The Magnetic North Part 70

"Brachet and Wills are decent enough men, but where else would they have the power and the freedom they have at Holy Cross? Why, they live there like feudal barons."

"Father Richmond could have done anything he chose."

"Ah, Father Richmond--" The Colonel shut his mouth suddenly, turned about, and proceeded to crawl under his blankets, feet to the fire.

"Well?"

No answer.

"Well?" insisted the Boy.

"Oh, Father Richmond must have seen a ghost."

"_What!_"

"Take my word for it. _He_ got frightened somehow. A man like Father Richmond has to be scared into a ca.s.sock."

The Boy's sudden laughter deepened the Colonel's own impression that the instance chosen had not been fortunate. One man of courage knows another man of courage when he sees him, and the Colonel knew he had d.a.m.ned his own argument.

"Wouldn't care for the job myself," the Boy was saying.

"What job?"

"Scarin' Father Richmond."

The Boy sat watching the slow wet snow-flakes fall and die in the fire.

His clothes were pretty damp, but he was warm after a chilly fas.h.i.+on, as warmth goes on the trail.

The Colonel suddenly put his head out from under the marmot-skin to say discontentedly, "What you sittin' up for?"

"Oh ... for instance!" But aside from the pertness of the answer, already it was dimly recognised as an offence for one to stay up longer than the other.

"Can't think how it is," the Colonel growled, "that you don't see that their principle is wrong. Through and through mediaeval, through and through despotic. They make a virtue of weakness, a fetich of vested authority. And it isn't American authority, either."

The Boy waited for him to quiet down. "What's the first rule," demanded the Colonel, half sitting up, "of the most powerful Catholic Order?

Blind obedience to an old gentleman over in Italy."

"I said last night, you know," the Boy put in quite meekly, "that it all seemed very un-American."

"Huh! Glad you can see that much." The Colonel drove his huge fist at the provision-bag, as though to beat the stiffnecked beans into a feathery yielding. "Blind submission don't come easy to most Americans.

The Great Republic was built upon revolt;" and he pulled the covers over his head.

"I know, I know. We jaw an awful lot about freedom and about what's American. There's plenty o' free speech in America and plenty o'

machinery, but there's a great deal o' human nature, too, I guess." The Boy looked out of the corner of his eye at the blanketed back of his big friend. "And maybe there'll always be some people who--who think there's something in the New Testament notion o' sacrifice and service."

The Colonel rolled like an angry leviathan, and came to the surface to blow. But the Boy dashed on, with a fearful joy in his own temerity.

"The difference between us, Colonel, is that I'm an unbeliever, and I know it, and you're a cantankerous old heathen, and you _don't_ know it." The Colonel sat suddenly bolt upright. "Needn't look at me like that. You're as bad as anybody--rather worse. Why are you _here?_ Dazzled and lured by the great gold craze. An' you're not even poor.

You want _more_ gold. You've got a home to stay in; but you weren't satisfied, not even in the fat lands down below."

"Well," said the Colonel solemnly, blinking at the fire, "I hope I'm a Christian, but as to bein' satisfied--"

"Church of England can't manage it, hey?"

"Church of England's got nothing to do with it. It's a question o'

character. Satisfied! We're little enough, G.o.d knows, but we're too big for that."

The Boy stood up, back to the fire, eyes on the hilltops whitening in the starlight.

"Perhaps--not--all of us."

"Yes, sah, all of us." The Colonel lifted his head with a fierce look of most un-Christian pride. Behind him the hills, leaving the struggling little wood far down the slope, went up and up into dimness, reaching to the near-by stars, and looking down to the far-off camp fire by the great ice-river's edge.

"Yes, sah," the Colonel thundered again, "all that have got good fightin' blood in 'em, like you and me. 'Tisn't as if we came of any worn-out, frightened, servile old stock. You and I belong to the free-livin', hard-ridin', straight-shootin' Southerners. The people before us fought bears, and fought Indians, and beat the British, and when there wasn't anything else left to beat, turned round and began to beat one another. It was the one battle we found didn't pay. We finished that job up in '65, and since then we've been lookin' round for something else to beat. We've got down now to beatin' records, and foreign markets, and breedin' prize bulls; but we don't breed cowards--yet; and we ain't lookin' round for any asylums. The Catholic Church is an asylum. It's for people who never had any nerve, or who have lost it."

The Colonel turned about, wagged his head defiantly at the icy hills and the night, and in the after-stillness fell sound asleep in the snow.

CHAPTER XII

THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE

"--paa dit Firmament Den klare Nordlyslampe taendt...."

Innocently thinking that they had seen Arctic travelling at its worst, and secretly looking upon themselves as highly accomplished trailmen, they had covered the forty-one miles from Holy Cross to Anvik in less than three days.

The Colonel made much of the pleasant and excellent man at the head of the Episcopal mission there, and the Boy haunted Benham's store, picking up a little Ingalik and the A. C. method of trading with the Indians, who, day and night, with a number of stranded Klond.y.k.ers, congregated about the grateful warmth of the big iron stove.

The travellers themselves did some business with the A. C. agent, laying in supplies of fresh meat, and even augmenting their hitherto carefully restricted outfit, for they were going far beyond the reach of stores, or even of missions. Anvik was the last white settlement below Nulato; Nulato was said to be over two hundred miles to the northward.

And yet after all their further preparation and expense, each man kept saying in his heart, during those first days out from Anvik, that the journey would be easy enough but for their "comforts"--the burden on the sled. By all the rules of arithmetic, the daily subtraction of three meals from the store should have lightened the load. It seemed to have the opposite effect. By some process of evil enchantment every ounce grew to weigh a pound, every pound a hundredweight. The sled itself was bewitched. Recall how lightsomely it ran down the snowy slope, from the Big Chimney Cabin to the river trail, that morning they set forth. The Boy took its pretty impetuosity for a happy augury--the very sled was eager for the mighty undertaking.

But never in all that weary march did it manifest again any such modest alacrity. If, thereafter, in the long going "up river" there came an interval of downhill, the sled turned summersaults in the air, wound its forward or backward rope round willow scrub or alder, or else advanced precipitately with an evil, low-comedy air, bottom side up, to attack its master in the s.h.i.+ns. It either held back with a power superhuman, or it lunged forward with a momentum that capsized its weary conductor. Its manners grew steadily worse as the travellers pushed farther and farther into the wilderness, beyond the exorcising power of Holy Cross, beyond the softening influences of Christian hospitality at Episcopal Anvik, even beyond Tischsocket, the last of the Indian villages for a hundred miles.

The two who had been scornful of the frailty of temper they had seen common in men's dealings up here in the North, began to realize that all other trials of brotherhood pale before the strain of life on the Arctic trail. Beyond any question, after a while something goes wrong with the nerves. The huge drafts on muscular endurance have, no doubt, something to do with it. They worked hard for fourteen, sometimes seventeen, hours at a stretch; they were ill-fed, suffering from exposure, intense cold, and a haunting uncertainty of the end of the undertaking. They were reasonable fellows as men go, with a respect for each other, but when hards.h.i.+p has got on the nerves, when you are suffering the agonies of snow-blindness, sore feet, and the pangs of hunger, you are not, to put it mildly, at your best as a member of the social order. They sometimes said things they were ashamed to remember, but both men grew carefuller at crucial moments, and the talkative one more silent as time went on.

By the rule of the day the hard s.h.i.+ft before dinner usually fell to the Boy. It was the worst time in the twenty-four hours, and equally dreaded by both men. It was only the first night out from Anvik, after an unusually trying day, the Boy was tramping heavily ahead, bent like an old man before the cutting sleet, fettered like a criminal, hands behind back, rope-wound, stiff, straining at the burden of the slow and sullen sled. On a sudden he stopped, straightened his back, and remonstrated with the Colonel in unprintable terms, for putting off the halt later than ever they had yet, "after such a day."

"Can't make fire with green cotton-wood," was the Colonel's rejoiner.

"Then let's stop and rest, anyhow."

"Nuh! We know where that would land us. Men who stop to rest, go to sleep in the snow, and men who go to sleep in the snow on empty stomachs don't wake up."

They pushed on another mile. When the Colonel at last called the halt, the Boy sank down on the sled too exhausted to speak. But it had grown to be a practice with them not to trust themselves to talk at this hour. The Colonel would give the signal to stop, simply by ceasing to push the sled that the boy was wearily dragging. The Boy had invariably been feeling (just as the Colonel had before, during his s.h.i.+ft in front) that the man behind wasn't helping all he might, whereupon followed a vague, consciously unreasonable, but wholly irresistible rage against the partner of his toil. But however much the man at the back was supposed to spare himself, the man in front had never yet failed to know when the impetus from behind was really removed.

The Boy sat now on the sled, silent, motionless, while the Colonel felled and chopped and brought the wood. Then the Boy dragged himself up, made the fire and the beef-tea. But still no word even after that reviving cup--the usual signal for a few remarks and more social relations to be established. Tonight no sound out of either. The Colonel changed his footgear and the melted snow in the pot began to boil noisily. But the Boy, who had again betaken himself to the sled, didn't budge. No man who really knows the trail would have dared, under the circ.u.mstances, to remind his pardner that it was now his business to get up and fry the bacon. But presently, without looking up, the hungry Colonel ventured: