Chapter V: Outfitting at Circle

In the great hall everything was as quiet as the faces on the totem poles that reared their ugliness into the air on either side of the Grand Palace Hotel. While the night before had been the most exciting of any that the oldest pioneers of Circle could remember since the days of ’94, in the broad light of the morning after, it seemed as though “the makin’s of it had just melted away,” as Bill expressed it.

The boys found Doc Marling in the ‘office’ of his hotel which meant that he was standing back of the register and ink-bottle. He greeted his paying guests mournfully and when Jack inquired what he had on his young mind that grieved him he pointed to the frame-work which had held the largest mirror north of Dawson so short a time before as yesterday. It only went to prove how fragile are mirrors and the mutability of things in general.

“My lookin’-glass is busted,” he said funeral-like, “and I’m out just three hundred cold dollars in gold.”

“I don’t see how you could blame us because a patron of yours thought he’d let daylight through me. Black Pete started it and it’s up to you to make him settle for it,” suggested Jack.

“He hasn’t got anything to settle with; that’s the worst part of it,” he replied, fishing.

“Then you orter take it gentle-like outen his hide.” This from Bill.

“Well, I kinda allowed that you about did that thing last night,” said Doc, “and bein’ somewhat of a philosopher I allowed too that while the glass was worth three hundred dollars it was worth well nigh that amount in gold dust to see him take his medicine.”

“That’s a pleasant way to look at it, Mr. Marling, and now,” said Jack, “we want you to tell us which of these stores here is the best place to buy our outfit.”

“They’re all all right. But you ought to go and make the acquaintance of Jack McQuesten over there at the _N. C._ (_Northern Commercial Company’s_) store. He is the daddy of Circle for he set up a tradin’ post here as soon as the pioneer prospectors begin to come in. Jack’s a man that seventeen dog-sleds loaded with moosehide sacks of gold couldn’t budge from the straight and unerrin’ path of rectitude, is Jack, and he’ll fix you lads up bully and O. K.,” he told them.

So the boys went over to the _N. C._, and while Jack McQuesten’s fame had reached them down as far as Skagway, Bill Adams’ fame had preceded them that morning from the hotel. The old trader was sitting on a box when they came in and they saw right away that he was a pioneer of the old school. A low, broad brimmed hat, without a dent or crease in it, set squarely on his head, and a pair of keen gray eyes, about half closed as if he didn’t want to see too much at a time, was boring holes through them.

He was full-faced, his nose was broad and his mustache gray; it was plain to be seen why he had been entrusted with hundreds of thousands of dollars by the various companies whose trading posts were famous all over Alaska. He was, as Doc Marling had said, as straight as a die and he knew character, even as characters knew him. He was dressed like a miner and the only outstanding feature of his rig that the boys caught sight of was a magnificent gold watch chain and charm--and he had a watch to match them in his pocket--which had been presented to him by the _Order of Pioneers_, for of the first of the hardy pioneers of Alaska, he was the very first.

“Mr. McQuesten,” began Jack, “we came over to get a winter’s supply of grub and an outfit fit for an arctic expedition.”

Jack McQuesten took a good look at Bill and said with a twinkle in his eye, “so you are the young chap that whipped Black Pete--well I’ll be dog-goned. But let me give you a pointer, be careful how you handle him for his ways are not our ways--and we can’t be responsible for them. It’s the first time in the history of Circle he has not done up his man and he isn’t any too particular how he does it, so watch out he doesn’t knife you.”

“We’ll be careful all right, from now on, Mr. McQuesten, believe me,” returned Bill.

“He’s out of his latitude,” put in Jack--that is Jack Heaton; “he ought to be ashamed of himself living up here on the Arctic Circle with white people instead of being down there on the Tropic of Cancer with the rest of the _greasers_.”

“If he pulls any of that _Chilili Mex_ stuff on me to-night I’ll send him so far he’ll need a weegie board to get back to earth on, but I’m thankin’ you Mister McQuesten for tellin’ me as how I should be careful, sir,” Bill said in an apologetic voice, perhaps because he had let Black Pete off so easily the night before.

“Now to get down to business, Mr. McQuesten,” began Jack who was anxious to get things a-moving. “What we want is an outfit of clothes, mess-gear and grub that will carry us through the winter. We’re not going so far away but what we expect to get back before the _last ice_ and _first water_ but we might want to keep on going and we must have an outfit so that we can pull through if needs be.”

“What you want is an outfit for about eight months but you couldn’t begin to pack it on your backs or haul it on sleds,” the old outfitter explained; “such an outfit would weigh in the neighborhood of eight hundred or a thousand pounds, and a man can’t carry more than fifty pounds or haul more than one hundred pounds on a stretch. What you ought to have is a couple of dog-sleds.”

“Perzactly!” agreed Bill, “and the question now is can we get the dogs.”

“There are some very likely dogs in and around Circle that I might be able to pick up for you and I’ll see the men who own them over at the Palace to-night. I’ll go ahead and outfit you on the strength of your being able to get the dogs.”

“Good!” ejaculated Jack.

“First of all the things you’ll wear,” the old trader struck out genially and his eyes twinkled more merrily than ever for here was big business staring him in the face--a volume of it such as he had not transacted since the palmy days of Circle these many years agone.

The boys were all attention.

“You’ll want a couple of suits of waterproof underwear, a Mackinaw coat and breeches for early winter and spring; a caribou skin coat with the fur on which has a hood fixed to it; a pair of moosehide or bearskin breeches, a couple of pairs of moccasins and _muk-luks_ apiece and about a dozen pairs of German sox.”

“Whoa, Buddy,” sang out Bill, “I wouldn’t wear a pair o’ them Boche socks if I had to go barefoot, see?”

“That’s only the name of them, boy; why they make them down there in Dawson,” explained Mr. Jack, the storekeeper.

“Well, I might wear ’em in a pinch then,” said Bill.

“Then you must have fur mittens that are lined with wool; several pairs of woolen mittens to wear when you are building your log cabin, heavy fur caps and fur lined sleeping bags. Of course there will be towels and handkerchiefs and all of that sort of small stuff.”

As the storekeeper enumerated the various items of clothing, he brought them forth and laid out two piles, one for each of the boys.

“Now let me tell you something about taking care of these fur clothes; if you expect them to last you for more than a month take my advice and keep them dry, or if they do get wet, don’t wait but stop where you are, build a fire and dry them then and there. I don’t care how low the _quick_ falls you can’t get cold in one of these suits.

“Oh, yes; I almost forgot your eye shades but they are absolutely necessary in traveling over the snow on bright days,” and he produced a queer looking pair of goggles without any glasses in them. “These are Esquimo shades and I wouldn’t give a cent for any other kind,” he said as he handed the boys a pair.

They examined them closely and found that they were made of wood and where the lenses were supposed to be in a pair of goggles there were thin pieces of wood instead with a couple of slits in them to let the light through. Jack and Bill put them on and made puns and had fun over and out of them. Jack pretended he was a college _prof_ and then gave an imitation of Teddy Roosevelt. Not to be outdone, Bill gave an imitation of Jack giving an imitation of him, and then he wound up by pretending he was Judge Gilhooley of the Harlem Police Court and promptly sentenced himself to pay a fine of seven dollars and twenty-three cents for falsely (or badly) impersonating _Hizzoner_.

Jack McQuesten laughed at their antics until his sides ached and the boys laughed too, and altogether Circle wasn’t such a bad town as they had painted it.

“You’ll take these eye shades more seriously when you have to use them and you’ll thank your Uncle Jack for giving them to you, for they leave no bad after effects as glass goggles do when you take them off.

“Next comes the hardware,” he went on explaining as he had to a thousand, yes ten thousand, _tenderfeet_, in the past, and he thoroughly enjoyed living over again those golden days. “I call everything hardware that you can’t eat, wear, use for medicine, hunt or fish with, except the dogs.

“You’ll need quite a lot of hardware including snowshoes and sleds, a wall tent, tarpaulins and compasses, for traveling. For building your cabin you will want a five-foot crosscut saw, a rip and a hand saw, an ax, hammer and some other carpenter tools, besides nails, hinges, rivets and such like traps.

“For cooking a folding sheet-iron stove, pans, coffee pot, tin plates, cups, knives, forks and spoons. You say you’ve got a good single barrelled repeating shotgun and a hunting knife apiece? You must take along plenty of loaded shells and I will fix up all of the fishing tackle you want. For your prospecting outfit you must take a prospector’s pick and a miner’s pick with a steel point, a shovel with a round point such as we use up here, a magnet, a few pounds of quicksilver, a gold pan, a small gold scale to weigh your winnings on and a magnifying glass.

“And now for the grub. This will include flour, corn-meal, yeast in cakes and baking powder; evaporated fruits, potatoes, onions and vegetables; sugar and saccharin tablets; ham, bacon and salt pork; about a hundred pounds of Alaska strawberries and hardtack for emergency rations, also a lot of pemmican for the same purpose; some tea, coffee and condensed milk, soap and oleomargarine; salt and pepper, and a few other little things I shall not forget to put in. You have a medicine case? What have you got in it?” he asked, for Jack McQuesten had taken a great interest in these two ‘down east’ boys and he intended to see that they had enough of everything and the right kind of things--that is if they ever started.

Jack told him it had bottles containing quinine, pepsin, cathartic pills, calomel and migrain.

“No drug kit is complete up here unless you have arnica for stiff joints and strained muscles and boracic acid for blistered and aching feet.”

The old trader was in no hurry to get the outfit together that day for he knew there was going to be a fight to the finish in the evening and knowing Black Pete better than he cared to and not knowing Bill Adams at all, he allowed that, like as not, the boys wouldn’t need anything further unless it was one or two spruce boxes.

“Looks to me as if Mr. Jack is tryin’ to sell us his store and is goin’ off to new diggin’s,” yawped Bill when he looked over the list Jack had made as the storekeeper called off the items. “An’ what’s the quicksilver for anyway--to fill up the thermometer tube when the bottom drops out o’ it?”

Jack laughed at his pal’s little joke. “No, to dissolve out the gold when we find it in quartz.”

“I suppose we’ll have to take it and pay for it and all them other prospectin’ tools just to make things look regular, but we’ll throw them away as soon as we gets outer sight. We’re after gold in sacks, not in handfuls,” said Bill. “Why man alive it ’ud take a freight car to transport all the stuff he’s goin’ to sell us; and besides, think o’ the skads o’ spondulicks we’re goin’ to have to cough up fer it all, too.”

“You must remember that we’ve got to live all winter, Bill, and McQuesten knows just what he’s about.”

“An’ what’s them Alaska strawberries?--a hundred pounds o’ them!--he must think we’re goin’ to a Fourth Ward Picnic or a strawberry festible. Do you know, Jack, I’m goin’ to have some o’ them night-bloomin’ strawberries for supper if I has to tip that slant-eyed, Hong-Kong cook at the hotel a four bit piece.

“I suppose you’ve eaten _pemmican_, haven’t you Bill?”

“I’ve eaten most everything from _chicken-à-la-King_ with youse at the Ritz-Carlton to a pair o’ old rubber boots when I was shipwrecked at sea. It seems to me I’ve heard that word _pemmican_ somewhere afore in my bright log-book o’ youth, but I can’t say as how I ever sat down to a _table-de-hoty_ dinner where it was served and that I knew I was partakin’ of it at the same time. Explain it to me and maybe I’ll remember it by the way it smells.”

“Pemmican,” began Jack, “is like Irish stew, Hungarian goulash, chop-suey or _chili-con-carne_ in that there is a general recipe for making it. But cooks take even more liberties than poets; consequently no two brands of pemmican are made the same, and, hence, cannot taste, or smell, alike, but the two things that all of them have in common are filling and staying qualities for either man or dog.

“Pemmican is usually made of meat ground up and grease added to it when it is cooked, and some makers put pea-flour and other vegetable ingredients into it to make it cheap. A pound of it will not fill a cup and you can eat it every meal without getting tired of it. We used great lots of it--in fact almost lived on it--when I went on that Arctic expedition, and we fed it to the dogs too.

“Rear Admiral Peary had his pemmican made to order to get the full food value out of it; his recipe called for lean beef ground fine, two thirds part, and this was mixed with beef fat, one third part, to which was added a little sugar and some raisins. The pemmican for the dogs is made of cats, dogs, horses or any other kind of meat that is cheap. What this pemmican is like that we are going to get here I haven’t the faintest idea, but it doesn’t matter much for we’re not going to use it as a steady diet.”

“One thing is sure, other prospectors have et it and what they can eat we can eat if we have to,” was Bill’s idea of it.

On returning to the hotel Bill took Sing Nook, the Chinese cook to one side, pressed a fifty cent piece into his hand and told him it was his earnest desire to have some Alaska strawberries for his supper by way of a little delicacy.

“Velly welly,” returned the celestial dignitary who presided over the joss-house of pots and pans; “I glivee you pleanty Alaska stlawbellies flor slupper.” And so that was easily fixed.

When Bill sat down to partake of the rations that evening he waited patiently for the Alaska strawberries to come under his observation; but none materialized as far as his acute judgment of the luscious fruit was concerned. As soon as the meal was over and the diners had dispersed Bill got Sing into a corner and sang him a song without music, but the words of which ran something like this:

“I gave you four bits this afternoon to get me a helpin’ o’ Alaska strawberries. You took my good money but you failed to deliver the goods. Now what have you got to say for yourself, you Shanghai colored son of a Pekin pigtail.”

“Allee samee I dlid glivee you Alaska stlawbellies flor slupper. You no catchee ’em?” Sing asked very much surprised.

“No, I didn’t catchee ’em and if you don’t catchee ’em for me right now youse ’ell catchee a couple of ’em in the eye, I’m a thinkin’.”

Sing had seen what Bill had done to Black Pete and he had a very wholesome respect for this boy with the “velly badee facee,” so he hustled out into the kitchen and was soon back with an enormous bowl of beans, which he set on the table.

“What’s this?” questioned Bill sharply.

“Alaska stlawbellies, allee samee you havee tonlight for slupper.”

“Holy cat!” cried Bill in an awful voice. “I’ve been stung!”

Sing in the meantime had become very much alarmed over the misunderstanding but when he heard Bill guffawing in appreciation of the joke, he joined in heartily. Bill had learned two things; namely, what Alaskan strawberries are, and that a Chinaman has a sense of humor.

There was a larger gathering of the Northmen in the Grand Palace Hotel that night than there had been since the last election. They came in like spooks at a séance, apparently materialized out of thin air, but unlike the latter, you would have to admit that they looked mighty like hard and fast, flesh and blood human beings; and further they refuse to dematerialize until they had seen what they came forth to see.

As was his wont, Rip Stoneback, who had been prospecting for gold in these parts for the last quarter of a century but whose innumerable disappointments had not affected his musical talent, was on the platform, but he was not fiddling. René and his big brown bear were there too but they were not executing any fancy steps or doing any funny stunts, for the gathering that night were neither interested in the goddess of music, nor of the dance, nor, again, of comedy.

What they were there to see was a man’s game that had originated in the primeval world, had been handed down while man was in the process of development, and has since bided in communities that are far more cultured than Circle. It was the old spirit of the fight that called them and they were there to a man.

The tables, which were always scattered round the hall, where divers and sundry games with the pasteboards were played of an evening, had all been set back against the walls and the chairs piled up around them. Just why Doc Marling had seen fit to move them off the floor was not apparent unless he thought it was going to be a sprinting match instead of a pugilistic contest. There was enough room in the hall for a dozen squared rings.

He had also removed all of the breakable assets to better protected places, his bump of precaution having been enlarged by the unfortunate breaking of his three hundred dollar “lookin’-glass” that was the pride of Circle and the envy of towns up and down the Yukon River for a hundred miles in either direction.

Conversation was being carried on but it was of a tense kind and low, and not at all like the big voiced, open hearted talk that is the way of these free men of the Northland. And all because a seasoned man, but a bully, was going to do battle with a stripling who hailed from a place they had heard spoken of as New York.

Bill had seen fights, yes, he had had fights ever since he could remember and in later years, as a member of the _Harlem Athletic Club_, he had watched some friendly bouts of give and take and had himself participated in so many battles that the fact he was going to fight Black Pete had no more effect on him than if he had been going to spar with Jack.

Black Pete was in a different mood. He too had had his fights but they were far between and rough and tumble ones at that with men who, like himself, knew nothing about the science of the game, and usually he came out on top. Failing in this he had used his knife on men who downed him, and once he shot a man. A bully sooner or later, though, will meet his match and when Black Pete met Bill he was scheduled for a K. O. (knockout).

At nine o’clock, or thereabouts, the proprietor walked over to the place where the bout was to be pulled off and made this announcement:

“We have with us to-night Black Pete, champeen all round pugilist of Alaska and Bill Adams, the New York Kid, in a friendly bout and may the best man win.”

Black Pete came on to the center of the floor full of dash and dog. Then Bill came on and held out his hand but Black Pete refused to shake, so Bill shook hands with himself, just like that. Evidently Pete was not going to fight according to approved ring rules. Instead he swung a vicious right hander at Bill’s head. Bill ducked it and laughed and he knew his man was slow.

Then by sparring and feinting he drew from Pete rights and lefts with the force of a sledge-hammer back of them but which Bill side-stepped or ducked. It was not long before Pete showed signs of getting tired of hitting the air. As Pete had told himself, if he could ever hit Bill he would smash in his face; the power was back of his blows all right but the trouble was that Bill wouldn’t stand still long enough to let him do it.

Bill, who was as lithe and nimble on his feet as a cat, was everywhere around his opponent at once and kept him on the go following his tactics. Then Bill must have gotten careless for Black Pete gave him a wallop on the jaw that sent him whirling a dozen feet. Now for the first time Pete’s friends egged him on and yelled “give it to him again.”

Then Pete, encouraged by his luck, rushed Bill, but he was not to be caught napping again. He warmed up to his work and tapped Pete on the nose, making it bleed, on the jaw, making it hurt, in the mouth, making it swell and in the eye making it black; in fact he hit him any and everywhere he wanted to and so fast did he hammer him that Pete got bewildered and began to strike out in every direction in the hope that some of his blows would land on his enemy’s anatomy, and so another did. It was a glancing blow and scraped Bill’s cheek so hard it nearly ripped the knife scar open.

“Wind him up Bill,” called out Jack.

“All right,” his partner answered, and with that he gave Pete one of his famous ’ospital punches and he went to the floor in a heap.

Jack went over to Pete and slowly counted ten and as he still failed to show any signs of intelligence he counted him out. Pete’s friends carried him over to a corner where he came to a half hour later and then they put him to bed. He had had “a yard and a half over plenty,” as Bill would say.

Rip sawed away again on his fiddle, Doc put the tables back on the floor, René danced and wrestled with his good-natured bear and the men played cards again, but no one asked Bill or Jack to have a drink, a cigar or a bullet as long as they were in Circle. I dare say that the veriest tenderfoot can now go into the Grand Palace Hotel and he will be treated as considerately as he would in the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York, the Blackstone in Chicago or the Palace in San Francisco.

The next morning after the bout Black Pete lit out for other diggings and he has never been seen in Circle since. In this primitive way then are bad breeds often made into better men.