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Page 12
And so it went, until Frederick wondered, when he came to die, if there
was one man in the county, much less in the adjoining county, who would
come to him at his bedside.
Seated at his desk, through the open windows would drift whiffs of
strong tobacco and rumbling voices, and he could not help catching
snatches of what the Yukoners talked.
"D'ye recollect that Koyokuk rush in the early nineties?" he would hear
one say. "Well, him an' me was pardners then, tradin' an' such. We had
a dinky little steamboat, the _Blatterbat_. He named her that, an' it
stuck. He was a caution. Well, sir, as I was sayin', him an' me loaded
the little _Blatterbat_ to the guards an' started up the Koyokuk, me
firin' an' engineerin' an' him steerin', an' both of us deck-handin'.
Once in a while we'd tie to the bank an' cut firewood. It was the fall,
an' mush-ice was comin' down, an' everything gettin' ready for the
freeze up. You see, we was north of the Arctic Circle then an' still
headin' north. But they was two hundred miners in there needin' grub if
they wintered, an' we had the grub.
"Well, sir, pretty soon they begun to pass us, driftin' down the river
in canoes an' rafts. They was pullin' out. We kept track of them. When a
hundred an' ninety-four had passed, we didn't see no reason for keepin'
on. So we turned tail and started down. A cold snap had come, an' the
water was fallin' fast, an' dang me if we didn't ground on a
bar--up-stream side. The _Blatterbat_ hung up solid. Couldn't budge
her. 'It's a shame to waste all that grub,' says I, just as we was
pullin' out in a canoe. 'Let's stay an' eat it,' says he. An' dang me if
we didn't. We wintered right there on the _Blatterbat_, huntin' and
tradin' with the Indians, an' when the river broke next year we brung
down eight thousand dollars' worth of skins. Now a whole winter, just
two of us, is goin' some. But never a cross word out of him.
Best-tempered pardner I ever seen. But fight!"
"Huh!" came the other voice. "I remember the winter Oily Jones allowed
he'd clean out Forty Mile. Only he didn't, for about the second yap he
let off he ran afoul of Husky Travers. It was in the White Caribou. 'I'm
a wolf!' yaps Jones. You know his style, a gun in his belt, fringes on
his moccasins, and long hair down his back. 'I'm a wolf,' he yaps, 'an'
this is my night to howl. Hear me, you long lean makeshift of a human
critter?'--an' this to Husky Travers."
"Well?" the other voice queried, after a pause.
"In about a second an' a half Oily Jones was on the floor an' Husky on
top askin' somebody kindly to pass him a butcher knife. What's he do but
plumb hack off all of Oily Jones' long hair. 'Now howl, damn you, howl,'
says Husky, gettin' up."
"He was a cool one, for a wild one," the first voice took up. "I seen
him buck roulette in the Little Wolverine, drop nine thousand in two
hours, borrow some more, win it back in fifteen minutes, buy the drinks,
an' cash in--dang me, all in fifteen minutes."
One evening Tom was unusually brightly awake, and Frederick, joining the
rapt young circle, sat and listened to his brother's serio-comic
narrative of the night of wreck on the island of Blang; of the swim
through the sharks where half the crew was lost; of the great pearl
which Desay brought ashore with him; of the head-decorated palisade that
surrounded the grass palace wherein dwelt the Malay queen with her royal
consort, a shipwrecked Chinese Eurasian; of the intrigue for the pearl
of Desay; of mad feasts and dances in the barbaric night, and quick
dangers and sudden deaths; of the queen's love-making to Desay, of
Desay's love-making to the queen's daughter, and of Desay, every joint
crushed, still alive, staked out on the reef at low tide to be eaten by
the sharks; of the coming of the plague; of the beating of tom-toms and
the exorcising of the devil-devil doctors; of the flight over the
man-trapped, wild-pig runs of the mountain bush-men; and of the final
rescue by Tasman, he who was hatcheted only last year and whose head
reposed in some Melanesian stronghold--and all breathing of the warmth
and abandon and savagery of the burning islands of the sun.
And despite himself, Frederick sat entranced; and when all the tale was
told, he was aware of a queer emptiness. He remembered back to his
boyhood, when he had pored over the illustrations in the old-fashioned
geography. He, too, had dreamed of amazing adventure in far places and
desired to go out on the shining ways. And he had planned to go; yet he
had known only work and duty. Perhaps that was the difference. Perhaps
that was the secret of the strange wisdom in his brother's eyes. For
the moment, faint and far, vicariously, he glimpsed the lordly vision
his brother had seen. He remembered a sharp saying of Polly's. "You have
missed romance. You traded it for dividends." She was right, and yet,
not fair. He had wanted romance, but the work had been placed ready to
his hand. He had toiled and moiled, day and night, and been faithful to
his trust. Yet he had missed love and the world-living that was forever
a-whisper in his brother. And what had Tom done to deserve it?--a
wastrel and an idle singer of songs.
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