A good old scout
Date: 2024-11-07T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short stories; Gold miners -- Fiction; Alaska -- Fiction

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Title: A good old scout

Author: Theodore Solomons

Release date: November 7, 2024 [eBook #74698]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Street & Smith Corporation

Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A GOOD OLD SCOUT ***

A GOOD OLD SCOUT

By Theodore Seixas Solomons

By the author of “Two Stirs Forward—Three Back,” Etc.

It was a question of sentiment—which had the more genuine, the old-timer or the more modern prospector. When a rich haul of gold was at stake, which man would cast aside his finer feelings and become a heartless grabber?

“It’s a land a-flowin’ with milk and money,” quoted old “Nock” Whipple, in a high and hopeful voice, “Jest as the Good Book says. Only the conditions is different. You got ter stew down the berries to git the honey—and it’s some puckery. Fer the milk—why, jest catch a caribou or a cow moose.”

He turned his gaunt frame on his elbow to laugh, his gray-bearded head and hollow neck emerging from the dingy blankets of his bed on the bough-strewn floor of the tent. His merriment ended in a fit of coughing.

“Get back under there, old scout!” admonished McAdams severely, striding to him and giving the blankets a jerk into place. “And shut up. You talk too much!” He shoved a stick or two of wood into the battered sheet-iron stove—a fortunate pick-up of the afternoon before, relic of a winter camp of earlier prospecting days.

“Don’t be so harsh to him, Aleck,” said a third man reprovingly. He was sitting in the corner, hunched over a diary or memorandum book of some sort, in which he was industriously writing.

“Aw, I know how to handle the old guy,” returned McAdams good-naturedly, as he slipped through the tent flap, bent on cutting stove wood for the night. The prospect without was a dreary one.

The pleasant, springlike summer of the Far North had ended weeks before, and the fall, brief precursor of the long and hard, white time, had already painted the few deciduous shrubs into danger signals, giving to the dun landscape of the arctic highland that little warmth of color the year knew. Rock and moss filled the near vistas of the landscape, its stream valleys of low relief and intricate contours marked by pencilings of fringing willows, with a hint, southward, of spruce forests where hazy patches of the hue of faded indigo revealed the lower reaches of the Porcupine, most northern tributary of the mighty Yukon.

The three had been out all summer on a prospecting trip through that far, unmapped region of Alaska—Enoch Whipple, pioneer Montanan, pioneer Alaskan, leading on the last of his once stout legs; Aleck McAdams, for some years his friend and occasional companion; and Mr. Alfred Lawrence Turner, a thirty-year-old mining engineer, rather down on his luck. It was a scoured watershed country—eroding to a new “base level,” as Turner put it, with little of the older gravels left. But old Nock Whipple had told them as much, though, in different language. What hadn’t been washed away, old pals had said, was sometimes gold bearing. A “pockety” country, hard to get to, and the pockets too rare to tempt any but bold men desperate for a grubstake.

Outside of the tent lay two pack saddles, canvas bags, a few prospecting tools. On the bare slope of the stream valley, two old mules, that had been sleek enough some months before, but were now skin-covered skeletons, browsed philosophically on frost-dried herbage.

McAdams browsed for dead willow sticks in drift litter under the banks of the creek. From the tent, hastily pitched the afternoon before, when Enoch Whipple’s legs had succumbed to the weakness of fever, came the droning sound of the old scout’s voice, high, almost senile, as he “knocked” the country to which he had gone, years before, yet too late in life for a chance to win—and probably lose again—another fortune in the West and Northwest. McAdams, between his cracking of sticks, listened with a quizzical smile, to the old man’s ravings.

“Yes, she’s a land o’ gold, all right, Alfred. Klondike, Forty-Mile, Nome, Fairbanks, Iditarod. Fortunes made. Millions of ’em. Well, anyhow, a dozen or two. Natcherly, a few of us didn’t get nothin’—leastways a million or two of us didn’t. The hull country was covered with gold, the papers said, when the old Klondike strike was boomin’—covered with gold like an old carpet with dust, they told us.

“I ’member a feller camped near us at Split-up Island at the mouth of the Stewart. He was playin’ a lone hand. Had a big awk’erd skiff loaded with s’plies—funniest junk you ever see. Hunnerd and five different articles o’ grub, he told us. One I ’member was manioca—somethin’ like that. Kinder cousin to tapioca, he says. Build yer up. Great stuff. He was a big, six-foot counterjumper from Kansas City or some’eres. Growed a beard to look like a sure-enough Western man. An’ every day while we was all splittin’ up, this guy—they called him Willie—would set up a little lookin’-glass against a tree and comb out his whiskers and slick up his long, wavy, brown hair.

“One mornin’ he ’pears on the river bank with a pack sack on his shoulders, loaded down with bacon an’ manioca and sich. He was startin’ to locate his claim. Where was he goin’, with the Klondike a hunnerd miles off yet? ‘Why,’ says he, ‘I’m a-goin’ up some creek anywheres,’ says he, ‘before we gets too close to Dawson where the crowd must ’a’ staked everything. I’m a-goin’ ter locate me a reg’lar claim. I’ll take out enough for to git me home and show the folks the gold, and then I’m a bringin’ in some of ’em—mother, mebbe, too—and we’ll work her out, and back to old Kansas City,’ he says, just like that!”

Old Whipple turned on his elbow for another laugh—and a coughing spell.

“Keep under your blankets, Whipple,” admonished Turner, merely pausing a moment in his note-making. “And don’t laugh like that, my good man. Bad for you and nerve-racking to me.”

“Just like that,” repeated old Whipple, when he got his breath. “As easy as fallin’ off a lawg. Whole country was covered with gold. All you had to do was find a piece of it without stakes on—and that was easy, in spite o’ fifty thousand stampeders. What did they amount to in a hunnerd and fifty thousand million acres o’ wilderness, hey? Say, this Willie was one of the guys that used to sing, ‘The Klondike Vale Tonight.’ Must ’a’ heered it on a boat comin’ up to Skag-a-way. Had a string thing like a banjo or somethin’. Fine voice Willie had, too. An’ he’d bawl her out in the evenin’ from his skiff moored to the bank. When the rag chewers was through sawin’ their stoves in two, and gittin’ ready to sleep to git new strength for quarrelin’ afresh in the mornin’, Willie would sing it mournful—fer he sure believed the words:

“In fur-away Alaska, whare the Yukon River flows,

An’ the mighty boulders stand ’mid wealth and might,

In a land o’ wealth untold, in a grave that’s decked with g-o-l-d,

He’s sleepin’ i-n th’ Klondike Vale to-night!”

Flushed, his faded, blue eyes shining in the deep sockets, old Whipple’s laughter sounded again, like mirthless echoes in an empty cavern.

“‘In a grave that’s decked with gold!’ Never be my luck, live or dead!”

“Shut up, Nock!” McAdams appeared with an armful of slender, twisted sticks. “Get yourself all het up, ye old fool!”

“No use abusing the old fellow,” remarked Turner. He had put the diary aside and was perusing a small pocket volume of something. “Delirium, I suppose,” he added in a lower voice. “Let him die in peace!”

“Aw,” McAdams muttered; “he’s all right. Tuckered out, tha’s all.” In a louder voice: “Lay still, old scout, will yer? They ain’t much grub left, and durn little game away up here. How we gonna get yer down to the Yukon ’less you rest up so we kin start again in a day or two? Cut out the gab!”

“Gosh, but you’re a rough devil, McAdams!” exclaimed Turner petulantly. “Let him die in peace, can’t you?”

“He’ll hear yer, you durn fool!”

Turner scowled. Comrades though they were, and in a desperate plight, he disliked the unwonted familiarity of the uncouth man more than he objected to the slur.

“He won’t. He’s only hearing his own maudlin talk. Man, you’ve got no heart, no sentiment!”

“Sentiment? What’s that?”

Turner shrugged.

“What you—haven’t got. Let him alone. Don’t nag him. It’s just a question of hours.”

“I’m tryin’ to buck him up, tha’s all. Got to get him outer here purty soon. Reckon we kin stick him on one mule by bunching what’s left of the outfit an’ crowdin’ it on the other one.”

“Impossible,” decided Turner, frowning. “We’ll simply do what we can for him till he—passes. Please speak to him kindly.” He turned again to his handy volume of the classics.

McAdams seized a small-caliber rifle and went after ptarmigan, a sparse few of which they had seen the day before in the bushlike willows of the divide. Their plight for food was desperate. A bird or two would make soup for the old man.

But Enoch Whipple was nearly beyond all help from food when the middle-aged, “unsentimental” McAdams returned belatedly, the early dark of the northern fall upon them. A couple of birds—already turning white to meet the coming winter—were slung over the barrel of his gun. Old Whipple was raving.

“Don’t none o’ you guys think this old Injun tracker was slow in gittin’ to the strikes up here?” he shouted to the solemn-faced engineer. “I was gen’rally before the first stakin’s was done. And, gentlemen, I allus pulled a blank. Nome? Say, in Nome, the gold was all around me, first on the beach and then out on old Dexter—a fraction, that was, all around me, boys—an’ mine, both of ’em, didn’t have a color!”

He seemed to doze for a while; but when McAdams roused him to take the ptarmigan broth, he glared crazily into the battered tin bowl and wagged his head refusingly.

“Looks yaller,” he muttered. “B’iled-up gold, I reckon. Not fer me. I git mine in a pan or a sluice box. That ain’t nothin’ but tundra water. Yaller. All over Alaska. Some folks think it’s gold—dissolved out by the grass roots. Gold at the grass roots! That’s it. That’s what they promised us when we come North. ‘Land o’ wealth untold—grave that’s decked with gold—’”

It was impossible to quiet him. Turner’s dignified gentleness, when old Whipple’s ravings disturbed his reading, was as unavailing as McAdams’ rough admonishings, which turned, finally, into severity. “Shut up and go to sleep, you!” It was the only way he knew of impressing the wandering mind of the old frontiersman, but it was inexpressibly shocking to Alfred Turner, of finer mold. He glared at McAdams balefully. McAdams only laughed.

“Always been knockin’ the country, sence I’ve known him,” he remarked to the engineer, as they sprawled on their blankets, a single fluttering candle between them. “Baptized Enoch, he was; and you kin figger what a grand chance that name gave the boys up here to nickname him. They jest left off the ‘e,’ that’s all. Oh, well, everybody knocks things and places when the luck is all agin’ ’em. But old Whipple’s always had it wuss than anybody I ever seen up here. Hey there!” he bawled, when the sick man began singing again. “I’ll tie you down, you old rascal, if you don’t lay quiet!”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mac,” protested Turner hotly. “It doesn’t do any good. Let him die happy!”

“Does do good,” insisted McAdams. “Slinks down, more or less, whenever I holler at him. You got an easy way of killin’ him off? Why ain’t he got a chance? Fever’s passin’, mebbe. He’s a tough old bird. Keep him quiet, I say!”

But neither Turner’s melancholy advice to the passing one nor the gruff-voiced commands of McAdams availed to stay the torrent of delirium. Only death stilled the weakly raucous voice. And his last words came in a kind of gasping chant, in high, thin falsetto:

“In a grave that’s decked with g-o-l-d,

He’s sleeping i-n the Klondike Vale to-night!”

Turner made considerable ado over laying out old Whipple in seemly guise, fussing about in the tent; while Aleck McAdams took upon himself the grilling task of digging a grave in the hard and rocky soil. The late night was a poor time, and the man was tired. But the two had agreed that an early get-away from that inhospitable barren land was imperative, and McAdams groped about for a nook that offered soil enough for a proper grave, deep beyond the fierce pawings of slinking creatures of the wild. In an angle of the creek bed, yet higher than the marks of the spring freshets, he found such a place, and with a light pick and short-handled shovel, McAdams went doggedly to work.

When he reentered the tent, admitting thereto a first faint light of dawn, he found his remaining companion smoothing off a flattened slab of wood.

“For an epitaph for the poor old fellow,” explained Turner, fumbling in his coat for his fountain pen.

“I know,” nodded McAdams, mopping his face with a grimy bandanna handkerchief. “In a grave that’s decked with gold, he’s sleepin’ in the Klondike Vale to-night! Fine!”

Turner gave a grunt of disgust.

“Doggerel. The word ‘wealth,’ if you quote the whole verse, is repeated twice. I suppose in the correct version it isn’t, but it’s rotten poetry to stick up on a grave, even in the wilderness.”

McAdams looked wistfully at the slab. “Still,” he urged, “it was the old man’s fav’rite joke—knockin’ the gold up here. And that ridic’lous ‘grave that’s decked with gold’—he allus split his sides laughin’ at that. Old man was some joker in his time, too. I been with him off and on a number of years.”

“Death and graves are solemn matters, McAdams,” replied Turner pettishly. “As I’ve had occasion to remark before. Mac, you’ve simply got no sentiment. The man was your friend. We’ll give him what decent burial we can, and mark his last resting place with something a little more fitting in the way of verse than that maudlin dance-hall stuff!”

“What’ll it be?” asked McAdams, abashed.

“I had thought of an epitaph, or a verse, rather, from the tomb of the immortal bard, Shakespeare. It’s a bit highbrow, perhaps, for poor old Whipple. It may protect the mound, though. Even you old sourdoughs are sometimes superstitious.”

McAdams leaned down, his hard hands resting on his clay-slippery overalls, and watched Turner as he printed slowly, beneath the name and date, the words:

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake, forbear
To dig the dust inclosed here;
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

“It ain’t the kind o’ langwage old Nock Whipple savvied,” commented McAdams soberly. “But I get the idee.”

He extinguished the candle with his heavy palm—thriftily.

“Now give me a hand, here——”

By the time McAdams had shoveled back all the gravel and smoothed the oval surface, Turner had ornately rounded the wooden slab and pointed its end. A few strokes with the back of the shovel and the little monument was driven to its place at the head of the grave underneath the high bank. Alfred Lawrence Turner murmured a brief prayer and dropped a silent tear.

It was barely light when they made up the packs, and McAdams brought in the shivering mules and saddled them. Their four companions trudged, single file, down the meandering stream bed, where five had come.

Turner clapped his hand to the breast pocket of his coat.

“Wait, Mac! I must have left my fountain pen where the tent was. I’ll go back after it.”

“Take you half an hour,” demurred McAdams, squinting at the rising sun. “We got some job getting outer this part of the world—on half rations.”

“Got to have the pen, you know!” Turner walked briskly away.

The little black tube was nowhere to be found among the tramped boughs that marked the site of the tent. Suddenly Turner remembered that he had used the pen last in making a decorative box around the epitaph. At the grave he found the pen—and also something else. The risen sun drew glintings from the fresh-turned gravel. He was amazed. He dug about with his fingers. A little nugget; a larger one; specks of fine gold and coarse. He ran down the creek and found an impatient McAdams feeding choice bits of bunch grass to the gaunt mules.

“Most wonderful thing! Where we camped last night——”

“Well, by heck! what d’ye know about that?” exclaimed McAdams, when the mining engineer had told him. The “pardner” of unlucky Enoch Whipple forgot about half rations, for the time being, and turned the mules back. In ten minutes the two prospectors were sizing up the vicinity of the last resting place of the old Montana scout.

The result was amazing—and disappointing. McAdams, in the dark, had come upon the only deposit of gravel. It was a pothole shielded by the angular, overhanging rim rock of the creek channel from the denuding forces of erosion that elsewhere had swept the highlands clean of all its old deposits. It had been known as a “pockety” country, as old Whipple had told them. Hereabouts there was one pocket. All that was mortal of Enoch Whipple rested there. The mining engineer and the old sour dough returned to the gold-flecked grave.

Alfred Lawrence Turner’s mouth twitched. He lit one of the last of his cigarettes.

“We won’t find as easy a place for a new grave,” he remarked thoughtfully. “But we’ll not need a new one. After we’ve washed the gravel—cleaned out this pothole completely—why, we can reinter the body and cover it with the tailings. Make it look just as it did——”

McAdams gasped.

“What d’yer mean? Dig him up again? You’re joking!”

Turner laughed uncomfortably. “Of course, if it had been lighter, we’d have seen that this was pay dirt. And naturally we’d have washed it out. Just because it was too dark to see——”

“But we buried him!” exclaimed Aleck McAdams. “This ain’t no placer dump. This is a grave. Grave of my old pal. What the devil are we? Body snatchers? Ghouls?”

“I’d hardly thought it of you!” Turner replied, reddening. “About as unsentimental a devil as I ever saw.”

“Yeah, you told me I ain’t got no sentiment. What have you got?”

Turner frowned and bit his lip.

“There’s a difference between sentiment and sentimentality. The former—sentiment—is a mighty good thing to use on living people. I didn’t roar at him and jerk the covers over his shoulders as if he was a horse, but he’s dead now—clay. It’s the most puerile sentimentality to talk about the sacredness of a mere grave.”

“Oh, it is hey? Well, I admit I don’t know the difference between the sentiment and the ‘tality’ you stick on it. But I do know I was riz decent, and I know what the homefolks think about graves and graveyards. Why, man, look what you wrote yourself!”

With a stubby finger Aleck McAdams pointed closely to the verse of the epitaph. Painfully squinting, he read out the words:

“‘Blest be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones.’ Hey, you don’t want to be cussed, do yer? Cussed for life fer a grave-snatching ghoul? Your own pal, at that? Poor old Nock!”

Alfred Turner’s eyes were averted. He smoked the last half of his cigarette in three long puffs and tossed the stub away with a determined gesture. He was as big, as quick and as strong as McAdams, and younger by fifteen years. However, he would try his wit first. He scooped a handful of the rich pay dirt.

“Do you realize, McAdams, what we have here? Not a dozen buckets of gravel, probably. A couple of hundred pans at the most, and perhaps as much more that you didn’t disturb in digging the hole.”

“Hole, is it? Just a hole! Sentimental, you are, fer a fact!”

“Just wait a minute. You’re a placer miner. You know what gravel goes to the pan when you can see the gold in it—pick out nuggets with your fingers! There’s five, six, seven thousand dollars in this pothole, this pocket, just as sure as the world. I need the money—need it bad, if you don’t. You’re broke, ain’t you?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” demanded McAdams.

Turner studied him. Was it affectation? No, the fellow looked frankly bewildered at the question. Was it cupidity? Did he intend later to return and take it all?

“It’s all right, this sentimentality—for that’s what it is—mere mawkish sentimentality. If you can afford it! Why we’d be just plain fools if we went off without it!”

McAdams had recourse to the grimy bandanna. He mopped his brow.

“Any man can work,” he answered doggedly. “He don’t have ter rob graves. I ain’t superstitious, Turner. But it’s durn funny old Whipple dies with them words on his lips: ‘In a grave that’s decked with gold.’ An’ here he is in a grave full of it. If there’s anything in sperits, maybe the old man’s hovering around and laughin’ to beat the dickens. Struck it at last—when it can’t do him no good!”

“It’s an excellent joke, no doubt,” returned the engineer unsmilingly. “But the real joke would be on us if we left thousands of dollars—after all the hardships we’ve gone through this summer. Left it for the next couple of prospectors to wash up and put it in their buckskin pokes. No, sir!”

McAdams scowlingly flipped his thumb at the epitaph.

“Didn’t you write that there po’try to skeer the next man off from tamperin’ with the grave? Maybe the next guy, even if he ain’t got the decency of a pig to let a grave alone, will be scairt out by the curse.”

“Oh, of course,” returned the engineer, ironically. ‘Prospectors are that way. Men that have got the nerve to take their lives in their hands in a wilderness like this—they’re going to be scared off by a verse they can’t even understand. With gold glittering under their hands. Why not advertise it? Write the other verse under it—tell ’em it’s a grave that’s decked with gold, for fear it’s a cloudy day when they pass by and they don’t catch a gleam in the dirt. Sure, let them have it!”

“You’re gittin’ sarcastic, now, ain’t you? Well, you kin, if you like.” McAdams folded his arms. His jaw was set. “This man Whipple didn’t amount to much in this country, so fur as success goes, though he always stood fer law and order. But old-timers that knew him tell me he’s been some punkins back in the States in early days. One of the best Injun fighters in the West, and known and trusted by the gov’ment men that come after Custer. If he was back in Montana, now, the old-timers’d plant him proper and give him a headstone with what he done cut on it, ’stead of a moldy old poem from this feller Shakespeare. Just because he cashes in away up here a thousand miles from nowheres is no reason why we oughter treat him like a dead animal. No, siree! Not by a darn sight.”

“Do as you damn please!” barked Turner, enraged. “Help me, or I’ll take it all!”

He stripped off his coat and walked to the pack mule that bore the short-handled shovel, thrust under the lashing. When he turned he looked into the muzzle of a revolver.

“You’ll take it all!” echoed Aleck McAdams.

“Every one of the five chambers if you tech this grave. You won’t listen ta reason. You’ll listen to this, if it talks!”

Turner went white.

“Partners, heh! This is the way you treat a partner because he don’t agree with you!”

“Yeh, this is the way I treat pardners. I got more respeck fur a dead pardner than I have fur some live ones I could mention. You kin cut off the slack of that lash rope there and tie your own hands. I’ll make a better job of it when you’re through.”

Aleck McAdams seemed to have had some experience in manhandling. He pocketed the revolver and tied his living partner securely and set him on a rock nearby, ignoring Turner’s threats and protestations. He got out the pick and pried loose many flat slabs of shale rock on the other side of the creek. These he carried to the grave and set them neatly upon the dirt mound, edge to edge, so that none of the gravel of the pothole remained in evidence to excite the cupidity of a passing prospector—a remote chance in that far land, yet one to be guarded against.

With his jackknife McAdams scraped away the verse and wrote instead, underneath the name and date:

A GOOD OLD SCOUT

He replaced the pick and shovel in the pack. Then he tethered the mining engineer to one of the mules by a ten-foot rope, and tied the red bandanna over Turner’s eyes so that he could see only the ground.

“What’s this unnecessary insult for?” inquired the man who vainly sought to illustrate the distinction between sentiment and sentimentality.

“You’re too durn handy with that there notebook of yours,” replied McAdams. “It’s a twisty country, yet with the help of sketchin’s I reckon you could sneak back here some day an’ rob the grave. I aim to put the kibosh on that!”

Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the September 7, 1927 issue of The Popular Magazine.

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