Smoke Bellew - Jack London (best summer reads of all time .txt) 📗

I’d wallop his block off if it’d make him well. And what all you lazy bums needs is a wallopin’. Come on! Out of that an’ into them duds of yourn, double quick, or I’ll sure muss up the front of your face.”

All the gangs groaned, and sighed, and wept, the tears streaming and freezing down their cheeks as they toiled; and it was patent that their agony was real. The situation was desperate, and Smoke’s prescription was heroic.

When the work-gangs came in at noon, they found decently cooked dinners awaiting them, prepared by the weaker members of their cabins under the tutelage and drive of Smoke and Shorty.

“That’ll do,” Smoke said at three in the afternoon. “Knock off. Go to your bunks. You may be feeling rotten now, but you’ll be the better for it to-morrow. Of course it hurts to get well, but I’m going to get you well.”

“Too late,” Amos Wentworth sneered pallidly at Smoke’s efforts. “They ought to have started in that way last fall.”

“Come along with me,” Smoke answered. “Pick up those two pails. You’re not ailing.”

From cabin to cabin the three men went, dosing every man and woman with a full pint of spruce-tea. Nor was it easy.

“You might as well learn at the start that we mean business,” Smoke stated to the first obdurate, who lay on his back, groaning through set teeth. “Stand by, Shorty.” Smoke caught the patient by the nose and tapped the solar-plexus section so as to make the mouth gasp open. “Now, Shorty! Down she goes!”

And down it went, accompanied with unavoidable splutterings and stranglings.

“Next time you’ll take it easier,” Smoke assured the victim, reaching for the nose of the man in the adjoining bunk.

“I’d sooner take castor oil,” was Shorty’s private confidence, ere he downed his own portion. “Great jumpin’ Methuselem!” was his entirely public proclamation the moment after he had swallowed the bitter dose. “It’s a pint long, but hogshead strong.”

“We’re covering this spruce-tea route four times a day, and there are eighty of you to be dosed each time,” Smoke informed Laura Sibley. “So we’ve no time to fool. Will you take it or must I hold your nose?” His thumb and forefinger hovered eloquently above her. “It’s vegetable, so you needn’t have any qualms.”

“Qualms!” Shorty snorted. “No, sure, certainly not. It’s the deliciousest dope!”

Laura Sibley hesitated. She gulped her apprehension.

“Well?” Smoke demanded peremptorily.

“I’ll—I’ll take it,” she quavered. “Hurry up!”

That night, exhausted as by no hard day of trail, Smoke and Shorty crawled into their blankets.

“I’m fairly sick with it,” Smoke confessed. “The way they suffer is awful. But exercise is the only remedy I can think of, and it must be given a thorough trial. I wish we had a sack of raw potatoes.”

“Sparkins he can’t wash no more dishes,” Shorty said. “It hurts him so he sweats his pain. I seen him sweat it. I had to put him back in the bunk, he was that helpless.”

“If only we had raw potatoes,” Smoke went on. “The vital, essential something is missing from that prepared stuff. The life has been evaporated out of it.”

“An’ if that young fellow Jones in the Brownlow cabin don’t croak before morning I miss my guess.”

“For Heaven’s sake be cheerful,” Smoke chided.

“We got to bury him, ain’t we?” came the indignant snort. “I tell you that boy’s something awful—”

“Shut up,” Smoke said.

And after several more indignant snorts, the heavy breathing of sleep arose from Shorty’s bunk.

In the morning, not only was Jones dead, but one of the stronger men who had worked on the firewood squad was found to have hanged himself. A nightmare procession of days set in. For a week, steeling himself to the task, Smoke enforced the exercise and the spruce-tea. And one by one, and in twos and threes, he was compelled to knock off the workers. As he was learning, exercise was the last thing in the world for scurvy patients. The diminishing burial squad was kept steadily at work, and a surplus half-dozen graves were always burned down and waiting.

“You couldn’t have selected a worse place for a camp,” Smoke told Laura Sibley. “Look at it—at the bottom of a narrow gorge, running east and west. The noon sun doesn’t rise above the top of the wall. You can’t have had sunlight for several months.”

“But how was I to know?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t see why not, if you could lead a hundred fools to a gold-mine.”

She glared malevolently at him and hobbled on. Several minutes afterward, coming back from a trip to where a squad of groaning patients was gathering spruce-boughs, Smoke saw the seeress entering Amos Wentworth’s cabin and followed after her. At the door he could hear her voice, whimpering and pleading.

“Just for me,” she was begging, as Smoke entered. “I won’t tell a soul.”

Both glanced guiltily at the intruder, and Smoke was certain that he was on the edge of something, he knew not what, and he cursed himself for not having eavesdropped.

“Out with it,” he commanded harshly. “What is it?”

“What is what?” Amos Wentworth asked sullenly. And Smoke could not name what was what.

Grimmer and grimmer grew the situation. In that dark hole of a canyon, where sunlight never penetrated, the horrible death list mounted up. Each day, in apprehension, Smoke and Shorty examined each other’s mouths for the whitening of the gums and mucous membranes—the invariable first symptom of the disease.

“I’ve quit,” Shorty announced one evening. “I’ve been thinkin’ it over, an’ I quit. I can make a go at slave-drivin’, but cripple-drivin’s too much for my stomach. They go from bad to worse. They ain’t twenty men I can drive to work. I told Jackson this afternoon he could take to his bunk. He was gettin’ ready to suicide. I could see it stickin’ out all over him. Exercise ain’t no good.”

“I’ve made up my mind to the same thing,” Smoke answered. “We’ll knock off all but about a dozen. They’ll have to lend a hand. We can relay them. And we’ll keep up the spruce-tea.”

“It ain’t no good.”

“I’m about ready to agree with that, too, but at any rate it doesn’t hurt them.”

“Another suicide,” was Shorty’s news the following morning. “That Phillips is the one. I seen it comin’ for days.”

“We’re up against the real thing,” Smoke groaned. “What would you suggest, Shorty?”

“Who? Me? I ain’t got no suggestions. The thing’s got to run its course.”

“But that means they’ll all die,” Smoke protested.

“Except Wentworth,” Shorty snarled; for he had quickly come to share his partner’s dislike for that individual.

The everlasting miracle of Wentworth’s immunity perplexed Smoke. Why should he alone not have developed scurvy? Why did Laura Sibley hate him, and at the same time whine and snivel and beg from him? What was it she begged from him and that he would not give?

On several occasions Smoke made it a point to drop into Wentworth’s cabin at meal-time. But one thing did he note that was suspicious, and that was Wentworth’s suspicion of him. Next he tried sounding out Laura Sibley.

“Raw potatoes would cure everybody here,” he remarked to the seeress. “I know it. I’ve seen it work before.”

The flare of conviction in her eyes, followed by bitterness and hatred, told him the scent was warm.

“Why didn’t you bring in a supply of fresh potatoes on the steamer?” he asked.

“We did. But coming up the river we sold them all out at a bargain at Fort Yukon. We had plenty of the evaporated kinds, and we knew they’d keep better. They wouldn’t even freeze.”

Smoke groaned. “And you sold them all?” he asked.

“Yes. How were we to know?”

“Now mightn’t there have been a couple of odd sacks left?—accidentally, you know, mislaid on the steamer?”

She shook her head, as he thought, a trifle belatedly, then added, “We never found any.”

“But mightn’t there?” he persisted.

“How do I know?” she rasped angrily. “I didn’t have charge of the commissary.”

“And Amos Wentworth did,” he jumped to the conclusion. “Very good. Now what is your private opinion—just between us two. Do you think Wentworth has any raw potatoes stored away somewhere?”

“No; certainly not. Why should he?”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

Struggle as he would with her, Smoke could not bring her to admit the possibility.

“Wentworth’s a swine,” was Shorty’s verdict, when Smoke told his suspicions.

“And so is Laura Sibley,” Smoke added. “She believes he has the potatoes, and is keeping it quiet, and trying to get him to share with her.”

“An’ he won’t come across, eh?” Shorty cursed frail human nature with one of his best flights, and caught his breath. “They both got their feet in the trough. May God rot them dead with scurvy for their reward, that’s all I got to say, except I’m goin’ right up now an’ knock Wentworth’s block off.”

But Smoke stood out for diplomacy. That night, when the camp groaned and slept, or groaned and did not sleep, he went to Wentworth’s unlighted cabin.

“Listen to me, Wentworth,” he said. “I’ve got a thousand dollars in dust right here in this sack. I’m a rich man in this country, and I can afford it. I think I’m getting touched. Put a raw potato in my hand and the dust is yours. Here, heft it.”

And Smoke thrilled when Amos Wentworth put out his hand in the darkness and hefted the gold. Smoke heard him fumble in the blankets, and then felt pressed into his hand, not the heavy gold-sack, but the unmistakable potato, the size of a hen’s egg, warm from contact with the other’s body.

Smoke did not wait till morning. He and Shorty were expecting at any time the deaths of their worst two cases, and to this cabin the partners went. Grated and mashed up in a cup, skin, and clinging specks of the earth, and all, was the thousand-dollar potato—a thick fluid, that they fed, several drops at a time, into the frightful orifices that had once been mouths. Shift by shift, through the long night, Smoke and Shorty relieved each other at administering the potato juice, rubbing it into the poor swollen gums where loose teeth rattled together and compelling the swallowing of every drop of the precious elixir.

By evening of the next day the change for the better in the two patients was miraculous and almost unbelievable. They were no longer the worst cases. In forty-eight hours, with the exhaustion of the potato, they were temporarily out of danger, though far from being cured.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Smoke said to Wentworth. “I’ve got holdings in this country, and my paper is good anywhere. I’ll give you five hundred dollars a potato up to fifty thousand dollars’ worth. That’s one hundred potatoes.”

“Was that all the dust you had?” Wentworth queried.

“Shorty and I scraped up all we had. But, straight, he and I are worth several millions between us.”

“I haven’t any potatoes,” Wentworth said finally. “Wish I had. That potato I gave you was the only one. I’d been saving it all the winter for fear I’d get the scurvy. I only sold it so as to be able to buy a passage out of the country when the river opens.”

Despite the cessation of potato-juice, the two treated cases continued to improve through the third day. The untreated cases went from bad to worse. On the fourth morning, three horrible corpses were buried. Shorty went through the ordeal, then turned to Smoke.

“You’ve tried your way. Now it’s me for mine.”

He headed straight for Wentworth’s cabin. What occurred there, Shorty never told. He emerged with