The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 2

Ticely held the receiver of his desk phone, and drummed a moment on his blotter.

“Hullo, Celie? I have a wire from a doctor in Kusko about Waring. He's got typhoid—evidently an epidemic up there. Says will do his best, but if I can send money the chance will be better. Yes, too bad, poor fellow. You want to talk to me about it? Well—oh, all right. I'll be up to luncheon, in half an hour.”

This is what she said to him: “You know what typhoid is! Didn't you tell me it broke out in Dawson, while you were there the first year. It must be frightful, up there in that swampy river district, in a small camp, and everybody poor—a very little gold and a very great crowd. Ugh!” she shuddered.

“Well, my dear, I've telegraphed two hundred and fifty dollars, and instructions to draw on me for more, if necessary.”

“But typhoid means nursing; a clean, decent place, and just the proper food—milk and broths, and very great care. How is that poor boy to get those things, especially during an epidemic? Mere money is no assurance.”

“But what can we do?”

“Let me go up there and look after him.”

Ticely dropped his fork. “Absurd, Celie. He'll be dead, or well, by the time you could get there.”

“No, sir! The telegram says he's just down. That's almost a hint. Typhoid runs for weeks. And the trip takes—how long?”

“About a week.”

“There you are, Fred; it's more than a case of the gift without the giver. We owe it to him.”

“The contract merely provides”

“Nothing about typhoid—I know. But think what you told him, when he left—'We'll back you, my boy, in every way.' You put up a little money, and he puts up his work. So far, you're even. But, besides his work, he puts up his life—the risk of it: A glacier, a gas-filled shaft, typhoid! He's entitled to the very best help we can give him. That is the substance of our real obligation to him, whatever the mere words were. I have no child that needs me and—I want to go.”

“You go right ahead, little woman,” said Ticely humbly.

He told her to take whatever she wished, and she did a clever piece of work, that afternoon. She had no idea what Kusko City could or could not furnish her, so she assumed nothing. She bought and shipped a small portable house and many things to put in it; four kinds of canned milk, and other foods for convalescence; and magazines. And paper flowers!

The paper flowers were the first things that Bruce Waring really saw, when he came out of the land of illusion; and next, the plump white angel, no longer flitting amid fantastic, absurdly incongruous surroundings, but as and where she really was—in a clean, smooth-boarded, square little house divided by a curtain. He was not sure. He tried to whisper, but he was too weak; quite too weak to put out his hand. But she came to him and laughed and talked, for a few moments, and his cooling brain told him it was really Cecelia Ticely. The filthy tent, the dirty men attendants, the obese and overworked Mrs. McColgan—where were they?

A week later—three weeks after her arrival—she answered all these questions. And, when he wondered at her goodness, she told him very simply that she did not regard it as goodness but rather as business—the business of life, she said it was, to keep to the spirit of your compact. And the last thing she told him, when they parted at the gangplank—it was she, this time, who was to embark—was that he must not say that he owed her anything. He must not even think it! He told her, in his slow, cogitative way, that it was too unbelievably wonderful, to owe your life to a person to whom you owed nothing for it! Some day, perhaps, he might be able to repay her in the same magic way—the way that needs no requital. He walked up the river bank trail, an extremely thin and very thoughtful young prospector.

He approached his cache with a great deal of anxiety, and, when he reached it, he borrowed a ladder, investigated the nether side of the big tarpaulin, and found his fears realized. His essential supplies were gone!

He was not sorry, on the whole. It gave him an excellent reason for shaking the dust, or rather the muck, of the Kuskokwim country from his boots. He hated the place of his nearly mortal sickness—mortal indeed, but for the ministrations of Cecelia Ticely. He pined for trees, for mountains, to remind him of his home land, forested Washington. Northward, in the Yukon, he could find them—and placer country, too. where, with better chances than in this absurdedly [sic] overrated camp, he could carry out an obligation which was now more binding upon him than before. Mrs. Ticely had insisted upon giving him what money she had left—several hundred dollars. She did not propose, she said, to hear again of his needing money in a dire emergency. So, with his dog team and Indian, he would go northward into the great Yukon basin and buy, at the last outpost, grub for another year's prospecting.

With the glazing of the marshes, in the first sharp cold, off they started, Ivan the Indian, with his three mongrels hitched to a flat Yukon sled, trailing Waring with his big basket sled, loaded to the rails. The ice of the marshes and sloughs held to the base of the fifty-mile slops of tundra, whose rise and fall, scarcely perceptible except to a straining husky, marks the height of land between the Kuskokwim and the Yukon. There they were held up for white weather, but they got three fat caribou. One night's snow gave them skidding, for their tundra run, over to the endless swales and sloughs of the lower Yukon, where they made good time to the mouth of the Innoko. Then a short portage—and suddenly they canted steeply down the bank of the mighty Yukon itself, northern Father of Waters, three miles wide, here, and already covered by an eighteen-inch roof of glare ice.

In five days they had made the two hundred miles to Kaltag, where the ancient, as well as the modern, portage to Unalaklik, on the Bering Sea, cuts off four hundred miles of the river route to Nome. Waring's objective was Nulato, some seventy-five miles farther up, where he proposed to replenish his supplies and ascend the Koyukuk River to Bettles and Tramway Bar, of which he had: heard old-timers speak with much respect.

Both before and since the days of Midas and Bruce Waring, the Koyukuk River has been one of the most fascinating riddles of the northern gold field. Destiny decreed, however, that he was to approach his goal from another direction.