Smoke Bellew | Page 6

and down, he

noted that the other tenderfeet were beginning to shed their
shooting-irons.
His short hauls decreased. At times a hundred feet was all he could
stagger, and then the ominous pounding of his heart against his
eardrums and the sickening totteriness of his knees compelled him to
rest. And his rests grew longer. But his mind was busy. It was a
twenty-eight-mile portage, which represented as many days, and this,
by all accounts, was the easiest part of it. "Wait till you get to
Chilkoot," others told him as they rested and talked, "where you climb
with hands and feet."
"They ain't going to be no Chilkoot," was his answer. "Not for me.
Long before that I'll be at peace in my little couch beneath the moss."
A slip and a violent, wrenching effort at recovery frightened him. He
felt that everything inside him had been torn asunder.
"If ever I fall down with this on my back, I'm a goner," he told another
packer.
"That's nothing," came the answer. "Wait till you hit the Canyon. You'll
have to cross a raging torrent on a sixty-foot pine-tree. No guide-ropes,
nothing, and the water boiling at the sag of the log to your knees. If you
fall with a pack on your back, there's no getting out of the straps. You
just stay there and drown."
"Sounds good to me," he retorted; and out of the depths of his
exhaustion he almost meant it.
"They drown three or four a day there," the man assured him. "I helped
fish a German out of there. He had four thousand in greenbacks on
him."
"Cheerful, I must say," said Kit, battling his way to his feet and
tottering on.
He and the sack of beans became a perambulating tragedy. It reminded

him of the old man of the sea who sat on Sinbad's neck. And this was
one of those intensely masculine vacations, he meditated. Compared
with it, the servitude to O'Hara was sweet. Again and again he was
nearly seduced by the thought of abandoning the sack of beans in the
brush and of sneaking around the camp to the beach and catching a
steamer for civilization.
But he didn't. Somewhere in him was the strain of the hard, and he
repeated over and over to himself that what other men could do, he
could. It became a nightmare chant, and he gibbered it to those that
passed him on the trail. At other times, resting, he watched and envied
the stolid, mule-footed Indians that plodded by under heavier packs.
They never seemed to rest, but went on and on with a steadiness and
certitude that were to him appalling.
He sat and cursed--he had no breath for it when under way--and fought
the temptation to sneak back to San Francisco. Before the mile pack
was ended he ceased cursing and took to crying. The tears were tears of
exhaustion and of disgust with self. If ever a man was a wreck, he was.
As the end of the pack came in sight, he strained himself in desperation,
gained the camp-site, and pitched forward on his face, the beans on his
back. It did not kill him, but he lay for fifteen minutes before he could
summon sufficient shreds of strength to release himself from the straps.
Then he became deathly sick, and was so found by Robbie, who had
similar troubles of his own. It was this sickness of Robbie that braced
Kit up.
"What other men can do, we can do," Kit told Robbie, though down in
his heart he wondered whether or not he was bluffing.
"And I am twenty-seven years old and a man," he privately assured
himself many times in the days that followed. There was need for it. At
the end of a week, though he had succeeded in moving his eight
hundred pounds forward a mile a day, he had lost fifteen pounds of his
own weight. His face was lean and haggard. All resilience had gone out
of his body and mind. He no longer walked, but plodded. And on the
back-trips, travelling light, his feet dragged almost as much as when he
was loaded.

He had become a work animal. He fell asleep over his food, and his
sleep was heavy and beastly, save when he was aroused, screaming
with agony, by the cramps in his legs. Every part of him ached. He
tramped on raw blisters; yet even this was easier than the fearful
bruising his feet received on the water-rounded rocks of the Dyea Flats,
across which the trail led for two miles. These two miles represented
thirty-eight miles of travelling. He washed his face once a day. His
nails, torn and broken and afflicted with hangnails, were never cleaned.
His shoulders