Alaska (89 page)

Gathering them beside the lake, he said: 'It's my job, you know, to see that the dead man's goods are properly handled ... a legal disposition, that is,' and he was startled by

537

the amount of money Buck had carried, and he warned: 'Mrs. Venn, I can't just hand this money over to you. Much too dangerous. I'll ask Superintendent Steele to take charge of this till you reach Dawson.'

Kirby's statement raised two difficult questions, and Missy took each in turn: 'I'm not Mrs. Venn. But half the money Buck carried is mine. And I will not turn my half over to anyone.' Kirby nodded, but stood by his first judgment: 'We'll wait till Superintendent Steele gets here on his inspection.'

The search of Buck's property turned up two items which Missy and Tom would not allow him to keep. The first was an envelope containing the hundred-dollar bill for the Belgian Mare, which, as Missy explained, belonged to her: 'We have nothing to do with it except to deliver it.'

Sergeant Kirby smiled indulgently: 'But, ma'am, don't you see? It's just this kind of money we can't have floating around with a defenseless woman. I must keep it.

She'll get it, I assure you.'

'But I must deliver it ... personally. It's an obligation.'

'And so you shall.' But the envelope with the money he filed in his blouse.

There was no argument about the paper Tom defended: 'An engineer drew this for me.

It's plans for the boat we'll have to build,' and when Kirby handed back the sketch, after surveying it, he said: 'That man could draw. Whoever he was, he knew boats.'

'If we build like that,' Tom asked, 'can we sail it to Dawson?' '

And now the gravest problem of all arose, one that Will Kirby had had to face several times before: 'Sit down, please. I need your full attention.' Standing soldier like and handsome before them in his proper uniform of striped trousers, neat jacket with ornaments and big hat, he was a figure of authority, and both Missy and Tom were prepared to listen to him.

'The question is: ”Do you really want to go on to Dawson?”Now wait, don't answer too fast.' And then he outlined the disadvantages of their position: 'There's twenty thousand people along these lakes, waiting for the ice to melt. You'll be lost in a stampede. You have no man to help you. Anyone can ride over you. And even if you do get there, you must realize that all the good spots will be taken. And maybe I shouldn't say all the

good spots, maybe I should say all the spots. Your goods will last maybe half a year. Your money will begin to run out.

And then what will you do?'

Missy and Tom looked at each other, and she spoke: 'The 538

man who gave us that money for the Belgian woman . . . the Klondike Kernel he called himself . . .'

'I've heard of him. Crazy sometimes, but very reliable.' He chuckled, then asked: 'Did he tell you what I just told you?'

'He did.'

'But you came anyway?'

'We did.'

'Mrs. Venn . . . Excuse me, the papers say you're Miss Peckham and he's young Mr.

Venn. To go to Dawson with a man to protect and guide you is one thing. To go alone is quite another.' He felt it necessary to shock these people into considering reality: 'Surely, a woman like you . . . you're not planning to enter the cribs, are you?'

Missy did not flinch: 'I have not that intention.'

'Well, it's my duty to see that Mr. Venn's property is legally handled. I give you and his son the sled, all the gear, the boat-building equipment. The money and the papers other than the boat plans I must hold on to.'

To everyone's surprise, even his own, Tom rose and stepped forward: 'You can't do that. We saw what happened at Skagway.'

Kirby nodded, pleased rather than offended that the boy should take such protective action: 'You're right. You're entitled to verification.' And he sent Tom scouting around the end of the lake for other members of the North West Mounted Police, and when two young men in uniform reported to the Venn tent, Kirby returned their salute and explained the situation: 'From previous experience at Skagway, Miss Peckham and young Mr. Venn refuse to surrender the dead man's goods to our care until an adjudication can be made.'

'Oh, but you must!' the younger of the two officers said.

'How can we trust him?' Missy asked. 'How can we trust you?'

'Ma'am,' the officer said, 'if you can't trust Sergeant Kirby, you can't trust anybody,'

and the other one said: 'And if you go to Dawson . . . alone . . . Ma'am, you've got to trust somebody.'

The two Mounties watched as Kirby wrote out a receipt, then they signed it and handed it to Missy, but she passed it along to Tom: 'He's Buck's son,' and one of them asked: 'But aren't you his wife?' and she said: 'No.'

Three days later, as thousands milled about at the lower end of Lake Lindeman preparing for the dash to Lake Bennett and the building of their boats, Sergeant Kirby brought to the Venn tent a hefty, mustachioed officer who had won the reputation of being the Lion of the Yukon. He was Super-539

intendent Samuel Steele, incorruptible dispenser of frontier justice. Tall, deep-chested and exuding a sense of power, he wore a large black cowboy hat and no visible gun; every movement, every gesture bespoke authority but also compassion. He had jurisdiction over a wild, almost ungovernable domain, with now more than twenty thousand strangers about to descend upon a city which had not even existed three years ago, and all men subject to his orders agreed that he was just.

He allowed a street of prostitutes, where the Belgian Mare ruled. He permitted saloons to run openly and gambling dens too, but the drinks and the wheels had to be honest.

Before any bank had opened in his town, he had served as the repository for miners'

funds, and no money was lost while in his care. He insisted that Sunday be observed.

There was no wild shooting on the streets, as had become so prevalent in American boomtowns, and he outlawed murder. If any man brazenly transgressed his rules, he himself went after him, faced him down, and threw him out of Canada.

It was this man who now stood before Missy Peckham and the boy Tom: 'I am most grieved to hear of your tragic loss.' Missy said nothing; she was hoarding her strength for the contest ahead. 'And I understand your reluctance to have us take charge of your dead husband's money.'

'He wasn't my husband,' Missy said.

'To us he stood in that regard.' As he said this he nodded gravely, for Kirby had informed him as to Missy's stalwart character.

'Now, ma'am, we've decided that the money involved is legally this young man's.'

'I agree. It's certainly not mine.' But when Superintendent Steele started to smile at this easy concession, Missy stopped him: 'But the half that's mine, which I earned as a waitress and aboard the Alacrity, that I want.'

'And you shall get it,' Steele said. 'But not here. Not in this jungle where we can't protect you.'

'Why not?'

'I'm not thinking about you so much, ma'am, as I am of my men. They can't protect you from here to Dawson. The things you'll be going through . . .'He stopped. 'You are determined to go ahead? We'll help you back over the pass, you know, if you want to return home, like I think you should.'

'We're going to Dawson.'

'When you reach there, we'll deliver your money, safe and sound.'

Missy was close to tears. In the short time since Buck's 540

death, she had made herself into a resolute woman, aware of the dangers that would be facing her and Tom in an unprotected trek to Dawson, but this constant pressure from the struggle up the Chilkoot, from death, and now from these official-looking men was almost too much: 'How do we know you're all not another gang of Soapy Smiths?'

It was a frontal attack, and so relevant that Superintendent Steele fell back a step.

Yes, how did an unprotected woman know that there was a difference? He gave a strange yet reassuring answer: 'Ma'am, I'd like to be in Skagway one week, with three or four men like Sergeant Kirby.'

She trembled, put her hand to her upper lip, and looked at the two men, whereupon Kirby told her an amazing fact: 'Did you know that on the day of the avalanche, Soapy dispatched four of his men to the scene to see what they could steal of the dead men's belongings? Ugly brutish oaf named Blacktooth Otto led them, and they made off with quite a bit, we're told.'

'How could you permit such a thing?' she asked, and Steele reminded her: 'That's Alaska, ma'am. Not our territory. That's how they do things over there. In Canada we don't allow it.”And Kirby said: 'Superintendent Steele and one of his men would handle Soapy in one afternoon. Wouldn't even last till nightfall.'

Reassured, she decided she could trust these men, and as they parted, Steele said: 'We never lose a customer. We'll see you in Dawson.' Then he added: 'Sergeant Kirby, see they build themselves a proper boat. And give it a lucky name. We need people like them in Dawson.'

They did not see Kirby again until they had painfully moved all their gear across the short distance from Lake Lindeman to the much more important Lake Bennett, which was, in some ways, the water equivalent to the snowy Chilkoot Pass, for here decisions of life and death were made. They concerned boats, because every traveler to Dawson City was required by the Mounties to build or buy a boat capable not only of sailing the five hundred and fifteen miles to Dawson but also sound enough to survive a fearsome canyon and several sets of violent rapids.

The reason they did not see Kirby was that it took him a while to find them. The shores of icebound Lake Bennett housed an exploding tent city of about twenty thousand would-be prospectors, each engaged in building a boat. Trees were felled at a speed which denuded the surrounding hills, and whipsaw pits were dug everywhere. The song of Lake Bennett was the rasping of saws, the hammering of nails, and this music continued around the clock. Men who had never 541

been near water four months ago were now studying how to bend a length of wood to conform to the shape of a boat, and the results were staggering in their ineptitude and variety.

One group of men constructed a scow that could have handled a railroad train. A sole adventurer built himself a snug little boat about eight feet long; the Mounties would not allow it to enter the dangerous passages, so he hired an Indian to help him portage it six miles. Prudent men kept the sails with which they had come down the slopes and across Lake Lindeman, and those who knew something about rapids and rock-strewn gorges built very long, heavy oars which they mounted on the rear of their boats and called sweeps; a man with strong nerves operating a sweep could avoid a lot of trouble.

When Missy and Tom erected their tent on a preferred spot near the edge of the lake with a whipsaw pit already constructed, they were able to do so only because sharp-eyed Missy saw two men about to quit the place and move their finished boat, a twenty-two-footer, to a spot more favorable for quick launching. When she asked them if she could have the spot they were vacating, they said: 'Sure. But if you ain't started your boat yet, you're gonna miss the armada.'

That afternoon Missy and Tom started the formidable task of building their twenty-three-footer.

He visited all the sites within walking distance, asking if anyone had extra planks to sell, or good nails, and in this way he accumulated more boards already sawn than he had expected. He then went into the remaining woods with his ax and felled trees till dusk, and since it was already spring, with the sun heading north, sunset did not come till nearly eight and darkness not till more than an hour later, so he was dog-tired when he quit.

Next morning they were both at work before sunrise, which came at half past four, and this was the way they passed the rest of April. Missy spent the morning cooking for men who paid her well for pancakes, bread and beans and in the afternoon she went into the woods, helping Tom drag home the logs he had felled. When they calculated they had enough to provide the planking needed for their boat, they gritted their teeth and began the cruel work of whipsawing out the boards required.

When they succeeded in maneuvering their first log into position over the pit, they faced the problem of who would work from the top, pulling the saw up, and who down at the bottom, pulling it down. Tom, believing the hardest work to be at the bottom end of the seven-foot whipsaw, volunteered for that spot; he was wrong about the difficulty of the work, for the person topside had to pull upward till his arms ached, 542

but he was right in thinking that the bottom work was much more unpleasant, for down in the pit that sawyer was going to eat a constant supply of sawdust as it fell upon him.

How easy it seemed when one explained the process, how brutally difficult when one had to do it. At the end of the first long day, Missy and Tom had barely squared off the first log, and had done so with such ineptness, the line wandering as if the man who drew it was drunk, that they despaired. But when they faced each other in the tent that night, Missy said grimly: 'Dammit, Tom. We learn to cut the boards or we rot here while the others sail on.' He did not point out that much of their failure stemmed from the fact that she could not keep the saw in a straight line.

Next day they tackled their work with even more seriousness than they had shown before, and although Missy's line wavered more than it should, they did hack out three rather good boards, and went to bed satisfied that with determination they could master the whipsaw. Tom was so worn-out that he fell asleep before he could brush the sawdust from his hair.

For five dreadful days, as the ice in Lake Bennett prepared to soften, the pair kept to the drudgery of whipsawing. Their hands produced blisters and then callouses.

Their back muscles tightened and their eyes grew dull, but on and on they went, stacking up the precious boards upon which their lives would soon depend.

On the day when Missy doubted that she could continue much longer, for she could barely lift her arms to pull the heavy saw, Sergeant Kirby found them after looking into some two thousand tents. 'You've done wonders,' he said, patting Tom on the shoulder. 'I see you have Missy up there where she belongs. Good for you.'