Chapter I

The idea came to Big Chris, as he stood on the beach gazing out through the narrow, darkened harbor mouth into the night and the storm, that this world of his was an outcast world, a land that God had cursed and forsaken, a pariah land outlawed from the kindly, sun-kissed world where the races moved and teemed. Because it was his home, because its grim, strange spirit of desolation and death had long ago got hold of him, it was as if he were a pariah too, God-cursed and God-forsaken, scarcely less so than the Remittance Man, with whom he had just become acquainted and who now lay in a drunken stupor in one of the tumble-down shacks in the darkened native village behind him; that because this land of his was lost and forgotten to the living world of men, it was as if he were lost and forgotten too, scarcely less so than the soul of some sailor drowned at sea, who now in the guise of a sea gull cried to him from the storm.

Such ideas did not haunt him often. He was huge and blond, and rugged—not a dreamer in any sense except as all men of the northern races, knowing life to its cruel depths, are given to dreams—and his last name was Larson. His job, that of a web foreman in connection with the fishing that was the one industry in these far, forsaken waters, kept him too busy for such moods as this. But the North was showing its teeth to-night. The very soul of his homeland was laid bare. Besides, he was inwardly ill at ease from purely material considerations—he had caught the cannery launch _Jupiter_ at Nushagak, with the idea of connecting up with the mail boat at Squaw Harbor, the _Jupiter’s_ home port, in a race to the “outside”, but the swift-breaking storm had forced the launch into a miniature cove far up in one of the most desolate and stormy stretches of seacoast in the entire North, there to remain for an uncertain time. The storms that break and beat on the rock-bound shores of the long, outstretching Alaskan peninsula are sometimes like a thunderclap, growing to incredible, earth-splitting intensity almost in a moment, and in a moment more paling and dying away. But sometimes they lock down upon the sea like a curse, not to lift for endless weeks, one upon another. His inner dismay enhanced the vague terror and threat that were born of the raging elements.

Of course it was only a squall in the tradition of seafarers. Captain Jim of the _Jupiter_—on the way home from a scouting trip for a new trap site—had driven his staunch little ship through seas twice as high. But Captain Jim did not care to take a chance when a mere passenger’s haste was the only consideration. Shiels, at Bellingham, and Bradford at Squaw Harbor had given definite instructions against that very thing, needless risk of the lives of his crew. Yet, Chris had to admit that this was no night for landlubbers. The shelter of the harbor was dear to-night even to those cold-nerved, hard-sailing Vikings who manned the _Jupiter_. The North was showing its teeth,—and the fangs of this particular remote and outcast portion of the North, Big Chris’s immediate range, were cruel and sharp.

In all his travels he had never known a land quite like this narrow, treeless, storm-blasted peninsula that was the fence between the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea. Perhaps that was why he hated it, and by a grotesque paradox that no mind such as his could ever explain, loved it too. The night so grim and mysterious about him, which laid such queer, dreadful pressure upon his eyeballs, was wholly characteristic of this outcast land. In the first place it was bitterly, savagely cold. The hill behind him sheltered him from the lash of the wind, yet he felt that odd dryness in his head that always marks zero weather, and the icy touch of the frost, as of a hand, crept under his heavy shirt. He wished he had his heavy sea-coat that he had left in a cabin in the village. Thence his thought turned to the Remittance Man, wondering how he was making out. It is not wise, on the Peninsula, to soak oneself in distilled sour dough and then lie in the cold. This was November: he made a bet with himself that the Remittance Man—granting that he sustained the drinking pace he had set and which, because it surpassed all records in this hard-drinking land, was already famous clear to Nushagak—would not participate in the Russian festival with which all far-western Alaska celebrates the Christmas season. There were some weeks to go before that time, and the man’s pace was astonishingly swift. The human body, sturdy though it is, can stand only so much poison; and besides, the Remittance Man had careless habits or he would not now be lying in drunken stupor in an unheated cabin. It occurred to Chris that he might make his way to the shack, gather the man’s no-insignificant bulk upon his own brawny shoulders, and carry him to the warm forecastle of the _Jupiter_. There was, however, very little to be gained by such action. The stranger had resolutely started upon the enterprise of drinking himself to death in the most expeditious fashion possible, and Big Chris saw no reason why he should interfere.

Yet for all the depth of killing cold, the sky was such as would delight lovers in far-distant, tropic gardens. It was part of the fiendish perversity of this land’s gods that they should crown such a night of cold and travail with a perfect bewilderment of stars. The sky was absolutely clear, and the hosts of heaven were in array. They were bright and sharp, and some of them hung so low it was easy to imagine them as ship lights in the _Jupiter’s_ tops. There was only the palest wisp of a waning moon, yet its light enabled him to make out dimly the wan, white, restless crests of the waves. Beneath this, and to the left and right, in the foreground and behind him, was only the pale darkness, dusk with no varying tones that seemed infinite as death.

The strange sense of solitude that is the eternal tone of the North had hold of him, and the same with every white man in the launch crew in the harbor. Only the Remittance Man, lost in drunken sleep, was immune. He felt deeply and eternally alone. It was true that there were human beings in plenty in the huts behind, but these did not count; they were Aleuts, curse-ridden and lost in the dark-age superstitions that were all they had left of a virile religion that had once spread to them from the Far East; and their presence did not in the least break the spell of solitude. They were a race apart, and he had never got close to them. Even the Remittance Man had never sought human companionship among them; and an echo of breeding and pride of race had kept him from crossing his blood with them. Even this renegade, from the States, was not accused of this.

As he watched, the storm seemed to increase; the beat of the waves on the rocks had a deeper, more sinister sound. How long would he be tied up here! He had the sensible notion to follow the Remittance Man’s example and forget his predicament, the storm, and all the moods it had brought, in sleep.

Yet it was not to be that he should lie in his bunk, or that the _Jupiter_ should lie in safety in the harbor. The darkness without the harbor was suddenly split by a queer, upward-darting flare of light.

The signal came from far away, evidently from off the rock-ribbed shore miles farther up the Peninsula, but the clear, icy air enabled him to distinguish it with entire plainness. He stood almost motionless, peering. There was only a short wait. Then he saw the yellow flare again.

The _Jupiter’s_ course was decided for her. She was not to lie in the snug cove, nor yet to carry her eager passenger to the home shelter of Squaw Harbor. Big Chris stepped to the water line.

“Captain Yim!” he called.

His voice, ringing and low, carried easily to the launch in the little harbor. Captain Jim stepped to the door of his pilot house, and his reply rolled back out of the darkness like a wave out of the dark sea. “Yas”—he said, and only the droll flattening of the _a_—always marked among men of Scandinavian birth—saved from sublimity that full, mysterious sound.

“Did you see dat light?”

“No——”

“Den look. East by nort’east——”

They watched, and the rocket made a long, yellow path through the darkness. There was no immediate change in Captain Jim’s expression. Really he had only two expressions—he either smiled or he did not smile—and this was no occasion for smiling. Rather it was an occasion for him and his crew to get straightway and immediately busy, with no large amount of confusion and no discussion or heroics whatsoever. He reached a hand and sounded a gong that told his chief engineer to stand by. Then he gave certain other orders—brusquely, bawlingly, as was his habit.

“Before you take in dat skiff come in and put me aboard!” Big Chris called from the darkened shore. It was not that he had any delusions in regard to this cruise of the _Jupiter_. The launch would not head toward its home port; nor would there be any great thrill in battling these angry waves. The far-western Alaskan does not seek thrills of this kind, he hates them with an unholy hate; but it is not the code of the land to turn from them when the need arises. If Big Chris had kept silent, the captain might have pushed out and forgotten him; they had met only a few days before, and therefore had no instinct to turn to each other in a crisis. However, it did not so much as occur to him that he could refrain from answering personally that distress call from the deep; or that he was entitled to any special credit for doing so.

Captain Jim’s brain moved deliberately and slow, but certain as yoked oxen. It was true, he knew, that no seconds were to be wasted in reaching that sinking ship. Yet every available man would be needed in the work of rescue, and particularly great-muscled, “scookem” fellows, such as he had observed Big Chris to be. At his command one of his meager crew pushed off in the skiff and, standing bent in the boat, rowed in swift, sure strokes to the shore.

Big Chris was standing ready to jump in, but he paused for one instant. “Is dar nobody else in dis village wort’ taking?” he asked.

“No. The storekeeper’s a cripple, but Lord, he’ll be mad. There’s only one other white in the village, and that’s the Remittance Man. Get in.”

It did not occur to either of them that they should take natives on this rescue trip. This was a white man’s job, and it would take the white man’s steel of heart. The term “white” itself was here used in a most restricted sense: it referred only to the strong-hearted Northern races,—Americans of the basic stock, and the Nordic peoples of the British Isles and North Europe, never to the lesser breeds. And they would not even go to see about the Remittance Man. Surely he was too lost to manhood and self-respect to be of any aid in this night’s work.

But they were suddenly brought up sharp in their work of pushing off by a voice in the darkness behind them. “Wait a second, you fellows,” the voice said. It was abrupt, almost commanding in tone, and there was the sound of hurrying feet in the snow. “I want to go.”

Even his irremediable disgrace—a disgrace that the northern men guessed at, but never knew in full—had not destroyed a certain quality of charm in the Remittance Man’s voice. It was a rich, full baritone, and it had an irrepressible boyish quality, a frankness and open-heartedness that appealed instinctively even to these hard-fisted men of the North. The Remittance Man was from “the States”, and the particular section of which he was native could usually be recognized by his accent: a softening of hard consonants and mellowing of vowels that is indigenous to the country south of the Mason-Dixon line. Like all Southerners he habitually dropped his R’s, but the absence of any pronounced drawl placed him further as of the South Atlantic States rather than the Southwest. The two men in the boat heard no thick speech to show his drunkenness. The sound of his step was unsteady: the darkness hid all other signs.

In an instant his great breadth pushed between them. The two men tried to probe the dusk to see his face.

“Are you sober?” the man from the _Jupiter_ asked bluntly.

“Not entirely,” was the answer. “Sober as I ever am. I’ll be sober as a saint by the time we get out to that sinking ship.”

“Then pile in. Push off, Larson.”

In a moment more all three were aboard the _Jupiter_, the powerful, rugged engines had begun to rumble, and the launch was struggling out to sea.

Captain Jim, at the wheel, steered straight out until he was comparatively out of danger of close-lying reefs and shallows, then turned east. Until now he had not realized the full power and height of the waves. It was a strange thing, awe-inspiring, for all his long years at sea, thus to be tossed about under that clear, marvelous sky of stars. He was not aware of any feeling of actual fear other than the dismay and apprehension for the lives of his crew that in many crises he had known before. Yet the whole tone of his thought was darkened, and his fancy took odd turns unique with him.

It was a strange voyage. The launch shuddered as if in great dread. He was a northern man, and the love of the sea was in the fiber of his being; but there was no joy to-night in this battle under the star-studded welkin. He found himself wishing that he was like that unexpected passenger, the Remittance Man, too near drunk really to understand. He had a deep feeling against going on—not fear, but rather a secret knowledge that he could not trace—and yet he could not turn back. It was not in him to turn the wheel and steer back to the harbor when those yellow rockets signalled for help. The laws of the sea are few and old, but they hold like iron shackles. It was not that he went on against his will: that he could not, if he had so desired, find excuses to turn back. Men obey the sea laws through love, not through hate; and it was simply part of him, and part of all the sea breed that he represented to push on in answer to that signal in the darkness. But he wondered that the Remittance Man should voluntarily choose to come. His thought was that the man must be too drunk to know.

Indeed, Captain Jim’s thought sped faster to the rescue than his towering body, borne on the struggling launch, could possibly follow. He wanted to make greater speed, and now that the wind was fair he saw the way.

He turned to Big Chris Larson—mostly a stranger to him but yet one of his own hard-sailing breed. “Are you a sailor?” he asked.

The man stood up from the bunk where he had been bracing. “Yas, sir,” he answered, with instinctive respect. “I sail in win’-yammers for ten year——”

“There’s no reason we shouldn’t spread her canvas. The wind’s fair, and that little mainsail will help to hold her steady. Get out on the deck. I’ll give you Eriksen to help.”

Big Chris turned toward the door. Captain Jim smiled dimly when the Remittance Man got up too.

“You are no sailor,” he commented.

“Nope! That part of my education was neglected. But any one who has done as much fancy balancing to keep his feet as I have in the last year will be a steady man in the tops! I’ll go out and be in that big Norwegian’s way.”

The mellow, easy voice some way heartened the man at the wheel. His pale blue eyes frankly studied the handsome, clean-cut face, now plainly revealed in the light of the pilot house. This Southerner had wasted the birthright of a powerful physique. He was a tall man, extremely broad of shoulder and big of bone, and a careless glance might have attributed to him even such physical power as that of Big Chris whom he resembled greatly in build. But there was no iron in those big, loose muscles. Instead of possessing really an imposing physique, he was merely forty pounds overweight. Captain Jim’s own weight was about a hundred and seventy; the Remittance Man’s should be approximately the same.

There was still, in his face, the lingering image of what had unquestionably been a general allowance of real, manly good looks. He had never possessed that effeminate prettiness that so enrages men: rather it was a combination of clean-cut, regular features, a clear complexion, wide-open, friendly Nordic eyes, sea blue, firm mouth and good, white, sound teeth, and most of all, an arrangement of facial lines that told of friendliness and humor, kind-heartedness and chivalry. The captain’s gaze was quick and penetrative to-night, and he could see back into the man’s past: he could see the man of which this half-drunken, dissipated creature was the image. Far away, and not long ago, he had been a youth of the greatest personal charm: well-bred, perfectly mannered, affectionate and good-natured; amiably weak yet chivalrous, quick to sympathy, kind and friendly to inferiors but recognizing no superiors; a certain well-loved type of Southern gentleman of an old school. What a social favorite he must have been! How the old, colored servants—Captain Jim could picture them—must have adored him and blessed him for his boyish, ready smile! He had not been all weakness: he had a firm, well-pronounced chin, a sensitive long-fingered hand that indexed certain strength of character; and there was a lingering spark in his dulled, bloodshot eyes that, in years agone, surely had been the mark of high and undaunted spirits. It perhaps might also be the key of a violent temper that could have easily brought him to his present pass. Surely the man had some vestige of courage, or he would not now be offering to go out on that storm-swept deck.

Curiously enough the man was clean-shaven; and the only explanation was that the lingering image of self-respect that kept him from crossing his blood with the Aleuts also kept him personally well-groomed. His beard, however, would have been decidedly brown; his shock of curly hair was light brown.

“All right,” Captain Jim pronounced at last. “Go out and help Big Chris all you can.”

The Remittance Man turned in obedience, and the tilting, wave-washed deck brought him to sobriety quickly. The danger, the night and the stars, most of all the eternity of plunging waves on which the ship was borne wakened an odd, dark mood, stranger to him in all the reckless, happy years of his youth. It was not merely the despair that had cursed him so many nights since his flight to the North: those terrible black hours between one debauch and another in which he had often been driven to the very brink of suicide. Mental agony at what he had lost, the nervous torture of his poisoned body had no part in this; rather it was merely an image, a dream born of a new reaction to this eerie world that had come to be his home. Some way he saw this North of his in a new light. For the first time since he had come here, he was sober enough to catch the real tone, to feel the spirit of these desolate seas and the eerie, savage, rock-bound shores they washed. He had never thought about them in particular before. He had simply lived in a nightmare world of drink, and all the stern magic of this land had passed him by. But he was receptive to it to-night. It stirred him: had it not been hopelessly crushed long since, a fighting spirit might have been wakened in him. It was all like a dream—the wild billows, the struggling ship, the flitting forms of the deck crew and his own half-realized efforts to obey their commands, that breath-taking serenity of stars—and yet, as he dreamed, he saw more clearly than ever before. As to Big Chris, earlier in the night, the soul of the North was laid bare.

It was such a mood as could easily hurl him into tragic regrets if he had let himself go—if he had not long ago forsworn all regrets. In the first place there was no particular act of his—not even the tragic outcome of the launch ride on the Savannah River—to which he could directly attribute his downfall: it had really been a combination of circumstances, many of which had been beyond his direct control. Men regret their errors more than their crimes, and while many times he had said, “Lord, have mercy upon me, a fool,” he had not often begged forgiveness for innate failings and frailties that had led to his ruin. It is opportunities lost, wrong roads taken, that waken in human hearts that unspeakable bitterness that is regret, rarely the fortune that an inexorable destiny has imposed; and really it was destiny that was hounding the Remittance Man to his death. He did not believe himself a wicked man: he knew men in plenty not half so kind or chivalrous or brave who still enjoyed the world’s good fortune. It was hardly retribution in his case. He had been weak, true enough—drinking rather too much than was good for him, but no more than other men of his class, and not one-tenth as hard as he was drinking now in forgetfulness. He had been jealous with little cause; but this was also a human trait. It was simply that—for all his auspicious beginning, his care-free youth and the wonder of those first, ineffable months with Dorothy—the cards of fate had been stacked against him. So it was neither wise nor fitting that he should yield himself to regret. There was surely nothing to be gained by so doing: it was not as if some way were open to him yet. By the same token he was not receptive to the fighting spirit that these fighting seas otherwise might have wakened in him. He could fight till he died; but the deed on the river would not be undone, and the road back to hope and self-respect and to all that mattered in life would remain closed and barred. There was no use of fighting when there was nothing to win. He could never go home. He must always be a fugitive from the world of men. He could never go back among his own kind: he could not even meet and work with rugged, worthy, though humbler men such as now toiled beside him except, of course, in these forgotten ends of the world where no one knew him or inquired whence he had come. These men would some time go back to God’s country. He must stay here till he died.

It seemed to him now that this ultimate end was nearer than he had ever dreamed. There was a strange sense of finality about this voyage. It seemed to him that the idea reached him telepathically from the men of the crew—something hidden in their words, their motions, in their even, placid faces as they stood on watch—rather than by his own cool appraisal of their dangerous situation. It was true that these were deadly waters in such a squall as this, but that alone would hardly account for the fatal atmosphere that he so plainly felt. He wondered if the seamen, knowing their situation better, sensed an imminent danger to which he was blind.

The small sail was spread and gave its aid to the laboring engine, serving particularly to keep the craft on a more even keel. The ship sped faster into the night and the storm. The passing hours had brought them close to the sinking ship; the flare of rockets seemed just at hand. And now, with less activity, the Remittance Man began to realize the real severity of the cold.

The wind was like a whiplash out of the northwest, stinging his eyelids, buffeting him as he braced himself on the tilting deck, seeking every little entrance through sleeve and collar into his vitals. In the loneliness of his mood it did not occur to him at once that his fellow watchman might be likewise suffering. He only knew the truth when Big Chris paused beside him, cursing.

“God, I wish I had my coat,” he said. “Like dam’ fool I lief it in dat native’s shack——”

The Remittance Man gazed at him in quick amazement. It was true: Chris’s heavy mackinaw shirt alone saved him from the lash of the cold.

“Good Lord, I wish you’d take mine,” the Remittance Man answered promptly. “I’m sweating like a horse——”

He saw the look of incredulous amazement in Larson’s face. “Yas, you are——” he began in derision.

“I am, no fooling. I guess it’s the liquor—besides, I’ve got a caribou shirt underneath.” He quickly threw off his heavy seaman’s coat and held it out. “Wear it a while, anyhow—we’re about the same build and it will fit you to a T. I’ll holler for it back as soon as I feel chilly.”

Big Chris muttered, but slipped the garment on. He could not doubt those ringing words; otherwise wild horses could not have forced the coat across his brawny shoulders. Presently he turned away, leaving this man of cities almost unprotected in the blast of the wind.

Why he had acted as he did, he could not have told. The dying liquor had chilled him, rather than warmed him, nor was there any shirt of cold-defying caribou hide under his outer garment of heavy flannel. If there had been a thought that Chris’s life was worth saving while his own was not, that this working man was needed upon the earth while he himself was but a drunken semblance of what had never been more than a waster and an idler, it did not reach the focus of his consciousness: he had acted thus because it was his inner law. It had been simply an impulse, born of that instinctive chivalry that is the Southern birthright; and yet, in any other eyes but his, it would have emphasized the tragedy of his fate as much as any other act in his life, simply because it showed that, after all, he possessed one of the qualities of greatness. This was one trait for which even his rivals had always given him credit—a warm-hearted generosity that is the finest tradition of his homeland—and now it was ineffably ironical that his greatest virtue might easily be the means of his destruction.

He could not exist long in such cold as this. The frost seemed to penetrate his vitals. The dawn was breaking over the sea, incredible after this night of storm and darkness; but it brought no mercy from the cold. Either he must leave his watch and seek shelter below, or else perish on the deck.

He turned, at last, toward the pilot house; but it was the strangest thing in all his strange life that he had little real desire to go. It was not that he was vitally needed on the deck. Rather, it was an outgrowth of the night’s dark mood; he had seen the end toward which he was drifting all too plain. At least there would be some semblance of decency in such a death,—to be stricken lifeless by the cold in his keeping of his watch. There was none at all in the ghastly, creeping, delirious end that waited him in his hovel in the native village: the destiny of all men who lived as he lived. There was some quality of redemption in meeting his end in such work as this, humble though his part in it was.

But the Remittance Man never reached the pilot-house door. There was one strange, bewildering, blinding instant of incredible stress, a quick, cracking, explosive sound that hardly had time to reach his ear drums, and then the swift realization, like a rocket’s flare, of irrevocable disaster. Where it lay and whence it had come there was no time exactly to know. The ship reeled, rent, the cruel crags ripped, caught, hurled it over; and the dark waves, foam-crested, roared, plunged, and smothered it in an instant. The man’s lips opened in one despairing cry; and then he was swept and hurled into darkness.