Jason's Gold (11 page)

In a fever-tossed delirium, the boy named Charlie teetered along the razor-thin margin between life and death. In and out of consciousness, he fought Jason's attempts to force tea and oatmeal and stewed fruit down him, to change his dressing and salve his wound, to bathe him clean when he fouled himself. Yet Jason prevailed, and kept him alive.

Three, four, five, six days. There were times when Jason thought he couldn't bear the boy's torment another minute.

“Put him out in the cold,” his uncle had said. Let the cold kill him. Put him out of his misery the way horses were put out of their misery on the Dead Horse Trail.

What if Henderson had done the same to him?

Monstrous, even to think of it. He had to fight to keep
this tangle-haired kid alive, no matter what might come of it—even if it meant starvation for both of them.

When the fever broke at last and the boy's eyes came into focus, his gaze darted wildly around the cabin from Jason to the husky to the door, then back to Jason. “Who are you?”

“Jason Hawthorn.”

“Where are they? I'll never catch up!”

He doesn't remember about his leg, Jason realized. He doesn't know. “They're long gone,” Jason said. “You weren't well enough to travel.”

The boy's eyes went around the room, from the opposite bunk and the shelf of magazines above it, to the wash on the clothesline strung across the room, to the window made of bottles. “Who else lives here?”

“Just me. I'm holing up here for the winter, on the way to finding my brothers in Dawson City.”

“Is that…a wolf?”

“It's a dog. A husky. His name's King.”

At the mention of his name, King got up and went to the boy's side, let himself be petted.

“It's warm in here,” the boy said approvingly.

“That's right. Nice and warm. Try to rest.”

Shortly after he awoke the next time, the boy looked startled. His head snapped back with a sudden realization, as if he'd taken a punch. Very slowly, he lifted the blanket, and he gasped.

Then he stared at the floor and saw the enormous darkened bloodstain there. Jason had tried without success to wash it away. The boy's face went pale as a corpse and his lips began to tremble.

Try to take his mind off the leg, Jason thought. “Where were they going, Charlie?”

“Who?”

“Your uncle, and the others. Where were they going?”

“Skagway,” the boy mumbled.

He's still delirious, Jason thought. Try it another way. “Where did you start out from?”

With an absent look came the answer: “Chicago.” With that, the dark-haired boy groaned and looked away, buried his face in the blanket, and sobbed himself to sleep.

Jason went outside to split wood and to think. If only he knew what to do, how to help this boy cope with the calamity that had come crashing down on him. Make some kind of crutches? If the boy was going to be able to get around at all, he'd need them. Fashioning crutches would give Jason something to do. And it would keep his mind off his biggest worry, whether he had enough food to take the two of them through the winter. Henderson had said he should get a moose, but there hadn't been a moose around since the one that nearly killed him.

On the ridge above the creek, Jason found young birches of just the right diameter for crutches. The snowshoe frames were made of birch, and so were canoe paddles and sleds. Birch should be good for crutches as well. While he was among the birches, he would strip more bark for fire starter.

Jason was back in the cabin whittling lengths for the crutches when the boy wakened again. “I have to go outside,” Charlie said.

As the boy tried to stand on his left leg, he swooned and fell back to the bunk.

“You lost enough blood for two people. Don't try getting up just yet.”

The boy stared at him fiercely. “Just help me up, will you? Don't tell me not to try.”

Jason hesitated, then stepped closer. Charlie tried again, clutching tight this time, and managed to hop outside, where he leaned on the cabin and relieved himself.

“Does it hurt bad?” Jason asked afterward. He didn't want to say the word
stump
.

“Hurts worse when I stand up.”

After he finished helping Charlie back to his bunk, Jason went outside. It was late afternoon already, time to think about supper. He took the ladder from behind the cabin and climbed up to the cache. He threw the makings for a mulligan stew into a bag—some bacon, dried onions, dried potatoes, and other dried soup vegetables.

In the cabin, he spread it all out on the table, then started heating water in a stewpot on top of the stove. Charlie was awake, lying on the bunk with his hands behind his head, staring at the log rafters.

“This will need to soak and simmer for a while,” Jason said, tossing the vegetables into the water. “I'll fry up the bacon a little later.”

“Can I stay here?” Charlie asked, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Jason threw some salt in the pot, then covered it. “I could use the company.”

“Good,” the boy whispered. Then he turned to face Jason, propping himself on his left elbow. “How long were they here?”

“Your uncle and the rest? Not long. They thought you were a goner.”

“When they get back home to Chicago, that's what they'll tell my mother. They'll tell her I'm dead.”

“Well then, you'll just have to surprise her.”

A faint smile crossed Charlie's face. “She'd like that, all right,” he agreed, nodding his head. But the smile was erased almost immediately by dread.

Jason wished the boy would talk. He wanted to hear his story. “Tell me again, Charlie, where your uncle and the others were going, and where you started from.”

“We were trying to get to Skagway. We started in Dawson City.”

“You've been to Dawson?” Jason could barely believe what he was hearing. “How long were you there?”

“Ten days or so. We got there the twenty-fifth of September.”

“You might have seen my brothers,” Jason said urgently. “Their names are Abe and Ethan. They're twenty-three and twenty-one. Abraham's taller, with a mustache; Ethan's powerful like a lumberjack and has a beard.”

Charlie put his right hand to the tousled hair spilling over his forehead, pulled on it as he closed his eyes. “I don't remember those names,” he said at last. “So many people there. Everyone has a mustache or a beard.”

“I suppose they were already at the creeks, staking a claim. Did you?”

“Stake a claim? No, we didn't. People were saying that the new discoveries don't amount to much. It looks like maybe you had to be there earlier, maybe a lot earlier.”

“But you
did
get there early, and so did my brothers. The Klondike is the richest goldfield in the world!”

“I suppose so, but how big? Oh, lots of people still think there will be new strikes anytime now—maybe they're right. I'm sorry; I just said what I heard.”

Jason's mind was reeling. It can't be too late, he thought; it just can't be.

“There'll be new strikes,” Jason insisted. “There have to be.”

“Gold wasn't even what people were talking about. Famine, that's what everybody was talking about. There's hardly any food there.”

Jason winced. “My brothers traded away some of their grub.”

“We never had much, and that's why we had to turn around. We had money, because of the investors at the bank where my uncle's a clerk. All the way from Chicago, my uncle kept saying, ‘We can buy grub in Dawson. The most important thing is to go fast and get there first.' When we got to customs, the Mounties weren't enforcing the weight limit for food yet—”

“They are now. How many people are there in Dawson City?”

“They say three or four thousand have been there almost since the beginning—August a year ago. When we got there, everybody was waiting for five steamboats that were supposed to be bringing supplies upriver all the way from the ocean. Two different companies in Dawson have food warehouses—both guarded by men with rifles—but there's hardly any food to buy. A couple pounds of beans or flour was all they'd sell you.”

Jason could still hardly believe Charlie had been to Dawson City, had just come from there. “Did you see any gold?” he asked, hoping Charlie wouldn't tire soon and leave off telling what he knew.

“I sure did. A man buys a shovel, he puts down dust or nuggets. People had gold, all right. Everybody was saying that the grub was going to sell out fast, though,
once the steamboats arrived, so we stayed close. Everyone in town was listening for a whistle and keeping one eye on the river. But only two steamboats ever got through, and by the time they did, the ice was thirty feet out from the shore.”

“Did you buy food then?”

“No. They hardly had any once they got to Dawson. Way downriver the boats got stuck on sandbars, because of the low water. They had to unload half their cargo to get unstuck; then the other half got robbed at some Alaska mining camp. About all they had left when they got to Dawson was hardware.”

“Good Lord!”

“You should've seen the panic.” Charlie was sitting up on his bunk now, his eyes wild, as if he were seeing it all again. “The inspector in charge of the Mounties posted a notice on Front Street, right by the river. It said something like ‘For those who have not laid in a winter's supply, to remain longer in Dawson City is to court death by starvation, or at least the certainty of sickness from scurvy and other troubles. Starvation now stares everyone in the face who is hoping and waiting for outside relief.'”

“My brothers…”

“It was bedlam. An official from one of the trading companies went running up and down Front Street yelling, ‘Go! Go! Flee for your lives! There is no time to lose! There are some supplies down at Fort Yukon. Whichever way you go, up the river or down, it's hazardous—but you must make the try!'”

Suddenly Jason was struck with a sickening realization. His brothers might not even
be
in Dawson. They might have gone downriver!

“What did people do?” he asked. “Did many leave?”

“At least fifty small boats took off within an hour, to be the first ones to Fort Yukon, which is more than three hundred miles downstream. At the same time, there was an official from another trading company who was calling the other fellow a frightened little cheechako. He said there wouldn't be enough food down at Fort Yukon to feed everybody who was evacuating Dawson City. ‘Stay put in Dawson,' he said. ‘There will be no starvation. If there is starvation, it won't be until spring.'”

Jason couldn't help laughing. “That must have sounded reassuring.”

“Everyone was crazy trying to make up their minds. The two steamboats were leaving within hours to try to beat the ice down to Fort Yukon. Some people were saying it was too late; the ice was going to catch them and wreck the boats, and they'd be stranded. Still, the decks of those two boats were full to bursting, and we kept wondering down to the last minute if we should get on board.”

“Why didn't you?”

“My uncle George had been running around like a chicken with its head cut off. He'd found a decrepit little steamboat called the
Kieukik
, and he'd got it in his mind that the only safe thing to do was to backtrack the way we'd come, and hike back over the Chilkoot Pass. So that's what we did—started back upriver—but the machinery on the boat kept breaking down. A week later we'd gone only thirty-five miles.”

“Battling the ice, I bet.”

“You're right; there was ice on all sides. Finally we ripped a gash in the hull and set out in Indian canoes. We thought we'd be able to buy some more food at the mouth of the Stewart River—we knew that some Klondikers had built winter cabins on the islands in the
Yukon there. But they weren't willing to sell more than a few pounds from their outfits—they were worried about famine too.

“By this time the river froze up, and we had to abandon the canoes and go on foot. A week or so later—I don't remember exactly; it was all a nightmare—my right leg went through the ice and my boot filled with water. I was walking at the end of the line. I didn't tell anybody it had happened, because my uncle—everybody, really—was crazy to keep going. My uncle was always yelling at me to keep up, like it was all my fault. I was in a daze and I just kept walking.

“In camp I was so exhausted, I didn't even pull my boot off to dry it out. We built two big bonfires and slept real close to the fire, as usual. I thought, with my boot close to the fire, I'd be fine. I felt no pain. Sometime during the night, in my sleep, I must have shifted position, and my foot ended up nowhere close to the fire. My sock and my boot were still wet, and my foot froze. That's how it happened.” With this, Charlie fell silent.

Jason started frying up the bacon for the stew. Then he reached over and handed the boy a piece of yeast cake. “Here. You can chew on this until the stew's ready.”

Charlie took the food. His face had paled and he looked exhausted. “Thanks—I'm starving. How long can I stay here?”

“Until we float out together in the spring, unless you feel like hiking over the Chilkoot this winter. Don't think I'd join you….”

The boy had eaten only a mouthful when he looked up with a sudden question on his face. “What about grub? Do we have enough?”

Instantly, Jason knew he had to steer a path around
the truth. This boy wasn't strong enough to hear it, at least not anytime soon. He knew Charlie couldn't possibly climb up to the cache to discover their true predicament. “We're okay if we pace ourselves,” Jason answered, doing his best to sound convincing. “Otherwise, I wouldn't have told them to leave you here with me.”

 

The next day Jason went searching for the carcass of the moose that had almost killed him, the one Henderson said a black bear had eaten from and covered up for the spring. Right now it wouldn't bother him in the least that the bear had eaten from it if he could claim the rest.