Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/170

 set it down on the low, upturned, empty canned-butter box. He frowned, pressed the handkerchief tighter to his temples, and planned, while Kibble, meek, sympathetic, sat at the other end of the tent, silent, waiting.

For the thousandth time he planned since he left Australia six months before. Sometimes he planned aloud—to Dick Kibble, who thought him a wonder at the game—but usually to himself, for Dick could not follow any but the more obvious moves. The subtler were debarred from Dick—or he from them—by reason of the simpler mind and simpler education of the young New Zealander whom Lederer had met on the steamer crossing the Pacific and hooked up with as a very fitting partner for one who needed a man Friday. There had been no difficulty in accomplishing the partnership, for Dick, alone, like himself, venturing, like himself, half across the world in search of the gold of the Klondike, was but too glad to become associated with a man so much his superior, so magnetic, so charming, so wonderfully educated and well-informed. A glance at Lederer's person, at the supple, graceful, muscular figure of the man, had removed the only doubt the young frontiersman had felt—the physical fitness of his new acquaintance for the struggle in a raw gold camp in the arctic wastes of America. The two had pooled their slender outfits when they landed in Seattle and transshiped [sic] for the Yukon. For four months, now, they had been together in the Klondike. Fall was upon them.

Lederer's planning took a hurried, hectic tinge from this imminence of fall. There was ice already on still pools. Very soon the last boats would be leaving and the long, deadly Northern winter would spread its white pall. He could not face that. He was a man who loved warmth, cheer. A native of Austria, reared in Italy, a cosmopolite of thirty-five years, he always had shunned the cold, the stern, the forbidding. He had not gone to Alaska to live in it but to take from it. When Kibble, facing a long fight for wealth or a competence, had spoken of “next winter,” Doctor Lederer had smiled to himself at the absurdity of it—for him! Kibble might do as he pleased. But he, Lederer, would be on the wing. He did not let Kibble know that. It would have been impolitic.

There had been before his mind, in his planning, three things: A new strike in which he, as an early stampeder, would be in on the ground floor; the fraction they were living on; and a coup. The coup might be anything. But coups—of the sort that this gentleman adventurer stooped to on occasion—were dangerous in the extreme. The stampedes were all more or less fakes, or, what was worse, started by honest fools. Eureka Creek was a case in point. That left the fraction as the one best chance.

A fraction, or fractional claim, as he had soon learned when, early in the spring they had reached Dawson ahead of many others and forged up the famous Bonanza Creek to the new strikes on the benches, was an area of ground staked between claims which, when the surveyors came to measure them, were found larger than the lawful size, thus leaving small plots between. Though every miner knew that these fractions were reserved by the government, they were eagerly seized upon and staked in the hope of a revision of the law, or, as frequently happened, of a favorable ruling by the gold commission based upon some real or fancied exception in favor of certain fractions. The Klondike was the wonder ground of the world; the gold in dust and great rugged nuggets, was almost spouting from it; and graft and “pull” and one underground influence and another wrought strange miracles on the fringes of official circles. Lederer, a month before, had made his attempts, received certain encouragements—and there the matter had rested.

It was a dangerous thing to permit the recording of a fraction. The circumstances must be exceptional. Lederer understood perfectly just what that word “exceptional” meant. It must be exceptionally rich—to justify the risk. The claims adjacent to this fraction staked by Lederer and Kibble were being opened up. They were as rich as any on rich Gold Hill. But was the fraction rich?

It took work to determine that, and Lederer had several objections to doing it. In the first place he never worked—with his hands. Not as a workman. Not as a laborer. In the second place, work might show that the pay streak missed the fraction, and then there would be no use moving heaven and earth to record the fraction, for who would want to buy it? In the third place, if gold were in it in plenty, there was still no assurance that the men on the fringes