The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 8

“Where is my other partner?” grinned Bruce, as he shook the Eskimo's hand—a ceremony which cordial Ak Tuk performed by the pump-handle method.

“Him come bime-by,” replied the native, outdoing Bruce's grin by a width of several inches.

The mid-April sun had already thawed the cut banks of the creek, which still slumbered modestly under its mantle of glazed snow, insensible of the burden of responsibility cast upon it by the conjuring name of Midas. Piles of wood, corded up back of the cabin, and on several of the claims above and below it, bore witness to the industry of the brawny lad who had “bached it” alone for ten solid weeks. But the cutting and hauling of wood for burning was only half of his labors; for after two weeks of continued drifting in the creek shaft, with no better results than before, Bruce had taken to roaming the hillsides, companioned by his dog team and a meditative pipe. He smoked a month's tobacco in less than a week while he studied the lay of the valley and its sloping sides, and made comparison with other placer creeks he had known.

“Maybe it's on the bench, on one side or the other,” he said to himself. On the right limit, at quite a distance from the creek, there was, in fact, a bench, defined as a belt of more gently sloping hillside that roughly paralleled the course of the stream. Evidently there had flowed here an older channel that long antedated the cutting of the stream's present base level. The whole slope was sparsely forested with spruce and birch, but this curving bench was plain to an observer from the other side of the valley.

In a thick bunch of timber opposite Three Above Discovery, where the flattening of the slope was marked, Bruce had made a small camp and started two holes. Opposite Ten Below Discovery, beyond which the bench broke down into a tributary gulch, he had started another. It was from the dump of one of the upper shafts that he had spied Ak Tuk coming down Midas, and had hastened down to greet him.

He eagerly eyed the big envelope the Eskimo handed him, but it was thick, and the Eskimo too hungry, to justify its perusal at once. He set it on the sill of the cabin window, and heated a big pot of beans. Ak Tuk took his time to the meal, but Bruce gulped his food and, taking the envelope outside, sat on his upturned basket sled and opened it. Thank Heaven, there were several smaller envelopes inside it, all but one of them addressed in a feminine hand! The one—which Bruce observed only casually—bore Ticely's familiar script.

“Hey, Ak Tuk, good work, my boy; good work!” he called to the native within, who replied, without in the least knowing what it was about: “Good work, betcherlife!”

“I guess Fred can wait,” Waring murmured; and he opened the first of Joan Manner's messages to the distant, lonesome pal of the one most memorable adventure of her adventurous life. He read it; and though it was only a sweetly sisterlike letter, his fine instinct for the fine instincts of women made him pleased and satisfied with it. Then he turned with sudden interest to Ticely's letter:

Waring was stunned—literally stunned. He hardly moved for half an hour. His head, with its heavy, tangled mane, resting against the logs of the little cabin, the cool evening breeze from the upcreek snow slopes fanned his upraised brow.

He was an earnest youth; modest, almost self-effacingly so; and this sudden limelight upon Ticely and Waring, and their dubious prospect in this far outland in sub-arctic Alaska, made him feel naked and afraid. He was a little slow-witted, too, though his mind's procedure was orderly and its processes strong. He would have to think it all out before yielding to his instinctive judgment that all was not right nor safe in this sudden accession of prosperity. No, it could hardly be called prosperity!

He knew that all the stir was based, not on the present, but on the future of this big creek which he and Ticely had barely begun to prospect. And the thought of these sales of its land brought to him that uneasiness and trepidation which, through ages of experience, has come to be the instinctive reaction of the conscientious poor to a sudden inflow of money. But he remembered Ticely's written words: “I've told them just what we had;” and these he repeated to himself for what assurance ought to have been in them. He tried to make himself believe that they afforded him relief; that they made everything all right. And in the midst of his strivings, his eye fell upon the other letters of Joan Manners.

A lump rose in his throat as he looked at them. Poor little Joan—he was a very neglectful friend! He took them up and read them slowly in the failing light. It was only the last that bore on the thing that troubled him—the coming of all these people to Midas Creek. In this letter, she told of the meetings with “your partner, Mr. Ticely,” and of her father's plan and hers, to cast their fortunes with those of her camp-mate of the Yukon portage in his wonderful mining enterprise. She wrote:

“You no sleep?” asked Ak Tuk. It was Eskimo etiquette not to roll up in his bunk in advance of his white friend. The sun had long set. It was past eleven o'clock.

Waring came out of his long reverie and shivered. “Me go sleep now,” he said. But he did not, though he went to bed.

The letters Ak Tuk brought affected Waring's course but slightly. He worked a part of each day on a cabin for the commissioner, as Ticely requested. And he staked off the town site. But with the rest of his time—and he labored eighteen hours of each twenty-four—he went doggedly on with his prospecting of the bench. It seemed to him like a promise of safe anchorage in a misty sea. And in this the lad builded better than he knew.

Allowing himself six days for the trip, he and Ak Tuk started out to blaze a route westward to the place of meeting in the Koyuk basin. There was not snow enough for a sled, so they took packs and a few packed dogs. What snow there was lay in patches, mostly in the timber, where the webless snowshoes Ak Tuk had advised their taking proved an actual necessity. For the rest, it was a “mush” through endless sloping tundra, berry covered on the higher ground and deeply soggy in the swales, with much retracing of the way to find the best going for the incoming party.

Two days beyond the treeless divide—a savage contrast of blackish rock and naked snow—Ak Tuk spied them twenty miles away—a crawling caravan on the snow-mottled flats of the Koyuk, horses, dogs, and men. A crooked line of ants they seemed; and though, spaced out as they were, they numbered less than a hundred, even counting the animals, they seemed a legion to Waring, whose misgivings woke again at the sight. The next day he met them face to face—the advance guard of the Midas Creek stampede, certainly the most curious and probably the most famous of the minor Alaskan gold rushes.