<SPAN name="chap0107"></SPAN>
<h3> CHAPTER VII </h3>
<p>This time the trail was easier. It was better packed, and they were
not carrying mail against time. The day's run was shorter, and
likewise the hours on trail. On his mail run Daylight had played out
three Indians; but his present partners knew that they must not be
played out when they arrived at the Stewart bars, so they set the
slower pace. And under this milder toil, where his companions
nevertheless grew weary, Daylight recuperated and rested up. At Forty
Mile they laid over two days for the sake of the dogs, and at Sixty
Mile Daylight's team was left with the trader. Unlike Daylight, after
the terrible run from Selkirk to Circle City, they had been unable to
recuperate on the back trail. So the four men pulled on from Sixty
Mile with a fresh team of dogs on Daylight's sled.</p>
<p>The following night they camped in the cluster of islands at the mouth
of the Stewart. Daylight talked town sites, and, though the others
laughed at him, he staked the whole maze of high, wooded islands.</p>
<p>"Just supposing the big strike does come on the Stewart," he argued.
"Mebbe you-all'll be in on it, and then again mebbe you-all won't. But
I sure will. You-all'd better reconsider and go in with me on it."</p>
<p>But they were stubborn.</p>
<p>"You're as bad as Harper and Joe Ladue," said Joe Hines. "They're
always at that game. You know that big flat jest below the Klondike
and under Moosehide Mountain? Well, the recorder at Forty Mile was
tellin' me they staked that not a month ago—The Harper & Ladue Town
Site. Ha! Ha! Ha!"</p>
<p>Elijah and Finn joined him in his laughter; but Daylight was gravely in
earnest.</p>
<p>"There she is!" he cried. "The hunch is working! It's in the air, I
tell you-all! What'd they-all stake the big flat for if they-all
didn't get the hunch? Wish I'd staked it."</p>
<p>The regret in his voice was provocative of a second burst of laughter.</p>
<p>"Laugh, you-all, laugh! That's what's the trouble with you-all.
You-all think gold-hunting is the only way to make a stake. But let me
tell you-all that when the big strike sure does come, you-all'll do a
little surface-scratchin' and muck-raking, but danged little you-all'll
have to show for it. You-all laugh at quicksilver in the riffles and
think flour gold was manufactured by God Almighty for the express
purpose of fooling suckers and chechaquos. Nothing but coarse gold for
you-all, that's your way, not getting half of it out of the ground and
losing into the tailings half of what you-all do get.</p>
<p>"But the men that land big will be them that stake the town sites,
organize the tradin' companies, start the banks—"</p>
<p>Here the explosion of mirth drowned him out. Banks in Alaska! The idea
of it was excruciating.</p>
<p>"Yep, and start the stock exchanges—"</p>
<p>Again they were convulsed. Joe Hines rolled over on his sleeping-robe,
holding his sides.</p>
<p>"And after them will come the big mining sharks that buy whole creeks
where you-all have been scratching like a lot of picayune hens, and
they-all will go to hydraulicking in summer and steam-thawing in
winter—"</p>
<p>Steam-thawing! That was the limit. Daylight was certainly exceeding
himself in his consummate fun-making. Steam-thawing—when even
wood-burning was an untried experiment, a dream in the air!</p>
<p>"Laugh, dang you, laugh! Why your eyes ain't open yet. You-all are a
bunch of little mewing kittens. I tell you-all if that strike comes on
Klondike, Harper and Ladue will be millionaires. And if it comes on
Stewart, you-all watch the Elam Harnish town site boom. In them days,
when you-all come around makin' poor mouths..." He heaved a sigh of
resignation. "Well, I suppose I'll have to give you-all a grub-stake
or soup, or something or other."</p>
<p>Daylight had vision. His scope had been rigidly limited, yet whatever
he saw, he saw big. His mind was orderly, his imagination practical,
and he never dreamed idly. When he superimposed a feverish metropolis
on a waste of timbered, snow-covered flat, he predicated first the
gold-strike that made the city possible, and next he had an eye for
steamboat landings, sawmill and warehouse locations, and all the needs
of a far-northern mining city. But this, in turn, was the mere setting
for something bigger, namely, the play of temperament. Opportunities
swarmed in the streets and buildings and human and economic relations
of the city of his dream. It was a larger table for gambling. The
limit was the sky, with the Southland on one side and the aurora
borealis on the other. The play would be big, bigger than any Yukoner
had ever imagined, and he, Burning Daylight, would see that he got in
on that play.</p>
<p>In the meantime there was naught to show for it but the hunch. But it
was coming. As he would stake his last ounce on a good poker hand, so
he staked his life and effort on the hunch that the future held in
store a big strike on the Upper River. So he and his three companions,
with dogs, and sleds, and snowshoes, toiled up the frozen breast of the
Stewart, toiled on and on through the white wilderness where the
unending stillness was never broken by the voices of men, the stroke of
an ax, or the distant crack of a rifle. They alone moved through the
vast and frozen quiet, little mites of earth-men, crawling their score
of miles a day, melting the ice that they might have water to drink,
camping in the snow at night, their wolf-dogs curled in frost-rimed,
hairy bunches, their eight snowshoes stuck on end in the snow beside
the sleds.</p>
<p>No signs of other men did they see, though once they passed a rude
poling-boat, cached on a platform by the river bank. Whoever had cached
it had never come back for it; and they wondered and mushed on.
Another time they chanced upon the site of an Indian village, but the
Indians had disappeared; undoubtedly they were on the higher reaches of
the Stewart in pursuit of the moose-herds. Two hundred miles up from
the Yukon, they came upon what Elijah decided were the bars mentioned
by Al Mayo. A permanent camp was made, their outfit of food cached on
a high platform to keep it from the dogs, and they started work on the
bars, cutting their way down to gravel through the rim of ice.</p>
<p>It was a hard and simple life. Breakfast over, and they were at work
by the first gray light; and when night descended, they did their
cooking and camp-chores, smoked and yarned for a while, then rolled up
in their sleeping-robes, and slept while the aurora borealis flamed
overhead and the stars leaped and danced in the great cold. Their fare
was monotonous: sour-dough bread, bacon, beans, and an occasional dish
of rice cooked along with a handful of prunes. Fresh meat they failed
to obtain. There was an unwonted absence of animal life. At rare
intervals they chanced upon the trail of a snowshoe rabbit or an
ermine; but in the main it seemed that all life had fled the land. It
was a condition not unknown to them, for in all their experience, at
one time or another, they had travelled one year through a region
teeming with game, where, a year or two or three years later, no game
at all would be found.</p>
<p>Gold they found on the bars, but not in paying quantities. Elijah,
while on a hunt for moose fifty miles away, had panned the surface
gravel of a large creek and found good colors. They harnessed their
dogs, and with light outfits sledded to the place. Here, and possibly
for the first time in the history of the Yukon, wood-burning, in
sinking a shaft, was tried. It was Daylight's initiative. After
clearing away the moss and grass, a fire of dry spruce was built. Six
hours of burning thawed eight inches of muck. Their picks drove full
depth into it, and, when they had shoveled out, another fire was
started. They worked early and late, excited over the success of the
experiment. Six feet of frozen muck brought them to gravel, likewise
frozen. Here progress was slower. But they learned to handle their
fires better, and were soon able to thaw five and six inches at a
burning. Flour gold was in this gravel, and after two feet it gave
away again to muck. At seventeen feet they struck a thin streak of
gravel, and in it coarse gold, testpans running as high as six and
eight dollars. Unfortunately, this streak of gravel was not more than
an inch thick. Beneath it was more muck, tangled with the trunks of
ancient trees and containing fossil bones of forgotten monsters. But
gold they had found—coarse gold; and what more likely than that the
big deposit would be found on bed-rock? Down to bed-rock they would
go, if it were forty feet away. They divided into two shifts, working
day and night, on two shafts, and the smoke of their burning rose
continually.</p>
<p>It was at this time that they ran short of beans and that Elijah was
despatched to the main camp to bring up more grub. Elijah was one of
the hard-bitten old-time travelers himself. The round trip was a
hundred miles, but he promised to be back on the third day, one day
going light, two days returning heavy. Instead, he arrived on the
night of the second day. They had just gone to bed when they heard him
coming.</p>
<p>"What in hell's the matter now?" Henry Finn demanded, as the empty sled
came into the circle of firelight and as he noted that Elijah's long,
serious face was longer and even more serious.</p>
<p>Joe Hines threw wood on the fire, and the three men, wrapped in their
robes, huddled up close to the warmth. Elijah's whiskered face was
matted with ice, as were his eyebrows, so that, what of his fur garb,
he looked like a New England caricature of Father Christmas.</p>
<p>"You recollect that big spruce that held up the corner of the cache
next to the river?" Elijah began.</p>
<p>The disaster was quickly told. The big tree, with all the seeming of
hardihood, promising to stand for centuries to come, had suffered from
a hidden decay. In some way its rooted grip on the earth had weakened.
The added burden of the cache and the winter snow had been too much for
it; the balance it had so long maintained with the forces of its
environment had been overthrown; it had toppled and crashed to the
ground, wrecking the cache and, in turn, overthrowing the balance with
environment that the four men and eleven dogs had been maintaining.
Their supply of grub was gone. The wolverines had got into the wrecked
cache, and what they had not eaten they had destroyed.</p>
<p>"They plumb e't all the bacon and prunes and sugar and dog-food,"
Elijah reported, "and gosh darn my buttons, if they didn't gnaw open
the sacks and scatter the flour and beans and rice from Dan to
Beersheba. I found empty sacks where they'd dragged them a quarter of
a mile away."</p>
<p>Nobody spoke for a long minute. It was nothing less than a
catastrophe, in the dead of an Arctic winter and in a game-abandoned
land, to lose their grub. They were not panic-stricken, but they were
busy looking the situation squarely in the face and considering. Joe
Hines was the first to speak.</p>
<p>"We can pan the snow for the beans and rice... though there wa'n't
more'n eight or ten pounds of rice left."</p>
<p>"And somebody will have to take a team and pull for Sixty Mile,"
Daylight said next.</p>
<p>"I'll go," said Finn.</p>
<p>They considered a while longer.</p>
<p>"But how are we going to feed the other team and three men till he gets
back?" Hines demanded.</p>
<p>"Only one thing to it," was Elijah's contribution. "You'll have to
take the other team, Joe, and pull up the Stewart till you find them
Indians. Then you come back with a load of meat. You'll get here long
before Henry can make it from Sixty Mile, and while you're gone
there'll only be Daylight and me to feed, and we'll feed good and
small."</p>
<p>"And in the morning we-all'll pull for the cache and pan snow to find
what grub we've got." Daylight lay back, as he spoke, and rolled in
his robe to sleep, then added: "Better turn in for an early start. Two
of you can take the dogs down. Elijah and me'll skin out on both sides
and see if we-all can scare up a moose on the way down."</p>
<br/><br/><br/>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />