The One Thousand Dozen

The One Thousand Dozen

David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man
of the one idea. Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North
rang on his ear, he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his
energy to its achievement. He figured briefly and to the point,
and the adventure became iridescent-hued, splendid. That eggs
would sell at Dawson for five dollars a dozen was a safe working
premise. Whence it was incontrovertible that one thousand dozen
would bring, in the Golden Metropolis, five thousand dollars.

On the other hand, expense was to be considered, and he considered
it well, for he was a careful man, keenly practical, with a hard
head and a heart that imagination never warmed. At fifteen cents a
dozen, the initial cost of his thousand dozen would be one hundred
and fifty dollars, a mere bagatelle in face of the enormous profit.
And suppose, just suppose, to be wildly extravagant for once, that
transportation for himself and eggs should run up eight hundred and
fifty more; he would still have four thousand clear cash and clean
when the last egg was disposed of and the last dust had rippled
into his sack

"You see, Alma,"--he figured it over with his wife, the cosy
dining-room submerged in a sea of maps, government surveys, guide-
books, and Alaskan itineraries,--"you see, expenses don't really
begin till you make Dyea--fifty dollars'll cover it with a first-
class passage thrown in. Now from Dyea to Lake Linderman, Indian
packers take your goods over for twelve cents a pound, twelve
dollars a hundred, or one hundred and twenty dollars a thousand.
Say I have fifteen hundred pounds, it'll cost one hundred and
eighty dollars--call it two hundred and be safe. I am creditably
informed by a Klondiker just come out that I can buy a boat for
three hundred. But the same man says I'm sure to get a couple of
passengers for one hundred and fifty each, which will give me the
boat for nothing, and, further, they can help me manage it. And .
. . that's all; I put my eggs ashore from the boat at Dawson. Now
let me see how much is that?"

"Fifty dollars from San Francisco to Dyea, two hundred from Dyea to
Linderman, passengers pay for the boat--two hundred and fifty all
told," she summed up swiftly.

"And a hundred for my clothes and personal outfit," he went on
happily; "that leaves a margin of five hundred for emergencies.
And what possible emergencies can arise?"

Alma shrugged her shoulders and elevated her brows. If that vast
Northland was capable of swallowing up a man and a thousand dozen
eggs, surely there was room and to spare for whatever else he might
happen to possess. So she thought, but she said nothing. She knew
David Rasmunsen too well to say anything.

"Doubling the time because of chance delays, I should make the trip
in two months. Think of it, Alma! Four thousand in two months!
Beats the paltry hundred a month I'm getting now. Why, we'll build
further out where we'll have more space, gas in every room, and a
view, and the rent of the cottage'll pay taxes, insurance, and
water, and leave something over. And then there's always the
chance of my striking it and coming out a millionaire. Now tell
me, Alma, don't you think I'm very moderate?"

And Alma could hardly think otherwise. Besides, had not her own
cousin,--though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black
sheep, the harum-scarum, the ne'er-do-well,--had not he come down
out of that weird North country with a hundred thousand in yellow
dust, to say nothing of a half-ownership in the hole from which it
came?

David Rasmunsen's grocer was surprised when he found him weighing
eggs in the scales at the end of the counter, and Rasmunsen himself
was more surprised when he found that a dozen eggs weighed a pound
and a half--fifteen hundred pounds for his thousand dozen! There
would be no weight left for his clothes, blankets, and cooking
utensils, to say nothing of the grub he must necessarily consume by
the way. His calculations were all thrown out, and he was just
proceeding to recast them when he hit upon the idea of weighing
small eggs. "For whether they be large or small, a dozen eggs is a
dozen eggs," he observed sagely to himself; and a dozen small ones
he found to weigh but a pound and a quarter. Thereat the city of
San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyed emissaries, and
commission houses and dairy associations were startled by a sudden
demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to the dozen.

Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars,
arranged for his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own
people, threw up his job, and started North. To keep within his
schedule he compromised on a second-class passage, which, because
of the rush, was worse than steerage; and in the late summer, a
pale and wabbly man, he disembarked with his eggs on the Dyea
beach. But it did not take him long to recover his land legs and
appetite. His first interview with the Chilkoot packers
straightened him up and stiffened his backbone. Forty cents a
pound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage, and while he
caught his breath and swallowed, the price went up to forty-three.
Fifteen husky Indians put the straps on his packs at forty-five,
but took them off at an offer of forty-seven from a Skaguay Croesus
in dirty shirt and ragged overalls who had lost his horses on the
White Pass trail and was now making a last desperate drive at the
country by way of Chilkoot.

But Rasmunsen was clean grit, and at fifty cents found takers, who,
two days later, set his eggs down intact at Linderman. But fifty
cents a pound is a thousand dollars a ton, and his fifteen hundred
pounds had exhausted his emergency fund and left him stranded at
the Tantalus point where each day he saw the fresh-whipsawed boats
departing for Dawson. Further, a great anxiety brooded over the
camp where the boats were built. Men worked frantically, early and
late, at the height of their endurance, caulking, nailing, and
pitching in a frenzy of haste for which adequate explanation was
not far to seek. Each day the snow-line crept farther down the
bleak, rock-shouldered peaks, and gale followed gale, with sleet
and slush and snow, and in the eddies and quiet places young ice
formed and thickened through the fleeting hours. And each morn,
toil-stiffened men turned wan faces across the lake to see if the
freeze-up had come. For the freeze-up heralded the death of their
hope--the hope that they would be floating down the swift river ere
navigation closed on the chain of lakes.

To harrow Rasmunsen's soul further, he discovered three competitors
in the egg business. It was true that one, a little German, had
gone broke and was himself forlornly back-tripping the last pack of
the portage; but the other two had boats nearly completed, and were
daily supplicating the god of merchants and traders to stay the
iron hand of winter for just another day. But the iron hand closed
down over the land. Men were being frozen in the blizzard which
swept Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frosted his toes ere he was aware.
He found a chance to go passenger with his freight in a boat just
shoving off through the rubble, but two hundred hard cash, was
required, and he had no money.

"Ay tank you yust wait one leedle w'ile," said the Swedish boat-
builder, who had struck his Klondike right there and was wise
enough to know it--"one leedle w'ile und I make you a tam fine
skiff boat, sure Pete."

With this unpledged word to go on, Rasmunsen hit the back trail to
Crater Lake, where he fell in with two press correspondents whose
tangled baggage was strewn from Stone House, over across the Pass,
and as far as Happy Camp.

"Yes," he said with consequence. "I've a thousand dozen eggs at
Linderman, and my boat's just about got the last seam caulked.
Consider myself in luck to get it. Boats are at a premium, you
know, and none to be had."

Whereupon and almost with bodily violence the correspondents
clamoured to go with him, fluttered greenbacks before his eyes, and
spilled yellow twenties from hand to hand. He could not hear of
it, but they over-persuaded him, and he reluctantly consented to
take them at three hundred apiece. Also they pressed upon him the
passage money in advance. And while they wrote to their respective
journals concerning the Good Samaritan with the thousand dozen
eggs, the Good Samaritan was hurrying back to the Swede at
Linderman.

"Here, you! Gimme that boat!" was his salutation, his hand
jingling the correspondents' gold pieces and his eyes hungrily bent
upon the finished craft.

The Swede regarded him stolidly and shook his head.

"How much is the other fellow paying? Three hundred? Well, here's
four. Take it."

He tried to press it upon him, but the man backed away.

"Ay tank not. Ay say him get der skiff boat. You yust wait--"

'Here's six hundred. Last call. Take it or leave it. Tell 'm
it's a mistake.'

The Swede wavered. "Ay tank yes," he finally said, and the last
Rasmunsen saw of him his vocabulary was going to wreck in a vain
effort to explain the mistake to the other fellows.

The German slipped and broke his ankle on the steep hogback above
Deep Lake, sold out his stock for a dollar a dozen, and with the
proceeds hired Indian packers to carry him back to Dyea. But on
the morning Rasmunsen shoved off with his correspondents, his two
rivals followed suit.

'How many you got?" one of them, a lean little New Englander,
called out.

"One thousand dozen," Rasmunsen answered proudly.

"Huh! I'll go you even stakes I beat you in with my eight
hundred."

The correspondents offered to lend him the money; but Rasmunsen
declined, and the Yankee closed with the remaining rival, a brawny
son of the sea and sailor of ships and things, who promised to show
them all a wrinkle or two when it came to cracking on. And crack
on he did, with a large tarpaulin square-sail which pressed the bow
half under at every jump. He was the first to run out of
Linderman, but, disdaining the portage, piled his loaded boat on
the rocks in the boiling rapids. Rasmunsen and the Yankee, who
likewise had two passengers, portaged across on their backs and
then lined their empty boats down through the bad water to Bennett.

Bennett was a twenty-five-mile lake, narrow and deep, a funnel
between the mountains through which storms ever romped. Rasmunsen
camped on the sand-pit at its head, where were many men and boats
bound north in the teeth of the Arctic winter. He awoke in the
morning to find a piping gale from the south, which caught the
chill from the whited peaks and glacial valleys and blew as cold as
north wind ever blew. But it was fair, and he also found the
Yankee staggering past the first bold headland with all sail set.
Boat after boat was getting under way, and the correspondents fell
to with enthusiasm.

"We'll catch him before Cariboo Crossing," they assured Rasmunsen,
as they ran up the sail and the Alma took the first icy spray over
her bow.

Now Rasmunsen all his life had been prone to cowardice on water,
but he clung to the kicking steering-oar with set face and
determined jaw. His thousand dozen were there in the boat before
his eyes, safely secured beneath the correspondents' baggage, and
somehow, before his eyes were the little cottage and the mortgage
for a thousand dollars.

It was bitter cold. Now and again he hauled in the steering-sweep
and put out a fresh one while his passengers chopped the ice from
the blade. Wherever the spray struck, it turned instantly to
frost, and the dipping boom of the spritsail was quickly fringed
with icicles. The Alma strained and hammered through the big seas
till the seams and butts began to spread, but in lieu of bailing
the correspondents chopped ice and flung it overboard. There was
no let-up. The mad race with winter was on, and the boats tore
along in a desperate string.

"W-w-we can't stop to save our souls!" one of the correspondents
chattered, from cold, not fright.

"That's right! Keep her down the middle, old man!" the other
encouraged.

Rasmunsen replied with an idiotic grin. The iron-bound shores were
in a lather of foam, and even down the middle the only hope was to
keep running away from the big seas. To lower sail was to be
overtaken and swamped. Time and again they passed boats pounding
among the rocks, and once they saw one on the edge of the breakers
about to strike. A little craft behind them, with two men, jibed
over and turned bottom up.

"W-w-watch out, old man," cried he of the chattering teeth.

Rasmunsen grinned and tightened his aching grip on the sweep.
Scores of times had the send of the sea caught the big square stern
of the Alma and thrown her off from dead before it till the after
leach of the spritsail fluttered hollowly, and each time, and only
with all his strength, had he forced her back. His grin by then
had become fixed, and it disturbed the correspondents to look at
him.

They roared down past an isolated rock a hundred yards from shore.
From its wave-drenched top a man shrieked wildly, for the instant
cutting the storm with his voice. But the next instant the Alma
was by, and the rock growing a black speck in the troubled froth.

"That settles the Yankee! Where's the sailor?" shouted one of his
passengers.

Rasmunsen shot a glance over his shoulder at a black square-sail.
He had seen it leap up out of the grey to windward, and for an
hour, off and on, had been watching it grow. The sailor had
evidently repaired damages and was making up for lost time.

"Look at him come!"

Both passengers stopped chopping ice to watch. Twenty miles of
Bennett were behind them--room and to spare for the sea to toss up
its mountains toward the sky. Sinking and soaring like a storm-
god, the sailor drove by them. The huge sail seemed to grip the
boat from the crests of the waves, to tear it bodily out of the
water, and fling it crashing and smothering down into the yawning
troughs.

"The sea'll never catch him!"

"But he'll r-r-run her nose under!"

Even as they spoke, the black tarpaulin swooped from sight behind a
big comber. The next wave rolled over the spot, and the next, but
the boat did not reappear. The Alma rushed by the place. A little
riffraff of oats and boxes was seen. An arm thrust up and a shaggy
head broke surface a score of yards away.

For a time there was silence. As the end of the lake came in
sight, the waves began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence
that the correspondents no longer chopped ice but flung the water
out with buckets. Even this would not do, and, after a shouted
conference with Rasmunsen, they attacked the baggage. Flour,
bacon, beans, blankets, cooking-stove, ropes, odds and ends,
everything they could get hands on, flew overboard. The boat
acknowledged it at once, taking less water and rising more
buoyantly.

"That'll do!" Rasmunsen called sternly, as they applied themselves
to the top layer of eggs.

"The h-hell it will!" answered the shivering one, savagely. With
the exception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had
sacrificed their outfit. He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box,
and began to worry it out from under the lashing.

"Drop it! Drop it, I say!"

Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of
his arm over the sweep head, was taking aim. The correspondent
stood up on the thwart, balancing back and forth, his face twisted
with menace and speechless anger.

"My God!"

So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward,
into the bottom of the boat. The Alma, under the divided attention
of Rasmunsen, had been caught by a great mass of water and whirled
around. The after leach hollowed, the sail emptied and jibed, and
the boom, sweeping with terrific force across the boat, carried the
angry correspondent overboard with a broken back. Mast and sail
had gone over the side as well. A drenching sea followed, as the
boat lost headway, and Rasmunsen sprang to the bailing bucket

Several boats hurtled past them in the next half-hour,--small
boats, boats of their own size, boats afraid, unable to do aught
but run madly on. Then a ten-ton barge, at imminent risk of
destruction, lowered sail to windward and lumbered down upon them.

"Keep off! Keep off!" Rasmunsen screamed.

But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the
remaining correspondent clambered aboard. Rasmunsen was over the
eggs like a cat and in the bow of the Alma, striving with numb
fingers to bend the hauling-lines together.

"Come on!" a red-whiskered man yelled at him.

"I've a thousand dozen eggs here," he shouted back. "Gimme a tow!
I'll pay you!"

"Come on!" they howled in chorus.

A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and
leaving the Alma half swamped. The men cast off, cursing him as
they ran up their sail. Rasmunsen cursed back and fell to bailing.
The mast and sail, like a sea anchor, still fast by the halyards,
held the boat head on to wind and sea and gave him a chance to
fight the water out.

Three hours later, numbed, exhausted, blathering like a lunatic,
but still bailing, he went ashore on an ice-strewn beach near
Cariboo Crossing. Two men, a government courier and a half-breed
voyageur, dragged him out of the surf, saved his cargo, and beached
the Alma. They were paddling out of the country in a Peterborough,
and gave him shelter for the night in their storm-bound camp. Next
morning they departed, but he elected to stay by his eggs. And
thereafter the name and fame of the man with the thousand dozen
eggs began to spread through the land. Gold-seekers who made in
before the freeze-up carried the news of his coming. Grizzled old-
timers of Forty Mile and Circle City, sour doughs with leathern
jaws and bean-calloused stomachs, called up dream memories of
chickens and green things at mention of his name. Dyea and Skaguay
took an interest in his being, and questioned his progress from
every man who came over the passes, while Dawson--golden,
omeletless Dawson--fretted and worried, and way-laid every chance
arrival for word of him.

But of this Rasmunsen knew nothing. The day after the wreck he
patched up the Alma and pulled out. A cruel east wind blew in his
teeth from Tagish, but he got the oars over the side and bucked
manfully into it, though half the time he was drifting backward and
chopping ice from the blades. According to the custom of the
country, he was driven ashore at Windy Arm; three times on Tagish
saw him swamped and beached; and Lake Marsh held him at the freeze-
up. The Alma was crushed in the jamming of the floes, but the eggs
were intact. These he back-tripped two miles across the ice to the
shore, where he built a cache, which stood for years after and was
pointed out by men who knew.

Half a thousand frozen miles stretched between him and Dawson, and
the waterway was closed. But Rasmunsen, with a peculiar tense look
in his face, struck back up the lakes on foot. What he suffered on
that lone trip, with nought but a single blanket, an axe, and a
handful of beans, is not given to ordinary mortals to know. Only
the Arctic adventurer may understand. Suffice that he was caught
in a blizzard on Chilkoot and left two of his toes with the surgeon
at Sheep Camp. Yet he stood on his feet and washed dishes in the
scullery of the PAWONA to the Puget Sound, and from there passed
coal on a P. S. boat to San Francisco.

It was a haggard, unkempt man who limped across the shining office
floor to raise a second mortgage from the bank people. His hollow
cheeks betrayed themselves through the scraggy beard, and his eyes
seemed to have retired into deep caverns where they burned with
cold fires. His hands were grained from exposure and hard work,
and the nails were rimmed with tight-packed dirt and coal-dust. He
spoke vaguely of eggs and ice-packs, winds and tides; but when they
declined to let him have more than a second thousand, his talk
became incoherent, concerning itself chiefly with the price of dogs
and dog-food, and such things as snowshoes and moccasins and winter
trails. They let him have fifteen hundred, which was more than the
cottage warranted, and breathed easier when he scrawled his
signature and passed out the door.

Two weeks later he went over Chilkoot with three dog sleds of five
dogs each. One team he drove, the two Indians with him driving the
others. At Lake Marsh they broke out the cache and loaded up. But
there was no trail. He was the first in over the ice, and to him
fell the task of packing the snow and hammering away through the
rough river jams. Behind him he often observed a camp-fire smoke
trickling thinly up through the quiet air, and he wondered why the
people did not overtake him. For he was a stranger to the land and
did not understand. Nor could he understand his Indians when they
tried to explain. This they conceived to be a hardship, but when
they balked and refused to break camp of mornings, he drove them to
their work at pistol point.

When he slipped through an ice bridge near the White Horse and
froze his foot, tender yet and oversensitive from the previous
freezing, the Indians looked for him to lie up. But he sacrificed
a blanket, and, with his foot incased in an enormous moccasin, big
as a water-bucket, continued to take his regular turn with the
front sled. Here was the cruellest work, and they respected him,
though on the side they rapped their foreheads with their knuckles
and significantly shook their heads. One night they tried to run
away, but the zip-zip of his bullets in the snow brought them back,
snarling but convinced. Whereupon, being only savage Chilkat men,
they put their heads together to kill him; but he slept like a cat,
and, waking or sleeping, the chance never came. Often they tried
to tell him the import of the smoke wreath in the rear, but he
could not comprehend and grew suspicious of them. And when they
sulked or shirked, he was quick to let drive at them between the
eyes, and quick to cool their heated souls with sight of his ready
revolver.

And so it went--with mutinous men, wild dogs, and a trail that
broke the heart. He fought the men to stay with him, fought the
dogs to keep them away from the eggs, fought the ice, the cold, and
the pain of his foot, which would not heal. As fast as the young
tissue renewed, it was bitten and scared by the frost, so that a
running sore developed, into which he could almost shove his fist.
In the mornings, when he first put his weight upon it, his head
went dizzy, and he was near to fainting from the pain; but later on
in the day it usually grew numb, to recommence when he crawled into
his blankets and tried to sleep. Yet he, who had been a clerk and
sat at a desk all his days, toiled till the Indians were exhausted,
and even out-worked the dogs. How hard he worked, how much he
suffered, he did not know. Being a man of the one idea, now that
the idea had come, it mastered him. In the foreground of his
consciousness was Dawson, in the background his thousand dozen
eggs, and midway between the two his ego fluttered, striving always
to draw them together to a glittering golden point. This golden
point was the five thousand dollars, the consummation of the idea
and the point of departure for whatever new idea might present
itself. For the rest, he was a mere automaton. He was unaware of
other things, seeing them as through a glass darkly, and giving
them no thought. The work of his hands he did with machine-like
wisdom; likewise the work of his head. So the look on his face
grew very tense, till even the Indians were afraid of it, and
marvelled at the strange white man who had made them slaves and
forced them to toil with such foolishness.

Then came a snap on Lake Le Barge, when the cold of outer space
smote the tip of the planet, and the force ranged sixty and odd
degrees below zero. Here, labouring with open mouth that he might
breathe more freely, he chilled his lungs, and for the rest of the
trip he was troubled with a dry, hacking cough, especially
irritable in smoke of camp or under stress of undue exertion. On
the Thirty Mile river he found much open water, spanned by
precarious ice bridges and fringed with narrow rim ice, tricky and
uncertain. The rim ice was impossible to reckon on, and he dared
it without reckoning, falling back on his revolver when his drivers
demurred. But on the ice bridges, covered with snow though they
were, precautions could be taken. These they crossed on their
snowshoes, with long poles, held crosswise in their hands, to which
to cling in case of accident. Once over, the dogs were called to
follow. And on such a bridge, where the absence of the centre ice
was masked by the snow, one of the Indians met his end. He went
through as quickly and neatly as a knife through thin cream, and
the current swept him from view down under the stream ice.

That night his mate fled away through the pale moonlight, Rasmunsen
futilely puncturing the silence with his revolver--a thing that he
handled with more celerity than cleverness. Thirty-six hours later
the Indian made a police camp on the Big Salmon.

"Um--um--um funny mans--what you call?--top um head all loose," the
interpreter explained to the puzzled captain. "Eh? Yep, clazy,
much clazy mans. Eggs, eggs, all a time eggs--savvy? Come bime-
by."

It was several days before Rasmunsen arrived, the three sleds
lashed together, and all the dogs in a single team. It was
awkward, and where the going was bad he was compelled to back-trip
it sled by sled, though he managed most of the time, through
herculean efforts, to bring all along on the one haul. He did not
seem moved when the captain of police told him his man was hitting
the high places for Dawson, and was by that time, probably, half-
way between Selkirk and Stewart. Nor did he appear interested when
informed that the police had broken the trail as far as Pelly; for
he had attained to a fatalistic acceptance of all natural
dispensations, good or ill. But when they told him that Dawson was
in the bitter clutch of famine, he smiled, threw the harness on his
dogs, and pulled out.

But it was at his next halt that the mystery of the smoke was
explained. With the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken
to Pelly, there was no longer any need for the smoke wreath to
linger in his wake; and Rasmunsen, crouching over lonely fire, saw
a motley string of sleds go by. First came the courier and the
half-breed who had hauled him out from Bennett; then mail-carriers
for Circle City, two sleds of them, and a mixed following of
ingoing Klondikers. Dogs and men were fresh and fat, while
Rasmunsen and his brutes were jaded and worn down to the skin and
bone. They of the smoke wreath had travelled one day in three,
resting and reserving their strength for the dash to come when
broken trail was met with; while each day he had plunged and
floundered forward, breaking the spirit of his dogs and robbing
them of their mettle.

As for himself, he was unbreakable. They thanked him kindly for
his efforts in their behalf, those fat, fresh men,--thanked him
kindly, with broad grins and ribald laughter; and now, when he
understood, he made no answer. Nor did he cherish silent
bitterness. It was immaterial. The idea--the fact behind the
idea--was not changed. Here he was and his thousand dozen; there
was Dawson; the problem was unaltered.

At the Little Salmon, being short of dog food, the dogs got into
his grub, and from there to Selkirk he lived on beans--coarse,
brown beans, big beans, grossly nutritive, which griped his stomach
and doubled him up at two-hour intervals. But the Factor at
Selkirk had a notice on the door of the Post to the effect that no
steamer had been up the Yukon for two years, and in consequence
grub was beyond price. He offered to swap flour, however, at the
rate of a cupful of each egg, but Rasmunsen shook his head and hit
the trail. Below the Post he managed to buy frozen horse hide for
the dogs, the horses having been slain by the Chilkat cattle men,
and the scraps and offal preserved by the Indians. He tackled the
hide himself, but the hair worked into the bean sores of his mouth,
and was beyond endurance.

Here at Selkirk he met the forerunners of the hungry exodus of
Dawson, and from there on they crept over the trail, a dismal
throng. "No grub!" was the song they sang. "No grub, and had to
go." "Everybody holding candles for a rise in the spring." "Flour
dollar 'n a half a pound, and no sellers."

"Eggs?" one of them answered. "Dollar apiece, but there ain't
none."

Rasmunsen made a rapid calculation. "Twelve thousand dollars," he
said aloud.

"Hey?" the man asked.

"Nothing," he answered, and MUSHED the dogs along.

When he arrived at Stewart River, seventy from Dawson, five of his
dogs were gone, and the remainder were falling in the traces. He,
also, was in the traces, hauling with what little strength was left
in him. Even then he was barely crawling along ten miles a day.
His cheek-bones and nose, frost-bitten again and again, were turned
bloody-black and hideous. The thumb, which was separated from the
fingers by the gee-pole, had likewise been nipped and gave him
great pain. The monstrous moccasin still incased his foot, and
strange pains were beginning to rack the leg. At Sixty Mile, the
last beans, which he had been rationing for some time, were
finished; yet he steadfastly refused to touch the eggs. He could
not reconcile his mind to the legitimacy of it, and staggered and
fell along the way to Indian River. Here a fresh-killed moose and
an open-handed old-timer gave him and his dogs new strength, and at
Ainslie's he felt repaid for it all when a stampede, ripe from
Dawson in five hours, was sure he could get a dollar and a quarter
for every egg he possessed.

He came up the steep bank by the Dawson barracks with fluttering
heart and shaking knees. The dogs were so weak that he was forced
to rest them, and, waiting, he leaned limply against the gee-pole.
A man, an eminently decorous-looking man, came sauntering by in a
great bearskin coat. He glanced at Rasmunsen curiously, then
stopped and ran a speculative eye over the dogs and the three
lashed sleds.

"What you got?" he asked.

"Eggs," Rasmunsen answered huskily, hardly able to pitch his voice
above a whisper.

"Eggs! Whoopee! Whoopee!" He sprang up into the air, gyrated
madly, and finished with half-a-dozen war steps. "You don't say--
all of 'em?"

"All of 'em."

"Say, you must be the Egg Man." He walked around and viewed
Rasmunsen from the other side. "Come, now, ain't you the Egg Man?"

Rasmunsen didn't know, but supposed he was, and the man sobered
down a bit.

"What d'ye expect to get for 'em?" he asked cautiously.

Rasmunsen became audacious. "Dollar 'n a half," he said.

"Done!" the man came back promptly. "Gimme a dozen."

"I--I mean a dollar 'n a half apiece," Rasmunsen hesitatingly
explained.

"Sure. I heard you. Make it two dozen. Here's the dust."

The man pulled out a healthy gold sack the size of a small sausage
and knocked it negligently against the gee-pole. Rasmunsen felt a
strange trembling in the pit of his stomach, a tickling of the
nostrils, and an almost overwhelming desire to sit down and cry.
But a curious, wide-eyed crowd was beginning to collect, and man
after man was calling out for eggs. He was without scales, but the
man with the bearskin coat fetched a pair and obligingly weighed in
the dust while Rasmunsen passed out the goods. Soon there was a
pushing and shoving and shouldering, and a great clamour.
Everybody wanted to buy and to be served first. And as the
excitement grew, Rasmunsen cooled down. This would never do.
There must be something behind the fact of their buying so eagerly.
It would be wiser if he rested first and sized up the market.
Perhaps eggs were worth two dollars apiece. Anyway, whenever he
wished to sell, he was sure of a dollar and a half. "Stop!" he
cried, when a couple of hundred had been sold. "No more now. I'm
played out. I've got to get a cabin, and then you can come and see
me."

A groan went up at this, but the man with the bearskin coat
approved. Twenty-four of the frozen eggs went rattling in his
capacious pockets, and he didn't care whether the rest of the town
ate or not. Besides, he could see Rasmunsen was on his last legs.

"There's a cabin right around the second corner from the Monte
Carlo," he told him--"the one with the sody-bottle window. It
ain't mine, but I've got charge of it. Rents for ten a day and
cheap for the money. You move right in, and I'll see you later.
Don't forget the sody-bottle window."

"Tra-la-loo!" he called back a moment later. "I'm goin' up the
hill to eat eggs and dream of home."

On his way to the cabin, Rasmunsen recollected he was hungry and
bought a small supply of provisions at the N. A. T. & T. store--
also a beefsteak at the butcher shop and dried salmon for the dogs.
He found the cabin without difficulty, and left the dogs in the
harness while he started the fire and got the coffee under way.

A dollar 'n a half apiece--one thousand dozen--eighteen thousand
dollars!" he kept muttering it to himself, over and over, as he
went about his work.

As he flopped the steak into the frying-pan the door opened. He
turned. It was the man with the bearskin coat. He seemed to come
in with determination, as though bound on some explicit errand, but
as he looked at Rasmunsen an expression of perplexity came into his
face.

"I say--now I say--" he began, then halted.

Rasmunsen wondered if he wanted the rent.

"I say, damn it, you know, them eggs is bad."

Rasmunsen staggered. He felt as though some one had struck him an
astounding blow between the eyes. The walls of the cabin reeled
and tilted up. He put out his hand to steady himself and rested it
on the stove. The sharp pain and the smell of the burning flesh
brought him back to himself.

"I see," he said slowly, fumbling in his pocket for the sack. "You
want your money back."

"It ain't the money," the man said, "but hain't you got any eggs--
good?"

Rasmunsen shook his head. "You'd better take the money."

But the man refused and backed away. "I'll come back," he said,
"when you've taken stock, and get what's comin'."

Rasmunsen rolled the chopping-block into the cabin and carried in
the eggs. He went about it quite calmly. He took up the hand-axe,
and, one by one, chopped the eggs in half. These halves he
examined carefully and let fall to the floor. At first he sampled
from the different cases, then deliberately emptied one case at a
time. The heap on the floor grew larger. The coffee boiled over
and the smoke of the burning beefsteak filled the cabin. He
chopped steadfastly and monotonously till the last case was
finished.

Somebody knocked at the door, knocked again, and let himself in.

"What a mess!" he remarked, as he paused and surveyed the scene.

The severed eggs were beginning to thaw in the heat of the stove,
and a miserable odour was growing stronger.

"Must a-happened on the steamer," he suggested.

Rasmunsen looked at him long and blankly.

"I'm Murray, Big Jim Murray, everybody knows me," the man
volunteered. "I'm just hearin' your eggs is rotten, and I'm
offerin' you two hundred for the batch. They ain't good as salmon,
but still they're fair scoffin's for dogs."

Rasmunsen seemed turned to stone. He did not move. "You go to
hell," he said passionlessly.

"Now just consider. I pride myself it's a decent price for a mess
like that, and it's better 'n nothin'. Two hundred. What you
say?"

"You go to hell," Rasmunsen repeated softly, "and get out of here."

Murray gaped with a great awe, then went out carefully, backward,
with his eyes fixed an the other's face.

Rasmunsen followed him out and turned the dogs loose. He threw
them all the salmon he had bought, and coiled a sled-lashing up in
his hand. Then he re-entered the cabin and drew the latch in after
him. The smoke from the cindered steak made his eyes smart. He
stood on the bunk, passed the lashing over the ridge-pole, and
measured the swing-off with his eye. It did not seem to satisfy,
for he put the stool on the bunk and climbed upon the stool. He
drove a noose in the end of the lashing and slipped his head
through. The other end he made fast. Then he kicked the stool out
from under.

-THE END-
Jack London's short story: The One Thousand Dozen

GO TO TOP OF SCREEN