Part 98 (2/2)
”Where's my dog, then?”
”He--he's up to Idyho Bar,” whimpered the prostrate one. And there the Boy found him, staggering under a pair of saddle-bags, hired out to Mike O'Reilly for a dollar and a half a day. Together they returned to Rampart to watch for the boat.
Certainly the ice was very late breaking up this year. The men of Rampart stood about in groups in the small hours of the morning of the 16th of May; as usual, smoking, yarning, speculating, inventing elaborate joshes. Somebody remembered that certain cheechalkos had gone to bed at midnight. Now this was unprecedented, even impertinent. If the river is not open by the middle of May, your Sour-dough may go to bed--only he doesn't. Still, he may do as he lists. But your cheechalko--why, this is the hour of his initiation. It was as if a man should yawn at his marriage or refuse to sleep at his funeral. The offenders were some of those Woodworth fellows, who, with a dozen or so others, had built shacks below ”the street” yet well above the river.
At two in the morning Sour-dough Saunders knocked them up.
”The ice is goin' out!”
In a flash the sleepers stood at the door.
”Only a josh.” One showed fight.
”Well, it's true what I'm tellin' yer,” persisted Saunders seriously: ”the ice is goin' out, and it's goin' soon, and when you're washed out o' yer bunks ye needn't blame me, fur I warned yer.”
”You don't mean the flood'll come up here?”
”Mebbe you've arranged so she won't this year.”
The cheechalkos consulted. In the end, four of them occupied the next two hours (to the infinite but masked amus.e.m.e.nt of the town) in floundering about in the mud, setting up tents in the boggy wood above the settlement, and with much pains transporting thither as many of their possessions as they did not lose in the bottomless pit of the mire.
When the business was ended, Minook self-control gave way. The cheechalkos found themselves the laughing-stock of the town. The others, who had dared to build down on the bank, but who ”hadn't scared worth a cent,” sauntered up to the Gold Nugget to enjoy the increased esteem of the Sour-doughs, and the humiliation of the men who had thought ”the Yukon was goin' over the Ramparts this year--haw, haw!”
It surprises the average mind to discover that one of civilization's most delicate weapons is in such use and is so potently dreaded among the roughest frontier spirits. No fine gentleman in a drawing-room, no sensitive girl, shrinks more from what Meredith calls ”the comic laugh,” none feels irony more keenly than your ordinary American pioneer. The men who had moved up into the soaking wood saw they had run a risk as great to them as the fabled danger of the river--the risk of the josher's irony, the dire humiliation of the laugh. If a man up here does you an injury, and you kill him, you haven't after all taken the ultimate revenge. You might have ”got the laugh on him,” and let him live to hear it.
While all Minook was ”jollying” the Woodworth men, Maudie made one of her sudden raids out of the Gold Nugget. She stood nearly up to the knees of her high rubber boots in the bog of ”Main Street,” talking earnestly with the Colonel. Keith and the Boy, sitting on a store box outside of the saloon, had looked on at the fun over the timid cheechalkos, and looked on now at Maudie and the Colonel. It crossed the Boy's mind that they'd be putting up a josh on his pardner pretty soon, and at the thought he frowned.
Keith had been saying that the old miners had nearly all got ”squawed.”
He had spoken almost superst.i.tiously of the queer, lasting effect of the supposedly temporary arrangement.
”No, they don't leave their wives as often as you'd expect, but in most cases it seems to kill the pride of the man. He gives up all idea of ever going home, and even if he makes a fortune, they say, he stays on here. And year by year he sinks lower and lower, till he's farther down in the scale of things human than his savage wife.”
”Yes, it's awful to think how the life up here can take the stiffening out of a fella.”
He looked darkly at the two out there in the mud. Keith nodded.
”Strong men have lain down on the trail this winter and cried.” But it wasn't that sort of thing the other meant. Keith followed his new friend's glowering looks.
”Yes. That's just the kind of man that gets taken in.”
”What?” said the Boy brusquely.
”Just the sort that goes and marries some flighty creature.”
”Well,” said his pardner haughtily, ”he could afford to marry 'a flighty creature.' The Colonel's got both feet on the ground.” And Keith felt properly snubbed. But what Maudie was saying to the Colonel was:
”You're goin' up in the first boat, I s'pose?”
”Yes.”
”Looks like I'll be the only person left in Minook.”
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