Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/172

 “What's this bloke out here for, doc?” He looked anxious.

“Wheels within wheels, my boy,” said the doctor in a low whisper. His manner with his young partner was always a combination of the mysterious and the confidential. It was a very potent mixture. “They've got to make something out of it themselves, you know, to afford to take the risk. Any time an inspector from Ottawa may come and check up on them. So, if we are to record, we must make a cut.”

“Oh, sure, doc—the bloomin' thieves!” It was Dick's invincible notion that the fraction law was an Ottawa steal. That was the only reason he was willing from the first to make whatever concessions might be necessary to the powers that were for the sake of a recording. Since he had found the pay streak he had almost literally danced on air. For he had a sweetheart near his homestead claim in the New Zealand bush settlement, but no wherewithal for the shanty and the plow. Now he dreamed dreams.

“I may be some little time in consummating the deal, Dick.” Doctor Lederer used large words when he wished to impress his partner in certain ways. He now looked about him in the tent. “I'll want my golf suit. Dining with the toffs, me boy, in our negotiations, perhaps.”

“You aren't going to sell out, doc, are you?” asked Dick anxiously.

“Only the slice we'll have to part with, Dicky. Unless”—Doctor Lederer desired to be candid—“unless the price offered is big. In that case—we'll talk it over first, of course.” He looked slyly at his leather bag, a thing he never took on the journeys afoot; it was too awkward. Queer, uncertain things were stirring in his mind. “I'd better take my best clothes in it. Look better, my boy. Not so?”

“Sure, make a flash, doc,” grinned Kibble.

“And—I spent the twenty dollars, Dicky. It just lasted. Better give me the pannings. You can pan some more right away, but say nothing till the fraction is ours.”

“Trust me, doc,” Dick chuckled. He was thinking absent-mindedly of how many pannings it would take to buy a span of oxen in the New Zealand bush settlement. But it would be sluicing, or rocking at worst, not panning, they'd be doing. He got the vials containing the panned gold and handed them to Lederer, who took them with his courtly nod and smile. Dick left the tent, and the man from many parts of the world gathered up his few good clothes, and this and that of personal possessions. He did not know exactly what might or might not happen. And it had been his rule, in such circumstances, to keep his possessions close at hand. He shortly left with the business-like person.

Dick Kibble ate a hurried meal of bread and beans and pulled a hand sled over the dry tundra moss a mile uphill to the fast-disappearing spruce forest to drag it down again filled with wood with which to build a fire in his tunnel and another in the shaft. The fellow was a tireless worker, a good man Friday. He knew that the partnership was one of brawn and brains. It was a very necessary combination in a mining camp. He was glad that “the doc” had the brains.

“The doc” had quite recovered from the Eureka trip. His few days in Dawson had quite set him up. The walk up Bonanza Creek to Gold Hill and the walk back again were nothing to him—a mere stimulation on the physical side to keep step with the enormous spiritual lift of his prospects. The businesslike individual walking by his side, or back of him or in front—as the trail twisted and angled erratically among dumps, across footbridges, around morasses—was hardly an impediment to his winging thought. He talked to him only enough to avoid the appearance of surliness or disdain, for if he were offended the man could, conceivably, lie about the fraction in his report.

He fell to thinking about the trail and comparing it with his life—as sinuous a course, with as many sudden angles, strange dippings into dangerous places, refreshing turns of luck into the high and safe—before the next inevitable slough of despond and quagmire. It was his life to perfection, mirrored through the tortuous mazes of Bonanza, its normal course of gentle curves fantastically hypertrophied by men gold-passion twisted. In Lederer's mood of present exaltation the simile tickled him.

In Dawson he saw, very soon—after the expert had seen them first—his true principals in the deal, or, at least, two men who stood to him as true principals. The transaction, normally following the course of first a recording of the fraction, thus vesting its title in the names of Lederer and Kibble and then a transfer of that title to the pur-