Chapter VI

And then spring came. From the trees came cracklings as their coatings of sleet and solidified snow were stripped off and fell melting to the earth below. From the river came minor rumblings as the thawed streams of the mountains poured their waters into it, and its surface ice, grown thinner, cracked across and spun downstream in crumbling icepans toward the sea. The rocks, from hooded things in dazzling cerements, peered out naked and glistening like newborn seals at the world that was stirring for its feverish growth of summer. The spruce buds swelled to bursting. Slowly dwindling patches of snow disclosed incongruously green grass prematurely sprouted. And the wild things seemed to awake. Bull caribou roared their challenges in the indefinite distance. Foxes moved about, keen and joyously savage, no longer hampered by the snow. Now and then the winter’s windrift above some hidden hollow stirred, and a peevish bear emerged from his long sleep, sleepily ferocious.

And Holliday worked like a madman. All day long he shoveled his gravel and dirt into the cradle through which a small stream ran. After the first few days he sang. It might be that he would not have a sum that would satisfy him, but he would squander some of it and see the girl who loved him. He would see her and speak to her again! It was no wonder that he sang.

And Dugan? He worked, too, and his eyes glistened at the size of his clean-ups. He filled one poke, then another, and still another as time went on. But Dugan would never be satisfied with what was his own. He went over to Holliday’s cabin now and then, and listened while Holliday told him excitedly of the miracle that would happen. He was going Outside! In a little while longer. He would see the girl.

He told the whole course of his progress to the man who had murdered his friend, while Cheechako sat between his feet and regarded Dugan speculatively. Cheechako could not understand why Dugan so consistently ignored him. It seemed illogical to the dog, because he remembered that in this same cabin——

And at last Holliday came back from the cradle, singing at the top of his voice.

Cheechako had caught some of his festive spirit and danced clumsily about him. Dugan was sitting on the bench before the cabin and his eyelids flickered when Holliday came into view.

“I’m through!” shouted Holliday, at sight of his visitor. “Dugan, I’m through! I’m going down-river in the morning with a fat poke in my pack to see the most wonderful girl in the world!”

Dugan grinned. He had been at the cabin for some little time, and there was a surprise he had prepared for Holliday inside. It was the same surprise he had prepared for Carson.

“I’m going down tomorrow myself,” he said. “Closed up my shack and quit my workings.”

“We’ll celebrate,” said Holliday exuberantly. “Man! I’m going Outside to the most wonderful——”

Cheechako sniffed the air in the cabin. Dugan did not smell normally human. He smelled as if he were afraid. And yet he was grinning and cracking jokes as if he shared in Holliday’s uproarious happiness.

Cheechako continued to be puzzled and to grow more puzzled. Two or three times he cocked up his ears as if listening to a faint rumbling murmur far off in the wilds which might have been anything—even the mill of a forest god, grinding the grist of men’s destinies. But mostly he watched the two men.

Dugan produced a bottle, long hoarded, but Holliday would not touch it. He wanted to stay awake, he said, that no atom of his wonderful good luck should go untasted to the full. He would be starting downstream at daybreak. And Dugan grinned, and drank himself.

Holliday began to cook a festive meal. The smells were savory and delicious, but Cheechako’s nose suddenly attracted him to an unusual spot. He went tentatively toward Holliday’s bunk. Being a well-mannered dog, he knew he should never climb upon his master’s bed, but something drew him there irresistibly. He sniffed, and Dugan’s smell was suddenly that of a thing in deadly fear. Cheechako turned his head and regarded him puzzledly. Dugan’s scent was on his master’s blankets, too, and Dugan had no business to be there. Cheechako sniffed, bewildered. This other odor——

“There’s just one thing,” said Holliday with a sudden wistful gravity. “Old Sam’s dead. I told you how he was murdered. I wish—well, I wish he was going Outside with me.”

The faint rumbling outside that sounded like millstones grinding grew suddenly loud and harsh, as if the stones were crumbling up the last stray grains that had been fed to them. Cheechako cocked his ears, but that was only a noise. There was a queer smell on his master’s bunk. He heaved up his forepaws to sniff it more nearly.

“Cheechako!” snapped Dugan. Dugan had gone suddenly pale, and more than ever he had the smell of fear about him.

Holliday lifted his head and a curious expression came upon his face. Dugan went over and took Cheechako by the collar.

“Shedding fleas on your bunk,” he said to Holliday, grinning. “But he ought to share in the celebration, too. Got any molasses?”

He knew, of course. He reached up and took down the bottle of syrup Holliday had saved as a supreme luxury.

“Taught a dog to do this once,” grinned Dugan. “Here, you, Cheechako! Open your mouth!”

Cheechako sniffed at his leg. Then he saw the bottle. His eyes danced. Dugan had remembered at last! He jumped up to lick eagerly.

“Ho!” roared Dugan, as Cheechako struggled frantically to coax out the sticky sweet stuff faster than it would flow. “I knew you’d like it! Watch him, Holliday!”

Holliday straightened up.

“You’ve never heard me call that dog ‘Cheechako,’” he said queerly. “I’ve always called him ‘Pup.’ The only other man who’d know his name would be Sam Carson and—” Holliday’s voice changed swiftly—“and the man who killed him! And that trick— By God, you’re Sam Carson’s murderer!”

His revolver flashed out. Dugan gasped. The bottle fell to the floor and Cheechako lapped eagerly at its exuding contents.

“You shot him from behind,” said Holliday savagely. “With your gun not a foot from his head! Get out that gun now, Dugan. I give you just two seconds!”

Dugan’s teeth chattered. His eyes darted despairingly to the bunk. Holliday’s face was like stone. There was no faintest trace of mercy in it. With a sudden squeal like that of a cornered rat, Dugan rushed for him.

And Holliday’s revolver was out and in his hand, but Dugan’s open-handed attack brought an instinctive response in kind. His free fist shot out in a terrific blow. It caught Dugan squarely between the eyes and hurled him backward. He staggered, and his foot crushed Cheechako’s paw. The dog leaped up with a yelp and bared teeth and his movement was enough to upset Dugan’s balance completely. He toppled backward and a sudden terrible scream filled all the cabin.

He fell against the bunk and his arms clutched wildly, while his face showed only frozen horror. Then he crashed down on the blankets.

And there was a bellowing roar and a burst of smoke from the bunk. Dugan did not even shudder. He lay quite still. Presently a sullen little “drip-drip-drip” sounded on the floor.

Holliday bent over and pawed among the blankets. He brought out a curious little contrivance, very much like a trap. It was a board with a revolver tied to it and a thong so arranged that pressure on the thong would discharge the revolver into the source of the pressure.

Cheechako sniffed at it. It was the source of the peculiar odor he had noted in his master’s bunk. He wagged his tail placatingly and looked up at Holliday.

“Right where my head would have gone,” said Holliday, shuddering a little in spite of himself, “when I lay down to sleep. And he was going to stay here overnight. I see how he killed Carson now. _Pfaugh!_”

Sick with disgust, and a little shaken, he flung down the board.

Holliday did not go down-river at daybreak. It was nearer noon when he started. And instead of one deeply-carved cross in the ground about the cabin there were two. One read:

SAM CARSON
MURDERED
JUNE 2, 19—

And the other:

HIS MURDERER
JUNE 2, 19—

Holliday paddled down the river with Cheechako in the bow of his canoe, looking with bright and curious eyes at all that was to be seen. Holliday had the gold that he had washed out himself during the winter. He had, besides, gold taken from Dugan’s pokes to the amount that Dugan had stolen. The surplus he had scattered in the river. He did not want it. He was going Outside to the girl who had waited for him.

And the mill? Oh, the mill had ground up all its grist. It stopped, until one day a half-breed killed a white man in some dispute over an Indian woman, and the echo of the shot traveled thinly over the wilds. And then a faint rumbling murmur set up which might, of course, have been the wind in the trees, or a landslide in the hills not so very far away. But, equally, of course, it might not.

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the July 10, 1924 issue of Short Stories magazine.]