Chapter XII: Back to the Haunts of Men

After the boys had taken the sacks of gold out of the pit they lowered the rude box that held all that was mortal of Michael Carscadden into it; stood with Eileen by the open grave with bowed heads and made their silent prayers for him. Then Bill played _Nearer My God To Thee_ on his mouth-organ and never before had he played the toy musical instrument so sweetly and with such feeling.

This done the boys filled in the space around and above the box with snow which they packed down tight; then they came to rigid attention, gave the military salute and Bill sounded _taps_ on his mouth-organ when the simple but sincere service was over. So ended the life of adventure and romance of one of Alaska’s greatest hunters of moose and seekers of gold--Michael Carscadden.

After the boys had put back the heavy hewn timbers, which formed the floor, they fell to discussing the best way to get Eileen and the gold over to their permanent camp, for it was about as hard a puzzle as getting the fox, the geese and corn across the river.

There were three ways of doing it but as two of them necessitated leaving Eileen alone at one or the other of the cabins they did not think well of either of these and hence eliminated them. The matter resolved itself down to the conclusion that the only feasible plan was for them all to go together and take along the gold at the same time.

“You can hitch up my dogs, boys,” spoke up Eileen, “then you will have seven dogs in each team and they can haul these heavy loads.”

“But your dogs are nothing but skin and bones, Eileen,” Jack explained to her, “and I doubt very much if they will be able to drag themselves back to our camp, let alone do any team-work.”

“Here we are millionaires in our own right an’ only half-a-pound of tea, a dozen biscuits and two cans of pemmican left and our dogs a-starvin’ to death. I’ll give a hundred dollars for a beefsteak as big as my hand,” said Bill, and he meant it, but there were no takers, for here in the frozen wilderness gold had lost its purchasing power.

That night while Eileen slept, the boys loaded the heavy sacks on their sleds and on one of them they made a comfortable bed for her of bear-skins. Then Jack prepared a pot of tea, doled out a single biscuit and a spoonful of pemmican for each hand and called Eileen to “breakfast.” While she was getting ready for the long journey the boys went out and whistled for the dogs but they were in no great hurry to leave their warm holes.

Less than half a ration of fish apiece was their share but they are long suffering beasts and actually seemed thankful for the little that they got. As Bill was hitching up his team, Sate, his lead dog, caught his eye and his master’s heart went out to him.

“Sate, you poor dum animule, you’ll get your fill o’ rations, I’m thinkin’, when we hits our camp,” he told him as he gave him a couple of love pats on the head.

“You’re all right, pard. You’re the goodest driver in all Alaska and I know it isn’t your fault that we’re starved out,” Sate said good-naturedly. At any rate he howled a couple of times cheerfully which was his way of saying it in short-hand dog-language.

When Jack went into the cabin Eileen had taken her last leave of her sleeping father whose burial place she might never see again.

“We’re all ready to go, Eileen,” he called cheerily.

“I am ready to go too, Jack,” she said simply; “there is nothing for me to stay for now.”

Jack picked her up and carried her out to his sled where he put her in her sleeping bag and tucked a lot of big fur robes around her.

It was an hour or more before the night would fade into day, yet so bright gleamed the aurora borealis that it was easily light enough to see to travel. Their whips cracked, the commands to _mush_ were given to the teams, the bells jingled, but there was lacking the great vibrant joy that comes of living in the open which usually marked their going. The sleds were heavy with gold, but Eileen’s daddy had been left behind and they were on the ragged edge of starvation.

Even when they reached the tundra the sleds did not pull easily for they were overloaded and the dogs were weak from hunger so that instead of enjoying themselves racing along in the traces, gold had made them work-dogs with all that this hard term implies.

Nor were the boys more kind to them because of the gold and hardship that had been thrust upon them. Rather they gave their orders in harsher tones and plied their whips harder and more often. The dogs well knew that there had been a great and sudden change in their lives and they laid it all to the girl who rode, when, according to their canine way of thinking, she by rights ought to and should have walked.

And Eileen thought so too and she often asked the boys to let her walk with them that the loads might be made the lighter but they would not hear of it. Her little added weight made no difference, according to Jack, and besides, alleged Bill, the dogs could stand it for once, for never had huskies been taken care of better, done so little real work, or had suffered less from hunger.

It took them two days and the best part of another one before they reached their camp and it was lucky for them that the time was not prolonged for that noon they had drunk their last drop of tea, eaten the last crumb of biscuit and particle of pemmican, and given their dogs the last bite of fish. So hungry had Bill become that he had marked out the dog he was going to kill to provide provender for them all, but fate was kind to the dog, and to Bill, for he was not called on to do this act of sabotage.

When they at last got to their camp Bill was as good as his word and fed the dogs a dozen rations of fish and moosemeat and having downed this in as many gulps they began to show signs of life and decency again. Jack threw together a real meal, the first that Eileen had eaten in weeks, nay months, and oh, how good those Alaska strawberries tasted! They were indeed a delicious fruit.

After the boys had gorged themselves they counted up their sacks of gold to make sure that none had escaped either by way of the door or up the chimney, and in their youthful ardor they were on the very verge of giving vent to their repressed feelings in true western style, and whoop things up. But somehow they simply couldn’t do it with that frail, slip of a girl, weakened by months of misery and starvation, and all of her own people gone out of her life forever, lying there on the bunk following their every movement. Once she smiled, ever so faintly, and the light of a new life was in her eyes and the peace of contentment was on her face.

After policing up the cooking utensils and setting things to rights a bit they turned the cabin over to Eileen and built a snow igloo of goodly size just outside the door, for their own quarters. Now that the precious metal they had sought for so long and hard was theirs they were keen to start back to the haunts of men, but Eileen did not grow strong as rapidly as they had hoped for and there was naught else for them to do but stay.

Then the question came up as to the safest way to get their winnings from their cabin in the Alaskan wilds back to the Atlantic seaboard and into the _Empire Safe Deposit Company’s_ vault. Convoying a cargo of gold nuggets, to say nothing of chaperoning a little Irish-Indian maid, from the almost unknown heart of this great sub-Arctic country, over rivers, sea and land and into the most thickly inhabited part of the world was, they realized, no small undertaking.

“There are two trails we can take to get to Seattle,” began Jack.

“One is the way we came up,” interrupted Bill, “and the other--”

“Is for us to sled down the Big Black and Porcupine Rivers to Fort Yukon, then take a Yukon River steamer to St. Michaels, over on Norton Sound, and from that place sail on a regular steamer that goes direct to Seattle.”

“But that way is longer by a thousand miles,” protested Bill.

“I know it is but if we go to Circle City and then up the Yukon River to White Horse we’ll have to cross over into Yukon Territory and the chances are we’ll have to hand over a ten per cent tax on our hard-earned winnings to the Canadian Government; besides they’ll be liable to make us do a lot of explaining as to where we got it from, and I hold it’s nobody’s business. Get me?”

Bill batted his eyes.

“Afore I’d pay a nickel tax on our dust I’d drive over to the North Pole and go around by the way of Greenland,” was his emphatic rejoinder.

Now there are a lot of terse phrases such as “nothing succeeds like success,” “a fool and his money are soon parted,” _et cetera_, and another might be to say that nothing makes most fellows so stingy as coming into possession of a fortune, for it was evident that these usually over-generous boys had “tightened up” since this golden manna had risen from the pit where it was _cached_ in such a strange manner. They were, as Bill expressed it, “fools for luck.”

Eileen was not progressing as fast as they thought she would though she improved slowly and surely. Good food, the best care, cheerful companionship and strong arms to look after her every want had made a wondrous change in this frail little girl who had dropped to the floor from exhaustion only a fortnight before. One thing was sure, however miserly the boys had grown in their minds, they took a tremendous interest in this silent half-breed child whose father had been the means of making them as rich as the richest caliph and that, you will allow, is pretty rich.

Eileen in turn recognized in them messengers sent by the Great Spirit who had saved her life, and as she watched them go about their work, heard them talk of their plans, and what they would do with and for her when they got home, she knew they were, like the nuggets in the sacks, twenty-four carats fine.

At first she couldn’t quite make Bill out, especially when he smiled, for the very emotion that nature intended a smile to represent, that terrible scar across his cheek gave the opposite appearance. Sometimes Eileen would look at him so curiously that Jack thought perhaps, she might be a little afraid of him, so one day while Bill was out getting some wood Jack told her how he came by that scar and the kind of a fellow he was as a friend and a fighter.

Came that day when all agreed that Eileen could safely make the sled trip down to Fort Yukon and, indeed, it was high time, for spring was fast coming on and this meant that the snow would melt, the ice grow thin and rotten and the bottom drop out of the trail at any moment.

So again the gold and the girl were loaded on the sleds and the long awaited start back home was made--a journey of some six thousand miles. Many things can happen in making a trip of even less length, aye, and _did_ happen as you shall presently see.

It was not often that the dogs got into any very serious fights but there had been bad blood between Eileen’s Indian dogs and Jack’s and Bill’s dogs from the time they first met and they would have discarded the Indian dogs long before but as each team was short a dog and the two _scrubs_, as Bill called them, could haul their full share, they kept them.

At the first camp they made, going down the Big Black River, Link, one of the Indian dogs and Dave, of Jack’s team, got into a fight over so small a thing as a piece of fish that neither of them had, and before the boys could separate them Link lay very close to the edge of the world next to come. It was a calamity that this fight should have happened a day after instead of a week before they started for it proved to be the most costly dog-fight that was ever pulled off anywhere, bar none.

Bill was for leaving the dog and going on but Jack said it was best to stay in camp for a few days and let Link’s wound’s heal, for they had great need of him as both sleds were loaded to the guards and it was all that a full team of seven dogs each could haul. Then again Jack had conscientious scruples against shooting the dog or turning him loose in the wilds. (Perhaps because Link belonged to Eileen). But before Link was whole again another seven days had slipped by and spring was pressing winter hard for first place.

The days were getting longer and so warm that their thick fur clothing was quite uncomfortable and they must needs change into their mackinaws. The melting snow and running water everywhere made sledding overland out of the question but the trail was still holding on the river though here and there holes appeared and cracks separated the more solid stretches of ice. Time was up and they must push on.

Jack took the lead as he had Eileen on his sled and Bill’s outfit came on a little ways behind. Another day’s march and they came to some rapids where the air holes were larger and the ice bent under the weight of their treasure. Jack was ahead of his team picking the way across the treacherous trail when all of a sudden Bill let out a blood-curdling yell of the Apache variety, and on looking back he and Eileen saw that he and his sled and Jinx, the wheel dog had gone through the ice while Sate and the rest of the team were straining every muscle to the breaking limit to keep from being dragged down into the icy waters behind them. The pole that Bill had taken the precaution to carry saved him from going under but try as he would he could not get out.

Running back at top speed Jack had the situation sized up long before he reached the scene of disaster. When he was within a dozen feet of the team he made a mighty slide, as a man sliding for home with three on bases, and drawing his hunting knife from its sheath at the same time, the instant he came alongside the last dog he cut the traces. Relieved of the mighty weight so suddenly the team fell headlong forward and sprawled about on the ice; at the same moment the sled, with over half of the moosehide sacks of gold on it, and Jinx, the wheel dog, dropped to the bottom of the river. Jack then helped Bill out and on getting back to the former’s team they made an air line for the shore.

It would add nothing to the gayety of the world to relate what Jack said to Bill and Bill said to Jack and what both of them said about the loss of their vast fortune so soon after they had found it. Eileen was the peace maker and she told them they still had enough gold to keep them forever and ever (she had never lived in New York) and that the loss of the gold mattered not a whit as long as Bill had been saved. And both of the boys came to think that she had the right view of it at that.

The result of the dreadful mishap was a pow-wow in which it was resolved first, that they couldn’t afford to take any further chances on the _last ice_ with either Eileen or the remainder of their treasure, second, that spring was altogether too far advanced to make any further attempt to get to Fort Yukon with their remaining sled, and third, that they must mark the spot where the gold went down so that they could recover it when conditions were more favorable.

“The only thing for us to do now,” declared Jack, “is to camp right here until the _first water_ and then build a boat or a raft and float on down to Fort Yukon, which is some seventy miles from here. In the meantime we’ll build up a cairn of rocks on each side of the river and in a line with the sunken yellow stuff so that when we do come back we’ll know right where it is.”

“An’ one good thing no one else ’ull ever guess out where it is,” philosophized Bill.

The boys made a fairly comfortable camp and set about building a raft of spruce logs which they lashed together with rawhide thongs. When this was done and they could get across the river they built up a great pile of rocks on either side of it but well back from the shore. Before another moon rolled round they were ready to make a fresh start down the river.

“What about these huskies here,” asked Bill, who always kept his weather-eye open for the welfare of their dogs even though they didn’t have any more use for them.

“We’ll turn them loose and they’ll follow us along the shore all right,” replied Jack, and so that little matter was settled.

They loaded the remaining sacks of gold, their outfit and provisions, of which precious little was left, onto the raft. In the middle they had built up a platform of saplings for Eileen to sit on to the thoughtful end that when the raft struck the rapids and took a notion to dive, like a submarine, the water would not wash over and wet her.

Then Eileen took her seat on the platform, Jack stood on the front end and Bill on the diagonal corner of the rear end and with their long poles they pushed their treasure float off shore. As Jack had said, the huskies followed them and they kept as close to the edge of the river as they could, barking and howling furiously as they ran along.

It took very little effort on the part of the boys to steer the raft and none at all to keep it moving as the current was augmented all along by rivulets and streams from the melting snows. Where the river was wide and the water shallow the raft sailed gently along but where the channel was narrow the boys had to do some tall maneuvering to keep it from getting swamped.

The rapids, of which there were many, were their despair. When the ungainly craft struck these eddying currents it pitched and rolled about like a piece of cork and the little crew had to hang on to it for dear life. In this exciting fashion they covered the rest of the distance down the Big Black River. Just before they came to the mouth where it empties into the Porcupine River the bed made a sharp descent and the water rushed down it in a mighty torrent.

There was a bend in the river ahead of them and this too they successfully navigated, but a rock, that projected out of the water, and which was directly in their course, proved their undoing. Jack managed to get his pole on it and brought all of his strength to bear to keep the raft clear of it, but the weight and the momentum were too great and a corner struck it with such force that Eileen and the boys were thrown bodily into the water.

It was well for them that they were good swimmers and after a struggle with the swift current all of them landed on the shore like bags of wet rags. Then the huskies covered with mud and rending the air with their vocal organs swarmed round them.

Never in all his life had Jack felt more like crying. He could stand any kind of bodily pain but with all of their gold gone he suffered exquisite mental torture. Many a prospector in the early days had killed himself for less bad luck. Bill seemed to be not all there for he acted queerly and talked about the little “boidies” that were singing in the trees, the “bloomin’” flowers that bloomed in the spring, and other like idiotic fancies that hadn’t anything to do with the case, tra, la.

Eileen was the only one who had kept her wits about her. She reasoned with the boys, or at least she tried to; she told them how very, very, lucky they were in that for the second time none of them were drowned, and as for the gold it was a blessed good thing it was all gone, she said, for it only brought bad luck.

Bill looked at her as she spoke these consoling words in a funny kind of way, as though he’d just got out of a merry-go-round and didn’t quite know where he was.

“Eileen,” he managed to say, blinking at her; “I wouldn’t even let a perliceman talk that way to me. If you was me pard, Jack here, I’d make you put up your dooks, see.”

Eileen laughed as if either he, or what he had said, was a great joke, and what’s more, she laughed out loud--the first time since they had known her. Then Jack laughed, and Bill, not to be left out in the cold, joined them with his hearty guffaw. And there the three of them sat on a fallen tree, water soaked, bedraggled, dead broke and as miserable as possible, laughing fit to kill.

Having had experience in losing things, including a few mere sacks of gold and a lot of provisions when his sled went down, Bill had insisted before they embarked on their raft that they should each carry a day’s rations strapped to their backs. Building a big fire they dried their clothes and had their drop of tea and bit of pemmican and after that they felt much better, and quit laughing.

The huskies fared very much _a la_ Mother Hubbard’s dog, which is to say that the cupboard was bare and so the poor brutes had none, no, not even a piece of fish to eat.

“Well, one good thing,” said Bill, whose pemmican had revived him again, “we won’t have to mark this blarsted spot where the last bit of our gold was dumped for I’d know that rock if I saw it a thousand miles off Fire Island.”

Jack and Eileen took a good look at the projecting finger which wouldn’t get out of the way of their raft, and they agreed with Bill that it was a monument of misfortune which having once been run into could never be forgotten.

As they were only twenty some odd miles from Fort Yukon these youngsters started out to walk there, or “hoof it” as Bill so inelegantly expressed it. They had not gone more than a couple of miles when they came upon--no, it couldn’t be, and yet there it was--their raft beached on the shore and on it there still remained three of the moosehide sacks of gold.

As Jack had often told Bill conditions are largely a matter of mind and truly it seemed so. For see you now, when they first stumbled on the pit of gold in Carscadden’s cabin they were not nearly as elated as one would have thought they’d be. Then when they lost the sled load of gold, though they were still millionaires, they were as sore at heart and mad at each other as they could be. When they lost all of their treasure and were dead-broke they laughed, and now having recovered three sacks of it they simply went wild with joy. Can you beat it?

It was a remarkable trio of youngsters that landed from their raft at Fort Yukon on that never-to-be-forgotten day in July. At any rate so said the inhabitants of that burg. Hoboes couldn’t have looked more disreputable. And the huskies were all there too, mean, lean and dog dirty.

The crowd at the landing that gathered round this motley little group scarce knew what to make of it, they felt so sorry for these woe-be-gone “kids.” But when they saw Bill take two moosehide sacks filled with something that was tremendously heavy under his arms and Jack take another and third one on his shoulder, the half-breed girl trudging along between them and their teams of huskies sticking as close to them as they could get without being stepped on, their mute sorrow changed to open expressions of surprise. Here was something to talk about to the end of time.

“Moosehide sacks filled with gold! by jimminy!” blurted out an old timer.

“An’ them kids found it where we couldn’t,” exclaimed another bitterly.

And so on, and so on.

They went over to the Crystal Hotel and while Bill stood guard over what was left of their treasure, Jack took Eileen across the street to the _New York Emporium_ and there they outfitted themselves and Bill for the trip down to St. Michaels. When they next appeared in public there had been a great transformation for Eileen was a brand new girl and Jack and Bill were almost themselves again.

Eileen, as pretty as ever an Irish lass and an Indian maid blended into one could be, had her hair done up, wore a blue traveling dress, a sailor hat and, cross my criss cross, she had on stockings and shoes, which latter, let it be whispered, she would willingly have traded for a pair of old moccasins.

The boys were clean, well groomed and had their hair cut. They wore real store clothes--all wool suits that looked as if the price tag on them had been marked up to $7.65 from $5.67. When they walked their shoes squeaked at every step like a duck having its neck wrung. They were rich, genial and willing to talk on any subject they didn’t know anything about, but of the moosehide sacks filled with gold, they said never a word.

Yet, with all their good humor the boys were ready to pull the triggers of their six-guns on the bat of an eyelid should any one get the idea in his head that he was going to relieve them of their treasure. And they guarded Eileen with the same jealous care.

A week’s run on the steamboat down the Yukon landed them at St. Michael, and once there they shipped their sacks of gold by express through to New York City when a part of their great responsibility was lifted from their minds. In a month’s time Jack and Bill were back where they had started from, while Eileen was being petted and pampered by the swelldom of Montclair.

THE END