Kabanata Kabanata 27 · BOOK III CHAPTER I

I will always remember my first day in the gold-camp. We were well in

front of the Argonaut army, but already thousands were in advance of us.

The flat at the mouth of Bonanza was a congestion of cabins; shacks and

tents clustered the hillside, scattered on the heights and massed again

on the slope sweeping down to the Klondike. An intense vitality charged

the air. The camp was alive, ahum, vibrant with fierce, dynamic energy.

In effect the town was but one street stretching alongside the water

front. It was amazingly packed with men from side to side, from end to

end. They lounged in the doorways of oddly assorted buildings, and

jostled each other on the dislocated sidewalks. Stores of all kinds,

saloons, gambling joints flourished without number, and in one block

alone there were half a dozen dance-halls. Yet all seemed plethorically

prosperous.

Many of the business houses were installed in tents. That huge canvas

erection was a mining exchange; that great log barn a dance-hall.

Dwarfish log cabins impudently nestled up to pretentious three-story

hotels. The effect was oddly staccato. All was grotesque, makeshift,

haphazard. Back of the main street lay the red-light quarter, and behind

it again a swamp of niggerheads, the breeding-place of fever and

mosquito.

The crowd that vitalised the street was strikingly cosmopolitan. Mostly

big, bearded fellows they were, with here the full-blooded face of the

saloon man, and there the quick, pallid mask of the gambler. Women too I

saw in plenty, bold, free, predacious creatures, a rustle of silk and a

reek of perfume. Till midnight I wandered up and down the long street;

but there was no darkness, no lull in its clamorous life.

I was looking for Berna. My heart hungered for her; my eyes ached for

her; my mind was so full of her there seemed no room for another single

thought. But it was like looking for a needle in a strawstack to find

her in that seething multitude. I knew no one, and it seemed futile to

inquire regarding her. These keen-eyed men with eager talk of claims and

pay-dirt could not help me. There seemed to be nothing for it but to

wait. So with spirits steadily sinking zerowards I waited.

We found, indeed, that there was little ground left to stake. The mining

laws were in some confusion, and were often changing. Several creeks

were closed to location, but always new strikes were being made and

stampedes started. So, after a session of debate, we decided to reserve

our rights to stake till a good chance offered. It was a bitter

awakening. Like all the rest we had expected to get ground that was gold

from the grass-roots down. But there was work to be had, and we would

not let ourselves be disheartened.

The Jam-wagon had already deserted us. He was off up on Eldorado

somewhere, shovelling dirt into a sluice-box for ten dollars a day. I

made up my mind I would follow him. Jim also would get to work, while

the Prodigal, we agreed, would look after all our interests, and stake

or buy a good claim.

Thus we planned, sitting in our little tent near the beach. We were in a

congeries of tents. The beach was fast whitening with them. If one was

in a hurry it was hard to avoid tripping over ropes and pegs. As each

succeeding party arrived they had to go further afield to find

camping-ground. And they were arriving in thousands daily. The shore for

a mile was lined five deep with boats. Scows had been hauled high and

dry on the gravel, and there the owners were living. A thousand stoves

were eloquent of beans and bacon. I met a man taking home a prize, a

porterhouse steak. He was carrying it over his arm like a towel, paper

was so scarce. The camp was a hive of energy, a hum of occupation.

But how many, after they had paraded that mile-long street with its mud,

its seething foam of life, its blare of gramophones and its blaze of

dance-halls, ached for their southland homes again! You could read the

disappointment in their sun-tanned faces. Yet they were the eager

navigators of the lakes, the reckless amateurs of the rivers. This was a

something different from the trail. It was as if, after all their

efforts, they had butted up against a stone wall. There was "nothing

doing," no ground left, and only hard work, the hardest on earth.

Moreover, the country was at the mercy of a gang of corrupt officials

who were using the public offices for their own enrichment. Franchises

were being given to the favourites of those in power, concessions sold,

liquor permits granted, and abuses of every kind practised on the free

miner. All was venality, injustice and exaction.

"Go home," said the Man in the Street; "the mining laws are rotten. All

kinds of ground is tied up. Even if you get hold of something good, them

dam-robber government sharks will flim-flam you out of it. There's no

square deal here. They tax you to mine; they tax you to cut a tree; they

tax you to sell a fish; pretty soon they'll be taxing you to breathe. Go

home!"

And many went, many of the trail's most indomitable. They could face

hardship and danger, the blizzards, the rapids, nature savage and

ravening; but when it came to craft, graft and the duplicity of their

fellow men they were discouraged, discomfited.

"Say, boys, I guess I've done a slick piece of work," said the Prodigal

with some satisfaction, as he entered the tent. "I've bought three whole

outfits on the beach. Got them for twenty-five per cent. less than the

cost price in Seattle. I'll pull out a hundred per cent. on the deal.

Now's the time to get in and buy from the quitters. They so soured at

the whole frame-up they're ready to pull their freights at any moment.

All they want's to get away. They want to put a few thousand miles

between them and this garbage dump of creation. They never want to hear

the name of Yukon again except as a cuss-word. I'm going to keep on

buying outfits. You boys see if I don't clean up a bunch of money."

"It's too bad to take advantage of them," I suggested.

"Too bad nothing! That's business; your necessity, my opportunity. Oh,

you'd never make a money-getter, my boy, this side of the

millennium--and you Scotch too."

"That's nothing," said Jim; "wait till I tell you of the deal I made

to-day. You recollect I packed a flat-iron among my stuff, an' you boys

joshed me about it, said I was bughouse. But I figured out: there's

camp-meetin's an' socials up there, an' a nice, dinky, white shirt once

in a way goes pretty good. Anyway, thinks I, if there ain't no one else

to dress for in that wilderness, I'll dress for the Almighty. So I

sticks to my old flat-iron."

He looked at us with a twinkle in his eye and then went on.

"Well, it seems there's only three more flat-irons in camp, an' all the

hot sports wantin' boiled shirts done up, an' all the painted Jezebels

hollerin' to have their lingery fixed, an' the wash-ladies just goin'

round crazy for flat-irons. Well, I didn't want to sell mine, but the

old coloured lady that runs the Bong Tong Laundry (an' a sister in the

Lord) came to me with tears in her eyes, an' at last I was prevailed on

to separate from it."

"How much, Jim?"

"Well, I didn't want to be too hard on the old girl, so I let her down

easy."

"How much?"

"Well, you see there's only three or four of them flat-irons in camp, so

I asked a hundred an' fifty dollars, an' quick's a flash, she took me

into a store an' paid me in gold-dust."

He flourished a little poke of dust in our laughing faces.

"That's pretty good," I said; "everything seems topsy-turvy up here.

Why, to-day I saw a man come in with a box of apples which the crowd

begged him to open. He was selling those apples at a dollar apiece, and

the folks were just fighting to get them."

It was so with everything. Extraordinary prices ruled. Eggs and candles

had been sold for a dollar each, and potatoes for a dollar a pound;

while on the trail in '97 horse-shoe nails were selling at _a dollar a

nail_.

Once more I roamed the long street with that awful restless agony in my

heart. Where was she, my girl, so precious now it seemed I had lost her?

Why does love mean so much to some, so little to others? Perhaps I am

the victim of an intensity of temperament, but I craved for her; I

visioned evils befalling her; I pierced my heart with dagger-thrusts of

fear for her. Oh, if I only knew she was safe and well! Every slim woman

I saw in the distance looked to be her, and made my heart leap with

emotion. Yet always I chewed on the rind of disappointment. There was

never a sign of Berna.

In the agitation and unrest of my mind I climbed the hill that

overshadows the gold-born city. The Dome they call it, and the face of

it is vastly scarred, blanched as by a cosmic blow. There on its topmost

height by a cairn of stone I stood at gaze, greatly awestruck.

The view was a spacious one, and of an overwhelming grandeur. Below me

lay the mighty Yukon, here like a silken ribbon, there broadening out to

a pool of quicksilver. It seemed motionless, dead, like a piece of

tinfoil lying on a sable shroud.

The great valley was preternaturally still, and pall-like as if steeped

in the colours of the long, long night. The land so vast, so silent, so

lifeless, was round in its contours, full of fat creases and bold

curves. The mountains were like sleeping giants; here was the swell of a

woman's breast, there the sweep of a man's thigh. And beyond that huddle

of sprawling Titans, far, far beyond, as if it were an enclosing

stockade, was the jagged outline of the Rockies.

Quite suddenly they seemed to stand up against the blazing sky,

monstrous, horrific, smiting the senses like a blow. Their primordial

faces were hacked and hewed fantastically, and there they posed in their

immemorial isolation, virgin peaks, inviolate valleys, impregnably

desolate and savagely sublime.

And beyond their stormy crests, surely a world was consuming in the

kilns of chaos. Was ever anything so insufferably bright as the

incandescent glow that brimmed those jagged clefts? That fierce

crimson, was it not the hue of a cooling crucible, that deep vermillion

the rich glory of a rose's heart? Did not that tawny orange mind you of

ripe wheat-fields and the exquisite intrusion of poppies? That pure,

clear gold, was it not a bank of primroses new washed in April rain?

What was that luminous opal but a lagoon, a pearly lagoon, with floating

in it islands of amber, their beaches crisped with ruby foam? And, over

all the riot of colour, that shimmering chrysoprase so tenderly

luminous--might it not fitly veil the splendours of paradise?

I looked to where gulped the mouth of Bonanza, cavernously wide and

filled with the purple smoke of many fires. There was the golden valley,

silent for centuries, now strident with human cries, vehement with human

strife. There was the timbered basin of the Klondike bleakly rising to

mountains eloquent of death. It was dominating, appalling, this vastness

without end, this unappeasable loneliness. Glad was I to turn again to

where, like white pebbles on a beach, gleamed the tents of the gold-born

city.

Somewhere amid that confusion of canvas, that muddle of cabins, was

Berna, maybe lying in some wide-eyed vigil of fear, maybe staining with

hopeless tears her restless pillow. Somewhere down there--Oh, I must

find her!

I returned to the town. I was tramping its long street once more, that

street with its hundreds of canvas signs. It was a city of signs. Every

place of business seemed to have its fluttering banner, and beneath

these banners moved the ever restless throng. There were men from the

mines in their flannel shirts and corduroys, their Stetsons and high

boots. There were men from the trail in sweaters and mackinaws, German

socks and caps with ear-flaps. But all were bronzed and bearded,

fleshless and clean-limbed. I marvelled at the seriousness of their

faces, till I remembered that here was no problem of a languorous

sunland, but one of grim emergency. It was a man's game up here in the

North, a man's game in a man's land, where the sunlight of the long,

long day is ever haunted by the shadow of the long, long night.

Oh, if I could only find her! The land was a great symphony; she the

haunting theme of it.

I bought a copy of the "Nugget" and went into the Sourdough Restaurant

to read it. As I lingered there sipping my coffee and perusing the paper

indifferently, a paragraph caught my eye and made my heart glow with

sudden hope.