CHAPTER XVII THE GREAT STAMPEDE

CHAPTER XVII

THE GREAT STAMPEDE

"Die Menchen suchen und suchen, wollen immer was Besseres finden.... Gott geb' ihnen nur Geduld!"

Men in the Gold Nugget were talking about some claims, staked and recorded in due form, but on which the statutory work had not been done.

"What about 'em?"

"They're jumpable at midnight."

French Charlie invited the Boy to go along, but neither he nor the Colonel felt enthusiastic.

"They're no good, those claims, except to sell to some sucker, and we're not in that business _yet_, sah."

They had just done twenty miles in slush and mire, and their hearts were heavier than their heels. No, they would go to bed while the others did the jumpin', and next day they would fill Keith's wood-bin.

"So if work does turn up we won't have to worry about usin' up his firin'." In the chill of the next evening they were cording the results of the day's chopping, when Maudie, in fur coat, skirts to the knee, and high rubber boots, appeared behind Keith's shack. Without deigning to notice the Boy, "Ain't seen you all day," says she to the Colonel.

"Busy," he replied, scarcely looking up.

"Did you do any jumpin' last night?"

"No."

"_That's_ all right."

She seated herself with satisfaction on a log. She looked at the Boy impudently, as much as to say, "When that blot on the landscape is removed, I'll tell you something." The Boy had not the smallest intention of removing the blot.

Grudgingly he admitted to himself that, away from the unsavory atmosphere of the Gold Nugget, there was nothing in Maudie positively offensive. At this moment, with her shrewd little face peering pertly out from her parki-hood, she looked more than ever like an audacious child, or like some strange, new little Arctic animal with a whimsical human air.

"Look here, Colonel," she said presently, either despairing of getting rid of the Boy or ceasing to care about it: "you got to get a wiggle on to-morrow."

"What for?"

She looked round, first over one shoulder, then over the other. "Well, it's on the quiet."

The Kentuckian nodded. But she winked her blue eyes suspiciously at the Boy.

"Oh, _he's_ all right."

"Well, you been down to Little Minóok, ain't you?"

"Yes."

"And you seen how the pay pinches out above No. 10?"

"Yes."

"Well, now, if it ain't above No. 10, where is it?" No answer. "Where does it _go_?" she repeated severely, like a schoolmarm to a class of backward boys.

"That's what everybody'd like to know."

"Then let 'em ask Pitcairn."

"What's Pitcairn say?"

She got up briskly, moved to another log almost at the Colonel's feet, and sat looking at him a moment as if making up her mind about something serious. The Colonel stood, fists at his sides, arrested by that name Pitcairn.

"You know Pitcairn's the best all-round man we got here," she asserted rather than asked.

The Colonel nodded.

"He's an Idaho miner, Pitcairn is!"

"I know."

"Well, he's been out lookin' at the place where the gold gives out on Little Minóok. There's a pup just there above No. 10--remember?"

"Perfectly."

"And above the pup, on the right, there's a bed of gravel."

"Couldn't see much of that for the snow."

"Well, sir, that bed o' gravel's an old channel."

"No!"

She nodded. "Pitcairn's sunk a prospect, and found colours in his first pan."

"Oh, colours!"

"But the deeper he went, the better prospects he got." She stood up now, close to the Colonel. The Boy stopped work and leaned on the wood pile, listening. "Pitcairn told Charlie and me (on the strict q. t.) that the gold channel crossed the divide at No. 10, and the only gold on Little Minóokust what spilt down on those six claims as the gold went crossin' the gulch. The real placer is that old channel above the pup, and boys"--in her enthusiasm she even included the Colonel's objectionable pardner--"boys, it's rich as blazes!"

"I wonder----" drawled the Colonel, recovering a little from his first thrill.

"I wouldn't advise you to waste much time wonderin'," she said with fire. "What I'm tellin' you is scientific. Pitcairn is straight as a string. You won't get any hymns out o' Pitcairn, but you'll get fair and square. His news is worth a lot. If you got any natchral gumption anywhere about you, you can have a claim worth anything from ten to fifty thousand dollars this time to-morrow."

"Well, well! Good Lord! Hey, Boy, what we goin' to do?"

"Well, you don't want to get excited," admonished the queer little Arctic animal, jumping up suddenly; "but you can bunk early and get a four a.m. wiggle on. Charlie and me'll meet you on the Minóokl. Ta-ta!" tad she whisked away as suddenly as a chipmunk.

They couldn't sleep. Some minutes before the time named they were quietly leaving Keith's shack. Out on the trail there were two or three men already disappearing towards Little Minóok here was Maudie, all by herself, sprinting along like a good fellow, on the thin surface of the last night's frost. She walked in native water-boots, but her snow-shoes stuck out above the small pack neatly lashed on her straight little shoulders. They waited for her.

She came up very brisk and businesslike. To their good-mornings she only nodded in a funny, preoccupied way, never opening her lips.

"Charlie gone on?" inquired the Colonel presently.

She shook her head. "Knocked out."

"Been fightin'?"

"No; ran a race to Hunter."

"To jump that claim?"

She nodded.

"Did he beat?"

She laughed. "Butts had the start. They got there together at nine o'clock!"

"Three hours before jumpin' time?"

Again she nodded. "And found four more waitin' on the same fool errand."

"What did they do?"

"Called a meetin'. Couldn't agree. It looked like there'd be a fight, and a fast race to the Recorder among the survivors. But before the meetin' was adjourned, those four that had got there first (they were pretty gay a'ready), they opened some hootch, so Butts and Charlie knew they'd nothing to fear except from one another."

On the top of the divide that gave them their last glimpse of Rampart she stopped an instant and looked back. The quick flash of anxiety deepening to defiance made the others turn. The bit they could see of the water-front thoroughfare was alive. The inhabitants were rushing about like a swarm of agitated ants.

"What's happening?"

"It's got out," she exploded indignantly. "They're comin', too!"

She turned, flew down the steep incline, and then settled into a steady, determined gait, that made her gain on the men who had got so long a start. Her late companions stood looking back in sheer amazement, for the town end of the trail was black with figures. The Boy began to laugh.

"Look! if there isn't old Jansen and his squaw wife."

The rheumatic cripple, huddled on a sled, was drawn by a native man and pushed by a native woman. They could hear him swearing at both impartially in broken English and Chinook.

The Colonel and the Boy hurried after Maudie. It was some minutes before they caught up. The Boy, feeling that he couldn't be stand-offish in the very act of profiting by her acquaintance, began to tell her about the crippled but undaunted Swede. She made no answer, just trotted steadily on. The Boy hazarded another remark--an opinion that she was making uncommon good time for a woman.

"You'll want all the wind you got before you get back," she said shortly, and silence fell on the stampeders.

Some of the young men behind were catching up. Maudie set her mouth very firm and quickened her pace. This spectacle touched up those that followed; they broke into a canter, floundered in a drift, recovered, and passed on. Maudie pulled up.

"That's all right! Let 'em get good and tired, half-way. We got to save all the run we got in us for the last lap."

The sun was hotter, the surface less good.

She loosened her shoulder-straps, released her snow-shoes, and put them on. As she tightened her little pack the ex-Governor came puffing up with apoplectic face.

"Why, she can throw the diamond hitch!" he gasped with admiration.

"S'pose you thought the squaw hitch would be good enough for me."

"Well, it is for me," he laughed breathlessly.

"That's 'cause you're an ex-Governor"; and steadily she tramped along.

In twenty minutes Maudie's party came upon those same young men who had passed running. They sat in a row on a fallen spruce. One had no rubber boots, the other had come off in such a hurry he had forgotten his snow-shoes. Already they were wet to the waist.

"Step out, Maudie," said one with short-breathed hilarity; "we'll be treadin' on your heels in a minute;" but they were badly blown.

Maudie wasted not a syllable. Her mouth began to look drawn. There were violet shadows under the straight-looking eyes.

The Colonel glanced at her now and then. Is she thinking about that four-year-old? Is Maudie stampedin' through the snow so that other little woman need never dance at the Alcazar? No, the Colonel knew well enough that Maudie rather liked this stampedin' business.

She had passed one of those men who had got the long start of her. He carried a pack. Once in a while she would turn her strained-looking face over her shoulder, glancing back, with the frank eyes of an enemy, at her fellow-citizens labouring along the trail.

"Come on, Colonel!" she commanded, with a new sharpness. "Keep up your lick."

But the Colonel had had about enough of this gait. From now on he fell more and more behind. But the Boy was with her neck and neck.

"Guess you're goin' to get there."

"Guess I am."

Some men behind them began to run. They passed. They had pulled off their parkis, and left them where they fell. They threw off their caps now, and the sweat rolled down their faces. Not a countenance but wore that immobile look, the fixed, unseeing eye of the spent runner, who is overtaxing heart and lungs. Not only Maudie now, but everyone was silent. Occasionally a man would rouse himself out of a walk, as if out of sleep, and run a few yards, going the more weakly after. Several of the men who had been behind caught up.

Where was Kentucky?

If Maudie wondered, she wasted no time over the speculation. For his own good she had admonished him to keep up his lick, but of course the main thing was that Maudie should keep up hers.

"What if this is the great day of my life!" thought the Boy. "Shall I always look back to this? Why, it's Sunday. Wonder if Kentucky remembers?" Never pausing, the Boy glanced back, vaguely amused, and saw the Colonel plunging heavily along in front of half a dozen, who were obviously out of condition for such an expedition--eyes bloodshot, lumbering on with nervous "whisky gait," now whipped into a breathless gallop, now half falling by the way. Another of the Gold Nugget women with two groggy-looking men, and somewhere down the trail, the crippled Swede swearing at his squaw. A dreamy feeling came over the Boy. Where in the gold basins of the North was this kind of thing not happening--finished yesterday, or planned for to-morrow? Yes, it was typical. Between patches of ragged black spruce, wide stretches of snow-covered moss, under a lowering sky, and a mob of men floundering through the drifts to find a fortune. "See how they run!"--mad mice. They'd been going on stampedes all winter, and would go year in, year out, until they died. The prizes were not for such as they. As for himself--ah, it was a great day for him! He was going at last to claim that gold-mine he had come so far to find. This was the decisive moment of his life. At the thought he straightened up, and passed Maudie. She gave him a single sidelong look, unfriendly, even fierce. That was because he could run like sixty, and keep it up. "When I'm a millionaire I shall always remember that I'm rich because I won the race." A dizzy feeling came over him. He seemed to be running through some softly resisting medium like water--no, like wine jelly. His heart was pounding up in his throat. "What if something's wrong, and I drop dead on the way to my mine? Well, Kentucky'll look after things."

Maudie had caught up again, and here was Little Minóok at last! A couple of men, who from the beginning had been well in advance of everyone else, and often out of sight, had seemed for the last five minutes to be losing ground. But now they put on steam, Maudie too. She stepped out of her snowshoes, and flung them up on the low roof of the first cabin. Then she ducked her head, crooked her arms at the elbow, and, with fists uplifted, she broke into a run, jumping from pile to pile of frozen pay, gliding under sluice-boxes, scrambling up the bank, slipping on the rotting ice, recovering, dashing on over fallen timber and through waist-deep drifts, on beyond No. 10 up to the bench above.

When the Boy got to Pitcairn's prospect hole, there were already six claims gone. He proceeded to stake the seventh, next to Maudie's. That person, with flaming cheeks, was driving her last location-post into a snow-drift with a piece of water-worn obsidian.

The Colonel came along in time to stake No. 14 Below, under Maudie's personal supervision.

Not much use, in her opinion, "except that with gold, it's where you find it, and that's all any man can tell you."

As she was returning alone to her own claim, behold two brawny Circle City miners pulling out her stakes and putting in their own. She flew at them with remarks unprintable.

"You keep your head shut," advised one of the men, a big, evil-looking fellow. "This was our claim first. We was here with Pitcairn yesterday. Somebody's took away our location-posts."

"You take me for a cheechalko?" she screamed, and her blue eyes flashed like smitten steel. She pulled up her sweater and felt in her belt. "You--take your stakes out! Put mine back, unless you want----" A murderous-looking revolver gleamed in her hand.

"Hold on!" said the spokesman hurriedly. "Can't you take a joke?"

"No; this ain't my day for jokin'. You want to put them stakes o' mine back." She stood on guard till it was done. "And now I'd advise you, like a mother, to back-track home. You'll find this climate very tryin' to your health."

They went farther up the slope and marked out a claim on the incline above the bench.

In a few hours the mountain-side was staked to the very top, and still the stream of people struggled out from Rampart to the scene of the new strike. All day long, and all the night, the trail was alive with the coming or the going of the five hundred and odd souls that made up the population. In the town itself the excitement grew rather than waned. Men talked themselves into a fever, others took fire, and the epidemic spread like some obscure nervous disease. Nobody slept, everybody drank and hurrahed, and said it was the greatest night in the history of Minóok. In the Gold Nugget saloon, crowded to suffocation, Pitcairn organized the new mining district, and named it the Idaho Bar. French Charlie and Keith had gone out late in the day. On their return, Keith sold his stake to a woman for twenty-five dollars, and Charlie advertised a half-interest in his for five thousand. Between these two extremes you could hear Idaho Bar quoted at any figure you liked.

Maudie was in towering spirits. She drank several cocktails, and in her knee-length "stampedin' skirt" and her scarlet sweater she danced the most audacious jig even Maudie had ever presented to the Gold Nugget patrons. The miners yelled with delight. One of them caught her up and put her on the counter of the bar, where, no whit at a loss, she curveted and spun among the bottles and the glasses as lightly as a dragonfly dips and whirls along a summer brook. The enthusiasm grew delirious. The men began to throw nuggets at her, and Maudie, never pausing in the dance, caught them on the fly.

Suddenly she saw the Big Chap turn away, and, with his back to her, pretend to read the notice on the wall, written in charcoal on a great sheet of brown wrapping-paper:

"MINÓOK, April 30.

"To who it may concern:

"Know all men by these presents that I, James McGinty, now of Minóok (or Rampart City), Alaska, do hereby give notice of my intention to hold and claim a lien by virtue of the statue in such case----"

He had read so far when Maudie, having jumped down off the bar with her fists full of nuggets, and dodging her admirers, wormed her way to the Colonel. She thrust her small person in between the notice and the reader, and scrutinised the tanned face, on which the Rochester burners shed a flood of light. "You lookin' mighty serious," she said.

"Am I?"

"M-hm! Thinkin' 'bout home sweet home?"

"N-no--not just then."

"Say, I told you 'bout--a--'bout me. You ain't never told me nothin'."

He seemed not to know the answer to that, and pulled at his ragged beard. She leaned back against McGinty's notice, and blurred still more the smudged intention "by virtue of the statue."

"Married, o' course," she said.

"No."

"Widder?"

"No."

"Never hitched up yet?"

He shook his head.

"Never goin' to, I s'pose."

"Oh, I don't know," he laughed, and turned his head over his shoulder to the curious scene between them and the bar. It was suddenly as if he had never seen it before; then, while Maudie waited, a little scornful, a little kind, his eyes went through the window to the pink and orange sunrise. As some change came over the Colonel's face, "She died!" said Maudie.

"No--no--she didn't die;" then half to himself, half to forestall Maudie's crude probing, "but I lost her," he finished.

"Oh, you lost her!"

He stood, looking past the ugliness within to the morning majesty without. But it was not either that he saw. Maudie studied him.

"Guess you ain't give up expectin' to find her some day?"

"No--no, not quite."

"Humph! Did you guess you'd find her here?"

"No," and his absent smile seemed to remove him leagues away. "No, not here."

"I could a' told you----" she began savagely. "I don't know for certain whether any--what you call good women come up here, but I'm dead sure none stay."

"When do you leave for home, Maudie?" he said gently.

But at the flattering implication the oddest thing happened. As she stood there, with her fists full of gold, Maudie's eyes filled. She turned abruptly and went out. The crowd began to melt away. In half an hour only those remained who had more hootch than they could carry off the premises. They made themselves comfortable on the floor, near the stove, and the greatest night Minóok had known was ended.

“One work. Many languages. One reading experience.”