Part 1

Two-Way Trail

By Clay Perry

A romance of Alaska--treasure house of strange stories of men and women and life in the raw.

The old sour dough, “Shorty” Freem, began the serious operation of lighting his pipe. It was serious for two good reasons: first, because the mercury had dropped to fifty below during the afternoon; and, second; because there was some doubt whether he could ignite the old heel that was left in the bowl of the cracked corncob.

He got a splinter from the fire, sheltering it with a gnarled and horny hand until the flame crawled up the stick and scorched his thumb.

He applied flame to the cavity and pulled hard until with a sputter and a flicker it went out, drowned by thick vapor from Shorty’s lips.

Thin smoke mingled with the steam as Shorty thrust his hand back into his mitten and beat his knee to restore circulation to his fingers.

Gresham watched him anxiously. He was “looking color”--not the kind of the old Klondiker had dug for, underground, but human color, “human interest.” This was what his paper had sent him for, along the old gold trails of the Yukon--to exploit the romance of the region in which interest had been revived.

Gresham believed he had got Shorty started in the right vein at last. It was time, for they were far out on the trail and so far Gresham’s prospecting had been disappointing.

On the steamer, up from Seattle, he had thought himself lucky to strike up an acquaintance with Hartwell, who admitted to being an ex-miner and who was going in over the old trails again on some errand.

But Hartwell proved taciturn almost to the point of being speechless, and Gresham concluded that he was one of those modern miners--agent for a syndicate which washed gold out of the hills by hydraulic pressure and got rich without romance. However, Gresham found that Hartwell knew how to pick a guide.

And here they were, almost one hundred miles above Dawson, camped in the firs--and Shorty, the guide, was telling a story of the old days in Dawson during the gold rush.

It was so cold that the dogs had burrowed in the snow bank. The sun set at three, for the long arctic night was beginning to close down.

Shorty had piled up a sloping bank of eight-foot logs against two young trees, six feet apart, for a Siwash fire, and all three men had scraped the snow up for the bank shelter on the other side. They waited for snow to melt in the kettle for boiling up.

Hartwell sat in his robes, propped against the Yukon sled, his face covered by the hood of his parka so that only the glint of his eyes was visible in the firelight.

They were remarkable, deep-set, far-looking eyes, bright with some strong inner fire; young eyes in a deep-lined face which was made to seem older by the frame of snow-white hair and brows that spoke of a day of suffering--perhaps tragedy. How Gresham wished he could get his story!

However, it was something to have got Shorty started. He was telling a tale of Dawson in the winter of the food panic and the fire--and of a girl who had sold herself at auction from the bar of a dance-hall saloon.

In the pause for pipe lighting Gresham grew doubtful whether Shorty had finished or not, and he asked a quick question to make sure--a question about the girl and the man who bid highest:

“How did they come out?” he inquired.

“Why, I never heard,” was Shorty’s maddening reply. “I never heard how they did come out. But I reckon,” he added judicially, “that they was only one way they could’ve come out. Seemed a shame, for she was a likely-lookin’ gal.”

He flung some more snow in the kettle, looked reproachfully at his pipe, whose stem had clogged--frozen up--and gave a little grunt and hunched closer to the fire. Gresham despaired. But Shorty resumed talking.

“It was a lot of fun at the time,” he said, “but I was sorry it happened, because I got to know somethin’ about her and how and why she come into the gold country. ‘Cap’ Hanson told me. She come up the Yukon to Dawson on his steamer, from Fort Yukon. It was the last boat that got to Dawson that season.”

Shorty drew a long breath and sighed a spurt of steam.

“It seems,” he drawled, “that there was a man named Clark----”

Gresham chuckled inwardly, for his training told him that the old man now intended really to tell the story he had only sketched before.

The bundled man, who was leaning against the sled, made a movement. It was only to draw his parka hood closer.

Shorty pulled another log onto the fire. The heat was flung back from the Siwash wall into their pit-like shelter, and happily there was no wind.

Gresham burrowed in his robes on the boughs which made a floor and which would be their bed.

“The way I get it,” Shorty resumed, “this man Clark brung the gal into the country to help her locate her brother, who was supposed to be somewheres in the vicinity of Circle City, mebbe at the Birch Creek mines. They come up from Seattle to St. Michael’s Island early in the summer, caught a river steamer up to the fort, and it was there I first run acrost the trail.

“People said she seemed to have plenty money. They was a lot of us had it in them days--money to burn and not much to do with it but burn it. Up in Dawson, the winter before, food was so scarce that we went on rations. The winter follerin’ they was plenty of food, but you could pay a dollar a pound for jest dog food, and whisky was fifty a gallon and jest about as fit to drink as kerosene which was the same price.

“But then they was the fire that wiped out most of the stores and saloons. It looked, for a while, like another winter on rations. No chance of anythin’ comin’ upriver. Why, I paid a dollar apiece for candles--and ate ’em! Learned the trick from a Eskimo. Money to burn--but not candles.

“Well, the gal put in a few weeks around the fort and then went up the creek to Circle City and cruised around the Birch Creek district. Then she caught the last steamer up and landed in Dawson.

“This man Clark was on the same boat, but Cap Hanson told me they wasn’t together--any more. It looked queer, because he was supposed to be a relative of hers of some kind. And he brung her in. But the gal kept shy of him on the boat, and when she landed at Dawson she streaked off by herself. Clark tried to foller her, but she made it plain she was through with him.

“The next thing I knowed of, Clark, he settled down in Louse Town with a Injun squaw, jest acrost the creek. Of course, they was plenty of men in the diggin’s which had entered into companionate arrangements with the female denizens of Louse Town, and they managed to live it down. The trouble with Clark seemed to be, he lived down to it.”

Shorty put some more sparkling white fluff in the kettle and watched it become yellowish water, for the kettle was old and rimed with tea stain.

“The gal,” he said, “went to work at Aleck’s Place. It seems her money had run out. On the other hand, Clark seemed to have plenty. Used to see him around Aleck’s. He gambled quite a little. Everybody did--but we gambled for fun, most of us. Clark took it serious--damn serious. He got hisself disliked.

“After a while only a chechahco or a stranger would sit in a game with him. He got to be called ‘Chesty’ Clark. Almost everybody had a nickname of some sort. Some of them fitted and some of ’em sounded queer--there was ‘Cutthroat’ Johnson, for instance. But the reason Clark was called ‘Chesty’ was not because he was always braggin’ or had a big chest. It was because he played his cards too close to his bosom to suit the free-and-easy habits of most of the miners.

“They was another feller who was called by the name of the ‘Red Rover.’ He had reddish hair, and some one said they’d seen him a thousand miles upriver from Dawson the winter before, and some one else had seen him almost as far downriver. He had a dog team! I’m a nut on dogs, anyhow. One of the huskies that’s curled up under that there snow bank is a grandson of Whitenose, which was the Red Rover’s lead dog.

“Well, jest two days after he struck town he got into a game with Chesty and was cleaned.

“I seen that game. Everybody seen some of it. The Red Rover made a sociable event of it. Every time the pot was opened he’d buy a round of drinks. He liked fun. When he’d win a pot he’d set ’em up--and then when he begun to lose he set ’em up, too, laughin’ like a kid. The gals hung around and seemed to be pullin’ for him--but--Chesty kept on winnin’.

“This here gal I been tellin’ you about--I forget her name; seems to me it was May or----”

“Never mind the name,” came the unexpected interruption from Hartwell, his words breaking on the frosty air like icicles.

Shorty looked up quickly. He reached for the tea sack and sifted some dusty particles into the briskly boiling water. His wrinkled, seamed face was squinted up against the heat. He looked a veritable patriarch of the trail. And yet his hair was only touched with gray. Hartwell might have been the elder.

“Anyhow,” Shorty continued, fumbling the cups in his mittened hands, “she kept sort of away from the table where they were playin’, until along toward the last. I remember seein’ her standin’ behind Chesty’s chair a little ways, with a look in her face---- Well, when Chesty raked in the last pot the Red Rover looked up, grinnin’ like the kid he was, flung his hands wide open and sat back and said: ‘Sold! Nothin’ to do now but travel.’

“Then I saw his eyes fly wide open as he saw the gal.

“I’ll play you the last pot against your dog team,” Clark offered.

“Well, she was a good-lookin’ gal. Aleck always prided hisself on havin’ his gals dressed in real Paris style. Evenin’ gowns an’ silk stockin’s and high-heeled dancin’ slippers. They was all good lookin’, in their way, but this gal stood out from the rest like a thoroughbred. She was a picter. But it was the eyes--I got a habit of watchin’ people’s eyes. If it wasn’t for that I might never have noticed how them two looked at each other. Everybody else was watchin’ the Red Rover’s hands, palms up on the table--and Chesty’s claws rakin’ in his winnin’s. A pile of money and a big poke of dust and some nuggets---- I reckon the tea’s ready now.”

Shorty tipped the boiling kettle so that the dark fluid ran into the ready cups, warming by the coals. Hartwell pushed back his parka and lifted a steaming drink to his lips. Gresham noticed his eyes--again. Then he looked at Shorty. The old man had one eye squinted against the flare of the flames, but the open one was focused on Hartwell.

Gresham sipped scalding tea and cleared his throat.

“It was her brother, eh?” he ventured.

“Who?” croaked Shorty, his voice cracking. He spilled some tea on his mitten. “The Red Rover? Well, I thought they knowed each other. Seemed as if he was flabbergasted to see the gal there and in that costume And it seemed as if she was hit hard, too, seein’ him settin’ opposite Chesty Clark with empty hands and empty pockets. But only their eyes that said anythin’. The Red Rover got up. Chesty Clark turned around and seen the gal standin’ near by. He picked up a poke of dust and tossed it at her, with a nasty laugh.

“‘Tuck that away,’ he says, ‘where I can find it--later.’

“She caught the bag, held it in her hand and hefted it a minute. Then she tucked it in her bosom and patted it softly.

“‘I’ll put it away,’ she says, ‘where you will never touch it! It belongs to me--and more--you dirty thief!’

“Aleck had started up the noise which passed for music and the dancin’ had begun and they was only a few that caught on to what was passin’. I was one of them few--and the Red Rover.

“Chesty Clark, he went livid and made a lunge for the gal. He took a swipe at her with his hooked fingers, tryin’ to grab the poke, and tore her dress a little. The next thing he was flat on the floor and the Red Rover standin’ over him. Everybody crowded around and begun formin’ a circle for a fight--but shucks! they wasn’t any fight. Chesty Clark was all through--and besides, the poke of dust he’d flung to the girl was in his claws again, and he snarled somethin’ about the gal not bein’ able to take a joke. Then he dragged his freight out.

“The gal disappeared.

“It was the very next day that the word went round town about a queer thing that was goin’ to happen at Aleck’s Place. The story was that one of the gals was goin’ to have herself auctioned off to the highest bidder.”

Shorty tested out his pipe. It had thawed out and with a refill it worked.

“At first,” he went on, “we took it as a sort of a put-up job to advertise the place. It sounded, the story did, like a hoax, but we was willin’ to be entertained even if the joke was on us. So the advertisement worked.

“Everybody who could walk was at Aleck’s long before ten o’clock, which was the time set for the auction. When it got out that it was the new gal who was goin’ to be the one, the excitement was pretty high. Myself, I couldn’t quite see why. Then I learned that she had discovered that her brother was dead. Yes, sir, he was one of the boys that never even got over Chilkoot Pass. I reckoned it that the gal had been purty hard hit and was desperate. I had the idee she was a good gal. So did Cap Hanson. But here she was at Aleck’s Place, broke and without a friend or relative--except Chester Clark, of course, and he was a queer sort of a relative. I figgered she was afeared of him.

“Well, when Aleck helped this gal up onto the bar at ten o’clock and announced the terms of the auction, you could’ve heard a button bust off, everythin’ was so quiet.

“‘This lady,’ he says, ‘has agreed to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, to be his housekeeper for the winter, to live with him as his wife until spring, and to collect the money, which will be deposited with me as the company agent’--that was the Alaska Company--‘which I promise to hand to her when the break-up comes. Or, if either party to the agreement isn’t satisfied, or either one breaks it, he or she can quit and they’ll split the pot and call it off any time. Gentlemen, what am I offered?’

“The biddin’ started off brisk as hell. I put in a bid myself. Not that I wanted the gal to keep house for me--because I was satisfied with my own cookin’, but I felt, like a lot of others, that she ought to git a show. She gave us one. She was a picter. She had on a dress of velvet and satin which gleamed smooth and shiny under the big oil lamp which hung over the bar. It was a black dress. It matched her hair, which was just as smooth and shiny and black. And her eyes. She was a good-lookin’ gal. White as milk, except for a little rosy flush in her cheeks. She held her head up and smiled.

“Chesty Clark made the first bid. ‘One thousand dollars,’ he said.

“‘Two thousand!’ snapped a voice close behind me.

“I turned and see it was the Red Rover. His face was as pale as--as the gal’s and more so. His eyes was black--around ’em. He looked as if he had been on a tear or hadn’t slept much or somethin’. I was surprised to hear him bid because I knowed he was broke. I guess I looked surprised. He gave me a grin and a wink and then his face settled back into a sort of frozen mask.

“Clark raised it to twenty-five hundred. The Red Rover’s lips set and his eyes narrowed. He didn’t say anythin’. Right there I put in my little two cents’ worth. I said: ‘Twenty-eight hundred.’ In two minutes it had gone to four thousand. Somehow it seemed to stick there. It wasn’t such a pile of money. As much and more was lost and won by a good many of the miners every night at Aleck’s at poker.

“But Aleck, he sensed somethin’ wrong. He had been a hoss auctioneer down in the States for a spell. He knew his job. He asked the gal to walk up and down the bar, and while she did he begun to ballyhoo.

“They wasn’t any horse talk in what he said. Nobody did any jokin’. It was all serious and quiet. Red Rover, he hadn’t made another bid. Chester Clark was high man. He looked pleased with hisself, but not pleasin’.

“‘What am I offered, gentlemen? Mr. Clark says four thousand.’ Aleck was sweatin’. He was workin’ hard. I give him credit; he wanted to get the girl a good grubstake.

“Somebody said, sotto voce, near by me: ‘Clark is married, ain’t he?’

“‘Not on this side of the creek,’ was the answer, and it got a snicker.

“‘Four thousand, once! Going once! Going twice!’

“Aleck stopped, because the gal made a motion to him and spoke up:

“‘Mr. MacDonald hasn’t given you all of the terms of the auction, gentlemen,’ she said in a clear voice. ‘He has forgotten to announce that I reserve the right to refuse any bid that is made.’

“The silence got dense for a minute. Then a cur’ous murmur went up. Aleck broke right in. ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘I forgot to announce that. The lady makes her own choice or refusal. Four thousand three times and----’

“‘Forty-eight hundred!’ sang out the Red Rover, like the crack of a dog whip.

“‘Forty-eight hundred is bid by Mister----’” Shorty was choked by a sudden fit of coughing.

“Drat this old sewer!” he snapped, glaring reproachfully at his pipe. With an angry movement he tossed it into the coals, but lunged after it with mittened hand at once and raked it out into the snow.

Neither of his hearers smiled or moved or spoke.

“Chesty Clark come right back with a bid of forty-nine,” Shorty continued in a husky tone, “and there the biddin’ stopped again. It stopped because the Red Rover was dickerin’ with me. I’d told him, the previous day, that I’d like to own his dogs. He was makin’ me the offer. He asked twenty-five hundred for ’em--five of ’em. I didn’t try to beat him down. A good dog was worth four or five hundred dollars in Dawson that winter.

“‘Forty-nine hundred is bid by Chester Clark of Louse Town,’ yelped Aleck. ‘Going once!’

“‘I refuse that bid, Mr. MacDonald,’ came the gal’s voice. ‘I learn that Mr. Clark already has a housekeeper.’

“Everybody turned to look at Chesty. He got red in the face and so mad he could only splutter. He had a scab on his chin where a fist had hit him, and a bump on the back of his head where it had hit planks the night before.

“‘Which sets it back to forty-eight,’ announced Aleck. ‘Do I hear another?’

“‘Five thousand dollars,’ came the quick answer--from the Red Rover.

“‘_And sold!_’ sung out Aleck, quick as that. ‘To the red-headed gent in shirt and pants over there beside Shorty Freem.’

“A laugh went up. It was the first time anybody laughed out loud since the auction commenced. It died down right away, because the Red Rover plowed through the crowd to the bar and turned around and stood there, facin’ us, with his arms folded.

“‘I want to make an announcement,’ he says. ‘I want you all to hear it. In the first place,’ he says, ‘I haven’t got five thousand dollars. I’ve got twenty-five hundred. Here it is, Aleck. I just sold my dog team to Shorty Freem to raise it. If you, Aleck, and the lady will trust me, I’ll agree to produce the other twenty-five hundred before the spring break-up. But to make this all on the square, I want to say that, right here and now, I am making this lady an offer of marriage, to take it or leave it, now or later.’

“He turned and looked at the gal. She was shakin’ her head. I seen her lips move, but it looked as if she hadn’t spoken a word out loud. It turned out, though, that she had. Aleck told me afterward that she said to the Red Rover: ‘I’ll trust you for the money. I want it and need it--but I can’t take it under any conditions other than those that were made before the auction.’

“After that she vanished from the saloon hall. Red Rover stuck around, and Aleck hung him up for credit. He bought drinks--but didn’t take any liquor hisself. Chesty Clark got drunk and tried to pull a gun out of his boot, and the Red Rover floored him and took the gun away, and that was all the excitement they was.

“But the next day”--Shorty retrieved his pipe, which was now covered with a coating of ice, from the snow, and pocketed it regretfully--“the next day the gal and Red Rover was gone. They quit town. I never seen ’em afterward and I don’t know how they come out.”

Gresham groaned, but he had sense enough to hold his tongue this time. Perhaps Shorty was only putting another period to his peroration. The silence persisted for so long that he ventured a remark.

“Well, the girl had courage,” he said. “Didn’t she ever come back to collect?”

“Oh, she had courage, all right,” Shorty agreed heartily. “I don’t know about what she did. I don’t know how it come out. I could guess. There was only one way it could come out, to my way of thinkin’. It was a one-way trail she traveled, son.”

“What do you mean?” Gresham sat up abruptly.

“This here old trail is--or was--a one-way trail for women, up above Dawson, son,” Shorty replied good-naturedly. “I mean, no woman ever went out, upriver. They could and did come in that way, from Juneau over the Pass and through the Rapids and so on. But goin’ out, it was always down to St. Michael’s by river boat and catch the first steamer for Seattle. This gal went upriver.”

“You mean she----”

“Once I thought I did see her, afterward,” Shorty, went on doubtfully. “I couldn’t be sure and I didn’t ask questions. Besides, she was travelin’ the wrong way. The woman I mean was travelin’ upriver, too. She was in a hurry. She was all bundled up to the eyes and didn’t talk much, and I didn’t annoy her with questions.”

Gresham winced but pretended not to notice the slap.

“You had her as a passenger?” he inquired.

“Yep. And the travelin’ was bad. It was spring. Shucks! it couldn’t been this gal, May--er--whatever her name was, because she’d have been goin’ downriver. She’d have paid her passage. I never seen Aleck to ask him if she did collect. He died.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” ejaculated Gresham. And then, with sudden inspiration, born, perhaps, out of the uncanny sixth sense of the good news reporter, he turned to Hartwell and said: “What do you make of it, Mr. Hartwell? You’ve been in this country. Did you ever hear----” He paused. Something seemed to halt him. Something stood like a shadow--or a flicker of light--on the frosty air, between the huddled man against the sled and himself. It was silence.

Shorty Freem piled more logs on the fire. It was long past the usual hour for turning in but the spirit of sleepless curiosity, of unanswered mysteries, seemed to tingle in the air, like the frost. The wilderness crackled with cold all about them. Now and then a tree exploded like a bomb. A wolf howled.

The men’s eyes were drawn to the fire as to a magnet.

“Yes, I’ve been in this country,” came the unexpected remark from the taciturn Hartwell. “I’ve camped on this very trail. Going over it again brings back old memories, some of them bitter and some of them sweet.”

Gresham pricked up his ears, for the voice had a ring to it, a rhythm to it which seemed, somehow, familiar. It was the voice of a man accustomed to express himself--and all this time he had been silent. Something had unlocked his tongue. Gresham locked his own tightly behind his teeth.

“In the first place, Shorty,” Hartwell went on pleasantly, “I’ve got to disagree with you about the Dawson trail being one-way for a woman. I won’t quarrel with you about it because I understand you made the statement as a sort of parable in connection with your story of the girl.

“I’ll agree with you that she had courage,” he continued, his voice rising more clearly. “She needed it to get herself out of Aleck’s hell hole. I suppose that it would do no harm to try to guess at how they came out,” he finished, sinking back against the sled again.

Once more Gresham groaned, but this time inwardly. He almost cheered at the next sentence Hartwell uttered.