Smoke Bellew

“Hello,” said Sanderson, as they re-entered. “I thought I’d seen the last of you.”

“Now what is your lowest figure?” Smoke asked.

“Twenty thousand.”

“I’ll give you ten thousand.”

“All right, I’ll sell at that figure. It’s all I wanted in the first place. But when will you pay the dust over?”

“To-morrow, at the Northwest Bank. But there are two other things I want for that ten thousand. In the first place, when you receive your money you pull down the river to Forty Mile and stay there the rest of the winter.”

“That’s easy. What else?”

“I’m going to pay you twenty-five thousand, and you rebate me fifteen of it.”

“I’m agreeable.” Sanderson turned to Shorty. “Folks said I was a fool when I come over here an’ town-sited,” he jeered. “Well, I’m a ten thousand dollar fool, ain’t I?”

“The Klondike’s sure full of fools,” was all Shorty could retort, “an’ when they’s so many of ‘em some has to be lucky, don’t they?”

Next morning the legal transfer of Dwight Sanderson’s town-site was made – “henceforth to be known as the town-site of Tra-Lee,” Smoke incorporated in the deed. Also, at the Northwest Bank, twenty-five thousand of Smoke’s gold was weighed out by the cashier, while half a dozen casual onlookers noted the weighing, the amount, and the recipient.

In a mining-camp all men are suspicious. Any untoward act of any man is likely to be the cue to a secret gold strike, whether the untoward act be no more than a hunting trip for moose or a stroll after dark to observe the aurora borealis. And when it became known that so prominent a figure as Smoke Bellew had paid twenty-five thousand dollars to old Dwight Sanderson, Dawson wanted to know what he had paid it for. What had Dwight Sanderson, starving on his abandoned town-site, ever owned that was worth twenty-five thousand? In lieu of an answer, Dawson was justified in keeping Smoke in feverish contemplation.

By mid-afternoon it was common knowledge that several score of men had made up light stampeding-packs and cached them in the convenient saloons along Main Street. Wherever Smoke moved, he was the observed of many eyes. And as proof that he was taken seriously, not one man of the many of his acquaintance had the effrontery to ask him about his deal with Dwight Sanderson. On the other hand, no one mentioned eggs to Smoke. Shorty was under similar surveillance and delicacy of friendliness.

“Makes me feel like I’d killed somebody, or had smallpox, the way they watch me an’ seem afraid to speak,” Shorty confessed, when he chanced to meet Smoke in front of the Elkhorn. “Look at Bill Saltman there acrost the way – just dyin’ to look, an’ keepin’ his eyes down the street all the time. Wouldn’t think he’d knowed you an’ me existed, to look at him. But I bet you the drinks, Smoke, if you an’ me flop around the corner quick, like we was goin’ somewheres, an’ then turn back from around the next corner, that we run into him a-hikin’ hell-bent.”

They tried the trick, and, doubling back around the second corner, encountered Saltman swinging a long trail-stride in pursuit.

“Hello, Bill,” Smoke greeted. “Which way?”

“Hello. Just a-strollin’,” Saltman answered, “just a-strollin’. Weather’s fine, ain’t it?”

“Huh!” Shorty jeered. “If you call that strollin’, what might you walk real fast at?”

When Shorty fed the dogs that evening, he was keenly conscious that from the encircling darkness a dozen pairs of eyes were boring in upon him. And when he stick-tied the dogs, instead of letting them forage free through the night, he knew that he had administered another jolt to the nervousness of Dawson.

According to program, Smoke ate supper downtown and then proceeded to enjoy himself. Wherever he appeared, he was the center of interest, and he purposely made the rounds. Saloons filled up after his entrance and emptied following upon his departure. If he bought a stack of chips at a sleepy roulette-table, inside five minutes a dozen players were around him. He avenged himself, in a small way, on Lucille Arral, by getting up and sauntering out of the Opera House just as she came on to sing her most popular song. In three minutes two-thirds of her audience had vanished after him.

At one in the morning he walked along an unusually populous Main Street and took the turning that led up the hill to his cabin. And when he paused on the ascent, he could hear behind him the crunch of moccasins in the snow.

For an hour the cabin was in darkness, then he lighted a candle, and, after a delay sufficient for a man to dress in, he and Shorty opened the door and began harnessing the dogs. As the light from the cabin flared out upon them and their work, a soft whistle went up from not far away. This whistle was repeated down the hill.

“Listen to it,” Smoke chuckled. “They’ve relayed on us and are passing the word down to town. I’ll bet you there are forty men right now rolling out of their blankets and climbing into their pants.”

“Ain’t folks fools,” Shorty giggled back. “Say, Smoke, they ain’t nothin’ in hard graft. A geezer that’d work his hands these days is a – well, a geezer. The world’s sure bustin’ full an’ dribblin’ over the edges with fools a-honin’ to be separated from their dust. An’ before we start down the hill I want to announce, if you’re still agreeable, that I come in half on this deal.”

The sled was lightly loaded with a sleeping- and a grub-outfit. A small coil of steel cable protruded inconspicuously from underneath a grub-sack, while a crowbar lay half hidden along the bottom of the sled next to the lashings.

Shorty fondled the cable with a swift-passing mitten, and gave a last affectionate touch to the crowbar. “Huh!” he whispered. “I’d sure do some tall thinking myself if I seen them objects on a sled on a dark night.”

They drove the dogs down the hill with cautious silence, and when, emerged on the flat, they turned the team north along Main Street toward the sawmill and directly away from the business part of town, they observed even greater caution. They had seen no one, yet when this change of direction was initiated, out of the dim starlit darkness behind arose a whistle. Past the sawmill and the hospital, at lively speed, they went for a quarter of a mile. Then they turned about and headed back over the ground they had just covered. At the end of the first hundred yards they barely missed colliding with five men racing along at a quick dog-trot. All were slightly stooped to the weight of stampeding-packs. One of them stopped Smoke’s lead-dog, and the rest clustered around.

“Seen a sled goin’ the other way?” was asked.

“Nope,” Smoke answered. “Is that you, Bill?”

“Well, I’ll be danged!” Bill Saltman ejaculated in honest surprise. “If it ain’t Smoke!”

“What are you doing out this time of night?” Smoke inquired. “Strolling?”

Before Bill Saltman could make reply, two running men joined the group. These were followed by several more, while the crunch of feet on the snow heralded the imminent arrival of many others.

“Who are your friends?” Smoke asked. “Where’s the stampede?”

Saltman, lighting his pipe, which was impossible for him to enjoy with lungs panting from the run, did not reply. The ruse of the match was too obviously for the purpose of seeing the sled to be misunderstood, and Smoke noted every pair of eyes focus on the coil of cable and the crowbar. Then the match went out.

“Just heard a rumor, that’s all, just a rumor,” Saltman mumbled with ponderous secretiveness.

“You might let Shorty and me in on it,” Smoke urged.

Somebody snickered sarcastically in the background.

“Where are YOU bound?” Saltman demanded.

“And who are you?” Smoke countered. “Committee of safety?”

“Just interested, just interested,” Saltman said.

“You bet your sweet life we’re interested,” another voice spoke up out of the darkness.

“Say,” Shorty put in, “I wonder who’s feelin’ the foolishest?”

Everybody laughed nervously.

“Come on, Shorty; we’ll be getting along,” Smoke said, mushing the dogs.

The crowd formed in behind and followed.

“Say, ain’t you-all made a mistake?” Shorty gibed. “When we met you you was goin’, an’ now you’re comin’ without bein’ anywheres. Have you lost your tag?”

“You go to the devil,” was Saltman’s courtesy. “We go and come just as we danged feel like. We don’t travel with tags.”

And the sled, with Smoke in the lead and Shorty at the pole, went on down Main Street escorted by three score men, each of whom, on his back, bore a stampeding-pack. It was three in the morning, and only the all-night rounders saw the procession and were able to tell Dawson about it next day.

Half an hour later, the hill was climbed and the dogs unharnessed at the cabin door, the sixty stampeders grimly attendant.

“Good-night, fellows,” Smoke called, as he closed the door.

In five minutes the candle was put out, but before half an hour had passed Smoke and Shorty emerged softly, and without lights began harnessing the dogs.

“Hello, Smoke!” Saltman said, stepping near enough for them to see the loom of his form.

“Can’t shake you, Bill, I see,” Smoke replied cheerfully. “Where’re your friends?”

“Gone to have a drink. They left me to keep an eye on you, and keep it I will. What’s in the wind anyway, Smoke? You can’t shake us, so you might as well let us in. We’re all your friends. You know that.”

“There are times when you can let your friends in,” Smoke evaded, “and times when you can’t. And, Bill, this is one of the times when we can’t. You’d better go to bed. Good-night.”

“Ain’t goin’ to be no good-night, Smoke. You don’t know us. We’re woodticks.”

Smoke sighed. “Well, Bill, if you WILL have your will, I guess you’ll have to have it. Come on, Shorty, we can’t fool around any longer.”

Saltman emitted a shrill whistle as the sled started, and swung in behind. From down the hill and across the flat came the answering whistles of the relays. Shorty was at the gee-pole, and Smoke and Saltman walked side by side.

“Look here, Bill,” Smoke said. “I’ll make you a proposition. Do you want to come in alone on this?”

Saltman did not hesitate. “An’ throw the gang down? No, sir. We’ll all come in.”

“You first, then,” Smoke exclaimed, lurching into a clinch and tipping the other into deep snow beside the trail.

Shorty hawed the dogs and swung the team to the south on the trail that led among the scattered cabins on the rolling slopes to the rear of Dawson. Smoke and Saltman, locked together, rolled in the snow. Smoke considered himself in gilt-edged condition, but Saltman outweighed him by fifty pounds of clean, trail-hardened muscle and repeatedly mastered him. Time and time again he got Smoke on his back, and Smoke lay complacently and rested. But each time Saltman attempted to get off him and get away, Smoke reached out a detaining, tripping hand that brought about a new clinch and wrestle.

“You can go some,” Saltman acknowledged, panting at the end of ten minutes, as he sat astride Smoke’s chest. “But I down you every time.”

“And I hold you every time,” Smoke panted back. “That’s what I’m here for, just to hold you. Where do you think Shorty’s getting to all this time?”

Saltman made a wild effort to go clear, and all but succeeded. Smoke gripped his ankle and threw him in a headlong tumble. From down the hill came anxious questioning whistles. Saltman sat up and whistled a shrill answer, and was grappled by Smoke, who rolled him face upward and sat astride his chest, his knees resting on Saltman’s biceps, his hands on Saltman’s shoulders and holding him down. And in this position the stampeders found them. Smoke laughed and got up.

“Well, good-night, fellows,” he said, and started down the hill, with sixty exasperated and grimly determined stampeders at his heels.

He turned north past the sawmill and the hospital and took the river trail along the precipitous bluffs at the base of Moosehide Mountain. Circling the Indian village, he held on to the mouth of Moose Creek, then turned and faced his pursuers.

“You make me tired,” he said, with a good imitation of a snarl.

“Hope we ain’t a-forcin’ you,” Saltman murmured politely.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Smoke snarled with an even better imitation, as he passed among them on the back-trail to Dawson. Twice he attempted to cross the trailless icejams of the river, still resolutely followed, and both times he gave up and returned to the Dawson shore. Straight down Main Street he trudged, crossing the ice of Klondike River to Klondike City and again retracing to Dawson. At eight o’clock, as gray dawn began to show, he led his weary gang to Slavovitch’s restaurant, where tables were at a premium for breakfast.

“Good-night fellows,” he said, as he paid his reckoning.

And again he said good-night, as he took the climb of the hill. In the clear light of day they did not follow him, contenting themselves with watching him up the hill to his cabin.

For two days Smoke lingered about town, continually under vigilant espionage. Shorty, with the sled and dogs, had disappeared. Neither travelers up and down the Yukon, nor from Bonanza, Eldorado, nor the Klondike, had seen him. Remained only Smoke, who, soon or late, was certain to try to connect with his missing partner; and upon Smoke everybody’s attention was centered. On the second night he did not leave his cabin, putting out the lamp at nine in the evening and setting the alarm for two next morning. The watch outside heard the alarm go off, so that when, half an hour later, he emerged from the cabin, he found waiting for him a band, not of sixty men, but of at least three hundred. A flaming aurora borealis lighted the scene, and, thus hugely escorted, he walked down to town and entered the Elkhorn. The place was immediately packed and jammed by an anxious and irritated multitude that bought drinks, and for four weary hours watched Smoke play cribbage with his old friend Breck. Shortly after six in the morning, with an expression on his face of commingled hatred and gloom, seeing no one, recognizing no one, Smoke left the Elkhorn and went up Main Street, behind him the three hundred, formed in disorderly ranks, chanting: “Hay-foot! Straw-foot! Hep! Hep! Hep!”

“Good-night, fellows,” he said bitterly, at the edge of the Yukon bank where the winter trail dipped down. “I’m going to get breakfast and then go to bed.”

The three hundred shouted that they were with him, and followed him out upon the frozen river on the direct path he took for Tra-Lee. At seven in the morning he led his stampeding cohort up the zigzag trail, across the face of the slide, that led to Dwight Sanderson’s cabin. The light of a candle showed through the parchment-paper window, and smoke curled from the chimney. Shorty threw open the door.

“Come on in, Smoke,” he greeted. “Breakfast’s ready. Who-all are your friends?”

Smoke turned about on the threshold. “Well, good-night, you fellows. Hope you enjoyed your pasear!”

“Hold on a moment, Smoke,” Bill Saltman cried, his voice keen with disappointment. “Want to talk with you a moment.”

“Fire away,” Smoke answered genially.

“What’d you pay old Sanderson twenty-five thousan’ for? Will you answer that?”

“Bill, you give me a pain,” was Smoke’s reply. “I came over here for a country residence, so to say, and here are you and a gang trying to cross-examine me when I’m looking for peace an’ quietness an’ breakfast. What’s a country residence good for, except for peace and quietness?”

“You ain’t answered the question,” Bill Saltman came back with rigid logic.

“And I’m not going to, Bill. That affair is peculiarly a personal affair between Dwight Sanderson and me. Any other question?”

“How about that crowbar an’ steel cable then, what you had on your sled the other night?”

“It’s none of your blessed and ruddy business, Bill. Though if Shorty here wants to tell you about it, he can.”

“Sure!” Shorty cried, springing eagerly into the breach. His mouth opened, then he faltered and turned to his partner. “Smoke, confidentially, just between you an’ me, I don’t think it IS any of their darn business. Come on in. The life’s gettin’ boiled outa that coffee.”

The door closed and the three hundred sagged into forlorn and grumbling groups.

“Say, Saltman,” one man said, “I thought you was goin’ to lead us to it.”

“Not on your life,” Saltman answered crustily. “I said Smoke would lead us to it.”

“An’ this is it?”

“You know as much about it as me, an’ we all know Smoke’s got something salted down somewheres. Or else for what did he pay Sanderson the twenty-five thousand? Not for this mangy town-site, that’s sure an’ certain.”

A chorus of cries affirmed Saltman’s judgment.

“Well, what are we goin’ to do now?” someone queried dolefully.

“Me for one for breakfast,” Wild Water Charley said cheerfully. “You led us up a blind alley this time, Bill.”

“I tell you I didn’t,” Saltman objected. “Smoke led us. An’ just the same, what about them twenty-five thousand?”

At half-past eight, when daylight had grown strong, Shorty carefully opened the door and peered out. “Shucks,” he exclaimed. “They-all’s hiked back to Dawson. I thought they was goin’ to camp here.”

“Don’t worry; they’ll come sneaking back,” Smoke reassured him. “If I don’t miss my guess you’ll see half Dawson over here before we’re done with it. Now jump in and lend me a hand. We’ve got work to do.”

“Aw, for Heaven’s sake put me on,” Shorty complained, when, at the end of an hour, he surveyed the result of their toil – a windlass in the corner of the cabin, with an endless rope that ran around double logrollers.

Smoke turned it with a minimum of effort, and the rope slipped and creaked. “Now, Shorty, you go outside and tell me what it sounds like.”

Shorty, listening at the closed door, heard all the sounds of a windlass hoisting a load, and caught himself unconsciously attempting to estimate the depth of shaft out of which this load was being hoisted. Next came a pause, and in his mind’s eye he saw the bucket swinging short to the windlass. Then he heard the quick lower-away and the dull sound as of the bucket coming to abrupt rest on the edge of the shaft. He threw open the door, beaming.

“I got you,” he cried. “I almost fell for it myself. What next?”

The next was the dragging into the cabin of a dozen sled-loads of rock. And through an exceedingly busy day there were many other nexts.

“Now you run the dogs over to Dawson this evening,” Smoke instructed, when supper was finished. “Leave them with Breck. He’ll take care of them. They’ll be watching what you do, so get Breck to go to the A. C. Company and buy up all the blasting-powder – there’s only several hundred pounds in stock. And have Breck order half a dozen hard-rock drills from the blacksmith. Breck’s a quartz-man, and he’ll give the blacksmith a rough idea of what he wants made. And give Breck these location descriptions, so that he can record them at the gold commissioner’s to-morrow. And finally, at ten o’clock, you be on Main Street listening. Mind you, I don’t want them to be too loud. Dawson must just hear them and no more than hear them. I’ll let off three, of different quantities, and you note which is more nearly the right thing.”

At ten that night Shorty, strolling down Main Street, aware of many curious eyes, his ears keyed tensely, heard a faint and distant explosion. Thirty seconds later there was a second, sufficiently loud to attract the attention of others on the street. Then came a third, so violent that it rattled the windows and brought the inhabitants into the street.

“Shook ‘em up beautiful,” Shorty proclaimed breathlessly, an hour afterward, when he arrived at the cabin on Tra-Lee. He gripped Smoke’s hand. “You should a-saw ‘em. Ever kick over a ant-hole? Dawson’s just like that. Main Street was crawlin’ an’ hummin’ when I pulled my freight. You won’t see Tra-Lee to-morrow for folks. An’ if they ain’t some a-sneakin’ acrost right now I don’t know minin’ nature, that’s all.”

Smoke grinned, stepped to the fake windlass, and gave it a couple of creaking turns. Shorty pulled out the moss-chinking from between the logs so as to make peep-holes on every side of the cabin. Then he blew out the candle.

“Now,” he whispered at the end of half an hour.

Smoke turned the windlass slowly, paused after several minutes, caught up a galvanized bucket filled with earth and struck it with slide and scrape and grind against the heap of rocks they had hauled in. Then he lighted a cigarette, shielding the flame of the match in his hands.

“They’s three of ‘em,” Shorty whispered. “You oughta saw ‘em. Say, when you made that bucket-dump noise they was fair quiverin’. They’s one at the window now tryin’ to peek in.”

Smoke glowed his cigarette, and glanced at his watch.

“We’ve got to do this thing regularly,” he breathed. “We’ll haul up a bucket every fifteen minutes. And in the meantime – ”

Through triple thicknesses of sacking, he struck a cold-chisel on the face of a rock.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” Shorty moaned with delight. He crept over noiselessly from the peep-hole. “They’ve got their heads together, an’ I can almost see ‘em talkin’.”

And from then until four in the morning, at fifteen-minute intervals, the seeming of a bucket was hoisted on the windlass that creaked and ran around on itself and hoisted nothing. Then their visitors departed, and Smoke and Shorty went to bed.

After daylight, Shorty examined the moccasin-marks. “Big Bill Saltman was one of them,” he concluded. “Look at the size of it.”

Smoke looked out over the river. “Get ready for visitors. There are two crossing the ice now.”

“Huh! Wait till Breck files that string of claims at nine o’clock. There’ll be two thousand crossing over.”

“And every mother’s son of them yammering ‘mother-lode,’” Smoke laughed. “‘The source of the Klondike placers found at last.’”

Shorty, who had clambered to the top of a steep shoulder of rock, gazed with the eye of a connoisseur at the strip they had staked.

“It sure looks like a true fissure vein,” he said. “A expert could almost trace the lines of it under the snow. It’d fool anybody. The slide fills the front of it an’ see them outcrops? Look like the real thing, only they ain’t.”

When the two men, crossing the river, climbed the zigzag trail up the slide, they found a closed cabin. Bill Saltman, who led the way, went softly to the door, listened, then beckoned Wild Water Charley up to him. From inside came the creak and whine of a windlass bearing a heavy load. They waited at the final pause, then heard the lower-away and the impact of a bucket on rock. Four times, in the next hour, they heard the thing repeated. Then Wild Water knocked on the door. From inside came low furtive noises, then silences, and more furtive noises, and at the end of five minutes Smoke, breathing heavily, opened the door an inch and peered out. They saw on his face and shirt powdered rock-fragments. His greeting was suspiciously genial.

“Wait a minute,” he added, “and I’ll be with you.”

Pulling on his mittens, he slipped through the door and confronted the visitors outside in the snow. Their quick eyes noted his shirt, across the shoulders, discolored and powdery, and the knees of his overalls that showed signs of dirt brushed hastily but not quite thoroughly away.

“Rather early for a call,” he observed. “What brings you across the river? Going hunting?”

“We’re on, Smoke,” Wild Water said confidentially. “An’ you’d just as well come through. You’ve got something here.”

“If you’re looking for eggs – ” Smoke began.

“Aw, forget it. We mean business.”

“You mean you want to buy lots, eh?” Smoke rattled on swiftly. “There’s some dandy building sites here. But, you see, we can’t sell yet. We haven’t had the town surveyed. Come around next week, Wild Water, and for peace and quietness, I’ll show you something swell, if you’re anxious to live over here. Next week, sure, it will be surveyed. Good-by. Sorry I can’t ask you inside, but Shorty – well, you know him. He’s peculiar. He says he came over for peace and quietness, and he’s asleep now. I wouldn’t wake him for the world.”

As Smoke talked he shook their hands warmly in farewell. Still talking and shaking their hands, he stepped inside and closed the door.

They looked at each other and nodded significantly.

“See the knees of his pants?” Saltman whispered hoarsely.