BY C. ALFRED
Harrison and his wife were evidently tenderfeet. Worse than that, they had never been outside the City of New York before; and why an inexperienced, city-bred young man like Harrison should have attempted to move a year’s outfit, which weighs a ton, over the Chilkoot Pass, and tempt Fate in the bleakness of the Yukon country, no one knew.
The reason really was Harrison’s wife. Tired of a living salary in the city, she was ready, when news of the Klondike gold-fields reached the world in 1897, to catch the gold fever; caught it, and argued Harrison into resigning his clerkship in an insurance company, and into taking her with him to Alaska. They were very much in love, and could not be separated. So they invested their savings in sacks of flour, and blankets, and tins of coffee, and in tickets to Dyea.
They landed there in December. This, of course, was an idiotic time to arrive, but they didn’t know, and there were lots of other idiots just then. When Harrison grasped the fact that he must, himself, pull all his pile of provisions over the desolate mountain range that ran upward in front of him, his heart failed him; as the Yukoners say, he got cold feet. But his wife cheered him. Mrs. Harrison was young, and, therefore, hopeful. Moreover, she was a pretty little woman, with a great mass of flaxen hair, and on her account many a rough packer on the trail gave Harrison a lift with his load in the steeper places.
They struggled on together through storms and snowdrifts. Little by little the outfit neared the summit that had lain eighteen miles from them when first they landed. Every morning Harrison would load some two hundred and fifty pounds on the sled, pull it up the trail seven miles or so, and come back in the afternoon. And the girl, for she was nothing more, would cook their little meals on the sheet-iron stove, and dry Harrison’s moccasins and coddle him, and tell him how like it all was to a picnic, and how she enjoyed the life. Which was not true.
And so they passed through Canyon City, beyond which there is no God, the packers say, and up to Sheep Camp, which is far up in the mountains on the timber line, and beyond which there lies a frozen desolation that supports no living thing—not even the scrubby spruce that can exist on the bare rock in lower altitudes. Here they disappeared from view, because the horses do not go past Sheep Camp, the trail being too rough; and the packers, not seeing them, could bring no word.
Now, there were hotels of a fashion in Dyea at this time, but the entire downstairs part was usually made into one room, and used as a bar, dance-hall, and gambling house. So when Harrison came back down the trail two weeks later at three o’clock in the morning, he had to elbow his way up to the bar in the Comique to ask for a room. The first bartender looked at him inquiringly, for he had seen the Harrisons on the trail, and the teamsters had said they must be over the summit by now. His curiosity got the better of him.
“Are you the party that went up with a little blonde lady three weeks ago?” he asked.
“I may be,” said Harrison.
“She seemed kind of light for this country,” pursued the bartender. “Hope she’s standing it all right. Did she come down with you?”
“I brought her with me,” said Harrison.
“Isn’t she coming in? She doesn’t have to pass through the saloon here if she don’t like. She can——”
Harrison’s hand went to his forehead. “She’s dead,” he said.
A teamster came in the side door and spoke to him, and he followed the man out. So did two of the dance-hall girls and the first bartender. Outside in one of the big freighting sleds lay Mrs. Harrison. Her flaxen hair waved as in life over the girlish face, hard now as marble and colder. The moon shone full upon her, and a snow crystal hung here and there on the little fur parkee that she wore. She might have been a marble Madonna there in the moonlight. Through the open door came the noise of the next waltz. One of the girls slipped in, and the orchestra stopped. Quickly a little group began to gather, but Harrison did not move. He seemed as in a trance, staring open-eyed, mistily, at the frozen woman in the sled.
Presently, Blanche, the girl who had stopped the music, touched him on the arm.
“I know there is nothing much I can do for you,” she said. “I know how it feels; but I thought perhaps you’d like to bring her inside, and you can have my room till you—till the funeral.”
And Harrison thanked her. But next day he moved the body to an empty cabin that stood on the river bank in the pine grove back of the Comique. He could not bury her, he could not give her up, he said. True, she could not speak to him, nor move, but even to have her body with him was something, a kind of comfort. The bitter cold of the Northland, the icy winds that roared in untrammeled fury down the cañon—these had killed her; now they would preserve the beauty they had stilled; keep her forever young, as he had known and loved her. Why should he bury her? And when they spoke to him of burial, he bade them leave him alone.
Only in the afternoons, when there was no dancing in the Comique, Blanche used still to go daily to the cabin in the pines, and brought him a padlock for the door, and a lantern, and other things.
It all might have drifted on in such wise indefinitely, had it not been that in a month Harrison had no money to buy his meals with, and that Blanche asked him point blank about it.
“Why don’t you come over and ask Coughlin for something to do?” she said, when Harrison admitted that he had eaten no dinner that day. Coughlin was the man who ran the Comique.
“What could I do?” inquired Harrison. “I’m only a bookkeeper.”
But that night he asked Coughlin about it. Now twice a day Coughlin put all the gold and bank-notes that were in the cash drawer into his pocket, leaving the silver for change; and he kept his accounts, which were few, in his head; and he didn’t need a bookkeeper. But he was sorry for Harrison; and, besides, Blanche had spoken to him of it, and he wanted to oblige her. For Blanche was popular among the men, and was asked to drink oftener than any girl in the house, and was valuable on that account in a country where one gets a dollar for two drinks. So he told Harrison he could go to work.
“In the morning?” said Harrison.
“Any time,” said Coughlin.
Harrison looked around a moment. “If you’ll show me the books, I think I might look them over now.”
“Books?” said Coughlin, hesitatingly. “There aint any, but I guess you can figure all right in this, perhaps.” He produced a small paper-covered blank book from under the bottle rack. “You’ll find a lead pencil in the drawer any time”; and he bustled over to the faro-bank, satisfied that he had demonstrated his familiarity with the bookkeeping craft. He came back to ask Harrison what wages he was going to work for.
“Anything,” said Harrison. “In New York I got seventy-five dollars a month.”
“That aint much,” said Coughlin. “I never asked any man to take less than three dollars a day and board. You can eat in the restaurant there.” Then he introduced Harrison to Big Joe, the day bartender, telling Joe this was the bookkeeper.
An hour later Joe called Harrison to announce that Red Sheehan had got a drink without paying therefor.
“He never will pay for it, either,” continued the experienced Joe, “but I suppose you’ll put it down in the bookkeeping.”
Harrison seemed a little undecided as to the value of this entry, and his uncertainty settled it, for thereafter Joe never mentioned such items, and as for Coughlin, he continued to dump the uncounted contents of the cash drawer at various times into his pocket, and to pay his debts out of the same receptacle with a total disregard to cash balances, daily receipts, or outstanding accounts, which made Harrison’s methodical hair stand on end.
Occasionally, however, he would ask Harrison how he was getting along, and Harrison, who had debited Red Sheehan’s account with one drink, and who had never had occasion to make a second entry of any kind, generally replied that the work was pretty light.
“That’s all right,” Coughlin would say. “Bookkeepers are mighty handy to have around in case you want to figure some time.”
And so Harrison drew his three dollars a day, and ate in the restaurant, where Blanche usually managed to sit opposite. Then in the evening he sat idle in the Comique, and watched the roulette wheels spin and the cards drop monotonously from the faro-box, heard the metallic call of the dealers and the buzz of the ball in the runaway of the wheel; saw the dancing-girls, in all the glories of scarlet satin, promiscuous affection, and peroxide hair, waltz past; listened to the wandering musicians of the orchestra play some good music and much bad; sat in a chair near the end of the bar, and watched the carnival of sin and revelry around him, and then, about midnight, when he felt entitled to leave, he went back to the lonely cabin, where his wife lay in her changeless sleep, to sit and keep his vigil with her he had loved in life and still adored in death.
In the restaurant he had many conversations with Blanche. “How long will you stay here?” she asked him once.
“Always, I suppose,” he said.
“But this is only a boom town,” she answered. “Next year there will be no one here but the Siwashes, and they will be quarreling among themselves for these buildings.”
“I’ll stay,” persisted Harrison.
“But how can you live? Coughlin is going down the river this summer, and a man must eat. Why don’t you come along with the rest of us? He’ll take everybody that is working here, for he means to open up again in the Yukon country.” Harrison shook his head.
To Blanche he was interesting. Even in the depths to which she had fallen, or rather deliberately descended, there exists an unconfessed desire for the better things of the past, for the moral levels which have been derided and deserted, for the things which are bitter with the sourness of the grapes the fox could not attain to; and to talk with Harrison was a breath from the old world, monotonous, perhaps, but lovable, where she, too ... but she never thought of those things. What was the use? It made her sad, and she would undoubtedly drink more than usual, and get reckless, and buy wine with her salary and percentage money, and be in debt to the house for a month afterward. So she didn’t think much. It didn’t ever occur to her that her interest in Harrison was passing the danger line. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.
A month later, Coughlin announced that the Comique would have a grand closing one week from that night. “The money is about through in this town,” he said, in explanation. “We’ll move on to the gold mines.”
Blanche discussed it that evening with Harrison in the restaurant The news disturbed him.
“You’ll come, too?” she said. He didn’t know. “There’ll be nothing here,” she went on, “and it will be so lonely.”
“I don’t mind the loneliness,” said Harrison.
“But I’ll be lonely.”
“Perhaps Coughlin wouldn’t want me, anyway. I haven’t done a stroke of work while I’ve been here.”
“But he’ll want you if I say so. I’m the best girl he’s got,” said Blanche, modestly, “and if I say so it goes. And I do say so.”
Harrison was silent. He had often thought of this. He had known, of course, that he could not live forever at the Comique. Many times he had decided that death were easier than a final parting from the dead. He had thought that he could never leave her, but now—— Well, the lust of life is strong. We do not know how far the fall is until we stand at the brink and look over. Besides there is no coming back. If we could only try it for a while and return again!
“Harrison,” said Blanche, suddenly, “listen. I think I know what you are thinking, and I know I can not argue such a thing with you. No one could. You know best, and no one else can know anything about it. But I want to tell you one fact that perhaps you haven’t thought of. You want to stay here with her—always. But you can’t. I know it is horrible to talk of, but it is not always winter even in Alaska, and the summer is almost here.” The man winced. “Go to bed, Harrison,” she said; “I can not talk of such things. You know best.”
He went away to the cabin. He knew that Blanche was right. It must be—but the anguish of it. How should he say the last farewell?
At the foot of the mountains that stretch upward from the Dyea sands, he dug a grave, four feet. And that night he would bury her. But his resolution failed him. All night he sat beside the unreplying dead and stroked her icy hands. “To-morrow I will do it,” he said. But the next day he dug again in the grave. It should be six feet. And neither could he say farewell that night.
Then Blanche came over to him. “We leave on Saturday. You know to-day is Wednesday,” she said, and went away quickly, for she saw the sheeted form, and understood something of his pain. On Thursday she came again. Harrison had not been at the restaurant all day, and she carried a tray with her. The cabin was empty, but a note on the table said: “I can not give her up. I could not hide her in a grave of earth. I will lay her on the mountain top above the glacier. Thank you. Good-by.”
Now the glacier lies in a greater crater of the mountains there, above the snow line, five thousand feet above Dyea; and behind it there towers a solitary peak that juts needle-like, head and shoulders over the lesser crags of the crater. Up above the world, far from the sound of man, into the great silence it reaches, where only the northern lights keep the long vigils with its wind-tormented top.
That night when Blanche asked Billy Matthews, who ought to know, being a squaw-man and an old-timer there, how long it would take to go to the glacier, he said the Siwashes called it two days. “And how long would it take to go to the top of the big peak?” Matthews smiled. “Why, no one’s ever gone, sis, and I don’t scarcely think they will.”
But the next day Blanche borrowed the glasses from the trading-post and watched the snow line. About four o’clock a black speck gradually emerged at the timber limit, and showed sharply against the snow-fields that lay beyond. The glasses showed a man with a long bundle upon his back. Blanche closed them, and watched the speck with her naked eye. Slowly it crept to the foot of the great ice rampart, and as it mounted the green precipices, a bank of cloud engulfed it.
Early next morning Blanche searched the mountain with the glasses. The speck had crossed the miles of glacier in the night, and was half way up the mighty pinnacle that lay behind. There it clung to a precarious hold on the storm-swept crag, its ghastly burden still upon its shoulders. Five hundred feet below it lay a great snow-field, hundreds of feet deep. Five hundred feet above it hung the mountain crest. Blanche could see the wind sweep great banks of snow around the speck. The footing must have been slippery, for the speck climbed less than a hundred feet in an hour, and then, as a wind-gust swept a swirling eddy of sleet across the precipice, it fell—fell straight to the eternal snows five hundred feet beneath it, and disappeared. Even with the glasses Blanche could see no hole in the drift, and besides the wind would fill it full again almost at once.
Gray-lipped, she sought out Matthews. “Billy,” she asked him, “how far would a man sink in that snow up there if he fell off the top of the peak?”
“My God, what questions,” said Billy. “How do I know? He’d stay a thousand years, anyway.”