Gratitude

By Roy Norton Author of “The Garden of Fate,” “The Plunderer,” Etc.

The first of a new series of stories about the Competents in Alaska. The season ended, they throw their last shovelfuls of dirt and bid good-by to the homely cabin on the mountainside. But their last days on the claim were not to pass without adventure.

I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning; Alas! The gratitude of men Hath oftener left me mourning.

Shakespeare George, lover of poetry, found the quotation in an old magazine, and carefully framed and tacked it above his bunk, where, in somber moods, he might refer to it. And the rest of us, partners in that isolated heart of Alaska, smiled, being well aware that cynicism had no place in his character. Sometimes, when tales of ingratitude came to his ears, he attempted to quote it; usually after this fashion:

“I’ve hearn of hearts unkind, them deeds With coolness still a-turning; But, Lord! The gratitude of folks Has most always left me busted.”

He sometimes stated that there were cases where even the poetry was inadequate, and in particular mentioned this fact in connection with Laughing Jim.

Jim was bad, through and through, with a thoroughness that left no cause for mistake, and he was rendered worse by such a charm of recklessness, bravery, and laughter, that half his misdeeds were overlooked. He laid no claim to honesty, and with amazing, disarming truthfulness, admitted his own shortcomings. He was a delightful story-teller, who could amuse and interest his auditors with recountals of his varied experiences in many jails. He was above the average in height, and as if to give the lie to his life, had fearless, candid, laughing eyes. Perhaps it was his sense of humor that made one doubt whether he was consciously bad, or merely lacking in moral sense. Anyway, he laughed at everything, himself included.

No one quite remembers when he arrived in Marook, or, at least, none ever mentioned it. Probably he came with that inrush in the late fall of ’97, when the newly discovered Klondike sent its refugees hurrying down the river to camps where they might be sure of supplies through the long winter season, and he laughed his way into a job as bartender, for want of something else to do, and then, in time, graduated to the post of running the roulette wheel at the Hang-out. He was distinguished in dress by having the only toothpick shoes in camp, which he always wore, and for the excellent care he bestowed on his hands. He was popular with those who went to the Hang-out to lose their hard-won gold dust, and set a new pace in crying his wares.

“Come, gather round me, merry gentlemen!” he would shout, when business languished. “Why play the bank when you can lose your money here so much faster? Your money extracted without pain. Try the wheel! No man ever quit me winner!”

And then he would throw back his handsome young head, and that free, reckless laugh of his would roar out over the rumble of conversation, the clink of bottle on glass, the persistent clacking of chips and markers at the bank, and the clattering of dice where chuck-a-luck held forth. My partners, known to the camp as “the Competents” Westerners all, and all of the sober, taciturn type, were too wise in the ways of gamedom to patronize either his or any of the other games in the Hang-out; but when spending nights in camp they frequently went there in lieu of other places to go, and for Shakespeare George this strange, unmoral, laughing man formed a liking. That George did not dislike him stood him in good stead on that night when Phil Mahoney ran amuck.

Phil had sold a claim for two thousand dollars, and Phil, ordinarily taciturn, developed into a roaring carouser of high rank. Moreover, a sporting tendency led him to accept Laughing Jim’s challenge and attempt to worst that proficient at his own game. We were loitering there when Phil, leering, trudged away from the bar to the wheel and bought chips.

“One more man’s money in the till!” shouted Jim. “Fair warning is fair warning. Play with me long enough and I take your wad!”

“If I plays long enough,” growled Phil, seating himself and shoving a stack of chips on the fifteen spot and sparing a few for the single and double O.

Still voicing that deep-throated laugh, Jim raked them in, and again asserted that all men who came to his wheel lost; but Phil, angry, doubled his stakes, and assumed a grin. Five times in succession he lost, and then bought more chips, and now the grin had given place to a sullen frown.

“There’ll be trouble with that fool yet,” said George to me, “and it’ll be his own bloomin’ fault, because he’s been warned often enough by Jim.”

We drew closer to the table, as did several others, seeing that Mahoney’s bets were increasing; but his exclamations of disappointment were drowned in the babel of sound that weltered throughout the Hang-out. Jim had begun by taunting him; but now, discovering his ill temper, as merely the cool “wheelman,” twirling the little white ball, and raking in the losses, or paying out the winnings. Once he objected to something Phil said.

“What makes you play when luck’s all against you?” he demanded. “It’s not my fault if you lose all the time, is it?”

But Phil, by this time heavily short in purse, played on with a certain unmistakable desperation, and lost with a persistence that rapidly depleted his bag of gold dust. Now and then he won for a few turns of the illusive wheel, but the certain percentage of the game against him again told, and finally he was down to his last money. He staked everything recklessly on the old “star combination,” and Jim waited patiently for him to place his bet, and, it seemed to me, with a faint hope that it might be withdrawn.

“All bets down?” he demanded at last.

“Ain’t blind, are you?” was Phil’s surly response, and Jim, with a slight shrug, twirled the ball. It hovered aimlessly for two or three turns as the wheel slowed down, and once it threatened to fall into a winning pocket; then, with the perversity of fortune, it slipped quietly into a partition and lay there. For a full quarter of a minute Jim did not touch it, nor the stakes that Phil had lost, and then he slowly reached over and swept the table clean, and, as he did so, again vented that slow laugh of his.

“Told you I’d get you,” he said; but in the friendliest and most careless of tones.

Phil, who had risen to his feet as the wheel spun, stood as if transfixed by adversity when Jim swept the last of the money into the drawer; but his lips were drawn back into a stiff, snarling grin, and his eyes were wild with disappointment and anger. At the sound of Jim’s laugh he suddenly broke loose into a storm of oaths, and, almost before any one could realize his intent, so swift was his action, he whipped a gun from his belt and “threw it down” on the wheelman.

The quickness of Shakespeare George was, and still is, proverbial among those who knew him up and down the long Northwestern coast. Undoubtedly, on that evening, it was the means of saving the life of Laughing Jim; for even as George leaped forward from the side and caught Phil’s arm, the pistol exploded. But so sure and deft had been George’s attack, the heavy bullet merely buried itself in one of the poles of the cabin roof, and the pistol hand, clutched by the harsh, sinewy fingers of the miner, waved aloft helplessly as the two men struggled backward and forward. The roulette wheel with its table was overturned, and for a minute the room was filled with excited men who broke forward to witness or participate in any trouble. Quite steadily George forced Phil back against the wall, still clutching the upraised hand, and held him there.

“Phil! Phil!” George expostulated. “What’s the matter with you--you fool! Cut it out, I tell you!”

Other voices joined the protest, and another of the competents, Bill Davis, reached up and twisted the gun from Phil’s hand. George released his hold, and for a minute they stood there, angry, excited, and gathered as if for further combat; then, slowly, Phil relaxed.

“You got a square deal, pardner, all right,” insisted Shakespeare George with his slow drawl. “I ain’t got no use at all for gamblers or them that plays; but we stood behind you when you commenced, and Jim told you he’d get your money. Then he tried to get you to stop when he saw luck was against you, and that you was gettin’ sore, and that didn’t do no good. I ain’t right sure that, if you’d ’a’ killed him, I wouldn’t have helped hang you. Now will you be good?”

With an impatient curse Phil shoved men out of his path and tramped through the doorway and into the night. Some one laughed with a clear, cool laugh, and it was Jim, the wheelman, righting his table and wheel. Another man laughed, some one said, “The cussed fool!” There was a return movement toward the other gambling tables, and the Hang-out had resumed its normal atmosphere of rumbling, subdued noise, stale smells of sweaty furs, dead smoke, and poisonous liquors.

Laughing Jim dropped the wheel back to its pivot, gave it a spin, and looked across at Shakespeare George. His face was, for an instant, grave and earnest.

“Close call--that!” he said quietly. “And I reckon, Mister Shakespeare George, that I owe you one. Thanks!”

He looked down and began to adjust his chips as if words were awkward for him under such circumstances, and then, as if to further conceal embarrassment, or through sheer, careless hardness, he again lifted his head and laughed, and his clear voice went out: “Everything all right again! Still doing business at the same old stand. Come up and try your luck, boys! Come try your luck!”

I was not certain whether mine was a sense of surprise at this callous outburst, or one of intense disgust for the whole sordid and near-tragic drama, as we followed the broken man out into the cold, still, starlit night. And, so slight is our gift of prescience, I did not in the least anticipate that this was but the opening scene for others in which Shakespeare George, clean, homely, and capable, and Laughing Jim, bad, attractive, and reckless, were to play parts.

The second scene was two months in coming. It was toward the very close of the long winter season that shut us in, and infolded us, like prisoners in a gloom of frost and ice, in the cold, yet attractive, center of a frozen world.

We, the Competents and I, had been working with persistent industry for weeks, and hungered for a touch of the camp and its vicissitudes; so, one night, when the restless craving for recreation was strong upon us, we went, slipping swiftly over the frozen trails in our moccasins, panting up steeps, and racing down short hills between bare trees as the dim path opened and beckoned us on.

The trail leading into the camp debouched into a cluster of cabins owned by miners who had claims on the gulches, and these were spread, regardless of streets, on the flat facing the river--frozen now into a broad ribbon of ice, snow-covered, and resting like a sinuous white blanket between the bordering hills. We passed through this clump of black squares, snow-capped, and out to the ribbon’s edge. Bill Davis, in the lead, stopped us with a gesture and an exclamation.