They crossed the Yukon to its west bank, shot down-stream with easy stroke, and at the end of forty minutes swung in close to the left around the tail of an island. Forty Mile spread itself suddenly before them. Both men straightened their backs and gazed at the sight. They gazed long and carefully, drifting with the current, in their faces an expression of mingled surprise and consternation slowly gathering. Not a thread of smoke was rising from the hundreds of log-cabins. There was no sound of axes biting sharply into wood, of hammering and sawing. Neither dogs nor men loitered before the big store. No steamboats lay at the bank, no canoes, nor scows, nor poling-boats. The river was as bare of craft as the town was of life.
“Kind of looks like Gabriel’s tooted his little horn, and you an’ me has turned up missing,” remarked Hootchinoo Bill.
His remark was casual, as though there was nothing unusual about the occurrence. Kink Mitchell’s reply was just as casual as though he, too, were unaware of any strange perturbation of spirit.
“Looks as they was all Baptists, then, and took the boats to go by water,” was his contribution.
“My ol’ dad was a Baptist,” Hootchinoo Bill supplemented. “An’ he always did hold it was forty thousand miles nearer that way.”
This was the end of their levity. They ran the canoe in and climbed the high earth bank. A feeling of awe descended upon them as they walked the deserted streets. The sunlight streamed placidly over the town. A gentle wind tapped the halyards against the flagpole before the closed doors of the Caledonia Dance Hall. Mosquitoes buzzed, robins sang, and moose birds tripped hungrily among the cabins; but there was no human life nor sign of human life.
“I’m just dyin’ for a drink,” Hootchinoo Bill said and unconsciously his voice sank to a hoarse whisper.
His partner nodded his head, loth to hear his own voice break the stillness. They trudged on in uneasy silence till surprised by an open door. Above this door, and stretching the width of the building, a rude sign announced the same as the “ Monte Carlo.” But beside the door, hat over eyes, chair tilted back, a man sat sunning himself. He was an old man. Beard and hair were long and white and patriarchal.
“If it ain’t ol’ Jim Cummings, turned up like us, too late for Resurrection!” said Kink Mitchell.
“Most like he didn’t hear Gabriel tootin’,” was Hootchinoo Bill’s suggestion.
“Hello, Jim! Wake up!” he shouted.
The old man unlimbered lamely, blinking his eyes and murmuring automatically: “What’ll ye have, gents? What’ll ye have?”
They followed him inside and ranged up against the long bar where of yore a half-dozen nimble bar-keepers found little time to loaf. The great room, ordinarily aroar with life, was still and gloomy as a tomb. There was no rattling of chips, no whirring of ivory balls. Roulette and faro tables were like gravestones under their canvas covers. No women’s voices drifted merrily from the dance-room behind. Ol’ Jim Cummings wiped a glass with palsied hands, and Kink Mitchell scrawled his initials on the dust-covered bar.
“Where’s the girls?” Hootchinoo Bill shouted, with affected geniality.
“Gone,” was the ancient bar-keeper’s reply, in a voice thin and aged as himself, and as unsteady as his hand.
“Where’s Bidwell and Barlow?”
“Gone.”
“And Sweetwater Charley?”
“Gone.”
“And his sister?”
“Gone too.”
“Your daughter Sally, then, and her little kid?”
“Gone, all gone.” The old man shook his head sadly, rummaging in an absent way among the dusty bottles.
“Great Sardanapolis! Where?” Kink Mitchell exploded, unable longer to restrain himself. “You don’t say you’ve had the plague?”
“Why, ain’t you heerd?” The old man chuckled quietly. “They-all’s gone to Dawson.”
“What-like is that?” Bill demanded. “A creek? or a bar? or a place?”
“Ain’t never heered of Dawson, eh?” The old man chuckled exasperatingly. “Why, Dawson ’s a town, a city, bigger’n Forty Mile. Yes, sir, bigger’n Forty Mile.”
“I’ve ben in this land seven year,” Bill announced emphatically, “an’ I make free to say I never heard tell of the burg before. Hold on! Let’s have some more of that whisky. Your information’s flabbergasted me, that it has. Now just whereabouts is this Dawson-place you was a-mentionin’?”
“On the big flat jest below the mouth of Klondike,” ol’ Jim answered. “But where has you-all ben this summer?”
“Never you mind where we-all’s ben,” was Kink Mitchell’s testy reply. “We-all’s ben where the skeeters is that thick you’ve got to throw a stick into the air so as to see the sun and tell the time of day. Ain’t I right, Bill?”
“Right you are,” said Bill. “But speakin’ of this Dawson-place how like did it happen to be, Jim?”
“Ounce to the pan on a creek called Bonanza, an’ they ain’t got to bedrock yet.”
“Who struck it?”
“Carmack.”
At mention of the discoverer’s name the partners stared at each other disgustedly. Then they winked with great solemnity.
“Siwash George,” sniffed Hootchinoo Bill.
“That squaw-man,” sneered Kink Mitchell.
“I wouldn’t put on my moccasins to stampede after anything he’d ever find,” said Bill.
“Same here,” announced his partner. “A cuss that’s too plumb lazy to fish his own salmon. That’s why he took up with the Indians. S’pose that black brother-in-law of his,-lemme see, Skookum Jim, eh?-s’pose he’s in on it?”
The old bar-keeper nodded. “Sure, an’ what’s more, all Forty Mile, exceptin’ me an’ a few cripples.”
“And drunks,” added Kink Mitchell.
“No-sir-ee!” the old man shouted emphatically.
“I bet you the drinks Honkins ain’t in on it!” Hootchinoo Bill cried with certitude.
Ol’ Jim’s face lighted up. “I takes you, Bill, an’ you loses.”
“However did that ol’ soak budge out of Forty Mile?” Mitchell demanded.
“The ties him down an’ throws him in the bottom of a polin’-boat,” ol’ Jim explained. “Come right in here, they did, an’ takes him out of that there chair there in the corner, an’ three more drunks they finds under the pianny. I tell you-alls the whole camp hits up the Yukon for Dawson jes’ like Sam Scratch was after them,-wimmen, children, babes in arms, the whole shebang. Bidwell comes to me an’ sez, sez he, ‘Jim, I wants you to keep tab on the Monte Carlo. I’m goin’.’
“‘Where’s Barlow?’ sez I. ‘Gone,’ sez he, ‘an’ I’m a-followin’ with a load of whisky.’ An’ with that, never waitin’ for me to decline, he makes a run for his boat an’ away he goes, polin’ up river like mad. So here I be, an’ these is the first drinks I’ve passed out in three days.”
The partners looked at each other.
“Gosh darn my buttoms!” said Hootchinoo Bill. “Seems likes you and me, Kink, is the kind of folks always caught out with forks when it rains soup.”
“Wouldn’t it take the saleratus out your dough, now?” said Kink Mitchell. “A stampede of tin-horns, drunks, an’ loafers.”
“An’ squaw-men,” added Bill. “Not a genooine miner in the whole caboodle.”
“Genooine miners like you an’ me, Kink,” he went on academically, “is all out an’ sweatin’ hard over Birch Creek way. Not a genooine miner in this whole crazy Dawson outfit, and I say right here, not a step do I budge for any Carmack strike. I’ve got to see the colour of the dust first.”
“Same here,” Mitchell agreed. “Let’s have another drink.”
Having wet this resolution, they beached the canoe, transferred its contents to their cabin, and cooked dinner. But as the afternoon wore along they grew restive. They were men used to the silence of the great wilderness, but this gravelike silence of a town worried them. They caught themselves listening for familiar sounds-“waitin’ for something to make a noise which ain’t goin’ to make a noise,” as Bill put it. They strolled through the deserted streets to the Monte Carlo for more drinks, and wandered along the river bank to the steamer landing, where only water gurgled as the eddy filled and emptied, and an occasional salmon leapt flashing into the sun.
They sat down in the shade in front of the store and talked with the consumptive storekeeper, whose liability to hemorrhage accounted for his presence. Bill and Kink told him how they intended loafing in their cabin and resting up after the hard summer’s work. They told him, with a certain insistence, that was half appeal for belief, half challenge for contradiction, how much they were going to enjoy their idleness. But the storekeeper was uninterested. He switched the conversation back to the strike on Klondike, and they could not keep him away from it. He could think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, till Hootchinoo Bill rose up in anger and disgust.