Pardners by Rex Beach (best books to read fiction txt) 📗

I came here to kill you, but you will go out across the mountains free, while I rave in madness and the medicine men make charms over me. When you come into Bethel Mission I'll be dead. Good-bye."

"Good Hell! We're takin' ye to Bethel and a doctor in ten minutes. A week's travel as the trail goes, but we'll save a chunk of ye yet, old man."

Five days later a broken team crawled over the snow to the Moravian Mission, urged by two men gaunt from the trail, and blistered by the cold. From the sledge came shrieks and throaty mutterings, horrid gabblings of post-freezing madness and Dr. Forrest, lifting back the robe, found Orloff lashed into his couch.

"Five days from Togiak. Two hundred miles in heavy trails," explained George wearily, as the cries of the maniac dimmed behind the log walls.

Two hours later Forrest spoke gravely as they nursed their frost bites in his room.

"We have operated. He will recover."

"It's a sad, sad day,"' mourned George. "It just takes the taste out of everything for me. He's a cripple now, eh ?"

"Yes! Helpless! I did not know Father Orloff had many—er—friends hereabout," continued the doctor. "He was thought to be hated by the whites. I'm glad the report was wrong."

"Friends be damned," said the other strongly. "What's a friend? Ye can get them any place, but where can ye find another enemy like that man?"

THE SCOURGE

Coming down coast from the Kotzebue country they stumbled onto the little camp in the early winter, and as there was food a plenty, of its kind, whereas they had subsisted for some days on puree of seal oil and short ribs of dog, Captain and Big George decided to winter. A maxim of the north teaches to cabin by a grub-pile.

It was an odd village they beheld that first day. Instead of the clean moss-chinked log shelters men were wont to build in this land, they found the community housed like marmots in holes and burrows.

It seemed that the troop had landed, fresh from the States, a hundred and a quarter strong, hot with the lust for gold, yet shaken by the newspaper horrors of Alaska's rigorous hardships and forbidding climate.

Debouching in the early fall, they had hastily prepared for an
Associated Press-painted Arctic winter.

Had they been forced to winter in the mountains of Idaho, or among
Montana's passes, they would have prepared simply and effectively.
Here, however, in a mystic land, surrounded by the unknown, they grew
panic stricken and lost their wits.

Thus, when the two "old timers" came upon them in the early winter they found them in bomb-proof hovels, sunk into the muck, banked with log walls, and thatched over with dirt and sod.

"Where are your windows and ventilators?" they were asked, and collectively the camp laughed at the question. They knew how to keep snug and warm even if half-witted "sourdoughs" didn't. They weren't taking any chances on freezing, not on your tin-type, no outdoor work and exposure for them!

As the winter settled, they snuggled back, ate three meals and more daily of bacon, beans, and baking-powder bread; playing cribbage for an appetite. They undertook no exercise more violent than seven-up, while the wood-cutting fell as a curse upon those unfortunates who lost at the game. They giggled at Captain and the big whaler who daily, snow or blow, hit the trail or wielded pick and shovel.

However, as the two maintained their practice, the camp grew to resent their industry, and, as is possible only in utterly idle communities, there sprung up a virulence totally out of proportion, and, founded without reason, most difficult to dispel. Before they knew it, the two were disliked and distrusted; their presence ignored; their society shunned.

Captain had talked to many in the camp. "You'll get scurvy, sure, living in these dark houses. They're damp and dirty, and you don't exercise. Besides, there isn't a pound of fresh grub in camp."

Figuratively, the camp's nose had tilted at this, and it stated pompously that it were better to preserve its classic purity of features and pro rata of toes, than to jeopardize these adjuncts through fear of a possible blood disease.

"Blood disease, eh?" George snorted like a sea-lion. "Wait till your legs get black and you spit your teeth out like plum-pits—mebbe you'll listen then. It'll come, see if it don't."

He was right. Yet when the plague did grip the camp and men died, one in five, they failed to rise to it. Instead of fighting manfully they lapsed into a frightened, stubborn coma.

There was one, and only one, who did not. Klusky the Jew; Klusky the pariah. They said he worked just to be ornery and different from the rest, he hated them so. They enjoyed baiting him to witness his fury. It sated that taint of Roman cruelty inherent in the man of ignorance. He was all the amusement they had, for it wasn't policy to stir up the two others—they might slop over and clean up the village. So they continued to goad him as they had done since leaving 'Frisco. They gibed and jeered till he shunned them, living alone in the fringe of the pines, bitter and vicious, as an outcast from the pack will grow, whether human or lupine. He frequented only the house of Captain and George, because they were exiles like himself.

The partners did not relish this overmuch, for he was an odious being, avaricious, carping, and dirty.

"His face reminds me of a tool," said George, once, "nose an' chin shuts up like calipers. He's got the forehead of a salmon trout, an' his chin don't retreat, it stampedes, plumb down ag'in his apple. Look out for that droop of the mouth. I've seen it before, an' his eyes is bad, too. They've stirred him up an' pickled all the good he ever had. Some day he'll do a murder."

"I wonder what he means by always saying he'll have revenge before spring. It makes me creep to hear him cackle and gloat. I think he's going crazy."

"Can't tell. This bunch would bust anybody's mental tugs, an' they make a mistake drivin' him so. Say! How's my gums look tonight?" George stretched his lips back, showing his teeth, while Captain made careful examination.

"All right. How are mine?"

"Red as a berry."

Every day they searched thus for the symptoms, looking for discolouration, and anxiously watching bruises on limb or body. Men live in fear when their comrades vanish silently from their midst. Each night upon retiring they felt legs nervously, punching here and there to see that the flesh retained its resiliency.

So insidious is the malady's approach that it may be detected only thus. A lassitude perhaps, a rheumatic laziness, or pains and swelling at the joints. Mayhap one notes a putty-like softness of the lower limbs. Where he presses, the finger mark remains, filling up sluggishly. No mental depression at first, nor fever, only a drooping ambition, fatigue, enlarging parts, now gradual, now sudden.

The grim humour of seeing grown men gravely poking their legs with rigid digits, or grinning anxiously into hand-mirrors had struck some of the tenderfeet at first, but the implacable progress of the disease; its black, merciless presence, pausing destructively here and there, had terrorized them into a hopeless fatalism till they cowered helplessly, awaiting its touch.

One night Captain announced to his partner. "I'm going over to the
Frenchmen's, I hear Menard is down."

"What's the use of buttin' in where ye ain't wanted? As fer me, them frogeaters can all die like salmon; I won't go nigh 'em an' I've told 'em so. I give 'em good advice, an' what'd I get? What'd that daffy doctor do? Pooh-poohed at me an' physiced them. Lord! Physic a man with scurvy—might as well bleed a patient fer amputation." George spoke with considerable heat.

Captain pulled his parka hood well down so that the fox-tails around the edge protected his features, and stepped out into the evening. He had made several such trips in the past few months to call on men smitten with the sickness, but all to no effect. Being "chechakos" they were supreme in their conceit, and refused to heed his advice.

Returning at bed time he found his partner webbing a pair of snow-shoes by the light of a stinking "go-devil," consisting of a string suspended in a can of molten grease. The camp had sold them grub, but refused the luxury of candles. Noting his gravity, George questioned:

"Well, how's Menard?"

"Dead!" Captain shook himself as though at the memory. "It was awful. He died while I was talking to him."

"Don't say! How's that?"

"I found him propped up in a chair. He looked bad, but said he was feeling fine—"

"That's the way they go. I've seen it many a time—feelin' fine plumb to the last."

"He'd been telling me about a bet he had with Promont. Promont was taken last week, too, you know, same time. Menard bet him twenty dollars that he'd outlast him."

"'I'm getting all right,' says he, 'but poor Promont's going to die. I'll get his twenty, sure!' I turned to josh with the boy a bit, an' when I spoke to Menard he didn't answer. His jaw had sagged and he'd settled in his chair. Promont saw it, too, and cackled. 'H'I 'ave win de bet! H'I 'ave win de bet!' That's all. He just slid off. Gee! It was horrible."

George put by his work and swore, pacing the rough pole floor.

"Oh, the cussed fools! That makes six dead from the one cabin—six from eighteen, an' Promont'll make seven to-morrow. Do ye mind how we begged 'em to quit that dug-out an' build a white man's house, an' drink spruce tea, an' work! They're too —— lazy. They lie around in that hole, breath bad air, an' rot."

"And just to think, if we only had a crate of potatoes in camp we could save every man jack of 'em. Lord! They never even brought no citric acid nor lime juice—nothin'! If we hadn't lost our grub when the whale-boat upset, eh? That ten-gallon keg of booze would help some. Say! I got such a thirst I don't never expect to squench it proper;" he spoke plaintively.

"Klusky was here again while you was gone, too. I itch to choke that
Jew whenever he gets to ravin' over these people. He's sure losin'
his paystreak. He gritted his teeth an' foamed like a mad malamoot,
I never see a low-downer lookin' aspect than him when he gets mad."

"'I'll make 'em come to me,' says he, 'on their bellies beggin'. It ain't time yet. Oh, no! Wait 'till half of 'em is dead, an' the rest is rotten with scurvy. Then they'll crawl to me with their gums thick and black, an' their flesh like dough; they'll kiss my feet an' cry, an' I'll stamp 'em into the snow!' You'd ought a heard him laugh. Some day I'm goin' to lay a hand on that man, right in my own house."

As they prepared for bed. Captain remarked:

"By the way, speaking of potatoes, I heard to-night that there was a crate in the Frenchmen's outfit somewhere, put in by mistake. perhaps, but when they boated their stuff up river last fall it couldn't be found—must have been lost."

It was some days later that, returning from a gameless hunt, Captain staggered into camp, weary from the drag of his snow-shoes.

Throwing himself into his bunk he rested while George prepared the meagre meal of brown beans, fried salt pork, and sour-dough bread. The excellence of this last, due to the whaler's years of practice, did much to mitigate the unpleasantness of the milkless, butterless, sugarless menu.

Captain's fatigue prevented notice of the other's bearing. However, when he had supped and the dishes were done George spoke, quietly and without emotion.

"Well, boy, the big thing has come off."

"What do you mean?"

For reply he took the grease dip and, holding