Chapter 14

None the less, he felt tolerably forlorn and desolate when, upon his last evening there, he was led away by his new master, whose name, it seemed, was Beeching, and locked in a small inclosure of high iron rails with nine other dogs, the remaining complement of the team in which he was now to serve. However, for a while he was kept too busy here to spare much thought for the matter of the loss of his companions.

Every one of the nine strangers was sleek and well fed. _Chechaquo_ Beeching was bound for the sea and civilization, with the moderate pile which a beginner's luck, rather than any skill or enterprise of his, had brought him; and he was bent on doing the trip in style, he and his curious friend, whom he called Harry. Of these nine finely conditioned dogs, four had met Jan about the town and learned to show him some deference. Two--Jinny and Poll--were bitches, and therefore not to be regarded by Jan as possible opponents in a fight; but the remaining three members of the crowd, lusty huskies, full of meat and insolence, had never seen the big hound before, and these had to be thrashed pretty soundly before Jan won his footing in the inclosure.

Fortunately, the two bitches were disposed to be friendly from the outset, and of the three huskies, two were intently engaged upon bones at the time of Jan's entrance. The third husky attacked him, blindly, without stopping to exchange so much as glances. This little incident was soon ended. In ten seconds Jan had bowled clean over on his back the too temerarious Gutty--to give this particular husky the name under which Mr. Beeching had bought him--and was shaking him by the throat as a terrier shakes a rat. But Jan was far from being really angry, or Gutty had paid with his life for the impudence of his attack; and when the husky chokingly whined for mercy he was allowed to spring to his feet and slink away into a dark corner, with nothing worse than a little skin-wound to worry over.

The case of the other two huskies was more serious, however; for in the half-light Jan chanced to brush against one of them as he gnawed his bone; and in the next moment they both were leaping at him with clashing fangs, convinced that he aimed at plunder. While Jan, in warding off their attacks, tried to explain, good-humoredly, that he meant them no ill, Jinny and Poll made off with their bones. But of this the two huskies knew nothing, being fully occupied by their joint attack upon the great dog who, had they but known it, was destined for some time to be their master, in the traces and out of them.

It was a rather troublesome fight, involving considerable bloodshed; for Fish and Pad, the two huskies, were quite notable battlers, and Jan, for his part, was genuinely anxious to avoid any killing. He was quite shrewd enough to know that he had now joined a new team, and, while it was very necessary that his prowess should be recognized and respected, he desired peace, and perfectly understood that, if he began by killing, the results might be serious for the team and for himself.

In the end, having made some sacrifices, he had to inflict a severe gash on the side of Pad's face, and to come near to throttling the life out of Fish, before he could reduce the pair of them to a state of comparatively decent, if still snarling, submission. After that there was peace; Fish and Pad were too busy in dressing their wounds to notice the loss of their bones; and Jan was free to introduce himself to the others of the pack, which he did in friendly fashion enough, despite his still raised hackles and rather noticeably stiff gait.

There was quite a gathering assembled next morning to see the last of Jan's new masters. But though he eyed the crowd closely to find them, Jan saw nothing of Jake or Jean, nor any of his old team-mates. Beeching and Harry--the latter a gentleman who, having apparently no faith in his own luck, believed in attaching himself firmly to any more fortunate person who would tolerate his society--were, to all seeming, not really unpopular. The thoroughly unpopular man is rarely guyed, with roars of open laughter and back-slapping merriment, by men who wink and nod at one another while joining forces in the matter of ragging their butt.

That was how Beeching was treated by the crowd of acquaintances who came to give him his start on the southward, seaward trail. Harry was, for the most part, merely ignored. It was understood that now, as in the past, he was supposed to make himself "useful" by way of paying his shot; and as he had never been known to be any other thing than useless, it was evidence rather of the easy good nature than the perspicacity of his associates that he never had actually lacked food and shelter in that place. But that was as much, men thought, as "Tame Cat Harry" could possibly expect. One of the last fond messages flung at Beeching, as his overloaded sled swung out on the trail, was:

"Don't you be letting Harry loose, mind you, or he'll surely hark back on the trail; an' then we'll shoot him on sight."

"Well, say," yelled another man, "if you do loose him any, be sure you put a muzzle on him, so's to keep our grub-boxes safe."

After which crude gibe at Harry's sponging proclivities, Homeric laughter set a period upon the town's farewell to Jan's new masters. And that laughter stirred to fresh activity the uneasy want of confidence, the rather cheerless sense of foreboding, which, for close upon twenty-four hours now, had been growing in the breast of the team's leader. Jan should, perhaps, have felt drawn toward Beeching and Harry, since both were compatriots of his and hailed from southern England. But England has sent a good many of her most confirmed wastrels oversea, along with the very cream of her manhood; and whether or no, Jan had no more confidence in his masters than he had in Gutty, the husky he had thrashed overnight, and far less than he had in Fish and Pad, the two opponents he had found so much more difficult to trounce.

As a fact, Jan's skepticism was amply justified. In the thirty-five-day trip thus begun--which should have been completed in sixteen days--Jan was given as striking an example of the effects of man's muddle-headed, slack-minded incompetence as that which Jean had furnished him of the effects of man's able-bodied, clear-headed competence and efficiency. Jan never worked it out in precisely this way, but after his own simple and direct fashion he came to the definite conclusion, before he had been two days on the trail with Beeching and Harry, that, for his part, he would sooner thole the harshest kind of severity or even cruelty in a master, so that it be allied with competence, than he would endure this evils which (in the northland more than in most places) attend all the steps of the man who is slack, shiftless, and incompetent; and, be it noted, make miserable the days of all and sundry who are forced to be in any way dependent on that man.

It was with much wistful regret that Jan recalled in these days the daily round of his life, after the fight with Bill, as Jean's lead dog. The swift, positive, and ordered evolutions of those smoothly running days seemed merely miraculous in retrospect as Jan compared his memory of them with the wretched muddle of Beeching's wasteful scramble across the country: They carried no trade goods, nothing save the necessary dog-food and creature-comforts for the two men; yet their sled--an extra-large one--was half as heavy again to pull as Jean's had been, despite the ten primely conditioned dogs who made up Beeching's "flash" team.

The morning was generally far advanced when Beeching and Harry started in to clear the muddle of their amateurish night's camp, with all its preposterous litter of bedding, utensils (always unclean), and other wasteful truck such as no men can afford to carry in the northland. But the day would be half done by the time their muddled preparations were finally completed.

And then, more often than not, one of the men would add his own not inconsiderable weight to that of the half-packed, overladen sled; and, at the best, Harry as a trail-breaker and finder was of no more use than a blind kitten would have been. A dozen times in the day a halt would be called for some enforced repacking of the jerry-built load on the sled; and at such times some unpacking would often have to be done to provide liquor or other refreshment for the men. There were times when, on a perfect trail, the day's run would be no more than twenty miles; and there were days of bad trail, when even Jean would have been put to it to make more than five and twenty miles, and these incompetents, with their ten-dog team, covered a bare eight or ten miles.

Pride in his leadership was as impossible for Jan in these conditions as was content or pride in his share of the work for any other member of the team. But that was not the worst of it. During the first day or two of the trip Jan was staggered to find that these new masters of his had no notion of measuring dog-rations, or even of serving these with any sort of regularity as to time, or portions, or gross quantity. They would feed some or all the dogs, at any time of day at all, and in any feckless way that came handy. At their first and second midday halts, for instance, they flung down to the team, as though to a herd of sheep or swine, food enough for three days' rations, their own leavings, and the orthodox dog-ration stuff, in a mixed heap.

Given decent, proper feeding, Jan would have seen to it that order was preserved and no thieving done. Each dog should have had his own "whack," and none have been molested. But with all his genuine love of order and discipline, Jan was no magician. He could not possibly apportion out a scattered refuse-heap. He had necessarily to grab a share for himself; and, as was inevitable, the weaker members of the team went short, or got nothing.

Then--unheard-of profligacy--came another equally casual distribution at night; and yet another, it might be, in the morning--in the morning, with the trail before them!

It resolved itself into this: there were no dog-meals on that journey; but only daily dog-fights--snarling, scrapping, blood and hatred-letting scrimmages for grub; disgraceful episodes, in themselves sufficient to shut out any hope of discipline in the team.

The quite inevitable shock came on the evening of the twelfth day. (With his costly team, Beeching had gaily figured on fifteen days for the entire trip, in place of the thirty-five days which it actually occupied.) The only good thing that memorable twelfth day brought was the end of Beeching's whisky-supply. Incidentally it marked, too, the end of his easy-going good temper. And to the consternation of an already thoroughly demoralized team, it brought also the serving out, in a heap as before--this cruel and messy trick, more perhaps than any other one thing, marked the men's wretched slackness and incompetence; qualities generally more cruel in their effects than any harshness or over-severity--of fish representing in the aggregate rather less than half a day's ration for each dog in the team.

The next day, and the next, and the next brought a similar dispensation to the dogs; no more. By this time the nightly feeding had become a horrid and bloody battle.

"Nasty savage brutes!" said sponging Harry.

"Blood does tell," observed the oracular Beeching, himself by repute a man of family. "They're every one of 'em mongrels."

The son of lordly Finn and queenly Desdemona attached no meaning to these words, of course; but were it not for the discipline, the generations of discipline in his blood, he could have strangled these two muddlers for the tragic folly of their incompetence, the gross exhibition of their slackness.

As the men themselves began to feel the belly-pinch, they brought up no reserves of manhood, but, on the contrary, they took to cruelly beating their now weakened team, when the dogs were safely tethered in the traces, and to cowardly avoidance of the poor brutes at all other times. Harry was quite unashamedly afraid to throw the dogs their beggarly half or quarter ration; and but for Beeching, it may be the dogs had starved while food still remained on the sled.

Maybe the fact that Beeching, with all his faults, had never reached Harry's depths as a sponger, preserved him from this particular crime. But he had small ground in that for self-gratulation, since it is a fact remembered in the country that when he did eventually stagger down to salt water with his sadly reduced team, the dogs had positively not had their harness off for a week. Mr. Beeching and his precious partner had been afraid to let their dogs out of the traces and the safe reach of their whips!

The fatally unwise Gutty was the first to succumb. Fish downed him for a morsel of food he had grabbed; and when the team had been over the spot on which he fell, there simply was no Gutty left. Poll, the slighter of the two bitches, died under Harry's whip--the haft of it--or she, like Jinny, would have seen salt water, because their sex was their protection--from their fellow-dogs, though not from the now starving and insensate clowns who drove them.

Everything but the scant remains of the men's food had, of course, been jettisoned before this. The dogs made a meal of the smart water-proof sheets, and Jan ate Beeching's show pair of moccasins. The whole business forms a wretched and shameful record that need not be prolonged.

To be quite just, one should mention that Beeching was afoot (hammering Jan's protruding haunches) when they staggered into the township on the evening of the thirty-fifth day. Harry lay groaning on the sled, and had been there, too lame to walk, he said, too despicable, perhaps, for Death's consideration, for three days and more. The ten-dog team of prime-conditioned animals of five weeks before consisted now of seven gaunt, staggering creatures, each a bony framework, masked in dried blood and bruises; each suffering jarring agony from every tremulous step taken, and all together (as the market went) worth, it might be--to a very speculative dog-doctor--say, ten dollars. The team had cost the deplorable Beeching about three thousand.

But, as a matter of fact, Pad died in the moment of stoppage, and two of his mates got their release while yet in the traces. Jan, Jinny, and two others survived still at the bitter end of what was perhaps the most wretchedly bungled trip ever made over that famous trail.

XXXII

JAN OBEYS ORDERS AT THE GREAT DIVIDE

Experienced observers contended that the most truly remarkable thing about _Chechaquo_ Beeching was not, after all, his super-slackness or his criminal stupidity, but his invincible luck.

Where many good men and true, infinitely capable and knowledgeable, had starved, or failed to make a scavenger's wage, Beeching had tumbled into possession of a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and, after having sampled most methods of "burning" money known to the northland, still had fully half this sum to his credit.

That was one astounding proof of his tenderfoot's luck. But more remarkable evidence of it was found, by those who understood, in his memorable journey to salt water.

By all the rules of the game, men said, Beeching and his hanger-on should have been starved, frozen, and eaten by their outraged dogs a week or more before the end of their trip. And failing that, some old-timers pointed out, they should have been publicly lynched on arrival at salt water.

Instead, they fell into the hands of roughly good-natured men, who not only gave them food and drink and helped them down to the wharf, but actually set them up with a traveling-kit of new clothing.

Then, again, consider the really astounding fact that a steamer should have been waiting to cast off at the moment these two men arrived, and that her skipper held his ship up for half an hour to suit the convenience of the precious pair, and finally carried them on in his best two cabins!

"But what about the sled and the team?" whined Harry, as he and Beeching hobbled up the gangway of the waiting steamer, bound for luxury and civilization. It may be Harry had thought of these as one of his hard-earned perquisites.

"Oh, to blazes with the sled and dogs!" cried _Chechaquo_ Beeching. "The town's welcome to 'em, for all I care."

Generous man! And at that precise moment, his tough life starved and hammered out of his hardy body, the exhausted Fish was breathing his last--still in the traces; and Jan, in whom the fires of life, though better laid than those of ninety-nine dogs in a hundred, were burning very low just now--barely flickering, indeed--was concentrating such energies as remained in him upon gnawing feebly at his traces, for the double purpose of extracting some nutriment from them, if that might be, and freeing himself from their control.

The first of these aims was a tolerably hopeless one, since Jan could not just now swallow any hard thing. But in the second he achieved success, just as the steamer's gangway was hauled up and the population of the town was engaged in waving farewell to the craft that connected with the big outside world, where sentimentality and dollars rule, just as in the northland muscle, grit, endurance--and dollars rule. Yes, even there money does play one of the chief ruling parts. But, as a general thing, sentimentality does not.

The remaining wrecks of the team, two dead, one dying, and three too far gone in the same direction to be capable of any effort, lay where they had fallen at the moment when willing hands had come to help their masters to the steamer.

It may be that Jan had bigger physical reserves to draw upon than his mates had. It is more likely, however, that the powers which kept him striving still to live, after the others had given up effort, were factors on the mental side of his composition. His memories were stronger and more vivid, his imagination a thing far more complex, than that of any husky. Also his faith in men and his desire for their help and companionship--even after five weeks with Beeching and Harry--were greatly stronger than the same factors were in any of his team-mates. The culminative influences of hundreds of generations of civilization spoke in him here.

And so, trailing beside him the gnawed-off ends of his traces, Jan dragged his emaciated frame along in jerks over the hard-trodden snow while the folk of the town cheered the departing steamer. In a little while Jan came to a small tent, the flap of which hung loose and open. At the entrance Jan smelt the fresh trail of a man; from within came--to nostrils cunning as Jan's--the odor of foodstuffs. Jan propped and jerked himself feebly into the tent, though for months now he had known that it was forbidden to enter the habitations of men-folk.

Nosing weakly to and fro, Jan found on a low shelf a can of milk. A half-blind jab of his muzzle brought it tumbling to the ground. Its lid was open, but the milk was firmly frozen. Jan licked at it, cutting his deep flews as he did so on the uneven edges of the tin. The warmth of his tongue extracted a certain sweet milkiness from this. But the metal edges were raw and sharp; Jan's exhaustion was very great, and presently he sank down upon the twig-strewn ground, and lay there, breathing in weak, sobbingly uncertain gasps, the milk-can between his outstretched paws.

Jan was now drawing very near, nearer than he had ever been before, to the Great Divide.

Within a hundred yards of Jan were groups of solid frame houses, with warm kitchens in them, and abundant food. But the tent, standing by itself, came first; and, though he could not know it, the tent was, on the whole, the very best of all the habitations in that bleak little town--for Jan. For this tent was the temporary home of an American named Willis--James Gurney Willis; as knowledgeable a man as Jean himself and, in addition, one known wherever he went into the northland as a white man.

Not many minutes after Jan's lying down there Jim Willis came striding up to his tent from the wharf, and found the half of its floor-space occupied by the gaunt wreck of the biggest hound he had ever seen. Willis was a man of experience in other places than the northland, and he would always have known a bloodhound when he saw one. But never had he seen a hound of any kind with such a frame as that he saw before him now. The dead, blood-matted black and iron-gray coat was no bloodhound's coat, he thought; too long and wiry and dense for that. But yet the head--And, anyway, thought Willis, how came the poor beast to have died just there, in his tent?

And in that moment the heavy lids of Jan's eyes twitched and lifted a little. It was rather ghastly. They showed no eyes, properly speaking. The eyes seemed to have receded, turned over, disappeared in some way. All that the lifted lids showed Willis was two deep, triangular patches of blood-red membrane. And above the prominent, thatched brows rose the noble bloodhound forehead, serried wrinkle over wrinkle to the lofty peak of the skull.

"My God!" muttered Willis, with no irreverent intent.

Always rich in the bloodhound characteristic of abundant folds of loose, rolling skin about the head, neck, and shoulders, the wreck of Jan, from which so very many pounds of solid flesh had been lost during the past month, seemed to carry the skin of two hounds. And set deep in these pouched and pendent folds of skin--tattered, blood-stained banners of the hound's past glories--the face of Jan was as a wedge, incredibly long and narrow.

His eyes had been torn out, it seemed. That was what forced the exclamation from Willis. But it was only an abnormal extension of the blood-red haws that Willis saw. The eyeballs had rolled up and back somewhat, as they mostly do when a hound is _in extremis_; but they would have shown if Jan had had the strength properly to lift his lids. Yet he had seen Willis. It was his utter weakness, combined with the hanging weight of his wrinkled face and flew-skin, that caused the ghastly show of blood-red membrane only where eyeballs should have been.

But Jan did see Willis, and the loose skin of his battered shoulders even shrank a little, in anticipation of a blow. Jan thought himself still in the traces. (As a fact he was; and breast-band, too.)

The moment Willis spoke--his low "My God!"--Jan fancied he had heard the old order to "Mush on!" and doubtless that another blow from the haft of Beeching's whip was due. In view of his then desperate state, the effort with which Jan answered the command he fancied he heard was a positive miracle. He actually staggered to his feet, though too weak to lift his eyelids, and plunged forward, with weakly scrabbling paws, to throw his weight upon the traces. And plunging against nothing but space, he had surely crashed to earth again, and in that moment crossed the Divide, but for Willis.

Willis was not of the type of men who waste breath over repetitions of exclamation of surprise. As Jan slowly heaved up his body, in a last effort at duty, Willis swiftly lowered his own body, dropping upon his knees, both arms widely extended. And it was at Willis's broad chest, and between his strongly supporting arms, that the wreck of Jan plunged, in response to what must be reckoned by far the greatest effort, till then, that the great hound had ever made.

And if the thing had ended there, this incident alone proved that when he chose the tent, before any of the more ambitious habitations near by, Jan had chosen what was assuredly the best place for him in all that town.

XXXIII

BACK TO THE TRAIL