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Three
days passed, by which time Buck and his mates found how
really tired and weak they were.
Then, on the morning of the fourth
day, two men from the States came along and bought them,
harness and all, for a song. The
men addressed each other as "Hal"
and "Charles." Charles was a middle-aged, lightish-colored
man, with weak and watery eyes and a mustache that twisted
fiercely and vigorously up, giving the lie to the limply drooping lip it concealed. Hal
was a youngster of nineteen or twenty, with
a big Colt's revolver and a hunting-knife strapped about him on a
belt that fairly bristled with cartridges.
This belt was the most salient
thing about him. It advertised
his callowness--a callowness
sheer and unutterable. Both men
were manifestly out of place,
and why such as they should adventure the North is part of
the mystery of things that passes understanding.
Buck
heard the chaffering, saw the money pass between the man and
the Government agent, and knew that the Scotch half-breed and the mail-train drivers were passing out of his life on the heels
of Perrault and Francois and
the others who had gone before. When
driven with his mates to the new owners' camp, Buck saw a slipshod
and slovenly affair, tent half stretched, dishes unwashed,
everything in disorder; also, he saw a woman. "Mercedes" the men
called her. She was
Charles's wife and Hal's sister--a nice
family party.
Buck
watched them apprehensively as they proceeded to take down
the tent and load the sled. There
was a great deal of effort about
their manner, but no businesslike method.
The tent was rolled into
an awkward bundle three times as large as it should
have been. The tin
dishes were packed away unwashed. Mercedes
continually fluttered in the way of her men and kept up an
unbroken chattering of remonstrance and advice.
When they put a clothes-sack
on the front of the sled, she suggested it should go
on the back; and when they had put it on the back, and covered it
over with a couple of other bundles, she discovered overlooked
articles which could abide nowhere else but in that very sack, and they unloaded again.
Three
men from a neighboring tent came out and looked on, grinning
and winking at one another.
"You've
got a right smart load as it is," said one of them; "and
it's not me should tell you your business, but I wouldn't tote
that tent along if I was you."
"Undreamed
of!" cried Mercedes, throwing up her hands in dainty
dismay. "However in
the world could I manage without a tent?"
"It's
springtime, and you won't get any more cold weather," the
man replied.
She
shook her head decidedly, and Charles and Hal put the last
odds and ends on top the mountainous load.
"Think
it'll ride?" one of the men asked.
"Why
shouldn't it?" Charles demanded rather shortly.
"Oh,
that's all right, that's all right," the man hastened meekly
to say. "I was just
a-wonderin', that is all. It
seemed a mite top-heavy."
Charles
turned his back and drew the lashings down as well as he
could, which was not in the least well.
"An'
of course the dogs can hike along all day with that
contraption behind them," affirmed a second of the men.
"Certainly,"
said Hal, with freezing politeness, taking hold of
the gee-pole with one hand and swinging his whip from the other.
"Mush!" he shouted. "Mush
on there!"
The
dogs sprang against the breast-bands, strained hard for a few
moments, then relaxed. They
were unable to move the sled.
"The
lazy brutes, I'll show them," he cried, preparing to lash out
at them with the whip.
But
Mercedes interfered, crying, "Oh, Hal, you mustn't," as she
caught hold of the whip and wrenched it from him. "The poor
dears! Now you must promise you
won't be harsh with them for the rest of
the trip, or I won't go a step."
"Precious
lot you know about dogs," her brother sneered; "and I
wish you'd leave me alone. They're
lazy, I tell you, and you've got
to whip them to get anything out of them. That's their way.
You ask any one. Ask one
of those men."
Mercedes
looked at them imploringly, untold repugnance at sight of
pain written in her pretty face.
"They're
weak as water, if you want to know," came the reply from
one of the men. "Plum
tuckered out, that's what's the matter.
They need a rest."
"Rest
be blanked," said Hal, with his beardless lips; and Mercedes
said, "Oh!" in pain and sorrow at the oath.
But
she was a clannish creature, and rushed at once to the defence
of her brother. "Never
mind that man," she said pointedly.
"You're driving our dogs, and you do what you think best with
them."
Again
Hal's whip fell upon the dogs. They
threw themselves against the
breast-bands, dug their feet into the packed snow, got
down low to it, and put forth all their strength. The sled held as
though it were an anchor. After
two efforts, they stood still, panting.
The whip was whistling savagely, when once more Mercedes
interfered. She dropped
on her knees before Buck, with tears in
her eyes, and put her arms around his neck.
"You
poor, poor dears," she cried sympathetically, "why don't you
pull hard?--then you wouldn't be whipped." Buck did not like
her, but he was feeling too
miserable to resist her, taking it as part
of the day's miserable work.
One
of the onlookers, who had been clenching his teeth to suppress
hot speech, now spoke up:--
"It's
not that I care a whoop what becomes of you, but for the
dogs' sakes I just want to tell you, you can help them a mighty lot by breaking out that sled.
The runners are froze fast. Throw
your weight against the gee-pole, right and left, and break it
out."
A
third time the attempt was made, but this time, following the
advice, Hal broke out the runners which had been frozen to the snow. The
overloaded and unwieldy sled forged ahead, Buck and his
mates struggling frantically under the rain of blows.
A hundred yards ahead
the path turned and sloped steeply into the main
street. It would have
required an experienced man to keep the
top-heavy sled upright, and Hal was not such a man.
As they swung on the
turn the sled went over, spilling half its load through the
loose lashings. The dogs
never stopped. The lightened
sled bounded on its side behind them.
They were angry because of the ill
treatment they had received and the unjust load.
Buck was raging.
He broke into a run, the team following his lead.
Hal cried "Whoa!
whoa!" but they gave no heed. He
tripped and was pulled off his
feet. The capsized sled ground
over him, and the dogs dashed
on up the street, adding to the gayety of Skaguay as
they scattered the remainder of the outfit along its chief thoroughfare.
Kind-hearted
citizens caught the dogs and gathered up the
scattered belongings. Also,
they gave advice. Half the load
and twice the dogs, if they
ever expected to reach Dawson, was what
was said. Hal and his
sister and brother-in-law listened unwillingly,
pitched tent, and overhauled the outfit. Canned goods
were turned out that made men laugh, for canned goods on the Long
Trail is a thing to dream about. "Blankets for a hotel"
quoth one of the men who
laughed and helped. "Half
as many is too much; get rid of
them. Throw away that tent, and all those dishes,--who's
going to wash them, anyway? Good
Lord, do you think you're travelling
on a Pullman?"
And
so it went, the inexorable elimination of the superfluous.
Mercedes cried when her clothes-bags were dumped on the ground and article after article was thrown out. She cried in general, and
she cried in particular over each discarded thing.
She clasped hands about
knees, rocking back and forth broken-heartedly.
She averred she would
not go an inch, not for a dozen Charleses.
She appealed to
everybody and to everything, finally wiping her eyes
and proceeding to cast out even articles of apparel that were
imperative necessaries. And
in her zeal, when she had finished with
her own, she attacked the belongings of her men and went
through them like a tornado.
This
accomplished, the outfit, though cut in half, was still a
formidable bulk. Charles
and Hal went out in the evening and bought
six Outside dogs. These, added
to the six of the original team,
and Teek and Koona, the huskies obtained at the Rink Rapids
on the record trip, brought the team up to fourteen. But the Outside
dogs, though practically broken in since their landing, did not amount to much.
Three were short-haired pointers, one was a Newfoundland, and the other two were mongrels of
indeterminate breed.
They did not seem to know anything, these newcomers.
Buck and his comrades
looked upon them with disgust, and though he
speedily taught them their places and what not to do, he could not
teach them what to do. They
did not take kindly to trace and trail.
With the exception of the two mongrels, they were
bewildered and spirit-broken by the strange savage environment in
which they found themselves and by the ill treatment they had
received. The two
mongrels were without spirit at all; bones were
the only things breakable about them.
With
the newcomers hopeless and forlorn, and the old team worn out
by twenty-five hundred miles of continuous trail, the outlook was
anything but bright. The
two men, however, were quite cheerful.
And they were proud, too. They were doing the thing in style, with
fourteen dogs. They had
seen other sleds depart over the Pass for
Dawson, or come in from Dawson, but never had they seen a sled
with so many as fourteen dogs. In
the nature of Arctic travel there
was a reason why fourteen dogs should not drag one sled, and
that was that one sled could not carry the food for fourteen dogs. But Charles and Hal did not know this. They had worked the trip
out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so many dogs, so many days,
Q.E.D. Mercedes looked
over their shoulders and nodded comprehensively,
it was all so very simple.
Late
next morning Buck led the long team up the street. There was
nothing lively about it, no snap or go in him and his fellows. They were starting dead weary.
Four times he had covered the distance
between Salt Water and Dawson, and the knowledge that,
jaded and tired, he was facing the same trail once more, made him
bitter. His heart was
not in the work, nor was the heart of any
dog. The Outsides were
timid and frightened, the Insides without
confidence in their masters.
Buck
felt vaguely that there was no depending upon these two men
and the woman. They did
not know how to do anything, and as the
days went by it became apparent that they could not learn.
They were slack in all
things, without order or discipline. It
took them half the night to
pitch a slovenly camp, and half the morning
to break that camp and get the sled loaded in fashion so slovenly
that for the rest of the day they were occupied in stopping and
rearranging the load. Some
days they did not make ten miles. On other days they were unable to get started at all.
And on no day did they succeed in making more than half the distance used
by the men as a basis in their
dog-food computation.
It
was inevitable that they should go short on dog-food. But they
hastened it by overfeeding, bringing the day nearer when
underfeeding would commence. The
Outside dogs, whose digestions had
not been trained by chronic famine to make the most of little,
had voracious appetites. And
when, in addition to this, the worn- out huskies pulled weakly, Hal decided
that the orthodox ration was
too small. He doubled it. And
to cap it all, when Mercedes, with
tears in her pretty eyes and a quaver in her throat, could not cajole him into giving the dogs still more, she stole
from the fish-sacks and fed
them slyly. But it was not food
that Buck and the huskies
needed, but rest. And though
they were making poor time, the
heavy load they dragged sapped their strength severely.
Then
came the underfeeding. Hal
awoke one day to the fact that his
dog-food was half gone and the distance only quarter covered;
further, that for love or money no additional dog-food was to be
obtained. So he cut down
even the orthodox ration and tried to increase
the day's travel. His sister
and brother-in-law seconded him;
but they were frustrated by their heavy outfit and their own
incompetence. It was a simple matter to give the dogs less food;
but it was impossible to make the dogs travel faster, while their
own inability to get under way earlier in the morning prevented
them from travelling longer hours.
Not only did they not know how to
work dogs, but they did not know how to work themselves.
The
first to go was Dub. Poor
blundering thief that he was, always
getting caught and punished, he had none the less been a
faithful worker. His
wrenched shoulder-blade, untreated and
unrested, went from bad to worse, till finally Hal shot him with
the big Colt's revolver. It
is a saying of the country that an Outside
dog starves to death on the ration of the husky, so the
six Outside dogs under Buck could do no less than die on half the
ration of the husky. The
Newfoundland went first, followed by the
three short-haired pointers, the two mongrels hanging more
grittily on to life, but going in the end.
By
this time all the amenities and gentlenesses of the Southland
had fallen away from the three people.
Shorn of its glamour and romance,
Arctic travel became to them a reality too harsh for their manhood and womanhood.
Mercedes ceased weeping over the
dogs, being too occupied with weeping over herself and with
quarrelling with her husband and brother.
To quarrel was the one thing
they were never too weary to do. Their
irritability arose out of their
misery, increased with it, doubled upon it,
outdistanced it. The
wonderful patience of the trail which comes
to men who toil hard and suffer sore, and remain sweet of speech
and kindly, did not come to these two men and the woman. They had no
inkling of such a patience. They
were stiff and in pain; their muscles
ached, their bones ached, their very hearts ached; and
because of this they became sharp of speech, and hard words were
first on their lips in the morning and last at night.
Charles
and Hal wrangled whenever Mercedes gave them a chance.
It was the cherished
belief of each that he did more than his share
of the work, and neither forbore to speak this belief at every
opportunity. Sometimes
Mercedes sided with her husband, sometimes
with her brother. The
result was a beautiful and unending family
quarrel. Starting from a
dispute as to which should chop a few sticks
for the fire (a dispute which concerned only Charles and
Hal), presently would be lugged in the rest of the family,
fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people thousands of miles away,
and some of them dead. That
Hal's views on art, or the sort of society
plays his mother's brother wrote, should have anything to
do with the chopping of a few sticks of firewood, passes
comprehension; nevertheless the quarrel was as likely to tend in
that direction as in the direction of Charles's political
prejudices. And that Charles's sister's tale-bearing tongue should
be relevant to the building of a Yukon fire, was apparent only to
Mercedes, who disburdened herself of copious opinions upon that topic, and incidentally upon a few other traits unpleasantly
peculiar to her husband's family.
In the meantime the fire remained
unbuilt, the camp half pitched, and the dogs unfed.
Mercedes
nursed a special grievance--the grievance of sex. She was
pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the present treatment by her husband and brother
was everything save chivalrous.
It was her custom to be helpless.
They complained. Upon which impeachment of what to her was her
most essential sex-prerogative, she made their lives unendurable.
She no longer considered the dogs, and because she was sore and tired, she persisted in riding on the sled.
She was pretty and soft, but she weighed one hundred and twenty pounds--a lusty
last straw to the load dragged
by the weak and starving animals. She
rode for days, till they fell in the traces and the sled stood
still. Charles and Hal
begged her to get off and walk, pleaded
with her, entreated, the while she wept and importuned Heaven with
a recital of their brutality.
On
one occasion they took her off the sled by main strength.
They never did it again.
She let her legs go limp like a spoiled
child, and sat down on the trail.
They went on their way, but she
did not move. After they had travelled three miles they unloaded
the sled, came back for her, and by main strength put her on the
sled again.
In
the excess of their own misery they were callous to the
suffering of their animals. Hal's
theory, which he practised on others,
was that one must get hardened. He
had started out preaching it to
his sister and brother-in-law. Failing
there, he hammered it into the
dogs with a club. At the Five
Fingers the dog-food gave out,
and a toothless old squaw offered to trade them
a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the Colt's revolver that
kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal's hip. A poor substitute
for food was this hide, just as it had been stripped from the
starved horses of the cattlemen six months back.
In its frozen state it
was more like strips of galvanized iron, and when a dog
wrestled it into his stomach it thawed into thin and innutritious
leathery strings and into a mass of short hair, irritating and
indigestible.
And
through it all Buck staggered along at the head of the team as
in a nightmare. He
pulled when he could; when he could no longer
pull, he fell down and remained down till blows from whip or club drove him to his feet again.
All the stiffness and gloss had gone
out of his beautiful furry coat. The hair hung down, limp and
draggled, or matted with dried blood where Hal's club had bruised
him. His muscles had
wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh
pads had disappeared, so that each rib and every bone in his frame
were outlined cleanly through the loose hide that was wrinkled in
folds of emptiness. It
was heartbreaking, only Buck's heart was
unbreakable. The man in
the red sweater had proved that.
As
it was with Buck, so was it with his mates.
They were perambulating
skeletons. There were seven all
together, including him.
In their very great misery they had become insensible to the
bite of the lash or the bruise of the club.
The pain of the beating was dull and distant, just as the things their eyes
saw and their ears heard seemed
dull and distant. They were not half living,
or quarter living. They were
simply so many bags of bones in
which sparks of life fluttered faintly. When a halt was made,
they dropped down in the traces like dead dogs, and the spark
dimmed and paled and seemed to go out.
And when the club or whip fell
upon them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they tottered
to their feet and staggered on.
There
came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not
rise. Hal had traded off
his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked
Billee on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the
carcass out of the harness and dragged it to one side.
Buck saw, and his mates
saw, and they knew that this thing was very close to
them. On the next day
Koona went, and but five of them remained:
Joe, too far gone to be malignant; Pike, crippled and limping,
only half conscious and not conscious enough longer to malinger;
Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still faithful to the toil of trace and
trail, and mournful in that he had so little strength with which to pull; Teek, who had not travelled so far that winter and
who was now beaten more than
the others because he was fresher; and
Buck, still at the head of the team, but no longer enforcing discipline or striving to enforce it, blind with weakness
half the time and keeping the
trail by the loom of it and by the dim feel
of his feet.
It
was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were
aware of it. Each day
the sun rose earlier and set later. It
was dawn by three in the
morning, and twilight lingered till nine at
night. The whole long
day was a blaze of sunshine. The
ghostly winter silence had
given way to the great spring murmur of
awakening life. This murmur arose from all the land, fraught with
the joy of living. It came from the things that lived and moved
again, things which had been as dead and which had not moved
during the long months of frost.
The sap was rising in the pines.
The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds.
Shrubs and vines were
putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets
sang in the nights, and in the
days all manner of creeping, crawling things
rustled forth into the sun. Partridges
and woodpeckers were booming
and knocking in the forest. Squirrels
were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl
driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air.
From
every hill slope came the trickle of running water, the music
of unseen fountains. AU
things were thawing, bending, snapping.
The Yukon was straining to break loose the ice that bound it down. It ate away from beneath; the sun ate from above.
Air-holes formed,
fissures sprang and spread apart, while thin sections of
ice fell through bodily into the river. And amid all this
bursting, rending, throbbing of awakening life, under the blazing
sun and through the soft-sighing breezes, like wayfarers to death,
staggered the two men, the woman, and the huskies.
With
the dogs falling, Mercedes weeping and riding, Hal swearing
innocuously, and Charles's eyes wistfully watering, they staggered into John Thornton's camp at the mouth of White River.
When they halted, the
dogs dropped down as though they had all been struck
dead. Mercedes dried her
eyes and looked at John Thornton.
Charles sat down on a log to rest.
He sat down very slowly and painstakingly
what of his great stiffness. Hal
did the talking. John
Thornton was whittling the last touches on an axe-handle he
had made from a stick of birch.
He whittled and listened, gave monosyllabic
replies, and, when it was asked, terse advice.
He knew the breed, and he gave his advice in the certainty that it
would not be followed.
"They
told us up above that the bottom was dropping out of the
trail and that the best thing for us to do was to lay over," Hal
said in response to Thornton's warning to take no more chances on the
rotten ice. "They told us
we couldn't make White River, and here
we are." This last with a sneering ring of triumph in it.
"And
they told you true," John Thornton answered.
"The bottom's likely
to drop out at any moment. Only
fools, with the blind luck of
fools, could have made it. I
tell you straight, I wouldn't risk
my carcass on that ice for all the gold in Alaska."
"That's
because you're not a fool, I suppose," said Hal. "All the
same, we'll go on to Dawson." He uncoiled his whip. "Get up
there, Buck! Hi! Get up there!
Mush on!"
Thornton
went on whittling. It was idle,
he knew, to get between a fool
and his folly; while two or three fools more or less would
not alter the scheme of things.
But
the team did not get up at the command. It
had long since passed into the
stage where blows were required to rouse it.
The whip flashed out,
here and there, on its merciless errands.
John Thornton compressed
his lips. Sol-leks was the
first to crawl to his feet.
Teek followed. Joe came
next, yelping with pain. Pike
made painful efforts. Twice
he fell over, when half up, and on the
third attempt managed to rise. Buck
made no effort. He lay
quietly where he had fallen. The
lash bit into him again and again,
but he neither whined nor struggled. Several
times Thornton started, as
though to speak, but changed his mind.
A moisture came into his
eyes, and, as the whipping continued, he
arose and walked irresolutely up and down.
This
was the first time Buck had failed, in itself a sufficient
reason to drive Hal into a rage.
He exchanged the whip for the customary
club. Buck refused to move
under the rain of heavier blows
which now fell upon him. Like
his mates, he barely able to get
up, but, unlike them, he had made up his mind not to get up.
He had a vague feeling of impending doom.
This had been strong upon
him when he pulled in to the bank, and it had not departed
from him. What of the
thin and rotten ice he had felt under his
feet all day, it seemed that he sensed disaster close at hand, out
there ahead on the ice where his master was trying to drive him.
He refused to stir. So greatly had he suffered, and so far gone was he, that the blows did not hurt much.
And as they continued to
fall upon him, the spark of life within flickered and went
down. It was nearly out. He felt strangely numb.
As though from a great
distance, he was aware that he was being beaten.
The last sensations of
pain left him. He no longer
felt anything, though very
faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body.
But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.
And
then, suddenly, without warning, uttering a cry that was
inarticulate and more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton sprang upon the man who wielded the club.
Hal was hurled backward, as though struck by a failing tree. Mercedes
screamed. Charles looked
on wistfully, wiped his watery eyes, but did not
get up because of his stiffness.
John
Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too
convulsed with rage to speak.
"If
you strike that dog again, I'll kill you," he at last managed
to say in a choking voice.
"It's
my dog," Hal replied, wiping the blood from his mouth as he
came back. "Get out
of my way, or I'll fix you. I'm going to
Dawson."
Thornton
stood between him and Buck, and evinced no intention of
getting out of the way. Hal
drew his long hunting-knife. Mercedes
screamed. cried, laughed, and manifested the chaotic
abandonment of hysteria. Thornton
rapped Hal's knuckles with the axe-handle,
knocking the knife to the ground. He rapped his knuckles
again as he tried to pick it up. Then
he stooped, picked it up
himself, and with two strokes cut Buck's traces.
Hal
had no fight left in him. Besides,
his hands were full with his
sister, or his arms, rather; while Buck was too near dead to
be of further use in hauling the sled.
A few minutes later they pulled
out from the bank and down the river. Buck
heard them go and raised his
head to see, Pike was leading, Sol-leks was at the
wheel, and between were Joe and Teek.
They were limping and staggering.
Mercedes was riding the loaded sled.
Hal guided at the gee-pole, and Charles stumbled along in the rear.
As
Buck watched them, Thornton knelt beside him and with rough,
kindly hands searched for broken bones.
By the time his search had
disclosed nothing more than many bruises and a state of
terrible starvation, the sled was a quarter of a mile away.
Dog and man watched it crawling along over the ice.
Suddenly, they saw its back end drop down, as into a rut, and the gee-pole,
with Hal clinging to it, jerk
into the air. Mercedes's scream came to
their ears. They saw
Charles turn and make one step to run back,
and then a whole section of ice give way and dogs and humans
disappear. A yawning
hole was all that was to be seen. The
bottom had dropped out of the trail.
John
Thornton and Buck looked at each other.
"You
poor devil," said John Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.
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