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
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. amp; 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
