GRATITUDE

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.

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:

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.

“Listen!” he said.

We did. In the profound stillness we heard voices—angry voices—as of turbulent men. They came from down the straggling business street, lasted for a moment, and then were again shut off, even as the shutter of a camera, timed, permits light and then stops it.

“Must have been down at the post,” Bill said. “We heard it while the door was open. Something doing. Let’s lope along and see.”

He set the pace, and in a few minutes we opened the door of the trading post to find it filled with muttering men, and it was plain to us that a miner’s meeting, irregular and hurried, perhaps, but nevertheless a miner’s meeting, was in session. Men in mackinaws, furs, and parkas were crowded into the place, and the dim lamps, with their tin reflectors, betrayed angry faces. Phil Mahoney was standing on the rough counter haranguing the men, and his face was black with excitement and temper.

“And look what he did to me!” he shouted, just as we entered. “Skinned me out of all I had, then laughed in my face. And it only took him ten or fifteen minutes to do it. They ain’t no square game could do it. He’s a crook! That’s what this Jim is! Why, he says so himself, and laughs about it. This camp’s had too much of him. He’s busted too many men. I move we go down and get him and start him over the ice, to-night! Now!”

Despite the small esteem in which I held Laughing Jim, a shudder rippled up my spine at the thought of such an execution; for it meant nothing less. To “start a man over the ice,” meant that he would be sent without blankets, or food, and that, with a full eighty miles to Taninaw, the nearest point of succor, meant nothing save condemnation to slow death by cold or exhaustion.

“Hold on! Hold on, a minute, before that’s put to a vote,” I heard Shakespeare George demand.

Men turned and craned their necks to look at him as he crowded toward the counter and into the little, open space reserved beneath it for courtesy.

“Me and my pardners just got here,” said George, “and we’d like to know what Jim’s done this time.”

“Done?” shouted Phil, rendered more angry by interference. “He’s skinned Missouri Jones out of all he had, and then won his pay dump from him. Ain’t that enough?”

George eyed Phil steadily, and took his time to answer.

“Why did Missouri go against him?” he demanded. “Ain’t he old enough, and wise enough, to know that he can’t beat a wheel?”

“But the wheel’s crooked!” declared Phil, his very beard bristling with excitement.

“Humph! You don’t know that, and I don’t,” retorted George. “Until it’s proved that it is, I’ll not vote to kill a man. That’s what it amounts to. You all know it.”

There was an instant’s silence that gave way to murmurs of approval, angry protests, and argument, above which rose Phil’s voice, high and shrill, demanding the question. George fought for more time, and begged men to consider carefully before voting; but the clamor drowned him at last, and the chairman put the motion to a vote by counting hands. There was a sudden silence, portentous, as it took place, and I looked around me at the hard or cruel faces of men whose hands were uplifted in the death sign, and heard the steady, solemn voice of the chairman counting: “One—two—three⸺” and so on, up to “twenty-seven.”

When the call for those opposed came, my hand, with those of the Competents, was held high, and with restrained breath we again listened to the tally. Slowly and more slow, it approached the end, and stopped at identically the same number. Three or four men, loudest of whom was Phil Mahoney, began shouting arguments; but were silenced by the chairman, who calmly stated that for purposes of certainty he would ask for another vote. Again trying moments passed and the result was the same. Quite deliberately the chairman got to his feet on the counter, and held up his hand.

“It rests with me to cast the deciding vote,” he said, and we all leaned forward in suspense and stared at him. His face was firm, and his voice without a tremor as he spoke. He was a brave man, was that chairman, standing there, dominant, before more than half a hundred earnest men!

“Shakespeare George,” he said, “has convinced me that we are in possible danger of condemning a man who, though his business is questionable, and his character confessedly loose, may be innocent of crookedness in the cases before this meeting. I therefore cast the deciding vote against sending him out over the ice, and declare the meeting open for any further business, or a motion to adjourn.”

Instantly the room was in a tumult that the chairman could not quell. Above the clamor, I heard Phil Mahoney shouting; “To thunder with such a vote! Come on, boys! Meeting or no meeting, we’ll get that thief! All that’s with me, come on!”

I felt a sudden jerk at my arm that almost overthrew me, and saw that it was George’s hand that had seized me.

“Quick! Outside!” he shouted in my ear, and plunged toward the door.

As a flying wedge the Competents, accustomed for many years to fighting together, quick, sinewy, big, and powerful men all, charged to the door, jerked it open, and drew themselves together in front of it, a grim little line of determination. The moon had risen to cast shadows at the foot of the trees on the white, still snow, and shadows at the feet of our pitifully thin line; but we were tensed and waiting for the rush. As the foremost men belched from the door they halted in surprise, for directly before them stood Shakespeare George with a heavy, menacing gun, held at the hip, and pointed toward them.

“Stop!” he ordered, and there was something so chill and commanding in his voice that men paused irresolutely; then, sensing the deadliness of the situation, obeyed.

“The meeting in there fairly voted down any action against Laughing Jim,” George said quietly. “My pardners and I stand for law and order. The majority is still the law in this camp, and if it comes to a show-down, we, my pardners and I, will furnish the order! There’ll be no rush on Laughing Jim so long as any of us can handle his gun. If you think you can put it over, men, try it on!”

His grim conclusion was not to go unchallenged; for when he ceased, Phil Mahoney leaped to the front, waving his arms and shouting an appeal to his followers to pay no heed. Before he had uttered a dozen words George leaped. The long barrel of his pistol flew into the air, and came crashing sidewise against Phil’s head, and the disturber fell to the snow, stricken as is an animal beneath the blow of a pole-ax.

Even as he fell, George’s voice, cold and drawling, steady and distinct, queried: “Who’s next?”

There was no “next.” I found myself the only unarmed one from our camp, leaning forward on tiptoes, with fists clenched, and the expectant lust of battle ripping through my veins as I saw them waver, saw other men line themselves back of us ready for combat, and witnessed, as the long seconds flew, the dissolution of Phil Mahoney’s forces. At the time it seemed that hours were passing; but that entire change of sentiment could not have required more than five minutes, and then there arose the murmur: “George is right, boys! The meeting decided it! That settles it!” and all was over.

The strange character of Shakespeare George was never better exemplified than in his following action, and thinking of the events of that far-fled night, I sometimes smile at his conception of “law and order”; for when it was certain that the mob spirit was quelled and dissipated, he slipped the gun back into its worn holster and whispered to us, his partners: “Come on, boys! I’ve got something else we ought to do,” and trudged away. The door of the trading post slammed as old Mayo swore at the loiterers and asserted that he had no contract to warm all outdoors. Black-moving spots were here and there on the white-covered earth as groups turned toward their cabins, moving quickly to escape the nipping teeth of the air.

Wondering what George could have in mind, we followed him, for with us it was custom to cling together, come what might. Straight he led us to the Hang-out, and in through the door. Already Laughing Jim was the center of a garrulous group, and his face for once was grave. As we entered he broke away from those who retailed to him the narrowness of his escape, and came toward George, admiring, reluctant, yet evidently anxious to voice his gratitude. But George’s brows drew themselves into a scowl, and his gray-blue eyes were cold and sharp as he looked at the man whose life he had most certainly saved for a second time.

“Put on your coat,” he said, “and come outside for a minute. We want to talk to you, Jim.”