A good old scout

By the author of “Two Stirs Forward--Three Back,” Etc.

It was a question of sentiment--which had the more genuine, the old-timer or the more modern prospector. When a rich haul of gold was at stake, which man would cast aside his finer feelings and become a heartless grabber?

“It’s a land a-flowin’ with milk and money,” quoted old “Nock” Whipple, in a high and hopeful voice, “Jest as the Good Book says. Only the conditions is different. You got ter stew down the berries to git the honey--and it’s some puckery. Fer the milk--why, jest catch a caribou or a cow moose.”

He turned his gaunt frame on his elbow to laugh, his gray-bearded head and hollow neck emerging from the dingy blankets of his bed on the bough-strewn floor of the tent. His merriment ended in a fit of coughing.

“Get back under there, old scout!” admonished McAdams severely, striding to him and giving the blankets a jerk into place. “And shut up. You talk too much!” He shoved a stick or two of wood into the battered sheet-iron stove--a fortunate pick-up of the afternoon before, relic of a winter camp of earlier prospecting days.

“Don’t be so harsh to him, Aleck,” said a third man reprovingly. He was sitting in the corner, hunched over a diary or memorandum book of some sort, in which he was industriously writing.

“Aw, I know how to handle the old guy,” returned McAdams good-naturedly, as he slipped through the tent flap, bent on cutting stove wood for the night. The prospect without was a dreary one.

The pleasant, springlike summer of the Far North had ended weeks before, and the fall, brief precursor of the long and hard, white time, had already painted the few deciduous shrubs into danger signals, giving to the dun landscape of the arctic highland that little warmth of color the year knew. Rock and moss filled the near vistas of the landscape, its stream valleys of low relief and intricate contours marked by pencilings of fringing willows, with a hint, southward, of spruce forests where hazy patches of the hue of faded indigo revealed the lower reaches of the Porcupine, most northern tributary of the mighty Yukon.

The three had been out all summer on a prospecting trip through that far, unmapped region of Alaska--Enoch Whipple, pioneer Montanan, pioneer Alaskan, leading on the last of his once stout legs; Aleck McAdams, for some years his friend and occasional companion; and Mr. Alfred Lawrence Turner, a thirty-year-old mining engineer, rather down on his luck. It was a scoured watershed country--eroding to a new “base level,” as Turner put it, with little of the older gravels left. But old Nock Whipple had told them as much, though, in different language. What hadn’t been washed away, old pals had said, was sometimes gold bearing. A “pockety” country, hard to get to, and the pockets too rare to tempt any but bold men desperate for a grubstake.

Outside of the tent lay two pack saddles, canvas bags, a few prospecting tools. On the bare slope of the stream valley, two old mules, that had been sleek enough some months before, but were now skin-covered skeletons, browsed philosophically on frost-dried herbage.

McAdams browsed for dead willow sticks in drift litter under the banks of the creek. From the tent, hastily pitched the afternoon before, when Enoch Whipple’s legs had succumbed to the weakness of fever, came the droning sound of the old scout’s voice, high, almost senile, as he “knocked” the country to which he had gone, years before, yet too late in life for a chance to win--and probably lose again--another fortune in the West and Northwest. McAdams, between his cracking of sticks, listened with a quizzical smile, to the old man’s ravings.

“Yes, she’s a land o’ gold, all right, Alfred. Klondike, Forty-Mile, Nome, Fairbanks, Iditarod. Fortunes made. Millions of ’em. Well, anyhow, a dozen or two. Natcherly, a few of us didn’t get nothin’--leastways a million or two of us didn’t. The hull country was covered with gold, the papers said, when the old Klondike strike was boomin’--covered with gold like an old carpet with dust, they told us.

“I ’member a feller camped near us at Split-up Island at the mouth of the Stewart. He was playin’ a lone hand. Had a big awk’erd skiff loaded with s’plies--funniest junk you ever see. Hunnerd and five different articles o’ grub, he told us. One I ’member was _manioca_--somethin’ like that. Kinder cousin to tapioca, he says. Build yer up. Great stuff. He was a big, six-foot counterjumper from Kansas City or some’eres. Growed a beard to look like a sure-enough Western man. An’ every day while we was all splittin’ up, this guy--they called him Willie--would set up a little lookin’-glass against a tree and comb out his whiskers and slick up his long, wavy, brown hair.

“One mornin’ he ’pears on the river bank with a pack sack on his shoulders, loaded down with bacon an’ manioca and sich. He was startin’ to locate his claim. Where was he goin’, with the Klondike a hunnerd miles off yet? ‘Why,’ says he, ‘I’m a-goin’ up some creek anywheres,’ says he, ‘before we gets too close to Dawson where the crowd must ’a’ staked everything. I’m a-goin’ ter locate me a reg’lar claim. I’ll take out enough for to git me home and show the folks the gold, and then I’m a bringin’ in some of ’em--mother, mebbe, too--and we’ll work her out, and back to old Kansas City,’ he says, just like that!”

Old Whipple turned on his elbow for another laugh--and a coughing spell.

“Keep under your blankets, Whipple,” admonished Turner, merely pausing a moment in his note-making. “And don’t laugh like that, my good man. Bad for you and nerve-racking to me.”

“Just like that,” repeated old Whipple, when he got his breath. “As easy as fallin’ off a lawg. Whole country was covered with gold. All you had to do was find a piece of it without stakes on--and that was easy, in spite o’ fifty thousand stampeders. What did they amount to in a hunnerd and fifty thousand million acres o’ wilderness, hey? Say, this Willie was one of the guys that used to sing, ‘The Klondike Vale Tonight.’ Must ’a’ heered it on a boat comin’ up to Skag-a-way. Had a string thing like a banjo or somethin’. Fine voice Willie had, too. An’ he’d bawl her out in the evenin’ from his skiff moored to the bank. When the rag chewers was through sawin’ their stoves in two, and gittin’ ready to sleep to git new strength for quarrelin’ afresh in the mornin’, Willie would sing it mournful--fer he sure believed the words:

“In fur-away Alaska, whare the Yukon River flows, An’ the mighty boulders stand ’mid wealth and might, In a land o’ wealth untold, in a grave that’s decked with g-o-l-d, He’s sleepin’ i-n th’ Klondike Vale to-night!”

Flushed, his faded, blue eyes shining in the deep sockets, old Whipple’s laughter sounded again, like mirthless echoes in an empty cavern.

“‘In a grave that’s decked with gold!’ Never be my luck, live or dead!”

“Shut up, Nock!” McAdams appeared with an armful of slender, twisted sticks. “Get yourself all het up, ye old fool!”

“No use abusing the old fellow,” remarked Turner. He had put the diary aside and was perusing a small pocket volume of something. “Delirium, I suppose,” he added in a lower voice. “Let him die in peace!”

“Aw,” McAdams muttered; “he’s all right. Tuckered out, tha’s all.” In a louder voice: “Lay still, old scout, will yer? They ain’t much grub left, and durn little game away up here. How we gonna get yer down to the Yukon ’less you rest up so we kin start again in a day or two? Cut out the gab!”

“Gosh, but you’re a rough devil, McAdams!” exclaimed Turner petulantly. “Let him die in peace, can’t you?”

“He’ll hear yer, you durn fool!”

Turner scowled. Comrades though they were, and in a desperate plight, he disliked the unwonted familiarity of the uncouth man more than he objected to the slur.

“He won’t. He’s only hearing his own maudlin talk. Man, you’ve got no heart, no sentiment!”

“Sentiment? What’s that?”

Turner shrugged.

“What you--haven’t got. Let him alone. Don’t nag him. It’s just a question of hours.”

“I’m tryin’ to buck him up, tha’s all. Got to get him outer here purty soon. Reckon we kin stick him on one mule by bunching what’s left of the outfit an’ crowdin’ it on the other one.”

“Impossible,” decided Turner, frowning. “We’ll simply do what we can for him till he--passes. Please speak to him kindly.” He turned again to his handy volume of the classics.

McAdams seized a small-caliber rifle and went after ptarmigan, a sparse few of which they had seen the day before in the bushlike willows of the divide. Their plight for food was desperate. A bird or two would make soup for the old man.

But Enoch Whipple was nearly beyond all help from food when the middle-aged, “unsentimental” McAdams returned belatedly, the early dark of the northern fall upon them. A couple of birds--already turning white to meet the coming winter--were slung over the barrel of his gun. Old Whipple was raving.

“Don’t none o’ you guys think this old Injun tracker was slow in gittin’ to the strikes up here?” he shouted to the solemn-faced engineer. “I was gen’rally before the first stakin’s was done. And, gentlemen, I allus pulled a blank. Nome? Say, in Nome, the gold was all around me, first on the beach and then out on old Dexter--a fraction, that was, all around me, boys--an’ mine, both of ’em, didn’t have a color!”

He seemed to doze for a while; but when McAdams roused him to take the ptarmigan broth, he glared crazily into the battered tin bowl and wagged his head refusingly.

“Looks yaller,” he muttered. “B’iled-up gold, I reckon. Not fer me. I git mine in a pan or a sluice box. That ain’t nothin’ but tundra water. Yaller. All over Alaska. Some folks think it’s gold--dissolved out by the grass roots. Gold at the grass roots! That’s it. That’s what they promised us when we come North. ‘Land o’ wealth untold--grave that’s decked with gold--’”

It was impossible to quiet him. Turner’s dignified gentleness, when old Whipple’s ravings disturbed his reading, was as unavailing as McAdams’ rough admonishings, which turned, finally, into severity. “Shut up and go to sleep, you!” It was the only way he knew of impressing the wandering mind of the old frontiersman, but it was inexpressibly shocking to Alfred Turner, of finer mold. He glared at McAdams balefully. McAdams only laughed.

“Always been knockin’ the country, sence I’ve known him,” he remarked to the engineer, as they sprawled on their blankets, a single fluttering candle between them. “Baptized Enoch, he was; and you kin figger what a grand chance that name gave the boys up here to nickname him. They jest left off the ‘e,’ that’s all. Oh, well, everybody knocks things and places when the luck is all agin’ ’em. But old Whipple’s always had it wuss than anybody I ever seen up here. Hey there!” he bawled, when the sick man began singing again. “I’ll tie you down, you old rascal, if you don’t lay quiet!”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mac,” protested Turner hotly. “It doesn’t do any good. Let him die happy!”