The Trail of 98 (17 page)

The crowd that
vitalised the street was strikingly cosmopolitan. Mostly big, bearded fellows
they were, with here the full-blooded face of the saloon man, and there the
quick, pallid mask of the gambler. Women too I saw in plenty, bold, free,
predacious creatures, a rustle of silk and a reek of perfume. Till midnight I
wandered up and down the long street; but there was no darkness, no lull in its
clamorous life.

I was looking for Berna. My heart hungered for her; my eyes ached for her; my
mind was so full of her there seemed no room for another single thought. But it
was like looking for a needle in a strawstack to find her in that seething
multitude. I knew no one, and it seemed futile to inquire regarding her. These
keen-eyed men with eager talk of claims and pay-dirt could not help me. There
seemed to be nothing for it but to wait. So with spirits steadily sinking
zerowards I waited.

We found, indeed, that there was little ground left to stake. The mining laws
were in some confusion, and were often changing. Several creeks were closed to
location, but always new strikes were being made and stampedes started. So,
after a session of debate, we decided to reserve our rights to stake till a good
chance offered. It was a bitter awakening. Like all the rest we had expected to
get ground that was gold from the grass-roots down. But there was work to be
had, and we would not let ourselves be disheartened.

The Jam-wagon had already deserted us. He was
off up on Eldorado somewhere, shovelling dirt into a
sluice-box for ten dollars a day. I made up my mind I would follow him. Jim also
would get to work, while the Prodigal, we agreed, would look after all our
interests, and stake or buy a good claim.

Thus we planned, sitting in our little tent near the beach. We were in a
congeries of tents. The beach was fast whitening with them. If one was in a
hurry it was hard to avoid tripping over ropes and pegs. As each succeeding
party arrived they had to go further afield to find camping-ground. And they
were arriving in thousands daily. The shore for a mile was lined five deep with
boats. Scows had been hauled high and dry on the gravel, and there the owners
were living. A thousand stoves were eloquent of beans and bacon. I met a man
taking home a prize, a porterhouse steak. He was carrying it over his arm like a
towel, paper was so scarce. The camp was a hive of energy, a hum of
occupation.

But how many, after they had paraded that mile-long street with its mud, its
seething foam of life, its blare of gramophones and its blaze of dance-halls,
ached for their southland homes again! You could read the disappointment in
their sun-tanned faces. Yet they were the eager navigators of the lakes, the
reckless amateurs of the rivers. This was a something different from the trail.
It was as if, after all their efforts, they had butted up against a stone wall.
There was "nothing doing," no ground left, and only hard work, the hardest on
earth.

Moreover, the
country was at the mercy of a gang of corrupt officials who were using the
public offices for their own enrichment. Franchises were being given to the
favourites of those in power, concessions sold, liquor permits granted, and
abuses of every kind practised on the free miner. All was venality, injustice
and exaction.

"Go home," said the Man in the Street; "the mining laws are rotten. All kinds
of ground is tied up. Even if you get hold of something good, them dam-robber
government sharks will flim-flam you out of it. There's no square deal here.
They tax you to mine; they tax you to cut a tree; they tax you to sell a fish;
pretty soon they'll be taxing you to breathe. Go home!"

And many went, many of the trail's most indomitable. They could face hardship
and danger, the blizzards, the rapids, nature savage and ravening; but when it
came to craft, graft and the duplicity of their fellow men they were
discouraged, discomfited.

"Say, boys, I guess I've done a slick piece of work," said the Prodigal with
some satisfaction, as he entered the tent. "I've bought three whole outfits on
the beach. Got them for twenty-five per cent. less than the cost price in
Seattle. I'll pull out a hundred per cent. on the deal. Now's the time to get in
and buy from the quitters. They so soured at the whole frame-up they're ready to
pull their freights at any moment. All they want's to get away. They want to put
a few thousand miles between them and
this garbage dump of creation. They never want to hear the
name of Yukon again except as a cuss-word. I'm going to keep on buying outfits.
You boys see if I don't clean up a bunch of money."

"It's too bad to take advantage of them," I suggested.

"Too bad nothing! That's business; your necessity, my opportunity. Oh, you'd
never make a money-getter, my boy, this side of the millenniumand you Scotch
too."

"That's nothing," said Jim; "wait till I tell you of the deal I made to-day.
You recollect I packed a flat-iron among my stuff, an' you boys joshed me about
it, said I was bughouse. But I figured out: there's camp-meetin's an' socials up
there, an' a nice, dinky, white shirt once in a way goes pretty good. Anyway,
thinks I, if there ain't no one else to dress for in that wilderness, I'll dress
for the Almighty. So I sticks to my old flat-iron."

He looked at us with a twinkle in his eye and then went on.

"Well, it seems there's only three more flat-irons in camp, an' all the hot
sports wantin' boiled shirts done up, an' all the painted Jezebels hollerin' to
have their lingery fixed, an' the wash-ladies just goin' round crazy for
flat-irons. Well, I didn't want to sell mine, but the old coloured lady that
runs the Bong Tong Laundry (an' a sister in the Lord) came to me with tears in
her eyes, an' at last I was prevailed on to separate from it."

"How much, Jim?"

"Well, I didn't want to be too hard on the old girl, so I let her down
easy."

"How much?"

"Well, you see there's only three or four of them flat-irons in camp, so I
asked a hundred an' fifty dollars, an' quick's a flash, she took me into a store
an' paid me in gold-dust."

He flourished a little poke of dust in our laughing faces.

"That's pretty good," I said; "everything seems topsy-turvy up here. Why,
to-day I saw a man come in with a box of apples which the crowd begged him to
open. He was selling those apples at a dollar apiece, and the folks were just
fighting to get them."

It was so with everything. Extraordinary prices ruled. Eggs and candles had
been sold for a dollar each, and potatoes for a dollar a pound; while on the
trail in '97 horse-shoe nails were selling at
a dollar a nail
.

Once more I roamed the long street with that awful restless agony in my
heart. Where was she, my girl, so precious now it seemed I had lost her? Why
does love mean so much to some, so little to others? Perhaps I am the victim of
an intensity of temperament, but I craved for her; I visioned evils befalling
her; I pierced my heart with dagger-thrusts of fear for her. Oh, if I only knew
she was safe and well! Every slim woman I saw in the distance looked to be her,
and made my heart leap with emotion. Yet always
I chewed on the rind of disappointment. There was
never a sign of Berna.

In the agitation and unrest of my mind I climbed the hill that overshadows
the gold-born city. The Dome they call it, and the face of it is vastly scarred,
blanched as by a cosmic blow. There on its topmost height by a cairn of stone I
stood at gaze, greatly awestruck.

The view was a spacious one, and of an overwhelming grandeur. Below me lay
the mighty Yukon, here like a silken ribbon, there broadening out to a pool of
quicksilver. It seemed motionless, dead, like a piece of tinfoil lying on a
sable shroud.

The great valley was preternaturally still, and pall-like as if steeped in
the colours of the long, long night. The land so vast, so silent, so lifeless,
was round in its contours, full of fat creases and bold curves. The mountains
were like sleeping giants; here was the swell of a woman's breast, there the
sweep of a man's thigh. And beyond that huddle of sprawling Titans, far, far
beyond, as if it were an enclosing stockade, was the jagged outline of the
Rockies.

Quite suddenly they seemed to stand up against the blazing sky, monstrous,
horrific, smiting the senses like a blow. Their primordial faces were hacked and
hewed fantastically, and there they posed in their immemorial isolation, virgin
peaks, inviolate valleys, impregnably desolate and savagely sublime.

And beyond their stormy crests, surely a world was consuming in the kilns of
chaos. Was ever anything so insufferably bright as the incandescent glow that
brimmed those jagged
clefts? That fierce crimson, was it not the hue of a cooling crucible, that deep
vermillion the rich glory of a rose's heart? Did not that tawny orange mind you
of ripe wheat-fields and the exquisite intrusion of poppies? That pure, clear
gold, was it not a bank of primroses new washed in April rain? What was that
luminous opal but a lagoon, a pearly lagoon, with floating in it islands of
amber, their beaches crisped with ruby foam? And, over all the riot of colour,
that shimmering chrysoprase so tenderly luminousmight it not fitly veil the
splendours of paradise?

I looked to where gulped the mouth of Bonanza, cavernously wide and filled
with the purple smoke of many fires. There was the golden valley, silent for
centuries, now strident with human cries, vehement with human strife. There was
the timbered basin of the Klondike bleakly rising to mountains eloquent of
death. It was dominating, appalling, this vastness without end, this
unappeasable loneliness. Glad was I to turn again to where, like white pebbles
on a beach, gleamed the tents of the gold-born city.

Somewhere amid that confusion of canvas, that muddle of cabins, was Berna,
maybe lying in some wide-eyed vigil of fear, maybe staining with hopeless tears
her restless pillow. Somewhere down thereOh, I must find her!

I returned to the town. I was tramping its long street once more, that street
with its hundreds of canvas signs. It was a city of signs. Every place of
business seemed to have its fluttering banner, and beneath
these banners moved the ever restless
throng. There were men from the mines in their flannel shirts and corduroys,
their Stetsons and high boots. There were men from the trail in sweaters and
mackinaws, German socks and caps with ear-flaps. But all were bronzed and
bearded, fleshless and clean-limbed. I marvelled at the seriousness of their
faces, till I remembered that here was no problem of a languorous sunland, but
one of grim emergency. It was a man's game up here in the North, a man's game in
a man's land, where the sunlight of the long, long day is ever haunted by the
shadow of the long, long night.

Oh, if I could only find her! The land was a great symphony; she the haunting
theme of it.

I bought a copy of the "Nugget" and went into the Sourdough Restaurant to
read it. As I lingered there sipping my coffee and perusing the paper
indifferently, a paragraph caught my eye and made my heart glow with sudden
hope.

Here was the item:

Jack Locasto! Why had I not thought of him before? Surely if any one knew of
the girl's whereabouts, it would be he. I determined I would ask him at
once.

So I hastily finished my coffee and inquired of the emasculated-looking
waiter where I might find the Klondike King.

"Oh, Black Jack," he
said: "well, at the Green Bay Tree, or the Tivoli, or the Monte Carlo. But
there's a big poker game on and he's liable to be in it."

Once more I paraded the seething street. It was long after midnight, but the
wondrous glow, still burning in the Northern sky, filled the land with strange
enchantment. In spite of the hour the town seemed to be more alive than ever.
Parties with pack-laden mules were starting off for the creeks, travelling at
night to avoid the heat and mosquitoes. Men with lean brown faces trudged
sturdily along carrying extraordinary loads on their stalwart shoulders. A
stove, blankets, cooking utensils, axe and shovel usually formed but a part of
their varied accoutrement.

Constables of the Mounted Police were patrolling the streets. In the drab
confusion their scarlet tunics were a piercing note of colour. They walked very
stiffly, with grim mouths and eyes sternly vigilant under the brims of their
Stetsons. Women were everywhere, smoking cigarettes, laughing, chaffing,
strolling in and out of the wide-open saloons. Their cheeks were rouged, their
eye-lashes painted, their eyes bright with wine. They gazed at the men like
sleek animals, with looks that were wanton and alluring. A libertine spirit was
in the air, a madcap freedom, an effluence of disdainful sin.

I found myself by the stockade that surrounded the Police reservation. On
every hand I saw traces of a recent overflow of the river that had transformed
the street into a
navigable canal. Now in places there were mudholes in which horses would
flounder to their bellies. One of the Police constables, a tall, slim Englishman
with a refined manner, proved to me a friend in need.