Smoke Bellew

“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.”