True, his joints werestiff—he admitted to a trifle of rheumatism. He moved slowly, and seemedto creak and crackle when he moved; but he kept on moving. Last into theblankets at night, he was first out in the morning, so that the otherthree had hot coffee before their one before-breakfast pack. And,between breakfast and dinner and between dinner and supper, he alwaysmanaged to back-trip for several packs himself. Sixty pounds was thelimit of his burden, however. He could manage seventy-five, but he couldnot keep it up. Once, he tried ninety, but collapsed on the trail andwas seriously shaky for a couple of days afterward.
Work! On a trail where hard-working men learned for the first time whatwork was, no man worked harder in proportion to his strength than OldTarwater. Driven desperately on by the near-thrust of winter, and luredmadly on by the dream of gold, they worked to their last ounce ofstrength and fell by the way. Others, when failure made certain, blewout their brains. Some went mad, and still others, under the irk of theman-destroying strain, broke partnerships and dissolved life-timefriendships with fellows just as good as themselves and just as strainedand mad.
Work! Old Tarwater could shame them all, despite his creaking andcrackling and the nasty hacking cough he had developed. Early and late,on trail or in camp beside the trail he was ever in evidence, ever busyat something, ever responsive to the hail of “Father Christmas.” Wearyback-trippers would rest their packs on a log or rock alongside of wherehe rested his, and would say: “Sing us that song of yourn, dad, aboutForty-Nine.” And, when he had wheezingly complied, they would ariseunder their loads, remark that it was real heartening, and hit theforward trail again.
“If ever a man worked his passage and earned it,” Big Bill confided tohis two partners, “that man’s our old Skeezicks.”
“You bet,” Anson confirmed. “He’s a valuable addition to the party, andI, for one, ain’t at all disagreeable to the notion of making him aregular partner—”
“None of that!” Charles Crayton cut in. “When we get to Dawson we’requit of him—that’s the agreement. We’d only have to bury him if we lethim stay on with us. Besides, there’s going to be a famine, and everyounce of grub’ll count. Remember, we’re feeding him out of our ownsupply all the way in. And if we run short in the pinch next year,you’ll know the reason. Steamboats can’t get up grub to Dawson till themiddle of June, and that’s nine months away.”
“Well, you put as much money and outfit in as the rest of us,” Big Billconceded, “and you’ve a say according.”
“And I’m going to have my say,” Charles asserted with increasingirritability. “And it’s lucky for you with your fool sentiments thatyou’ve got somebody to think ahead for you, else you’d all starve todeath. I tell you that famine’s coming. I’ve been studying thesituation. Flour will be two dollars a pound, or ten, and no sellers.You mark my words.”
Across the rubble-covered flats, up the dark canyon to Sheep Camp, pastthe over-hanging and ever-threatening glaciers to the Scales, and fromthe Scales up the steep pitches of ice-scoured rock where packers climbedwith hands and feet, Old Tarwater camp-cooked and packed and sang. Heblew across Chilcoot Pass, above timberline, in the first swirl of autumnsnow. Those below, without firewood, on the bitter rim of Crater Lake,heard from the driving obscurity above them a weird voice chanting:
“Like Argus of the ancient times, We leave this modern Greece, Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum, To shear the Golden Fleece.”
And out of the snow flurries they saw appear a tall, gaunt form, withwhiskers of flying white that blended with the storm, bending under asixty-pound pack of camp dunnage.
“Father Christmas!” was the hail. And then: “Three rousing cheers forFather Christmas!”
Two miles beyond Crater Lake lay Happy Camp—so named because here wasfound the uppermost fringe of the timber line, where men might warmthemselves by fire again. Scarcely could it be called timber, for it wasa dwarf rock-spruce that never raised its loftiest branches higher than afoot above the moss, and that twisted and grovelled like a pig-vegetableunder the moss. Here, on the trail leading into Happy Camp, in the firstsunshine of half a dozen days, Old Tarwater rested his pack against ahuge boulder and caught his breath. Around this boulder the trailpassed, laden men toiling slowly forward and men with empty pack-strapslimping rapidly back for fresh loads. Twice Old Tarwater essayed to riseand go on, and each time, warned by his shakiness, sank back to recovermore strength. From around the boulder he heard voices in greeting,recognized Charles Crayton’s voice, and realized that at last they hadmet up with Young Liverpool. Quickly, Charles plunged into business, andTarwater heard with great distinctness every word of Charles’unflattering description of him and the proposition to give him passageto Dawson.
“A dam fool proposition,” was Liverpool’s judgment, when Charles hadconcluded. “An old granddad of seventy! If he’s on his last legs, whyin hell did you hook up with him? If there’s going to be a famine, andit looks like it, we need every ounce of grub for ourselves. We onlyout-fitted for four, not five.”
“It’s all right,” Tarwater heard Charles assuring the other. “Don’t getexcited. The old codger agreed to leave the final decision to you whenwe caught up with you. All you’ve got to do is put your foot down andsay no.”
“You mean it’s up to me to turn the old one down, after your encouraginghim and taking advantage of his work clear from Dyea here?”
“It’s a hard trail, Liverpool, and only the men that are hard will getthrough,” Charles strove to palliate.
“And I’m to do the dirty work?” Liverpool complained, while Tarwater’sheart sank.
“That’s just about the size of it,” Charles said. “You’ve got thedeciding.”
Then old Tarwater’s heart uprose again as the air was rent by a cycloneof profanity, from the midst of which crackled sentences like:—“Dirtyskunks! . . . See you in hell first! . . . My mind’s made up! . . .Hell’s fire and corruption! . . . The old codger goes down the Yukon withus, stack on that, my hearty! . . . Hard? You don’t know what hard isunless I show you! . . . I’ll bust the whole outfit to hell and gone ifany of you try to side-track him! . . . Just try to side-track him, thatis all, and you’ll think the Day of Judgment and all God’s blastingnesshas hit the camp in one chunk!”
Such was the invigoratingness of Liverpool’s flow of speech that, quitewithout consciousness of effort, the old man arose easily under his loadand strode on toward Happy Camp.
From Happy Camp to Long Lake, from Long Lake to Deep Lake, and from DeepLake up over the enormous hog-back and down to Linderman, the man-killingrace against winter kept on. Men broke their hearts and backs and weptbeside the trail in sheer exhaustion. But winter never faltered. Thefall gales blew, and amid bitter soaking rains and ever-increasing snowflurries, Tarwater and the party to which he was attached piled the lastof their outfit on the beach.
There was no rest. Across the lake, a mile above a roaring torrent, theylocated a patch of spruce and built their saw-pit. Here, by hand, withan inadequate whipsaw, they sawed the spruce-trunks into lumber. Theyworked night and day. Thrice, on the night-shift, underneath in thesaw-pit, Old Tarwater fainted. By day he cooked as well, and, in thebetweenwhiles, helped Anson in the building of the boat beside thetorrent as the green planks came down.
The days grew shorter. The wind shifted into the north and blew unendinggales. In the mornings the weary men crawled from their blankets and intheir socks thawed out their frozen shoes by the fire Tarwater always hadburning for them. Ever arose the increasing tale of famine on theInside. The last grub steamboats up from Bering Sea were stalled by lowwater at the beginning of the Yukon Flats hundreds of miles north ofDawson. In fact, they lay at the old Hudson Bay Company’s post at FortYukon inside the Arctic Circle. Flour in Dawson was up to two dollars apound, but no one would sell. Bonanza and Eldorado Kings, with money toburn, were leaving for the Outside because they could buy no grub.Miners’ Committees were confi
scating all grub and putting the populationon strict rations. A man who held out an ounce of grub was shot like adog. A score had been so executed already.
And, under a strain which had broken so many younger men, Old Tarwaterbegan to break. His cough had become terrible, and had not his exhaustedcomrades slept like the dead, he would have kept them awake nights.Also, he began to take chills, so that he dressed up to go to bed. Whenhe had finished so dressing, not a rag of garment remained in his clothesbag. All he possessed was on his back and swathed around his gaunt oldform.
“Gee!” said Big Bill. “If he puts all he’s got on now, when it ain’tlower than twenty above, what’ll he do later on when it goes down tofifty and sixty below?”
They lined the rough-made boat down the mountain torrent, nearly losingit a dozen times, and rowed across the south end of Lake Linderman in thethick of a fall blizzard. Next morning they planned to load and start,squarely into the teeth of the north, on their perilous traverse of halfa thousand miles of lakes and rapids and box