Jack London
The One Thousand Dozen
From The Faith Of Men
David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man of the one
idea. Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North rang on his ear, he conceived
an adventure in eggs and bent all his energy to its achievement. He figured
briefly and to the point, and the adventure became iridescent-hued, splendid.
That eggs would sell at Dawson for five dollars a dozen was a safe working
premise. Whence it was incontrovertible that one thousand dozen would bring, in
the Golden Metropolis, five thousand dollars.
On the other hand, expense was to be considered, and he considered it well,
for he was a careful man, keenly practical, with a hard head and a heart that
imagination never warmed. At fifteen cents a dozen, the initial cost of his
thousand dozen would be one hundred and fifty dollars, a mere bagatelle in face
of the enormous profit. And suppose, just suppose, to be wildly extravagant for
once, that transportation for himself and eggs should run up eight hundred and
fifty more; he would still have four thousand clear cash and clean when the last
egg was disposed of and the last dust had rippled into his sack.
"You see, Alma," - he figured it over with his wife, the cosy dining room
submerged in a sea of maps, government surveys, guidebooks, and Alaskan
itineraries, - "you see, expenses don't really begin till you make Dyea - fifty
dollars'll cover it with a first-class passage thrown in. Now from Dyea to Lake
Linderman, Indian packers take your goods over for twelve cents a pound, twelve
dollars a hundred, or one hundred and twenty dollars a thousand. Say I have
fifteen hundred pounds, it'll cost one hundred and eighty dollars - call it two
hundred and be safe. I am creditably informed by a Klondiker just come out that
I can buy a boat for three hundred. But the same man says I'm sure to get
a couple of passengers for one hundred and fifty each, which will give me the
boat for nothing, and, further, they can help me manage it. And... that's all;
I put my eggs ashore from the boat at Dawson. Now let me see how much is that?"
"Fifty dollars from San Francisco to Dyea, two hundred from Dyea to
Linderman, passengers pay for the boat - two hundred and fifty all told," she
summed up swiftly.
"And a hundred for my clothes and personal outfit," he went on happily; "that
leaves a margin of five hundred for emergencies. And what possible emergencies
can arise?"
Alma shrugged her shoulders and elevated her brows. If that vast Northland
was capable of swallowing up a man and a thousand dozen eggs, surely there was
room and to spare for whatever else he might happen to possess. So she thought,
but she said nothing. She knew David Rasmunsen too well to say anything.
"Doubling the time because of chance delays, I should make the trip in two
months. Think of it, Alma! Four thousand in two months! Beats the paltry hundred
a month I'm getting now. Why, we'll build further out where we'll have more
space, gas in every room, and a view, and the rent of the cottage'll pay taxes,
insurance, and water, and leave something over. And then there's always the
chance of my striking it and coming out a millionnaire. Now tell me, Alma, don't
you think I'm very moderate ?"
And Alma could hardly think otherwise. Besides, had not her own cousin, -
though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black sheep, the harum-scarum,
the ne'er-do-well, - had not he come down out of that weird North country with
a hundred thousand in yellow dust, to say nothing of a half-ownership in the hole
from which it came?
David Rasmunsen's grocer was surprised when he found him weighing eggs in the
scales at the end of the counter, and Rasmunsen himself was more surprised when
he found that a dozen eggs weighed a pound and a half - fifteen hundred pounds
for his thousand dozen! There would be no weight left for his clothes, blankets,
and cooking utensils, to say nothing of the grub he must necessarily consume by
the way. His calculations were all thrown out, and he was just proceeding to
recast them when he hit upon the idea of weighing small eggs.
"For whether they be large or small, a dozen eggs is a dozen eggs," he
observed sagely to himself; and a dozen small ones he found to weigh but a pound
and a quarter. Thereat the city of San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyed
emissaries, and commission houses and dairy associations were startled by a
sudden demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to the dozen.
Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars, arranged for
his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own people, threw up his job, and
started North. To keep within his schedule he compromised on a second-class
passage, which, because of the rush, was worse than steerage; and in the late
summer, a pale and wabbly man, he disembarked with his eggs on the Dyea beach.
But it did not take him long to recover his land legs and appetite. His first
interview with the Chilkoot packers straightened him up and stiffened his
backbone. Forty cents a pound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage,
and while he caught his breath and swallowed, the price went up to forty-three.
Fifteen husky Indians put the straps on his packs at forty-five, but took them
off at an offer of forty-seven from a Skaguay Croesus in dirty shirt and ragged
overalls who had lost his horses on the White Pass Trail and was now making a
last desperate drive at the country by way of Chilkoot.
But Rasmunsen was clean grit, and at fifty cents found takers, who, two days
later, set his eggs down intact at Linderman. But fifty cents a pound is a
thousand dollars a ton, and his fifteen hundred pounds had exhausted his
emergency fund and left him stranded at the Tantalus point where each day he saw
the fresh-whipsawed boats departing for Dawson. Further, a great anxiety brooded
over the camp where the boats were built. Men worked frantically, early and late,
at the height of their endurance, calking, nailing, and pitching in a frenzy of
haste for which adequate explanation was not far to seek. Each day the snowline
crept farther down the bleak, rock- shouldered peaks, and gale followed gale,
with sleet and slush and snow, and in the eddies and quiet places young ice
formed and thickened through the fleeting hours. And each morn, toil-stiffened
men turned wan faces across the lake to see if the freeze-up had come. For the
freeze-up heralded the death of their hope - the hope that they would be floating
down the swift river ere navigation closed on the chain of lakes.
To harrow Rasmunsen's soul further, he discovered three competitors in the
egg business. It was true that one, a little German, had gone broke and was
himself forlornly back-tripping the last pack of the portage; but the other two
had boats nearly completed and were daily supplicating the god of merchants and
traders to stay the iron hand of winter for just another day. But the iron hand
closed down over the land. Men were being frozen in the blizzard, which swept
Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frosted his toes ere he was aware. He found a chance to
go passenger with his freight in a boat just shoving off through the rubble, but
two hundred, hard cash, was required, and he had no money.
"Ay tank you yust wait one leedle w'ile," said the Swedish boatbuilder, who
had struck his Klondike right there and was wise enough to know it - "one leedle
w'ile und I make you a tam fine skiff boat, sure Pete."
With this unpledged word to go on, Rasmunsen hit the back trail to Crater
Lake, where he fell in with two press correspondents whose tangled baggage was
strewn from Stone House, over across the Pass, and as far as Happy Camp.
"Yes," he said with consequence. "I've a thousand dozen eggs at Linderman,
and my boat's just about got the last seam calked. Consider myself in luck to get
it. Boats are at a premium, you know, and none to be had."
Whereupon and almost with bodily violence the correspondents clamored to go
with him, fluttered greenbacks before his eyes, and spilled yellow twenties from
hand to hand. He could not hear of it, but they overpersuaded him, and he
reluctantly consented to take them at three hundred apiece. Also they pressed
upon him the passage money in advance. And while they wrote to their respective
journals concerning the good Samaritan with the thousand dozen eggs, the good
Samaritan was hurrying back to the Swede at Linderman.
"Here, you! Gimme that boat!" was his salutation, his hand jingling the
correspondents' gold pieces and his eyes hungrily bent upon the finished craft.
The Swede regarded him stolidly and shook his head.
"How much is the other fellow paying? Three hundred? Well, here's four. Take
it."
He tried to press it upon him, but the man backed away.
"Ay tank not. Ay say him get der skiff boat. You yust wait -"
"Here's six hundred. Last call. Take it or leave it. Tell'm it's a mistake."
The Swede wavered. "Ay tank yes," he finally said, and the last Rasmunsen
saw of him his vocabulary was going to wreck in a vain effort to explain the
mistake to the other fellows.
The German slipped and broke his ankle on the steep hogback above Deep Lake,
sold out his stock for a dollar a dozen, and with the proceeds hired Indian
packers to carry him back to Dyea. But on the morning Rasmunsen shoved off with
his correspondents, his two rivals followed suit.
"How many you got?" one of them, a lean little New Englander, called out.
"One thousand dozen," Rasmunsen answered proudly.
"Huh! I'll go you even stakes I beat you in with my eight hundred."
The correspondents offered to lend him the money; but Rasmunsen declined, and
the Yankee closed with the remaining rival, a brawny son of the sea and sailor of
ships and things, who promised to show them all a wrinkle or two when it came to
cracking on. And crack on he did, with a large tarpaulin squaresail which pressed
the bow half under at every jump. He was the first to run out of Linderman, but,
disdaining the portage, piled his loaded boat on the rocks in the boiling rapids.
Rasmunsen and the Yankee, who likewise had two passengers, portaged across on
their backs and then lined their empty boats down through the bad water to
Bennett.
Bennett was a twenty-five-mile lake, narrow and deep, a funnel between the
mountains through which storms ever romped. Rasmunsen camped on the sand-pit at
its head, where were many men and boats bound north in the teeth of the Arctic
winter. He awoke in the morning to find a piping gale from the south, which
caught the chill from the whited peaks and glacial valleys and blew as cold as
north wind ever blew. But it was fair, and he also found the Yankee staggering
past the first bold headland with all sail set. Boat after boat was getting under
way, and the correspondents fell to with enthusiasm.
"We'll catch him before Cariboo Crossing," they assured Rasmunsen, as they
ran up the sail and the Alma took the first icy spray over her bow.
Now Rasmunsen all his life had been prone to cowardice on water, but he clung
to the kicking steering-oar with set face and determined jaw. His thousand dozen
were there in the boat before his eyes, safely secured beneath the
correspondents' baggage, and somehow, before his eyes, were the little cottage
and the mortgage for a thousand dollars.
It was bitter cold. Now and again he hauled in the steering-sweep and put out
a fresh one while his passengers chopped the ice from the blade. Wherever the
spray struck, it turned instantly to frost, and the dipping boom of the spritsail
was quickly fringed with icicles. The Alma strained and hammered through the big
seas till the seams and butts began to spread, but in lieu of bailing the
correspondents chopped ice and flung it overboard. There was no let-up. The mad
race with winter was on, and the boats tore along in a desperate string.
"W-w-we can't stop to save our souls!" one of the correspondents chattered,
from cold, not fright.
"That's right! Keep her down the middle, old man!" the other encouraged.
Rasmunsen replied with an idiotic grin. The iron-bound shores were in a
lather of foam, and even down the middle the only hope was to keep running away
from the big seas. To lower sail was to be overtaken and swamped. Time and again
they passed boats pounding among the rocks, and once they saw one on the edge of
the breakers about to strike. A little craft behind them, with two men, jibed
over and turned bottom up.
"Wow-watch out, old man!" cried he of the chattering teeth.
Rasmunsen grinned and tightened his aching grip on the sweep. Scores of times
had the send of the sea caught the big square stern of the Alma and thrown her
off from dead before it till the after leach of the spritsail fluttered hollowly,
and each time, and only with all his strength, had he forced her back. His grin
by then had become fixed, and it disturbed the correspondents to look at him.
They roared down past an isolated rock a hundred yards from shore. From its
wave-drenched top a man shrieked wildly, for the instant cutting the storm with
his voice. But the next instant the Alma was by, and the rock growing a black
speck in the troubled froth.
"That settles the Yankee! Where's the sailor?" shouted one of his passengers.
Rasmunsen shot a glance over his shoulder at a black squaresail. He had seen it
leap up out of the gray to windward, and for an hour, off and on, had been
watching it grow. The sailor had evidently repaired damages and was making up for
lost time.
"Look at him come!"
Both passengers stopped chopping ice to watch. Twenty miles of Bennett were
behind them - room and to spare for the sea to toss up its mountains toward the
sky. Sinking and soaring like a storm god, the sailor drove by them. The huge
sail seemed to grip the boat from the crests of the waves, to tear it bodily out
of the water, and fling it crashing and smothering down into the yawning troughs.
"The sea'll never catch him!"
"But he'll r-r-run her nose under!"
Even as they spoke, the black tarpaulin swooped from sight behind a big
comber. The next wave rolled over the spot, and the next, but the boat did not
reappear. The Alma rushed by the place. A little riffraff of oars and boxes was
seen. An arm thrust up and a shaggy head broke, surface a score of yards away.
For a time there was silence. As the end of the lake came in sight, the waves
began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence that the correspondents no
longer chopped ice but flung the water out with buckets. Even this would not do,
and, after a shouted conference with Rasmunsen, they attacked the baggage. Flour,
bacon, beans, blankets, cooking stove, ropes, odds and ends, everything they
could get hands on, flew overboard. The boat acknowledged it at once, taking less
water and rising more buoyantly.
"That'll do!" Rasmunsen called sternly, as they applied themselves to the top
layer of eggs.
"The in-hell it will!" answered the shivering one, savagely. With the
exception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had sacrificed their outfit.
He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box, and began to worry it out from under the
lashing.
"Drop it! Drop it, I say!"
Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of his arm
over the sweep head was taking aim. The correspondent stood up on the thwart,
balancing back and forth, his face twisted with menace and speechless anger.
"My God!"
So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward, into the
bottom of the boat. The Alma, under the divided attention of Rasmunsen, had been
caught by a great mass of water and whirled around. The after leach hollowed, the
sail emptied and jibed, and the boom, sweeping with terrific force across the
boat, carried the angry correspondent overboard with a broken back. Mast and sail
had gone over the side as well. A drenching sea followed, as the boat lost
headway, and Rasmunsen sprang to the bailing bucket.
Several boats hurtled past them in the next half-hour, small boats, boats of
their own size, boats afraid, unable to do aught but run madly on. Then a ten-ton
barge, at imminent risk of destruction, lowered sail to windward and lumbered
down upon them.
"Keep off! Keep off!" Rasmunsen screamed.
But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the remaining
correspondent clambered aboard. Rasmunsen was over the eggs like a cat and in the
bow of the Alma, striving with numb fingers to bend the hauling-lines together.
"Come on!" a red-whiskered man yelled at him.
"I've a thousand dozen eggs here," he shouted back. "Gimme a tow! I'll pay
you!"
"Come on!" they howled in chorus.
A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and leaving the Alma
half swamped. The men cast off, cursing him as they ran up their sail. Rasmunsen
cursed back and fell to bailing. The mast and sail, like a sea anchor, still fast
by the halyards, held the boat head on to wind and sea and gave him a chance to
fight the water out.
Three hours later, numbed, exhausted, blathering like a lunatic, but still
bailing, he went ashore on an ice-strewn beach near Cariboo Crossing. Two men, a
government courier and a half-breed voyageur, dragged him out of the surf, saved
his cargo, and beached the Alma. They were paddling out of the country in a
Peterborough, and gave him shelter for the night in their storm-bound camp. Next
morning they departed, but he elected to stay by his eggs. And thereafter the
name and fame of the man with the thousand dozen eggs began to spread through the
land. Gold-seekers who made in before the freeze-up carried the news of his
coming. Grizzled old-timers of Forty Mile and Circle City, sour doughs with
leathern jaws and bean-calloused stomachs, called up dream memories of chickens
and green things at mention of his name. Dyea and Skaguay took an interest in his
being, and questioned his progress from every man who came over the passes, while
Dawson - golden, omeletless Dawson - fretted and worried, and waylaid every
chance arrival for word of him.
But of this, Rasmunsen knew nothing. The day after the wreck he patched up
the Alma and pulled out. A cruel east wind blew in his teeth from Tagish, but he
got the oars over the side and bucked manfully into it, though half the time he
was drifting backward and chopping ice from the blades. According to the custom
of the country, he was driven ashore at Windy Arm; three times on Tagish saw him
swamped and beached; and Lake Marsh held him at the freeze-up. The Alma was
crushed in the jamming of the floes, but the eggs were intact. These he
back-tripped two miles across the ice to the shore, where he built a cache, which
stood for years after and was pointed out by men who knew.
Half a thousand frozen miles stretched between him and Dawson, and the
waterway was closed. But Rasmunsen, with a peculiar tense look in his face,
struck back up the lakes on foot. What he suffered on that lone trip, with naught
but a single blanket, an axe, and a handful of beans, is not given to ordinary
mortals to know. Only the Arctic adventurer may understand. Suffice that he was
caught in a blizzard on Chilkoot and left two of his toes with the surgeon at
Sheep Camp. Yet he stood on his feet and washed dishes in the scullery of the
Pawona to the Puget Sound, and from there passed coal on a P. S. boat to
San Francisco.
It was a haggard, unkempt man who limped across the shining office floor to
raise a second mortgage from the bank people. His hollow cheeks betrayed
themselves through the scraggly beard, and his eyes seemed to have retired into
deep caverns where they burned with cold fires. His hands were grained from
exposure and hard work, and the nails were rimmed with tight-packed dirt and coal
dust. He spoke vaguely of eggs and ice-packs, winds and tides; but when they
declined to let him have more than a second thousand, his talk became incoherent,
concerning itself chiefly with the price of dogs and dog-food, and such things as
snowshoes and moccasins and winter trails. They let him have fifteen hundred,
which was more than the cottage warranted, and breathed easier when he scrawled
his signature and passed out the door.
Two weeks later he went over Chilkoot with three dog sleds of five dogs each.
One team he drove, the two Indians with him driving the others. At Lake Marsh
they broke out the cache and loaded up. But there was no trail. He was the first
in over the ice, and to him fell the task of packing the snow and hammering away
through the rough river jams. Behind him he often observed a camp-fire smoke
trickling thinly up through the quiet air, and he wondered why the people did not
overtake him. For he was a stranger to the land and did not understand. Nor could
he understand his Indians when they tried to explain. This they conceived to be a
hardship, but when they balked and refused to break camp of mornings, he drove
them to their work at pistol point.
When he slipped through an ice bridge near the White Horse and froze his
foot, tender yet and oversensitive from the previous freezing, the Indians looked
for him to lie up. But he sacrificed a blanket, and, with his foot incased in an
enormous moccasin, big as a water-bucket, continued to take his regular turn with
the front sled. Here was the cruelest work, and they respected him, though on the
side they rapped their foreheads with their knuckles and significantly shook
their heads. One night they tried to run away, but the zip-zip of his bullets in
the snow brought them back, snarling but convinced. Whereupon, being only savage
Chilkat men, they put their heads together to kill him; but he slept like a cat,
and, waking or sleeping, the chance never came. Often they tried to tell him the
import of the smoke wreath in the rear, but he could not comprehend and grew
suspicious of them. And when they sulked or shirked, he was quick to let drive at
them between the eyes, and quick to cool their heated souls with sight of his
ready revolver.
And so it went - with mutinous men, wild dogs, and a trail that broke the
heart. He fought the men to stay with him, fought the dogs to keep them away from
the eggs, fought the ice, the cold, and the pain of his foot, which would not
heal. As fast as the young tissue renewed, it was bitten and seared by the frost,
so that a running sore developed, into which he could almost shove his fist.
In the mornings, when he first put his weight upon it, his head went dizzy, and
he was near to fainting from the pain; but later on in the day it usually grew
numb, to recommence when he crawled into his blankets and tried to sleep. Yet he,
who had been a clerk and sat at a desk all his days, toiled till the Indians were
exhausted, and even outworked the dogs. How hard he worked, how much he suffered,
he did not know. Being a man of the one idea, now that the idea had come, it
mastered him. In the foreground of his consciousness was Dawson, in the
background his thousand dozen eggs, and midway between the two his ego fluttered,
striving alway to draw them together to a glittering golden point. This golden
point was the five thousand dollars, the consummation of the idea and the point
of departure for whatever new idea might present itself. For the rest, he was
a mere automaton. He was unaware of other things, seeing them as through a glass
darkly, and giving them no thought. The work of his hands he did with
machine-like wisdom; likewise the work of his head. So the look on his face grew
very tense, till even the Indians were afraid of it, and marvelled at the strange
white man who had made them slaves and forced them to toil with such foolishness.
Then came a snap on Lake Le Barge, when the cold of outer space smote the tip
of the planet, and the frost ranged sixty and odd degrees below zero. Here,
laboring with open mouth that he might breathe more freely, he chilled his lungs,
and for the rest of the trip he was troubled with a dry, hacking cough,
especially irritable in smoke of camp or under stress of undue exertion. On the
Thirty Mile river he found much open water, spanned by precarious ice bridges and
fringed with narrow rim ice, tricky and uncertain. The rim ice was impossible to
reckon on, and he dared it without reckoning, falling back on his revolver when
his drivers demurred. But on the ice bridges, covered with snow though they were,
precautions could be taken. These they crossed on their snowshoes, with long
poles, held crosswise in their hands, to which to cling in case of accident. Once
over, the dogs were called to follow. And on such a bridge, where the absence of
the centre ice was masked by the snow, one of the Indians met his end. He went
through as quickly and neatly as a knife through thin cream, and the current
swept him from view down under the stream ice.
That night his mate fled away through the pale moonlight, Rasmunsen futilely
puncturing the silence with his revolver - a thing that he handled with more
celerity than cleverness. Thirty-six hours later the Indian made a police camp on
the Big Salmon. "Um - um - um funny mans - what you call? - top um head all
loose," the interpreter explained to the puzzled captain. "Eh ? Yep, crazy, much
crazy mans. Eggs, eggs, all a time eggs - savvy? Come bime-by."
It was several days before Rasmunsen arrived, the three sleds lashed
together, and all the dogs in a single team. It was awkward, and where the going
was bad he was compelled to back-trip it sled by sled, though he managed most of
the time, through herculean efforts, to bring all along on the one haul. He did
not seem moved when the captain of police told him his man was hitting the high
places for Dawson, and was by that time, probably, halfway between Selkirk and
Stewart. Nor did he appear interested when informed that the police had broken
the trail as far as Pelly; for he had attained to a fatalistic acceptance of all
natural dispensations, good or ill. But when they told him that Dawson was in the
bitter clutch of famine, he smiled, threw the harness on his dogs, and pulled
out.
But it was at his next halt that the mystery of the smoke was explained. With
the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken to Pelly, there was no longer
any need for the smoke wreath to linger in his wake; and Rasmunsen, crouching
over his lonely fire, saw a motley string of sleds go by. First came the courier
and the half-breed who had hauled him out from Bennett; then mail-carriers for
Circle City, two sleds of them, and a mixed following of ingoing Klondikers. Dogs
and men were fresh and fat, while Rasmunsen and his brutes were jaded and worn
down to the skin and bone. They of the smoke wreath had travelled one day in
three, resting and reserving their strength for their dash to come when broken
trail was met with; while each day he had plunged and floundered forward,
breaking the spirit of his dogs and, robbing them of their mettle.
As for himself, he was unbreakable. They thanked him kindly for his efforts
in their behalf, those fat, fresh men, - thanked him kindly, with broad grins and
ribald laughter; and now, when he understood, he made no answer. Nor did he
cherish silent bitterness. It was immaterial. The idea - the fact behind the
idea - was not changed. Here he was and his thousand dozen; there was Dawson; the
problem was unaltered.
At the Little Salmon, being short of dog food, the dogs got into his grub,
and from there to Selkirk he lived on beans - coarse, brown beans, big beans,
grossly nutritive, which griped his stomach and doubled him up at two-hour
intervals. But the Factor at Selkirk had a notice on the door of the Post to the
effect that no steamer had been up the Yukon for two years, and in consequence
grub was beyond price. He offered to swap flour, however, at the rate of a cupful
for each egg, but Rasmunsen shook his head and hit the trail. Below the Post he
managed to buy frozen horse hide for the dogs, the horses having been slain by
the Chilkat cattle men, and the scraps and offal preserved by the Indians. He
tackled the hide himself, but the hair worked into the bean sores of his mouth,
and was beyond endurance.
Here at Selkirk, he met the forerunners of the hungry exodus of Dawson, and
from there on they crept over the trail, a dismal throng. "No grub!" was the song
they sang. "No grub, and had to go." "Every- body holding candles for a rise in
the spring." "Flour dollar'n a half a pound, and no sellers."
"Eggs?" one of them answered. "Dollar apiece, but they ain't none." Rasmunsen
made a rapid calculation. "Twelve thousand dollars," he said aloud.
"Hey?" the man asked.
"Nothing," he answered, and mushed the dogs along.
When he arrived at Stewart River, seventy miles from Dawson, five of his dogs
were gone, and the remainder were falling in the traces. He, also, was in the
traces, hauling with what little strength was left in him. Even then he was
barely crawling along ten miles a day. His cheekbones and nose, frost-bitten
again and again, were turned bloody-black and hideous. The thumb, which was
separated from the fingers by the gee-pole, had likewise been nipped and gave him
great pain. The monstrous moccasin still incased his foot, and strange pains were
beginning to rack the leg. At Sixty Mile, the last beans, which he had been
rationing for some time, were finished; yet he steadfastly refused to touch the
eggs. He could not reconcile his mind to the legitimacy of it, and staggered and
fell along the way to Indian River. Here a fresh-killed moose and an open-handed
old-timer gave him and his dogs new strength, and at Ainslie's he felt repaid for
it all when a stampede, ripe from Dawson in five hours, was sure he could get a
dollar and a quarter for every egg he possessed.
He came up the steep bank by the Dawson barracks with fluttering heart and
shaking knees. The dogs were so weak that he was forced to rest them, and,
waiting, he leaned limply against the gee-pole. A man, an eminently
decorous-looking man, came sauntering by in a great bearskin coat. He glanced at
Rasmunsen curiously, then stopped and ran a speculative eye over the dogs and the
three lashed sleds.
"What you got?" he asked.
"Eggs," Rasmunsen answered huskily, hardly able to pitch his voice above
a whisper.
"Eggs! Whoopee! Whoopee!" He sprang up into the air, gyrated madly, and
finished with half a dozen war steps. "You don't say - all of 'em?"
"All of 'em."
"Say, you must be the Egg Man." He walked around and viewed Rasmunsen from
the other side. "Come, now, ain't you the Egg Man?" Rasmunsen didn't know, but
supposed he was, and the man sobered down a bit.
"What d'ye expect to get for'em?" he asked cautiously.
Rasmunsen became audacious. "Dollar'n a half," he said.
"Done ! " the man came back promptly. "Gimme a dozen. "
"I - I mean a dollar'n a half apiece," Rasmunsen hesitatingly explained.
"Sure. I heard you. Make it two dozen. Here's the dust." The man pulled out a
healthy gold sack the size of a small sausage and knocked it negligently against
the gee-pole. Rasmunsen felt a strange trembling in the pit of his stomach, a
tickling of the nostrils, and an almost overwhelming desire to sit down and cry.
But a curious, wide-eyed crowd was beginning to collect, and man after man was
calling out for eggs. He was without scales, but the man with the bearskin coat
fetched a pair and obligingly weighed in the dust while Rasmunsen passed out the
goods. Soon there was a pushing and shoving and shouldering, and a great clamor.
Everybody wanted to buy and to be served first. And as the excitement grew,
Rasmunsen cooled down. This would never do. There must be something behind the
fact of their buying so eagerly. It would be wiser if he rested first and sized
up the market. Perhaps eggs were worth two dollars apiece. Anyway, whenever he
wished to sell, he was sure of a dollar and a half. "Stop!" he cried, when a
couple of hundred had been sold.
"No more now. I'm played out. I've got to get a cabin, and then you can come
and see me."
A groan went up at this, but the man with the bearskin coat approved.
Twenty-four of the frozen eggs went rattling in his capacious pockets and he
didn't care whether the rest of the town ate or not. Besides, he could see
Rasmunsen was on his last legs.
"There's a cabin right around the second corner from the Monte Carlo," he
told him - "the one with the sody-bottle window. It ain't mine, but I've got
charge of it. Rents for ten a day and cheap for the money. You move right in, and
I'll see you later. Don't forget the sody-bottle window."
"Tra-la-loo!" he called back a moment later. "I'm goin' up the hill to eat
eggs and dream of home."
On his way to the cabin, Rasmunsen recollected he was hungry and bought a
small supply of provisions at the N. A. T. & T. store - also a beefsteak at the
butcher shop and dried salmon for the dogs. He found the cabin without difficulty
and left the dogs in the harness while he started the fire and got the coffee
under way.
"A dollar'n a half apiece - one thousand dozen - eighteen thousand dollars!"
He kept muttering it to himself, over and over, as he went about his work.
As he flopped the steak into the frying-pan the door opened. He turned. It
was the man with the bearskin coat. He seemed to come in with determination, as
though bound on some explicit errand, but as he looked at Rasmunsen an expression
of perplexity came into his face.
"I say - now I say -" he began, then halted.
Rasmunsen wondered if he wanted the rent.
"I say, damn it, you know, them eggs is bad."
Rasmunsen staggered. He felt as though some one had struck him an astounding
blow between the eyes. The walls of the cabin reeled and tilted up. He put out
his hand to steady himself and rested it on the stove. The sharp pain and the
smell of the burning flesh brought him back to himself.
"I see," he said slowly, fumbling in his pocket for the sack. "You want your
money back." "It ain't the money," the man said, "but hadn't you got any eggs -
good ?" Rasmunsen shook his head. "You'd better take the money."
But the man refused and backed away. "I'll come back," he said, "when you've
taken stock, and get what's comin'."
Rasmunsen rolled the chopping-block into the cabin and carried in the eggs.
He went about it quite calmly. He took up the hand-axe, and, one by one, chopped
the eggs in half. These halves he examined carefully and let fall to the floor.
At first he sampled from the different cases, then deliberately emptied one case
at a time. The heap on the floor grew larger. The coffee boiled over and the
smoke of the burning beefsteak filled the cabin. He chopped steadfastly and
monotonously till the last case was finished.
Somebody knocked at the door, knocked again, and let himself in.
"What a mess!" he remarked, as he paused and surveyed the scene.
The severed eggs were beginning to thaw in the heat of the stove, and a
miserable odor was growing stronger.
"Must a happened on the steamer," he suggested.
Rasmunsen looked at him long and blankly.
"I'm Murray, Big Jim Murray, everybody knows me," the man volunteered. "I'm
just hearin' your eggs is rotten, and I'm offerin' you two hundred for the batch.
They ain't good as salmon, but still they're fair scoffin's for dogs."
Rasmunsen seemed turned to stone. He did not move. "You go to hell," he said
passionlessly.
"Now just consider. I pride myself it's a decent price for a mess like that,
and it's better'n nothin'. Two hundred. What you say ?"
"You go to hell," Rasmunsen repeated softly, "and get out of here."
Murray gaped with a great awe, then went out carefully, backward, with his
eyes fixed on the other's face.
Rasmunsen followed him out and turned the dogs loose. He threw them all the
salmon he had bought, and coiled a sled-lashing up in his hand. Then he reentered
the cabin and drew the latch in after him. The smoke from the cindered steak made
his eyes smart. He stood on the bunk, passed the lashing over the ridge-pole, and
measured the swingoff with his eye. It did not seem to satisfy, for he put the
stool on the bunk and climbed upon the stool. He drove a noose in the end of the
lashing and slipped his head through. The other end he made fast. Then he kicked
the stool out from under.
1903
_________________________________________________________________________________
Используются технологии
uCoz