Part 1

THE HUNT-PACK

by Samuel Alexander White

Author of “The Ocean Born,” “The Spoilsman,” etc.

In hilarious Happy Camp, on the north side of Chilkoot Pass, inbound stampeders traveling laden and outbound packers traveling light, rested by night from the toil of the trail. Foregathered in the Saxon Saloon they relaxed their muscles, their throats and their poke-strings.

Motley crowds haunted the bar on one side of the huge canvas room, surrounded the gaming-tables on the other side, clogged the central space where, within a circle of chairs, a red-hot stove throbbed like a giant engine and overflowed upon the dancing-floor at the rear.

A haze of smoke invested everything, blurring the oil-lamps swung from the ridgepole, and softening the uncouth garments and rough faces of the men.

In all quarters, except in the immediate vicinity of the tables, where a businesslike quiet reigned, was laughter, song and badinage; was clamor, jest and camaraderie; was open hand, open heart and a devil-take-tomorrow’s-worry atmosphere. Old-timers, hailing from opposite ends of the earth, called one another friend and swapped harsh experiences, vile tobacco and colossal lies; while chechakos, to whom these seared adventurers were little less than gods, worshiped meekly at their feet, imbibing among other things instruction in the ways and wiles of the land.

And with the noise of the main room of the Saxon at its height, into it swept like a flood the babel of the dance-hall. Blended music of violin and piano stopped. Two-score couples circling the floor whirled about and made a concentrated rush for refreshments. In a shrieking, giggling, shoving mass they surged forth, the women in satins and pumps, the men in moccasins and mukluks and fur or mackinaw coats, shaking the oil-lamps on the ridge-pole with their raucous laughter, swirling the haze of the place into strange eddies with the violence of their charge.

For this was a night of rejoicing. This was Happy Camp! The Titanic climb of storm-harried Chilkoot was past, and the trend of the gold-trail now led down the mountain and onward by ice-bound lake and river to desired Dawson. That many who had started up the Pass from Dyea had never crossed the Summit, had drowned in Dyea River, broken their necks in the Cañon, got caught near the Scales by shoving glacier or thundering avalanche, or fallen to frost and blizzard upon the Palisades, was not a thing to be remembered at this hour. The rest were here, the survivors, the fit, the strong, in whom life flowed fiercely with its primordial pulse, and they were reveling in triumph and shouting toasts to the trough roof, when the door of the Saxon opened and the frost puffed in a fog-bank into the superheated room.

* * * * *

Out of the fog-bank stepped two figures, a man and a woman, fresh from the trail. Their parkas where they clung tightly over their backs and sagged on their hips were rimmed with hoarfrost, advertising body-sweat congealed, and about the close-drawn puckers of their hoods icicles hung like tusks.

Upon the two were the unmistakable signs of the Chilkoot climb. New recruits to the ranks of the strong they seemed, and the triumphant army in the Saxon acclaimed them with a thunderous cheer.

The man and the woman held their heads over the heat. The icy tusks thawed and fell to sizzle and steam upon the glowing stove-top. The two shoved back the parka hoods and nodded genially to their welcomers.

But the moment the newcomers’ faces were bared, a thick-set man in moccasins, German socks and bearskin coat stagged off at the hips, rose up on the other side of the stove and peered sharply through the steam. Next, an unspoken question in his eyes, he gazed significantly at his six companions around the fire. They likewise scrutinized the late arrivals for a keen second, looked back at the thick-set man in the stagged-off bearskin and nodded grimly.

Whereupon the bearskin-clad one raised an authoritative hand amid the bedlam of the Saxon.

At once the din lessened.

“What’s up, Bassett?” yelled an irrepressible member of the dance crowd. “Relatives of yours?”

“Maybe they come through the Chilkoot by tunnel and ain’t had the third degree of the Pass!” hazarded another facetiously. “Tom’s going to find out.”

But Tom Bassett had stepped swiftly round the stove and laid a hand upon the shoulder of the man in the parka.

“What might your name be, stranger?”

“Karle Lott.”

“Lie number one! It’s Jose Cantine. And who’s the woman with you?”

“My wife!” He resentfully shook off Bassett’s hand.

“Lie number two, you hound! It’s Eric Sark’s wife—vamoosed with in White Pass City months and months back! Aw, hold up!” Bassett seized the hand that dived under the parka and jerked it forth again. “You don’t go gunnin’ with me. If you was fair game I’d sure let you, but you ain’t. My pardner Sark’s got a mortgage on you. And if I was over in his place establishin’ relay camps on another trail and he was here in mine you’d pay right now. I’m sufferin’ sorry he ain’t here, but all the same it’s a bloody short morator-ee-um you’re gittin’, Cantine. Savvy? That’s why I’m lettin’ you stay hull-skinned.”

“Well, if you’re lettin’ me stay whole-skinned what you crossin’ me for then?” fiercely demanded the man in the parka, anger darkening his already dark eyes, tensing sharper his already sharp features. “Mind, I ain’t admittin’ I’m Cantine either. But if I was Cantine, and you ain’t goin’ to perforate Cantine on sight, what in Hades do you mean?”

“Mean?” echoed Bassett. “Your gall is sure chilled steel and case-hardened on top. Do you think as me or any other white man’s goin’ to eat, drink or sleep with or breathe the same air as you? You as broke the bond of bread and blanket, the Northland law as no man ever breaks, and lives to boast of it! Days on end I seen you sit at table with my pardner Sark under his own roof in White Pass City. Nights on end I seen you smoke by his fireside and bed down in his blankets. And with the guile of your stinkin’ soul you was plannin’ and executin’ his betrayal every blasted minute of the time!

“Then ag’in, do you think as any woman in this camp’s goin’ to suffer the companionship of yon female you call your wife who’s ten times guiltier’n you? The girls of Happy Camp is slightly frivolous and not what you’d term pernickety, but they draw the line at her. And I tell you, Cantine, I draw the line at you. I wouldn’t deserve to be called Sark’s pardner if I didn’t. I wouldn’t deserve to be called a white man if I didn’t. I’m strong for sanitation here. The likes of you two is stench and putrefaction in a healthy place. Savvy what I mean? You git to blazes outa Happy’ Camp!”

Bassett released the other’s wrist as he spoke, and the man, his lips drawn up in a wolf-dog’s snarl, stepped back a yard.

“I’ll be bludgeoned if we do!” he snapped. “You ain’t proved anything yet. Anyway there ain’t anything to prove.”

Tom Bassett gazed at him with a wearied air and resignedly waved a hand to his companions.

“Who is he, men?” he asked.

As one man, six of them took pipes out of their mouths, lowered their feet from the guard-rail of the stove, and spat toward the damper.

“Jose Cantine!” they chorused. Immediately their feet went up to the guard-rail again, and their pipes went back to their mouths.

“And about the woman!” Bassett paused and scanned the throng of dancers. “Where’s White-Pass-City Winnie?” he asked. “Ain’t she here tonight? I thought I seen her yeller dress somewhar. Oh, she’s at the back, eh? Well, trot her forrard.”

The throng shifted, leaving an irregular lane in its center.

Through this lane a fresh-faced girl of twenty-four or -five pushed from the rear, the rustle of her canary-satin dress and the tap-tap of her dainty pumps falling with strange distinctness across the silence of the Saxon.

“Winnie, shake hands with an old friend of yours!” yawned Bassett.

White-Pass-City Winnie gave one swift, curious glance at the woman by the stove and recoiled, her nose in the air.

“Me? Shake with Blera Sark? Not much! And if I’d shamed as good a man as Eric Sark for a cur like Jose Cantine I’d spare my old friends the sight of my face!”

Winnie, arms folded so tight as to lock her hands away from any possible contamination, flounced back into the front rank of the dance-crowd and remained there standing on her dignity and her high heels.

For a little the other woman gazed fixedly at her scorner. Then her flushed face, still handsome in spite of the marring frontier life, began to quiver and work. Her hands clenched upon the breast of her parka, and tears splashed down and hissed upon the stove.

“You—you—vixen!” she choked.

For revelation as well as inexpressible hurt was White-Pass-City Winnie’s opinion of her social status.

Yet her shame and her tears had no weakening effect upon those about her. Bassett was gazing significantly at Cantine.

“No good, Jose!” he shrugged. “Seein’ as I’m an all-fired, welded and cemented pardner of Sark’s, I figgered you wouldn’t be anyways partial to my views; I figgered you’d be hard-bent on disputin’ my identification if ever I spotted you. So I ain’t standin’ on my own identification. I’m standin’ on the identification of these here six men as knowed you along the White Pass Trail. I’m standin’ on the identification of White-Pass-City Winnie, who was a close friend of Blera Sark’s. What’s more, I’ll bet a thousand ounces thar ain’t a person present as doubts yon evidence. If thar is let him speak up for you!”

Bassett’s challenging glance traveled swiftly round the Saxon. The dancing-floor was empty, the bar deserted, every faro, stud-poker, draw-poker, crap and roulette table idle. To a man the stakers had left their stiffest games to hear the controversy in the middle of the room. And to a man they stood with Tom Bassett. No one spoke for Cantine.

“It’s settled!” decided Bassett, whirling upon Jose. “And lemme tell you you’re gittin’ outa Happy Camp pretty safe. I know many’s the camp as would give you twenty lashes for stealin’ a rind of bacon. And for stealin’ a man’s wife and home and hopes and honor—say, Cantine, liquid hell-fire ain’t a squirt on what they’d do to you. You’re lucky to be goin’ so safe. Now git!”

“We won’t!” defied Jose recklessly. “We’ve come twenty-odd miles, climbed nigh four thousand feet, and it’s forty-one below zero by the thermometer on the door. You can’t turn us out on a night like this.”

“Kin’t?” growled Bassett. With a quick jerk he flipped his watch from his pocket on to his open palm. “Sixty seconds I’m givin’ you,” he announced. “Walk through that door before then or git thrown through arter!”

The Saxon was very still. Bristling like a malamute at bay, Jose Cantine half-crouched in front of Bassett, who intently held the watch on him.

“One, two, three, four, five—ten—fifteen—” rasped Bassett’s deep voice monotonously counting off the seconds.

Cantine’s coal-black eyes shifted appealingly round the room, but the crowd of men gazed back at him stolidly.

“Twenty—thirty—forty—fifty—sixty!”

Bassett flipped his watch into his pocket and jumped.

As he jumped, Cantine’s hand again dived under his parka. He had the Colt out this time before Tom grasped his arm. Two shots went wild through the stovepipe, but, his wrist twisted with a violent wrench, Cantine felt the weapon slipping from his fingers, felt himself lifted like a doll in Bassett’s powerful hands and bundled to the door.

In the doorway Bassett poised a second. Suddenly he kicked. Cantine hurtled down the slope like a football, gaining momentum every second, and plunged into a snowdrift one hundred yards below.

“Now, missus—”

But the woman who had been Blera Sark fled past Bassett after Jose.

“Mebbe you think you’ve run ag’in a pretty hard snag in me!” Bassett called down the slope to them. “You haven’t. I’m a gentle, ministerin’, velvet-fingered angel of mercy to what you’ll strike before you make Dawson City!”

He closed the Saxon door against the boring frost.

“The air sure smells better,” he observed, sniffing with relief.

“Sure does,” nodded the old-timers by the stove. “But what trail’s your pardner plantin’ relay camps on?”

“The Nordenskold Trail,” answered Bassett. “That’s the same trail yon two skunks is takin’ on from Whitehorse, only they dunno it yit. But, ladies and gentlemen,” apologizing to the crowd, “I’m sure sufferin’ sorry to be the cause of the delay in your fun. Don’t let her delay any longer. Go cavortin’ to it!”

Immediately clamor broke out again. Violin and piano struck up.

The click of the ivory roulette-ball and the rattle of dealt cases arose from the tables.

Happy Camp was Happy Camp once more, and for it the incident was closed.

* * * * *

But not for Cantine and the woman.

She helped the cursing Jose to pull himself out of the drift, and together they floundered back to the beaten trail.

In the snow-walled defile they stood a moment, gazing upward at the glowing lights of Happy Camp and the stark outline of Chilcoot Mountain etched against a green night sky.

With a string of muffled imprecations Jose made a move as if to go back up the slope, but Blera put her hands on his shoulders and checked him.

“Don’t, Jose, don’t!” she besought. “They’ll maim and manhandle you till you’re a proper cripple. And the word’ll go round like a plague. There isn’t any tent there for us tonight.”

“I ain’t seein’ any here either, then,” snarled Jose. “You know how light we come over the Pass to make it in a day. Grub enough for one stop, and no blankets!”

“Well,” shivered Blera petulantly, “there’s lots of fire, isn’t there? What’s the use of lamenting in the frost?”

Happy Camp marked the edge of timber-line after the nakedness of the glacier-scoured rocks and volcanic slag about Crater Lake and the steeps above, and into the first scrubby pines Cantine and the woman turned.

Here was a chaos of dead and splintered trunks as thick as a man’s arm, and piling these up they kindled a giant fire. Food was lacking. Yet they melted snow in a drinking-cup that Cantine carried in his pocket and swallowed great drafts of hot water.

Blankets they were likewise powerless to improvise. They simply threw big heaps of green spruce boughs beside the fire and, lying upon them close to the coals, basked and drowsed, warming back and breast alternately in the terrific cold, and alternately rising to drag on fresh fuel.

Above them in the January night the aurora flashed and dimmed, and the sapphire stars leaped with dire prophecy of still intenser cold. And the January day, when it came, was as the night, except that the stars vanished and the aurora ceased to play. The jagged, sunless world was frigid, stiff and white, and the green night sky had changed to muddy gray.

Cantine and Blera arose early, drank more hot water and plowed down the ice-trail across Deep Lake and Long Lake, ancient volcano pits that with Crater linked Lake Linderman to the mountains.

All about them the stampede was on the move, hurrying along the deep trench of trampled snow which constituted the trail. The throng hauled loaded hand-sleds, drove dogs attached to loaded dog-sleds or went by man-power under enormous packs. Ever these packs were cast down without care at the side of the trail while the owners back-tripped for more till the side snows were heaped with bags, boxes and rope-lashed bundles of all descriptions.

On the right of Cantine and Blera, on their left, ahead of them, behind them were tons upon tons of provisions, yet they dared not put forth their hands to lift a morsel. Well they knew the Northland law concerning wayside caches, and well they knew the punishment that fell upon him who broke the law. The bitter resentment they nursed against Bassett who had ejected them from Happy Camp and against all the rest who had consented to that ejection blazed into a sort of savagery, a hatred of their own breed which mocked and tantalized and ostracized them.

Every man of that breed bound inward had a vision before his eyes and a hope in his heart. Each worked in a frenzy and performed prodigies of toil for the attainment of his vision and the realizing of his high ambition, but the jaded souls of Cantine and Blera did not respond to any such spur.

From the start they had been under no spell but the spell of shallow, garish enticements; and the unlooked-for collision with Tom Bassett and the specter of another day had seared them into callousness. Without lifting eyes to their companions of the trail who passed, met, repassed and oftentimes jostled them, they plodded, pariahs of their race, down the frozen surface of Long Lake.

Near Long Lake’s foot a string of seven sleds drawn by swift dog-teams, and going light, overtook them. They drove down upon the two without the customary warning hail.

Cantine and the woman had barely time to throw themselves prone into the side snow before the lead-dog of the first team, ripping at them with vicious fangs, flashed past. The other teams flashed alter, each dog taking the chance to snap futilely at their moccasined heels and the drivers with raucous laughter flicking their whiplashes like long, black snakes into the drifts around the heads of the fallen pair.

Although no blow had been landed on them, the demonstration rankled in the hearts of Jose and Blera. Blera knew that had it not been for the fact that she was a woman the blows would surely have been sent home and perhaps the wolf-dogs swerved from their course to rend them as they ran. More bitter still her anger flared, and Jose himself quivered with passion as he clambered out of the side snow back into the trail and reviled the disappearing seven. He could not fully identify the befurred and parka-clad drivers, but he had a suspicion that they were Tom Bassett and the six men who had sat around the stove the night before in the Saxon Saloon.

On down to Lake Linderman, the end of the twenty-eight-mile portage over Chilcoot from Dyea Beach, he carried his suspicion, and there at Linderman Landing he found his suspicions justified.

The shore of the lake was dotted with log-cabins, half-log and half-canvas cabins and flimsy tents, standing where the whipsaws had swept the trees away. On the edge of the main trail just at the dip to the ice bulked the Linderman Restaurant run by Flambald. It flaunted a huge cotton sign painted with pies and prices and advertised a satiating meal for ten dollars in gold. Instinctively Cantine and Blera increased their pace as they made for it.

There was a crowd about the door. Cantine went to push through and suddenly recoiled. Tom Bassett lounged on one end of the log door-step with his back against the log wall.

“What’s the matter, Cantine?” grinned Tom derisively. “Ain’t you hungry?” Cantine put out a hand for his companion and gingerly, his eyes watching Bassett for an untoward action, moved over the door-step. He seemed astounded that he got across untouched. He looked back over his shoulder uncertainly, half paused and went on again toward the tables. Bassett had never moved a muscle. Only Cantine could see the derisive profile of his nose, cheek and mouth as he leaned against the outside wall, and the sight awoke in Jose queer premonitions.

Nevertheless he boldly handed Blera into a chair and waited for some one to take his order. No one came. Jose beckoned madly, but the waiters were always busy. They nodded, but they never came. In the fury of his hunger Jose leaped up and rushed over to the plank desk where Flambald took the money for the waiters’ checks.

“Look here!” he flared. “We’re famished, and your waiters are a lot of dummies. Send some one round with grub.”

Flambald, a man of colossal and unhealthy girth, looked at him over the plank desk.

“You go to condemnation!” he bellowed. “You aren’t eating here.”

“Why? What in—”

“Stop!” roared Flambald, “This is my house. I feed who I like, but you I don’t like. Savvy?”

Jose savvied.

Flambald’s hand was on a huge iron paper-weight that held his bills upon the plank desk, and there was no arguing. Jose silently beckoned Blera and slunk out again.

On the door-step lounged Bassett, and Jose turned in the trail to curse him futilely. He knew better than to try any other restaurant. Bassett had passed the word. His receptions would be all the same. Also he knew better than to try force. He had had his lesson from that up by timberline. Besides, Blera’s hand was on his arm, fear fully dragging him on down Linderman’s frozen bosom.

Thus began a grim game in which Bassett was persecution personified, a Nemesis unshakable. He passed them on Lake Linderman, welcomed them at Bennett Post, and once more showed them the tail of his sled halfway down to West Arm on Bennett Lake.

That night they spent much like the preceding one, feeding a gigantic fire, drinking inconceivable quantities of hot water and gnawing mangy dried salmon purchased at a Stick Indian tee-pee on Lake Bennett’s shore.

Thenceforward Bassett’s hand as well as the hand of every other man was against them up the chain of lakes. The white breed of the land was a hunt-pack turned upon them, and though by virtue of stray Indian camps they survived through Caribou Crossing, Tagish Post and McClintock Post to Whitehorse, Bassett beat them in the end.

For on the Fifty-mile River beyond the Whitehorse camp his dog-sled passed them once again, and the next far post was Selkirk at the Pelly’s mouth.

“Jose, how many miles to Selkirk?” asked Blera as they stared after the vanishing outfit.

“More’n two hundred and fifty,” answered Jose dejectedly. “Bassett’s got us, sure.”

“No, he hasn’t, then!” Blera’s blue eyes flashed in the frost, and she shook her fur-gantleted hand in Bassett’s wake. “He’s aiming to starve us out on the river-stretch and make us quit it again, but it’ll take a sore sight more than him to do it!”

“How you meaning? We can’t make Selkirk on hot water and dog-feed.”

“I know that, but there’s the Dalton Trail.”

“By thunder! Say, I hadn’t figured on that track! But it’ll do. Blera, you’re sure a—a—a winner. I know there’s a Stick village at the mouth of the Klokhok—old Tutchi’s Village. I’ve been in it often. The beggars is rich. They’re lousy with dogs, and we’ll dicker for some and go down the Middle Fork of the Nordenskold. After that, Dawson’s dead easy with dogs. And in Dawson we’ll lie low till we get a chance to square up with Mister Bassett. Come on!”

Endowed with redoubled energy at his bettered prospects, Jose turned and sped off in a long lurching snowshoe stride for the mouth of the Takhini River which emptied into the Fifty-mile halfway between Whitehorse and Lake Laberge.

They turned up the Takhini, sometimes called the Mendenhall since both these rivers joined to form the larger stream which emptied into the Fifty-mile, the Mendenhall draining Taye Lake lying to the westward on the Dalton Trail and the Takhini flowing north by east from Kusawa Lake between the Yukon River and the Dezadeash country.

Cantine and Blera were traveling almost due westward. On their left to the south lay Haeckel Hill. On their right to the north loomed the Miner’s Range, and on the far horizon beyond the valley of the tributary Klokhok jutted higher, nameless peaks. In interminable vastness the land spread before them, virgin ground oft from the main-traveled trail to Dawson City, and the stupendous extent of it was enough to strike fear into the human heart.