Smoke Bellew | Page 8

thick of a driving snow-squall, it
was in the company of his Indians, and his secret pride was that he had
come through with them and never squealed and never lagged. To be
almost as good as an Indian was a new ambition to cherish.
When he had paid off the Indians and seen them depart, a stormy
darkness was falling, and he was left alone, a thousand feet above
timber-line, on the backbone of a mountain. Wet to the waist, famished
and exhausted, he would have given a year's income for a fire and a cup
of coffee. Instead, he ate half a dozen cold flapjacks and crawled into
the folds of the partly unrolled tent. As he dozed off he had time for
only one fleeting thought, and he grinned with vicious pleasure at the
picture of John Bellew in the days to follow, masculinely back-tripping
his four hundred pounds up Chilcoot. As for himself, even though
burdened with two thousand pounds, he was bound down the hill.
In the morning, stiff from his labours and numb with the frost, he rolled
out of the canvas, ate a couple of pounds of uncooked bacon, buckled
the straps on a hundred pounds, and went down the rocky way. Several
hundred yards beneath, the trail led across a small glacier and down to
Crater Lake. Other men packed across the glacier. All that day he
dropped his packs at the glacier's upper edge, and, by virtue of the
shortness of the pack, he put his straps on one hundred and fifty pounds
each load. His astonishment at being able to do it never abated. For two
dollars he bought from an Indian three leathery sea-biscuits, and out of
these, and a huge quantity of raw bacon, made several meals.
Unwashed, unwarmed, his clothing wet with sweat, he slept another
night in the canvas.
In the early morning he spread a tarpaulin on the ice, loaded it with
three-quarters of a ton, and started to pull. Where the pitch of the
glacier accelerated, his load likewise accelerated, overran him, scooped

him in on top, and ran away with him.
A hundred packers, bending under their loads, stopped to watch him.
He yelled frantic warnings, and those in his path stumbled and
staggered clear. Below, on the lower edge of the glacier, was pitched a
small tent, which seemed leaping toward him, so rapidly did it grow
larger. He left the beaten track where the packers' trail swerved to the
left, and struck a patch of fresh snow. This arose about him in frosty
smoke, while it reduced his speed. He saw the tent the instant he struck
it, carrying away the corner guys, bursting in the front flaps, and
fetching up inside, still on top of the tarpaulin and in the midst of his
grub-sacks. The tent rocked drunkenly, and in the frosty vapour he
found himself face to face with a startled young woman who was
sitting up in her blankets--the very one who had called him a tenderfoot
at Dyea.
"Did you see my smoke?" he queried cheerfully.
She regarded him with disapproval.
"Talk about your magic carpets!" he went on.
"Do you mind removing that sack from my foot?" she said coldly.
He looked, and lifted his weight quickly.
"It wasn't a sack. It was my elbow. Pardon me."
The information did not perturb her, and her coolness was a challenge.
"It was a mercy you did not overturn the stove," she said.
He followed her glance and saw a sheet-iron stove and a coffee-pot,
attended by a young squaw. He sniffed the coffee and looked back to
the girl.
"I'm a chechako," he said.
Her bored expression told him that he was stating the obvious. But he

was unabashed.
"I've shed my shooting-irons," he added.
Then she recognized him, and her eyes lighted. "I never thought you'd
get this far," she informed him.
Again, and greedily, he sniffed the air. "As I live, coffee!" He turned
and directly addressed her: "I'll give you my little finger--cut it right off
now; I'll do anything; I'll be your slave for a year and a day or any other
old time, if you'll give me a cup out of that pot."
And over the coffee he gave his name and learned hers--Joy Gastell.
Also, he learned that she was an old-timer in the country. She had been
born in a trading-post on the Great Slave, and as a child had crossed the
Rockies with her father and come down to the Yukon. She was going in,
she said, with her father, who had been delayed by business in Seattle,
and who had then been wrecked on the ill-fated Chanter and carried
back to Puget Sound by the rescuing steamer.
In view of