A Man to His Mate Read online

  CHAPTER XV

  SMOKE

  When Rainey came on deck the next morning he found the schooner floatingin a small lagoon that made the center of a floe. The water in it wasslush, half solid. Main and fore were close furled, the headsails also,and the _Karluk_ was nosing against the far end of the rapidlydiminishing basin. The wind was still lively.

  All about were other floes, but they were widely separated, and betweenthem crisp waves of indigo were curling snappily.

  The island stood up sharp and jagged, much larger than Rainey hadanticipated. It boasted two cones, from one of which smoke was lazilytrailing. Ice was piled in wild confusion about its shores, wrecked bythe gale that had blown hard from four till eight, and was nowsubsiding with the swift change common to the Arctic.

  A deep hum of bursting surf undertoned all other noises and, prisoned asshe was, the schooner and her floe were sweeping slowly toward the landin the grip of a current rather than before the gusty wind.

  Lund had fendered the schooner's bows effectively before he went belowwith old sails that enveloped stem and swell, stuffed with ropes andbits of canvas.

  Within an hour the wind had ceased and the slush in the lagoon hadpancaked into flakes of forming ice that bid fair to become solid withina short time, for the day was bitterly cold and tremendously bright. Thesky rose from filmy silver-azure to richest sapphire, and the rollingwaters between the floes were darkest purple-blue. As the whip of thewind ceased they settled to a vast swell on which the great clumps ofice rose and fell with dazzling reflections.

  Lund came up within the hour and stood blinking at the brilliance.

  "My eyes ain't as strong yit as they should be," he said to Rainey. "Ishouldn't have slung them glasses so hasty at Carlsen, though theysp'iled his aim, at that. If this weather keeps up I'll have to makesnow-specs; there ain't another pair of smokes aboard." He made a shadeof his curved hand as he gazed at the island.

  "Current's got us," he said, "an' we'll fetch up mighty close to thebeach. It lies between those two ridges, close together, buttin' outfrom the volcano. Long Strait current splits on Wrangell Island, andwe're in the trend of the northern loop. That's why the sea don't freezeup more solid. It's freezin' fast enough round us, where there ain'tmotion."

  He seemed well satisfied with the prospect. "Had breakfast?" he askedRainey, and then: "All right. We'll git the men aft."

  He bellowed an order, and soon every one came trooping, to gather in twogroups either side of the cabin skylight. Their faces were eager withthe proximity of the gold, yet half sullen as they waited to hear whatLund had to say. Since the attempt against him Lund had said nothingabout their shares. They acknowledged him as master, but they stillrebelled in spirit.

  "There's the island," said Lund. "We'll make it afore sundown. The beachis there, waitin' for us to dig it up. It'll be some job. I don't reckonit's frozen hard, on'y crusted. If it is we'll bust the crust withdynamite. But we got to hop to it. There'll be another cold spell afterthis one peters out an' the next is like to be permanent. I want thegold washed out afore then, an' us well down the Strait. It's up to youto hump yoreselves, an' I'll help the humpin'.

  "We'll cradle most of the stuff an', if they's time, we'll flume thesilt tailin's for the fine dust. Providin' we can git a fall of water.There'll be plenty for all hands to do. An' the shares go as firstfixed. I ain't expectin' you to do the diggin' an' not git a pinch ortwo of the dust."

  The men's faces lighted, and they shuffled about, looking at one anotherwith grins of relief.

  "No cheers?" asked Lund ironically. "Wall, I hardly expected enny.Hansen, you'll be one of the foremen, with pay accordin'. Deming."

  "I can't dig," said the hunter truculently. "Neither can Beale, with hisribs."

  "You've got a sweet nerve," said Lund. "I reckon you've won enough to besure of yore shares, if the boys pay up. Enough for you to do somediggin' in yore pockets for Beale. His ribs 'ud be whole if you hadn'tstarted the bolshevik stunt. But I'll find something for both of you todo. Don't let that worry you none.

  "We've got mercury aboard somewhere," Lund continued, to Rainey, whenthe men had dispersed, far more cheerful than they had gathered. "We'lluse that for concentration in the film riffles. Hansen'll have rockersmade that'll catch the big stuff. If the worst comes to the worst,we'll load up the old hooker with the pay dirt an' wash it out on theway home. I'll strip that beach down to bedrock if I have to work thetoes an' fingers off 'em."

  By noon the schooner was glazed in as firmly as a toy model that ismounted in a glass sea. The wind blew itself entirely out, but thecurrent bore them steadily on to the clamorous shore, where the swellswere creating promontories, bays, cliffs and chasms in the piled-upconfusion of the floes pounding on the rocks, breaking up or slidingatop one another in noisy confusion.

  The marble-whiteness of the ice masses was set off by the blues and softviolets of their shadows, and by a pearly sheen wherever the planescaught the light at a proper slant for the play of prisms. Beautiful asit was, the sight was fearful to Rainey, in common with the crew. OnlyLund surveyed it nonchalantly.

  "It's bustin' up fast," he said. "All we need is a little luck. If weain't got that there's no use of worryin'. We can't blast ourselves outo' this without riskin' the schooner. We ought to be thankful we frozein gentle. There ain't a plank started. The floe'll fend us off. Thereain't enny big chunks enny way near us aft. Luck--to make a decentlandin'--is all we need, an' it's my hunch it's comin' our way."

  His "hunch" was correct. Though they did not actually make the littlebay on which the treasure beach debouched, they fetched up near itagainst a broken hill of ice that had lodged on the sharp slopes of alittle promontory, making the connection without further damage than asplitting of the forward end of their encasing floe, with hardly a jarto the _Karluk_.

  Lund sent men ashore over the ice, climbing to the promontory crags withhawsers by which they tied up schooner, floe and all, to the land. Ifthe broken hill suffered further catastrophe, which did not seem likely,its fragments would fall upon the floe. In case of emergency Lundordered men told off day and night to stand by the hawsers, to castloose or cut, as the extremity needed.

  The main danger threatened from following floes piling up on theirs andramming over it to smash the schooner, but that was a risk that must bemet as it evolved, and there did not seem much prospect of thehappening.

  It was dark before they were snugged. The men volunteered, throughHansen, to commence digging that night by the light of big fires, socrazy were they at the nearness of the gold. But Lund forbade it.

  "You'll work reg'lar shifts when you git started," he said. "An' youwon't start till ter-morrer. We've got to stand by the ship ter-nightuntil we find out by mornin' how snug we're goin' to be berthed."

  All night long they lay in a pandemonium of noise. After a while theywould become used to it as do the workers in a stampmill, but that nightit deafened them, kept them awake and alert, fearful, with thetremendous cannonading. The bite of the frost made the timbers of the_Karluk_ creak and its thrust continually worked among the strandedmasses with groaning thunders and shrill grindings, while the surf everboomed on the resonant sheets of ice.

  The place held a strange mystery. On top of the main cone the volcanicglow hung above the crater chimney, reflected waveringly on the rollingclouds of smoke that blotted out the stars. There were no tremors, norumblings from the hidden furnace, only the flare of its stoking. Thestars that were visible were intensely brilliant points, and, when themoon rose, it was accompanied by four mock moons bound in a halo thatwidely encircled the true orb. The moon-dogs shone intermittently withprismatic colors, like disks of mother-of-pearl, and the moon itself wasfour-rayed.

  Under moon and stars the coast snaked away to end in a deceptive glimmerthat persisted beyond the eye-range of definite dimensions. And, despiteall the sound, muffled and sharp, of splinterings and explosions, ofthe reverberation of the swell, outside all this clamor, silence seemedt
o gather and to wait. Silence and loneliness. It awed the crew, itinvested the spirits of Peggy Simms and Rainey, gazing at the mysticbeauty of the Arctic landscape.

  The walls of forced-up ice shifted about them and came clattering down,booming on their floe as if it had been a drum, and threatening to tiltit by sheer weight had they not been fairly grounded forward. Otherfloes came from seaward to batter at the cliffs, but the eddy that hadbrought them to their resting-place seemed to have been dissolved in themain current and, save for an occasional alarm, their stern was notseriously invaded.

  Only, as the night wore on, the floating masses became cemented to oneanother and the shore. The _Karluk_ was hard and fast within two hundredyards of her Tom Tiddler's ground, just over the promontory. If a thawcame, all should go well. If Lund had been deceived, and the truewinter was setting in early, the prospects were far from cheerful,though no one seemed to think of that possibility.

  Beneath the glamour of the magic night, the weird paraselene of themoon's phenomenon, the glow of the volcano, the noises, the menwhispered of one thing only--Gold!

  Dawn came before they were aware of it, a sudden rush of light that dyedthe ice in every hue of red and orange, that tipped the frozen coastwith bursts of ruby flame that flared like beacons and gilded the crestsof the long swells, tinging all their world with a wild, unnaturalglory.

  Lund, striding the deck, his red beard iced with his breath, suddenlystopped and stared into the east. There, in the very eye of the dawn,was a trail of smoke, like a plume against the flaming, three-quarterscircle of the rising sun!