy skiff handled excellently and responded bravely to our steady oars. We tore through the Ramparts where the waters lashed the rocks, and out into the breadths below, and then set ourselves to our task, as we traveled through that great uninhabited country. Save for the flying fowl, and a bear that lazily paused from drinking on a distant shore, we saw no living thing, and we did not pause for luncheon, but took turns with the oars. Accustomed as we were to the heaviest work, and in the perfect physical condition that comes from healthful food and clean lives, we did not suffer from the prolonged exertion. Indeed, had our mission been less melancholy and desperate, I, for one, would have enjoyed that steady, rhythmic motion, the gurgling of the water under our bow, the ever-changing scenery at our sides, and the beauties of a perfect day. We did not talk much, but once or twice Shakespeare George, brooding, quoted as if to himself, in a bitter tone, his own version of Wordsworth’s “Gratitude.”

What would have been evening in a more southerly latitude came on, and found us still rowing with that same measured stroke, save that we took shorter turns at the oars, and found the resting spells more grateful. The current carried us closer toward a shore, around a point that seemed blanketed with the evening’s purple haze, and we stopped rowing abruptly at the sound of a rifle shot. Nestled at the foot of a bluff was a squalid little Indian village, and the natives were running excitedly up and down the water’s edge and waving to us. It was evident that the shot had been fired to attract our attention. We headed the boat toward them, and they caught our prow and pulled us up on the shingle before we could protest.

“Come! Quick come!” urged a withered, kindly faced old native, presumably the tyune of this little domain. “White man ’most _peluck_! Him soon die. Quick come!”

We hastened after him to the big Kazima, a sort of clubhouse which each village of any size possesses, crawled in after him, and when our eyes grew accustomed to the dull, smoke-blackened, raftered interior, lighted only by a huge hole in the upper center over the fire pit through which the soft daylight streamed, we stood above the cause of his solicitude. Our chase was ended; for on the skins, at our feet, lay Laughing Jim.

George knelt beside him, and ran his hand inside the blue shirt that was torn open across the chest, and then looked up at us.

“Somethin’s happened to him,” he said, “feels to me as if he was all shot to pieces.”

At the sound of his voice Laughing Jim opened his eyes a little wildly, then smiled as recognition crept into their clear, but pain-drawn, depths.

“I’m going,” he croaked, with a queer, gasping effort. “You got here just in time. I--I---- Drink!”

Bill Davis pulled our little emergency flask from his pocket, George lifted the wounded man up, and gave him a strong sup of the brandy, and it momentarily strengthened him. All our animosity was forgotten now, as we stood there rubbing shoulders with death, such is the queer awe and pity that assails us at sight of the mortally stricken regardless of their merits.

“Who did it, Jim?” asked George, still supporting the dying man’s shoulders and head.

“Mahoney. But I got him! He’s over there!”

He rolled his eyes toward the dark corner of the Kazima, and with exclamations of surprise all of us, save George, hurried to the corner, struck matches, and looked. There lay Phil Mahoney, beyond all aid, dead. I threw my handkerchief over his face before we went back to George and Jim, on tiptoe, as if the sound of our footsteps on that beaten earth would ever matter to him. We gave Jim another draft of the brandy, and he feebly waved for silence.

“Let me talk,” he said. “Not much time left. Been going out all day. I’ve never been any good. Gambler’s habit of sleeping days, awake nights. Took walk yesterday morning. Wanted to get close to birds and hear ’em sing. Mile above camp. Saw Phil Mahoney toting something toward boat. Acted queer. Didn’t see me. Got in boat and shoved off. Skirted opposite shore as if afraid being seen. ‘Funny,’ says I. ‘Wonder what that big, ugly devil’s up to?’ Forgot all about it and went back to my cabin, to clean up. Couldn’t find best shoes. Cussed some, and wondered what Siwash could have swiped them. Then, all of sudden, remembered Mahoney walked queer. So I----”

He stopped and his lithe, wounded body was twisted with a harsh cough that threatened to undo him, and again we gave him brandy. After a time, but in a weaker and more broken voice, he went on: “So I went back. Never trusted him, anyhow. Sure enough there were tracks in the mud. He had ’em on. I back-tracked him. Found thicket of pussy willows, and inside of it empty gold sacks. Special buck. You fellows’ names on ’em in indelible pencil. Got wild! Ran back farther along tracks and saw he must have come from gulch trail--your direction. Saw it all in a minute. Saw you fellows wouldn’t believe me, because you know I’ve been a bad one--sometimes--not always. Maybe not so bad as some. Only thing I could do to show you I wasn’t a dog, and appreciated what you all had done for me, was to catch thief. Grabbed canoe and chased him. Caught him here, where he’d stopped to make tea, above village. Saw smoke. Found boat--nothing in it. Crept up on him. He had gold dust with him. Tried to get drop on him, but he was too quick. Whirled and shot.”

He rested silently for a moment as if to gather strength, and there was a little, exultant gleam in his eyes as he continued:

“I was down. Played fox. ‘That’s all right!’ says he, as he came up and stood over me, ‘but I’d rather you’d been hanged by them Competents.’ Then he laughed and turned back. I got to my elbow and shot. He went down. Then we shot from the ground, and luck was against me. Could feel every one of his hit. Didn’t know any more till Indians came running and picked me up. Phil was dead. Made natives bring me here with your dust. Told ’em better bring Phil, too, so if I went out, and you came, you’d understand.”

He coughed again, more violently, and the brandy seemed to have lost its effect. He motioned with his dying fingers toward his side, and we had to bend over to catch his whispered words:

“It’s there--by me--all of it--and--and--George, you’re white and--I’m not so bad--after all--am I? Wanted you boys to know that----”

As if the severing of soul and body had given him an instant’s strength, he half stiffened, struggled, and then tried to laugh, a ghastly semblance of that reckless, full-throated laugh that had given him his sobriquet, twitched, gasped, seemed to abruptly relax, and rested very still.

“Right? You’re right as rain! You are! God knows you are!”

George shouted the words to him as if speeding them out to overtake his parting soul, and I like to remember that Laughing Jim’s eyes seemed to twitch and that he went out with a smile on his face.

Side by side we buried them there, close to where the babble of the Yukon might croon to them in the long summers, or display to the cold skies its beaten winter trails, Phil Mahoney, the thief, in his stolen shoes, and Laughing Jim, the strange admixture of evil and nobility. And over each, with equal forgiveness, we put a rude wooden cross, while curious, stolid natives stood quietly by. The sole distinction we made was that the cross above Jim was carefully hewn. But George lingered behind as we made our preparations to camp in the village for the night, and the next morning, still filled with the tragedy, I slipped back up the hillside for a last look at the graves. On that of Laughing Jim, who would laugh no more, lay a handful of dying wild flowers, and I saw scrawled on the cross, in the handwriting of Shakespeare George, these words:

Under here is Laughing Jim. Paid a little favor with his life, And died with a laugh on his lips! Bad as he was, better’n Most of us, and provin’ that sometimes even poets is wrong, and That men don’t forget. Lord help us all to do as well.

And so we left him, and my eyes were fixed, as we rowed back up the river, and the village with its natives was lost to view, on the rough-hewn cross that seemed to blaze with a peculiar glory all its own, a shining standard for one honorably dead on the field of gratitude.

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the December 1, 1913 issue of The Popular Magazine.]