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precise care verified each weighing.
"There's too much silver in it," he remarked as he tied up the gold-sack. "I
don't think it will run quite sixteen to the ounce.
You got a trifle the better of me, Womble."
He handled the sack lovingly, and with due appreciation of its preciousness
carried it out to his sled.
Returning, he gathered his pots and pans together, packed his grub-
box, and rolled up his bed. When the sled was lashed and the complaining dogs
harnessed, he returned into the cabin for his mittens.
"Good-by, Tess," he said, standing at the open door.
She turned on him, struggling for speech but too frantic to word the passion
that burned in her.
"Good-by, Tess," he repeated gently.
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"Beast!" she managed to articulate.
She turned and tottered to the bunk, flinging herself face down upon it,
sobbing: "You beasts! You beasts!"
John Messner closed the door softly behind him, and, as he started the dogs,
looked back at the cabin with a great relief in his face.
At the bottom of the bank, beside the water-hole, he halted the sled. He
worked the sack of gold out between the lashings and carried it to the
water-hole. Already a new skin of ice had formed. This he broke with his
fist. Untying the knotted mouth with his teeth, he emptied the contents of
the sack into the water.
The river was shallow at that point, and two feet beneath the surface he could
see the bottom dull-yellow in the fading light.
At the sight of it, he spat into the hole.
He started the dogs along the Yukon trail. Whining spiritlessly, they were
reluctant to work. Clinging to the gee-pole with his right band and with his
left rubbing cheeks and nose, he stumbled over the rope as the dogs swung on a
bend.
"Mush-on, you poor, sore-footed brutes!" he cried. "That's it, mush-on!"
THE WHITE MAN'S WAY
"TO cook by your fire and to sleep under your roof for the night,"
I had announced on entering old Ebbits's cabin; and he had looked at me
blear-eyed and vacuous, while Zilla had favored me with a sour face and a
contemptuous grunt. Zilla was his wife, and no
more bitter-tongued, implacable old squaw dwelt on the Yukon. Nor would I
have stopped there had my dogs been less tired or had the rest of the village
been inhabited. But this cabin alone had I
found occupied, and in this cabin, perforce, I took my shelter.
Old Ebbits now and again pulled his tangled wits together, and hints and
sparkles of intelligence came and went in his eyes.
Several times during the preparation of my supper he even essayed hospitable
inquiries about my health, the condition and number of my dogs, and the
distance I had travelled that day. And each time
Zilla had looked sourer than ever and grunted more contemptuously.
Yet I confess that there was no particular call for cheerfulness on their
part. There they crouched by the fire, the pair of them, at the end of their
days, old and withered and helpless, racked by rheumatism, bitten by hunger,
and tantalized by the frying-odors of my abundance of meat. They rocked back
and forth in a slow and hopeless way, and regularly, once every five minutes,
Ebbits emitted a low groan. It was not so much a groan of pain, as of
pain-weariness. He was oppressed by the weight and the torment of this thing
called life, and still more was he oppressed by the fear of death. His was
that eternal tragedy of the aged, with whom the joy of life has departed and
the instinct for death has not come.
When my moose-meat spluttered rowdily in the frying-pan, I noticed old
Ebbits's nostrils twitch and distend as he caught the food-
scent. He ceased rocking for a space and forgot to groan, while a look of
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intelligence seemed to come into his face.
Zilla, on the other hand, rocked more rapidly, and for the first time, in
sharp little yelps, voiced her pain. It came to me that their behavior was
like that of hungry dogs, and in the fitness of things I should not have been
astonished had Zilla suddenly developed a tail and thumped it on the floor in
right doggish fashion. Ebbits drooled a little and stopped his rocking very
frequently to lean forward and thrust his tremulous nose nearer to the source
of gustatory excitement.
When I passed them each a plate of the fried meat, they ate greedily, making
loud mouth-noises - champings of worn teeth and sucking intakes of the breath,
accompanied by a continuous spluttering and mumbling. After that, when I gave
them each a mug
of scalding tea, the noises ceased. Easement and content came into their
faces. Zilla relaxed her sour mouth long enough to sigh her satisfaction.
Neither rocked any more, and they seemed to have fallen into placid
meditation. Then a dampness came into Ebbits's eyes, and I knew that the
sorrow of self-pity was his. The search required to find their pipes told
plainly that they had been without tobacco a long time, and the old man's
eagerness for the narcotic rendered him helpless, so that I was compelled to
light his pipe for him.
"Why are you all alone in the village?" I asked. "Is everybody dead? Has
there been a great sickness? Are you alone left of the living?"
Old Ebbits shook his head, saying: "Nay, there has been no great sickness.
The village has gone away to hunt meat. We be too old, our legs are not
strong, nor can our backs carry the burdens of camp and trail. Wherefore we
remain here and wonder when the young men will return with meat."
"What if the young men do return with meat?" Zilla demanded harshly.
"They may return with much meat," he quavered hopefully.
"Even so, with much meat," she continued, more harshly than before.
"But of what worth to you and me? A few bones to gnaw in our toothless old
age. But the back-fat, the kidneys, and the tongues
- these shall go into other mouths than thine and mine, old man."
Ebbits nodded his head and wept silently.
"There be no one to hunt meat for us," she cried, turning fiercely upon me.
There was accusation in her manner, and I shrugged my shoulders in token that
I was not guilty of the unknown crime imputed to me.
"Know, O White Man, that it is because of thy kind, because of all white men,
that my man and I have no meat in our old age and sit without tobacco in the
cold."
"Nay," Ebbits said gravely, with a stricter sense of justice.
"Wrong has been done us, it be true; but the white men did not mean the
wrong."
"Where be Moklan?" she demanded. "Where be thy strong son, Moklan, and the
fish he was ever willing to bring that you might eat?"
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The old man shook his head.
"And where be Bidarshik, thy strong son? Ever was he a mighty hunter, and
ever did he bring thee the good back-fat and the sweet dried tongues of the
moose and the caribou. I see no back-fat and no sweet dried tongues. Your
stomach is full with emptiness through the days, and it is for a man of a very
miserable and lying people to give you to eat."
"Nay," old Ebbits interposed in kindliness, "the white man's is not a lying
people. The white man speaks true. Always does the white man speak true."
He paused, casting about him for words wherewith to temper the severity of
what he was about to say. "But the white man speaks true in different ways.
To-day he speaks true one way, to-morrow he speaks true another way, and there
is no understanding him nor his way."
"To-day speak true one way, to-morrow speak true another way, which is to
lie," was Zilla's dictum.
"There is no understanding the white man," Ebbits went on doggedly.
The meat, and the tea, and the tobacco seemed to have brought him back to
life, and he gripped tighter hold of the idea behind his age-bleared eyes. He [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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