Thrice Armed

"Sit down again," he said. "I begin to understand how it is with you. Still, you can't afford to do the thing you want to. It quite often happens that way."

"I fancy that what I can't afford is to remain on board the Shasta," said Jimmy dryly.

"Sit down," said Jordan; "we'll talk out this thing. Now, why do you want to go up there?"

Jimmy did as he was bidden, though there was a significant gleam in his eyes. "Well," he said, "perhaps it's your due that I should tell you. For one thing, because I feel that I must. I'm not sure you'll understand me, but I feel it's what I was made for. There are half-frozen swamps to be crossed, leagues of forest, cañons, melting snow to be floundered through. That kind of thing gets hold of some of us. I feel I have to go. Secondly, there seems to be gold up there. I want the money."

Jordan noisily thrust back his chair, and then took up a pen and, apparently without recognizing what he was doing, snapped it across.

"Stop right there! I can't stand too much – and there's Eleanor," he said, and broke into a harsh laugh as he glanced down at the pen. "In one way, it's significant that I've broken the – thing."

He said nothing for the next moment or two, and appeared to be putting a restraint upon himself, but there was longing in his voice when he went on again. "Lord! I guess it's in us. When we'd only the wagons and axes we worried right across the continent. There was always something that drew us to the place we didn't know. The harder the way was the more the longing grew. I was up in the Selkirks on the gold-trail once, and I'm never going to work something that life left behind right out of me."

"Come!" said Jimmy simply.

The veins rose swollen on Jordan's forehead, but he struck the table with a clenched fist and gazed at his comrade with hot anger in his eyes.

"Will you stop, you – fool?" he said. "Don't you know how I want to go? Stop, or I'll throw you out right now!"

He sat still, looking at Jimmy for perhaps half a minute, and each was conscious of the same longing in his heart and the same tingling of his blood, for that is a country where men still feel the lust of the primeval conflict and the allurements of the wilderness. Then Jordan appeared to recover himself.

"I guess we'll be ashamed of this afterwards, but I have got to talk," he said. "Anyway, we can't all get right in with the axe and shovel. My work's here, and I've just sense enough to stay with it. Besides, it's a sure thing that everybody who goes north won't rake out money. Now, you want the snow and the cañons? You can't have them; but I'll give you drift-ice, blinding fog, reefs and breaking surf instead. You want money? Well, we'll try to meet your views on that point, and by and by we'll double what you're getting."

Jimmy gazed at him in evident bewilderment, and his comrade waved his hand.

"You're going to take the first of the crowd to St. Michael's in the Shasta, and the man who can run a 250-ton boat there and back again will have all the excitement he has any use for. Half the reefs aren't charted, the tides run any way, and when the gale drops, the fog shuts down thicker than a blanket. You can't pound a rock-drill or swing the shovel, but you can hold a steamer's wheel. Get hold of that, and try to understand it. It's the whole point of the thing."

He stopped a moment as if for breath, and then went on again, hurling out his words incisively while his eyes snapped.

"It's St. Michaels now, but by and by they'll find a way in from the Pan-handle or over British soil. The C.P.R. will put big boats on, and they'll run everything that will float up from 'Frisco and Portland; but we'll be in first and take hold with the Shasta. The men you're going to carry would go in a canoe. She has built up the coast trade enough to make it easy for us to raise the money to buy another boat – I'm hanging right on to that trade too – and I know of a handy steamer. I'll get an option on her now. She'll be worth considerably more in a week or two. You stand by the Shasta Company, and do your part in the rush that's coming in the way you know, and you'll rake in more money than you ever would mining. We'll put a thousand-ton boat on before long if you play our hand well. I want your answer right off: are you hanging on to us?"

"Yes," said Jimmy quietly. "After all, your point of view is no doubt the right one. If the boat were only fifty tons I'd start as soon as she was ready."

Jordan rose and grabbed his hat before he flung a letter across the table. "Then I'm going for old Leeson now. Hustle, and wire those people that we want an option on that steamboat firm until to-morrow."

He strode out of the office, and when Jimmy reached the street a minute later he saw him running hard in the direction of Leeson's house.

CHAPTER XXII

ASHORE

It was summer in the north, and now that the bitter wind which had blown thick rain before it had dropped, the clammy fog shut the Shasta in like a wall. She crept through it with engines pounding steadily, swinging to the slow heave of the swell, while Jimmy stood, chilled to the backbone, on his bridge, as he had done for most of the last forty-eight hours. A chart in a glass case was clamped to the rail in front of him, and Lindstrom, the mate, stooped over it with the moisture trickling from his oilskins.

"This thing is not much good," he said. "The stream moves a different way with the change of wind. Also there is discrepancy in the depth of water."

"There is. If I knew how much to mark off for leeway in that last breeze I'd feel a good deal easier," said Jimmy, who turned to fling a disgusted glance at the chart, upon which little arrows, that indicated the general drifts of the currents, had apparently been scattered promiscuously. Then he raised his voice. "Forward there! See you have a good arming on your lead, and stand by to let go when I take the way off her!"

He pressed down his telegraph and a curious silence followed the clang of the gong when the engines stopped. The Shasta lurched on more slowly into the fog, and when Jimmy swung up his hand a man on the half-seen forecastle loosed the deep-sea lead, while another, perched in the mainmast shrouds, stood intent with a coil of slack line in his hand. There was a splash, the line ran out, and when a sing-song cry came up Jimmy made a little impatient gesture as he turned to the chart.

"A fathom less than we ought to have," he said, and raised his voice. "What bottom have you got?"

A couple of men were busy hauling in the ponderous lead, and one of them who lifted it turned to the bridge. "Mud, sir," he said. "Soft at that."

Jimmy looked at Lindstrom. "That, at least, is what this thing says. I suppose one ought to bring her up, and wait for a sight, but we can't stay here a week on the odd chance of a blink of clear weather. Anyway, there's plenty water under us, and we'll try the lead again presently."

The mate made a sign of concurrence as Jimmy pressed down his telegraph. "I was at Kenai four year ago. For two weeks we see nothing. How we get there I cannot tell you, but I think it is by good fortune. Also the skipper come there often for the Commercial Company. You do a thing several times, then you shut your eye, and perhaps you do it again."

He went down the ladder, and Jimmy was left alone except for the silent, shapeless figure in trickling oilskins at the steering wheel. How he had groped his way to St. Michael's near the tremendous desolation of willow swamps about the Yukon mouth he did not exactly know, but he had accomplished it in spite of screaming gale and blinding fog, and the treasure-seekers he had taken up had duly presented him with a written testimonial, which was all they had to give. A few days of clear weather had permitted him to steam across to one of the Commercial Company's factories, but since he left it he had held southward at a venture through thick rain and fog without a single glimpse of any celestial body. That would not have mattered so much had the sea been still as a lake is, for then he could have steered by dead reckoning; but that sea is swept by currents which run for the most part in guessed-at and variable directions, and it was impossible to calculate how far they might have deflected his course for him. In fact, for all he knew, they might have deflected it several times and set it right again. He had cable enough to anchor, but, as he had said, he could not stay there for a week or two on the odd chance of getting an hour's clear weather.

So, since the chart suggested that he was clear of the shore, he went on leisurely, leaning on his bridge-rails chilled in every limb, with the damp trickling off him, while the Shasta bored her way through the woolly vapor, until a little while after the lead had given him a reassuring depth of water she stopped suddenly. Jimmy was flung against the wheel with a violence that drove all the breath out of him, but the next moment he had jumped for his telegraph while everything in the vessel banged and rattled, and the gong clanged out his orders, "Stop her!" and "Hard astern!"

Then while the smooth swell lapped level with one depressed rail the Shasta shook in every plate, and the men who came scrambling to her slanted deck looked at him anxiously. There was, however, no clamor or any sign of undue consternation. The men had almost expected this, and the energy, which for want of direction now and then in such cases leads to purposeless and unreasoning scurry, had been washed out of them. Jimmy leaned quietly on the rails, and nodded in answer to their glances.

"Yes," he said, "we're hard on. If the propeller won't shake her loose in the next ten minutes, we'll see about laying out an anchor. Mr. Lindstrom, will you clear the two boats ready, and ask Fleming if there's any more water in his bilges?"

It was twenty minutes before the pounding engines stopped, but the Shasta had not moved an inch astern. The lower side of her lifted as the long gray swell lapped gurgling to her rail, and then came down again; but that was all. In the meanwhile the hand-lead armed with tallow had shown the bottom to be soft, and Fleming quietly reported that there was no sign of any water coming in. Then Jimmy turned to Lindstrom, who once more had climbed to the bridge.

"If this fog lifts and the breeze gets up as usual, she'll certainly break up," he said. "If it doesn't, I don't think there's any reason why we shouldn't heave her off. We'll try it first with the coal in. It's a long way to Wellington, and I don't want to dump a ton if I can help it."

The big Scandinavian went down the ladder, and by and by half the men on board the Shasta were engaged under his direction in lashing a platform of hatch-planks between the two boats that lay beneath the forecastle. The long heave drove them banging against the Shasta's side, and jerked the planks loose as they strove to lash them fast; but at last they accomplished it, and, while the dimness that stands for the Northern summer night crept into the fog, the men on the forecastle head lowered the anchor down. It was of the old, stocked pattern, and though the Shasta was not a large vessel, they found it and the cable which came down after it sufficiently difficult to handle upon a slippery platform that heaved and slanted under them. Still, the thing was done because it was necessary; and with oars splashing clumsily, because there was little space for the men who pulled them, they paddled off into the fog.

When they came back the cable was unshackled and the end of it led in through the mooring half-moon on the vessel's stern, and there then remained the second anchor to lay out. The cable of this one was unshackled too, but wire-rope purchases were rigged to the end of it from the after winch, and by the time all was ready it was six o'clock in the morning. The men were worn out, and Jimmy's eyes were heavy with want of sleep, but nobody made any demur about facing the further work before him. They knew what would happen if the fog lifted and the breeze that rolled it back should find the Shasta there.

Jimmy pressed down the telegraph on his bridge. Winch and windlass groaned and rattled, the wire-rope screamed, and the clanking cable tightened suddenly. Then the thudding propeller shook the ship until she quivered like a thing in pain each time the smooth swell lifted one side of her. Steam drifted about her, wire and cable were drawn rigid, but she would not budge an inch in spite of them, and Jimmy's face was a trifle grim when he flung up his hand. The thud of the propeller slackened, and there was a silence that was almost oppressive when winch and windlass stopped. The gurgle of the gray swell about the steamer's plates and the drip of moisture from the slanted shrouds emphasized it. Then Jimmy signed to one of the men.

"Send Mr. Fleming here," he said.

The man disappeared, and the engineer looked grave when he climbed to the bridge.

"You'll be wanting to dump my coal now?" he asked. "How are you going to take her home without it?"

"There is a good deal of heavy timber right down the West Coast," said Jimmy dryly. "There are also quite a few inlets into which one could take a steamer."

"You can't feed a boiler furnace with four-foot-diameter pines."

"They can be sawn and split. Besides, there are probably smaller ones among those four-foot pines. They don't grow that size in a year or two."

The engineer made a last protest. "I'm aware that it won't be much use, but it's my duty to point out the difficulties. You can't saw those trees without a big cross-cut, and I'm not sure what my boiler tubes will do under a stream of resinous flame."

"Well," said Jimmy thoughtfully, "I think I could make some kind of cross-cut out of a thin plate if I were an engineer. In fact, I'd make two, and keep a man filing up one of them while I used the other. Then I'd pump my feed-water rather higher than usual about those tubes."

"You can't pump water round the back-end," said the engineer. "You're going to see that resin flame make a hole in the back plate of the combustion chamber."

He stopped, and smiled when Jimmy looked at him. "Well, now that I've told you, I'll start every man to dumping the coal over."

Worn out as they were, the men worked feverishly until noon. Some panted at the ash-hoist, some standing on slippery iron ladders passed the heavy baskets from one to another, and the rest toiled amidst the stifling dust that streamed from the bunkers. Those who could see it were sincerely glad that the fog still hung about them – clammy, impenetrable, and apparently as solid as a wall.

Then it commenced to stir a little and slide past the vessel in filmy wisps, and it seemed to Jimmy that the smooth gray swell which lapped about her was getting steeper. Once or twice, indeed, it overlapped her depressed rail, and poured on board in a long green cascade. He knew that meant the breeze had already awakened somewhere not far away, and that when the sea that it was stirring up came down on them it would not take it very long to knock the bottom out of the Shasta. So did the men, and they toiled the harder, until when the bunkers were almost empty Jimmy once more stopped them.