The Faith of Men
"Tell you what we'll do; we'll shake for it."
"That suits me," said the second man, turning, as he spoke, to the
Indian that was mending snow-shoes in a corner of the cabin.
"Here, you Billebedam, take a run down to Oleson's cabin like a
good fellow, and tell him we want to borrow his dice box."
This sudden request in the midst of a council on wages of men,
wood, and grub surprised Billebedam. Besides, it was early in the
day, and he had never known white men of the calibre of Pentfield
and Hutchinson to dice and play till the day's work was done. But
his face was impassive as a Yukon Indian's should be, as he pulled
on his mittens and went out the door.
Though eight o'clock, it was still dark outside, and the cabin was
lighted by a tallow candle thrust into an empty whisky bottle. It
stood on the pine-board table in the middle of a disarray of dirty
tin dishes. Tallow from innumerable candles had dripped down the
long neck of the bottle and hardened into a miniature glacier. The
small room, which composed the entire cabin, was as badly littered
as the table; while at one end, against the wall, were two bunks,
one above the other, with the blankets turned down just as the two
men had crawled out in the morning.
Lawrence Pentfield and Corry Hutchinson were millionaires, though
they did not look it. There seemed nothing unusual about them,
while they would have passed muster as fair specimens of lumbermen
in any Michigan camp. But outside, in the darkness, where holes
yawned in the ground, were many men engaged in windlassing muck and
gravel and gold from the bottoms of the holes where other men
received fifteen dollars per day for scraping it from off the
bedrock. Each day thousands of dollars' worth of gold were scraped
from bedrock and windlassed to the surface, and it all belonged to
Pentfield and Hutchinson, who took their rank among the richest
kings of Bonanza.
Pentfield broke the silence that followed on Billebedam's departure
by heaping the dirty plates higher on the table and drumming a
tattoo on the cleared space with his knuckles. Hutchinson snuffed
the smoky candle and reflectively rubbed the soot from the wick
between thumb and forefinger.
"By Jove, I wish we could both go out!" he abruptly exclaimed.
"That would settle it all."
Pentfield looked at him darkly.
"If it weren't for your cursed obstinacy, it'd be settled anyway.
All you have to do is get up and go. I'll look after things, and
next year I can go out."
"Why should I go? I've no one waiting for me--"
"Your people," Pentfield broke in roughly.
"Like you have," Hutchinson went on. "A girl, I mean, and you know
it."
Pentfield shrugged his shoulders gloomily. "She can wait, I
guess."
"But she's been waiting two years now."
"And another won't age her beyond recognition."
"That'd be three years. Think of it, old man, three years in this
end of the earth, this falling-off place for the damned!"
Hutchinson threw up his arm in an almost articulate groan.
He was several years younger than his partner, not more than
twenty-six, and there was a certain wistfulness in his face that
comes into the faces of men when they yearn vainly for the things
they have been long denied. This same wistfulness was in
Pentfield's face, and the groan of it was articulate in the heave
of his shoulders.
"I dreamed last night I was in Zinkand's," he said. "The music
playing, glasses clinking, voices humming, women laughing, and I
was ordering eggs--yes, sir, eggs, fried and boiled and poached and
scrambled, and in all sorts of ways, and downing them as fast as
they arrived."
"I'd have ordered salads and green things," Hutchinson criticized
hungrily, "with a big, rare, Porterhouse, and young onions and
radishes,--the kind your teeth sink into with a crunch."
"I'd have followed the eggs with them, I guess, if I hadn't
awakened," Pentfield replied.
He picked up a trail-scarred banjo from the floor and began to
strum a few wandering notes. Hutchinson winced and breathed
heavily.
"Quit it!" he burst out with sudden fury, as the other struck into
a gaily lifting swing. "It drives me mad. I can't stand it"
Pentfield tossed the banjo into a bunk and quoted:-
"Hear me babble what the weakest won't confess -
I am Memory and Torment--I am Town!
I am all that ever went with evening dress!"
The other man winced where he sat and dropped his head forward on
the table. Pentfield resumed the monotonous drumming with his
knuckles. A loud snap from the door attracted his attention. The
frost was creeping up the inside in a white sheet, and he began to
hum:-
"The flocks are folded, boughs are bare,
The salmon takes the sea;
And oh, my fair, would I somewhere
Might house my heart with thee."
Silence fell and was not again broken till Billebedam arrived and
threw the dice box on the table.
"Um much cold," he said. "Oleson um speak to me, um say um Yukon
freeze last night."
"Hear that, old man!" Pentfield cried, slapping Hutchinson on the
shoulder. "Whoever wins can be hitting the trail for God's country
this time tomorrow morning!"
He picked up the box, briskly rattling the dice.
"What'll it be?"
"Straight poker dice," Hutchinson answered. "Go on and roll them
out."
Pentfield swept the dishes from the table with a crash and rolled
out the five dice. Both looked tragedy. The shake was without a
pair and five-spot high.
"A stiff!" Pentfield groaned.
After much deliberating Pentfield picked up all the five dice and
put them in the box.
"I'd shake to the five if I were you," Hutchinson suggested.
"No, you wouldn't, not when you see this," Pentfield replied,
shaking out the dice.
Again they were without a pair, running this time in unbroken
sequence from two to six.
"A second stiff!" he groaned. "No use your shaking, Corry. You
can't lose."
The other man gathered up the dice without a word, rattled them,
rolled them out on the table with a flourish, and saw that he had
likewise shaken a six-high stiff.
"Tied you, anyway, but I'll have to do better than that," he said,
gathering in four of them and shaking to the six. "And here's what
beats you!"
But they rolled out deuce, tray, four, and five--a stiff still and
no better nor worse than Pentfield's throw.
Hutchinson sighed.
"Couldn't happen once in a million times," said.
"Nor in a million lives," Pentfield added, catching up the dice and
quickly throwing them out. Three fives appeared, and, after much
delay, he was rewarded by a fourth five on the second shake.
Hutchinson seemed to have lost his last hope.
But three sixes turned up on his first shake. A great doubt rose
in the other's eyes, and hope returned into his. He had one more
shake. Another six and he would go over the ice to salt water and
the States.
He rattled the dice in the box, made as though to cast them,
hesitated, and continued rattle them.
"Go on! Go on! Don't take all night about it!" Pentfield cried
sharply, bending his nails on the table, so tight was the clutch
with which he strove to control himself.
The dice rolled forth, an upturned six meeting their eyes. Both
men sat staring at it. There was a long silence. Hutchinson shot
a covert glance at his partner, who, still more covertly, caught
it, and pursed up his lips in an attempt to advertise his
unconcern.
Hutchinson laughed as he got up on his feet. It was a nervous,
apprehensive laugh. It was a case where it was more awkward to win
than lose. He walked over to his partner, who whirled upon him
fiercely:-
"Now you just shut up, Corry! I know all you're going to say--that
you'd rather stay in and let me go, and all that; so don't say it.
You've your own people in Detroit to see, and that's enough.
Besides, you can do for me the very thing I expected to do if I
went out."
"And that is--?"
Pentfield read the full question in his partner's eyes, and
answered:-
"Yes, that very thing. You can bring her in to me. The only
difference will be a Dawson wedding instead of a San Franciscan
one."
"But, man alike!" Corry Hutchinson objected "how under the sun can
I bring her in? We're not exactly brother and sister, seeing that
I have not even met her, and it wouldn't be just the proper thing,
you know, for us to travel together. Of course, it would be all
right--you and I know that; but think of the looks of it, man!"
Pentfield swore under his breath, consigning the looks of it to a
less frigid region than Alaska.
"Now, if you'll just listen and not get astride that high horse of
yours so blamed quick," his partner went on, "you'll see that the
only fair thing under the circumstances is for me to let you go out
this year. Next year is only a year away, and then I can take my
fling."
Pentfield shook his head, though visibly swayed by the temptation.
"It won't do, Corry, old man. I appreciate your kindness and all
that, but it won't do. I'd be ashamed every time I thought of you
slaving away in here in my place."
A thought seemed suddenly to strike him. Burrowing into his bunk
and disrupting it in his eagerness, he secured a writing-pad and
pencil, and sitting down at the table, began to write with
swiftness and certitude.
"Here," he said, thrusting the scrawled letter into his partner's
hand. "You just deliver that and everything'll be all right."
Hutchinson ran his eye over it and laid it down.
"How do you know the brother will be willing to make that beastly
trip in here?" he demanded.
"Oh, he'll do it for me--and for his sister," Pentfield replied.
"You see, he's tenderfoot, and I wouldn't trust her with him alone.
But with you along it will be an easy trip and a safe one. As soon
as you get out, you'll go to her and prepare her. Then you can
take your run east to your own people, and in the spring she and
her brother'll be ready to start with you. You'll like her, I
know, right from the jump; and from that, you'll know her as soon
as you lay eyes on her."
So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl's
photograph pasted on the inside of the case. Corry Hutchinson
gazed at it with admiration welling up in his eyes.
"Mabel is her name," Pentfield went on. "And it's just as well you
should know how to find the house. Soon as you strike 'Frisco,
take a cab, and just say, 'Holmes's place, Myrdon Avenue'--I doubt
if the Myrdon Avenue is necessary. The cabby'll know where Judge
Holmes lives.
"And say," Pentfield continued, after a pause, "it won't be a bad
idea for you to get me a few little things which a--er--"
"A married man should have in his business," Hutchinson blurted out
with a grin.
Pentfield grinned back.
"Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and such
things. And you might get a good set of china. You know it'll
come hard for her to settle down to this sort of thing. You can
freight them in by steamer around by Bering Sea. And, I say,
what's the matter with a piano?"
Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily. His reluctance had
vanished, and he was warming up to his mission.
"By Jove! Lawrence," he said at the conclusion of the council, as
they both rose to their feet, "I'll bring back that girl of yours
in style. I'll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all
that brother'll have to do will be to see to her comfort and do for
her whatever I've forgotten. And I'll forget damn little, I can
tell you."
The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last
time and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the
frozen Yukon on his way to salt water and the world. Pentfield
went back to his Bonanza mine, which was many times more dreary
than before, and faced resolutely into the long winter. There was
work to be done, men to superintend, and operations to direct in
burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his heart was not in
the work. Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered logs of a
new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine. It was a
grand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms.
Each log was hand-hewed and squared--an expensive whim when the
axemen received a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing
could be too costly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live.
So he went about with the building of the cabin, singing, "And oh,
my fair, would I somewhere might house my heart with thee!" Also,
he had a calendar pinned on the wall above the table, and his first
act each morning was to check off the day and to count the days
that were left ere his partner would come booming down the Yukon
ice in the spring. Another whim of his was to permit no one to
sleep in the new cabin on the hill. It must be as fresh for her
occupancy as the square-hewed wood was fresh; and when it stood
complete, he put a padlock on the door. No one entered save
himself, and he was wont to spend long hours there, and to come
forth with his face strangely radiant and in his eyes a glad, warm
light.
In December he received a letter from Corry Hutchinson. He had
just seen Mabel Holmes. She was all she ought to be, to be
Lawrence Pentfield's wife, he wrote. He was enthusiastic, and his
letter sent the blood tingling through Pentfield's veins. Other
letters followed, one on the heels of another, and sometimes two or
three together when the mail lumped up. And they were all in the
same tenor. Corry had just come from Myrdon Avenue; Corry was just
going to Myrdon Avenue; or Corry was at Myrdon Avenue. And he
lingered on and on in San Francisco, nor even mentioned his trip to
Detroit.
Lawrence Pentfield began to think that his partner was a great deal
in the company of Mabel Holmes for a fellow who was going east to
see his people. He even caught himself worrying about it at times,
though he would have worried more had he not known Mabel and Corry
so well. Mabel's letters, on the other hand, had a great deal to
say about Corry. Also, a thread of timidity that was near to
disinclination ran through them concerning the trip in over the ice
and the Dawson marriage. Pentfield wrote back heartily, laughing
at her fears, which he took to be the mere physical ones of danger
and hardship rather than those bred of maidenly reserve.
But the long winter and tedious wait, following upon the two
previous long winters, were telling upon him. The superintendence
of the men and the pursuit of the pay streak could not break the
irk of the daily round, and the end of January found him making
occasional trips to Dawson, where he could forget his identity for
a space at the gambling tables. Because he could afford to lose,
he won, and "Pentfield's luck" became a stock phrase among the faro
players.
His luck ran with him till the second week in February. How much
farther it might have run is conjectural; for, after one big game,
he never played again.
It was in the Opera House that it occurred, and for an hour it had
seemed that he could not place his money on a card without making
the card a winner. In the lull at the end of a deal, while the
game-keeper was shuffling the deck, Nick Inwood the owner of the
game, remarked, apropos of nothing:-
"I say, Pentfield, I see that partner of yours has been cutting up
monkey-shines on the outside."
"Trust Corry to have a good time," Pentfield had answered;
"especially when he has earned it."
"Every man to his taste," Nick Inwood laughed; "but I should
scarcely call getting married a good time."
"Corry married!" Pentfield cried, incredulous and yet surprised out
of himself for the moment.
'Sure," Inwood said. "I saw it in the 'Frisco paper that came in
over the ice this morning."
"Well, and who's the girl?" Pentfield demanded, somewhat with the
air of patient fortitude with which one takes the bait of a catch
and is aware at the time of the large laugh bound to follow at his
expense.
Nick Inwood pulled the newspaper from his pocket and began looking
it over, saying:-
"I haven't a remarkable memory for names, but it seems to me it's
something like Mabel--Mabel--oh yes, here it--'Mabel Holmes,
daughter of Judge Holmes,'--whoever he is."
Lawrence Pentfield never turned a hair, though he wondered how any
man in the North could know her name. He glanced coolly from face
to face to note any vagrant signs of the game that was being played
upon him, but beyond a healthy curiosity the faces betrayed
nothing. Then he turned to the gambler and said in cold, even
tones:-
"Inwood, I've got an even five hundred here that says the print of
what you have just said is not in that paper."
The gambler looked at him in quizzical surprise. "Go 'way, child.
I don't want your money."
"I thought so," Pentfield sneered, returning to the game and laying
a couple of bets.
Nick Inwood's face flushed, and, as though doubting his senses, he
ran careful eyes over the print of a quarter of a column. Then be
turned on Lawrence Pentfield.
"Look here, Pentfield," he said, in a quiet, nervous manner; "I
can't allow that, you know."
"Allow what?" Pentfield demanded brutally.
"You implied that I lied."
"Nothing of the sort," came the reply. "I merely implied that you
were trying to be clumsily witty."
"Make your bets, gentlemen," the dealer protested.
"But I tell you it's true," Nick Inwood insisted.
"And I have told you I've five hundred that says it's not in that
paper," Pentfield answered, at the same time throwing a heavy sack
of dust on the table.
"I am sorry to take your money," was the retort, as Inwood thrust
the newspaper into Pentfield's hand.
Pentfield saw, though he could not quite bring himself to believe.
Glancing through the headline, "Young Lochinvar came out of the
North," and skimming the article until the names of Mabel Holmes
and Corry Hutchinson, coupled together, leaped squarely before his
eyes, he turned to the top of the page. It was a San Francisco
paper.
"The money's yours, Inwood," he remarked, with a short laugh.
"There's no telling what that partner of mine will do when he gets
started."
Then he returned to the article and read it word for word, very
slowly and very carefully. He could no longer doubt. Beyond
dispute, Corry Hutchinson had married Mabel Holmes. "One of the
Bonanza kings," it described him, "a partner with Lawrence
Pentfield (whom San Francisco society has not yet forgotten), and
interested with that gentleman in other rich, Klondike properties."
Further, and at the end, he read, "It is whispered that Mr. and
Mrs. Hutchinson will, after a brief trip east to Detroit, make
their real honeymoon journey into the fascinating Klondike
country."
"I'll be back again; keep my place for me," Pentfield said, rising
to his feet and taking his sack, which meantime had hit the blower
and came back lighter by five hundred dollars.
He went down the street and bought a Seattle paper. It contained
the same facts, though somewhat condensed. Corry and Mabel were
indubitably married. Pentfield returned to the Opera House and
resumed his seat in the game. He asked to have the limit removed.
"Trying to get action," Nick Inwood laughed, as he nodded assent to
the dealer. "I was going down to the A. C. store, but now I guess
I'll stay and watch you do your worst."
This Lawrence Pentfield did at the end of two hours' plunging, when
the dealer bit the end off a fresh cigar and struck a match as he
announced that the bank was broken. Pentfield cashed in for forty
thousand, shook hands with Nick Inwood, and stated that it was the
last time he would ever play at his game or at anybody's else's.
No one knew nor guessed that he had been hit, much less hit hard.
There was no apparent change in his manner. For a week he went
about his work much as he had always done, when he read an account
of the marriage in a Portland paper. Then he called in a friend to
take charge of his mine and departed up the Yukon behind his dogs.
He held to the Salt Water trail till White River was reached, into
which he turned. Five days later he came upon a hunting camp of
the White River Indians. In the evening there was a feast, and he
sat in honour beside the chief; and next morning he headed his dogs
back toward the Yukon. But he no longer travelled alone. A young
squaw fed his dogs for him that night and helped to pitch camp.
She had been mauled by a bear in her childhood and suffered from a
slight limp. Her name was Lashka, and she was diffident at first
with the strange white man that had come out of the Unknown,
married her with scarcely a look or word, and now was carrying her
back with him into the Unknown.
But Lashka's was better fortune than falls to most Indian girls
that mate with white men in the Northland. No sooner was Dawson
reached than the barbaric marriage that had joined them was re-
solemnized, in the white man's fashion, before a priest. From
Dawson, which to her was all a marvel and a dream, she was taken
directly to the Bonanza claim and installed in the square-hewed
cabin on the hill.
The nine days' wonder that followed arose not so much out of the
fact of the squaw whom Lawrence Pentfield had taken to bed and
board as out of the ceremony that had legalized the tie. The
properly sanctioned marriage was the one thing that passed the
community's comprehension. But no one bothered Pentfield about it.
So long as a man's vagaries did no special hurt to the community,
the community let the man alone, nor was Pentfield barred from the
cabins of men who possessed white wives. The marriage ceremony
removed him from the status of squaw-man and placed him beyond
moral reproach, though there were men that challenged his taste
where women were concerned.
No more letters arrived from the outside. Six sledloads of mails
had been lost at the Big Salmon. Besides, Pentfield knew that
Corry and his bride must by that time have started in over the
trail. They were even then on their honeymoon trip--the honeymoon
trip he had dreamed of for himself through two dreary years. His
lip curled with bitterness at the thought; but beyond being kinder
to Lashka he gave no sign.
March had passed and April was nearing its end, when, one spring
morning, Lashka asked permission to go down the creek several miles
to Siwash Pete's cabin. Pete's wife, a Stewart River woman, had
sent up word that something was wrong with her baby, and Lashka,
who was pre-eminently a mother-woman and who held herself to be
truly wise in the matter of infantile troubles, missed no
opportunity of nursing the children of other women as yet more
fortunate than she.
Pentfield harnessed his dogs, and with Lashka behind took the trail
down the creek bed of Bonanza. Spring was in the air. The
sharpness had gone out of the bite of the frost and though snow
still covered the land, the murmur and trickling of water told that
the iron grip of winter was relaxing. The bottom was dropping out
of the trail, and here and there a new trail had been broken around
open holes. At such a place, where there was not room for two
sleds to pass, Pentfield heard the jingle of approaching bells and
stopped his dogs.
A team of tired-looking dogs appeared around the narrow bend,
followed by a heavily-loaded sled. At the gee-pole was a man who
steered in a manner familiar to Pentfield, and behind the sled
walked two women. His glance returned to the man at the gee-pole.
It was Corry. Pentfield got on his feet and waited. He was glad
that Lashka was with him. The meeting could not have come about
better had it been planned, he thought. And as he waited he
wondered what they would say, what they would be able to say. As
for himself there was no need to say anything. The explaining was
all on their side, and he was ready to listen to them.
As they drew in abreast, Corry recognized him and halted the dogs.
With a "Hello, old man," he held out his hand.
Pentfield shook it, but without warmth or speech. By this time the
two women had come up, and he noticed that the second one was Dora
Holmes. He doffed his fur cap, the flaps of which were flying,
shook hands with her, and turned toward Mabel. She swayed forward,
splendid and radiant, but faltered before his outstretched hand.
He had intended to say, "How do you do, Mrs. Hutchinson?"--but
somehow, the Mrs. Hutchinson had choked him, and all he had managed
to articulate was the "How do you do?"
There was all the constraint and awkwardness in the situation he
could have wished. Mabel betrayed the agitation appropriate to her
position, while Dora, evidently brought along as some sort of
peacemaker, was saying:-
"Why, what is the matter, Lawrence?"
Before he could answer, Corry plucked him by the sleeve and drew
him aside.
"See here, old man, what's this mean?" Corry demanded in a low
tone, indicating Lashka with his eyes.
"I can hardly see, Corry, where you can have any concern in the
matter," Pentfield answered mockingly.
But Corry drove straight to the point.
"What is that squaw doing on your sled? A nasty job you've given
me to explain all this away. I only hope it can be explained away.
Who is she? Whose squaw is she?"
Then Lawrence Pentfield delivered his stroke, and he delivered it
with a certain calm elation of spirit that seemed somewhat to
compensate for the wrong that had been done him.
"She is my squaw," he said; "Mrs. Pentfield, if you please."
Corry Hutchinson gasped, and Pentfield left him and returned to the
two women. Mabel, with a worried expression on her face, seemed
holding herself aloof. He turned to Dora and asked, quite
genially, as though all the world was sunshine:- "How did you stand
the trip, anyway? Have any trouble to sleep warm?"
"And, how did Mrs. Hutchinson stand it?" he asked next, his eyes on
Mabel.
"Oh, you dear ninny!" Dora cried, throwing her arms around him and
hugging him. "Then you saw it, too! I thought something was the
matter, you were acting so strangely."
"I--I hardly understand," he stammered.
"It was corrected in next day's paper," Dora chattered on. "We did
not dream you would see it. All the other papers had it correctly,
and of course that one miserable paper was the very one you saw!"
"Wait a moment! What do you mean?" Pentfield demanded, a sudden
fear at his heart, for he felt himself on the verge of a great
gulf.
But Dora swept volubly on.
"Why, when it became known that Mabel and I were going to Klondike,
EVERY OTHER WEEK said that when we were gone, it would be lovely on
Myrdon Avenue, meaning, of course, lonely."
"Then--"
"I am Mrs. Hutchinson," Dora answered. "And you thought it was
Mabel all the time--"
"Precisely the way of it," Pentfield replied slowly. "But I can
see now. The reporter got the names mixed. The Seattle and
Portland paper copied."
He stood silently for a minute. Mabel's face was turned toward him
again, and he could see the glow of expectancy in it. Corry was
deeply interested in the ragged toe of one of his moccasins, while
Dora was stealing sidelong glances at the immobile face of Lashka
sitting on the sled. Lawrence Pentfield stared straight out before
him into a dreary future, through the grey vistas of which he saw
himself riding on a sled behind running dogs with lame Lashka by
his side.
Then he spoke, quite simply, looking Mabel in the eyes.
"I am very sorry. I did not dream it. I thought you had married
Corry. That is Mrs. Pentfield sitting on the sled over there."
Mabel Holmes turned weakly toward her sister, as though all the
fatigue of her great journey had suddenly descended on her. Dora
caught her around the waist. Corry Hutchinson was still occupied
with his moccasins. Pentfield glanced quickly from face to face,
then turned to his sled.
"Can't stop here all day, with Pete's baby waiting," he said to
Lashka.
The long whip-lash hissed out, the dogs sprang against the breast
bands, and the sled lurched and jerked ahead.
"Oh, I say, Corry," Pentfield called back, "you'd better occupy the
old cabin. It's not been used for some time. I've built a new one
on the hill."
-THE END-
Jack London's short story: The Faith of Men
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
