'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 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 Superintendent 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 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 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, 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.'
The exhausted sawyers were so glad to see Kirby that for the moment they forgot their pains and worked the great saw with a vigor, but he noticed that Missy was operating on courage alone, so he scrambled to the top of the structure, gently lifted her to the ground, and took the top handle. As soon as he did so, Tom could feel the difference. The saw came down with more strength, stayed closer to the line, and was pulled back up with authority. For about two hours the two men ripped down the squared-off log, producing planks at a speed Tom had not felt possible.
At the noon break Missy had soup ready, and Kirby stayed at the pit most of that afternoon. He returned next day to help Tom finish off the planking whose length had been determined by the Kernel's drawing, and that night Kirby stayed for supper.
When the actual building of the boat started, with a heavy keel neatly formed, Kirby appeared frequently to give not only advice but also his valued assistance in shaping the form of the boat. He took his meals there too, providing meat and vegetables from his own sources of supply, and late one afternoon Missy came to Tom with a curious request: 'Tom, could you maybe sleep over in the Stantons' tent tonight?' He stood stock-still, hands at his side, his head in a whirl. He was fifteen years old and Missy was twenty-three, and under no conceivable circumstances would he have said that he loved her, but he had admitted to himself many times in recent months that she was the best woman he had ever known. Never did he refer to her as a girl; a girl would be someone his own age and he had met several in school who were attractive, with every promise of becoming more so as the years passed.
Missy was a woman; she had been the salvation of the Venns during the years of privation and the agent of his father's rejuvenation. She was a wonderful person, courageous, hardworking, amiable, and on those trips down the mountain on the shovel he had clung to her as if they were one person engaged in a great adventure. Recently, as they worked on the whipsaw, he had known how mortally tired she was, and he had wished that he might have done all the work himself. Indeed, he had pushed up and pulled down with doubled effort to spare her, and he did so almost joyously, for his affection for this strong-minded woman went beyond words. He felt they were a team, not one that conformed to any ordinary description, but a pair of likeminded, strong people.
They would cut their planks, and build their boat, and guide it through the canyons and past the rapids, and what happened when they got to Dawson was a problem for another day. Now he was being asked to take his bedroll somewhere else, and he felt displaced.
But when Sergeant Kirby moved into Missy's tent, the building of the boat took a leap ahead, for the Mountie had had numerous experiences with the very rough waters that the stampeders would be facing as soon as they left placid Lake Bennett, and this knowledge caused the first rupture between him and Tom. When he saw that Tom proposed building the boat to the exact specifications laid down in the Klondike Kernel's sketch, he asked: 'Are you sure you want it that big? Two people could ride in something a lot smaller.'
'That's what he said. Look.' There the figures were: '23' long and 5' 6"in the beam' and that's what the boat would be.
'The point is,' Kirby said, 'there are two places which are extremely dangerous, Miles Canyon and Whitehorse Rapids. A lot of boats are lost there, lives too.'
&n
bsp; 'He said a boat like this would make it,' Tom said firmly, not designating who the he was.
'I'm sure he said it. But if you had a boat half that size, you could still pack all your gear, and when you came to the bad spots you could hire Indians to help you portage around. You have the money, I know that.'
'The boat has to be this long,' and it was remarkable to see this city boy, who knew nothing of either wood or shipbuilding, join the timbers to the keel and form them moderately well at the forward post. With help from Kirby and Missy at the difficult joins, and with constant reference to both the sketch the Kernel had provided and the thin metal square his father had bought, Tom built a boat that was better than nine-tenths of those put together by experienced men.
When it was finished, he was disgusted with the number of open chinks he had left where boards did not join accurately, but Kirby laughed: 'Tom, all boat builders leave chinks. That's why we have caulking.'
'What's that?'
'Oakum.'
'And what's that?'
'Hemp and tar. You hammer it into the open spots and make the boat watertight. Otherwise you'd sink.' And suddenly Tom and Melissa realized that in this leaky craft built by a fifteen-year-old boy they were about to trust their lives on a five-hundred-mile run down extremely dangerous waters.
'Where do you get the tar and the other?'
'You ought to have brought it with you, but you didn't. Your Kernel couldn't think of everything, could he?' But Kirby had an idea: 'We'll go to men finishing their boats and see if they'll sell us the caulking they have left over.' And when a bizarre collection of substitutes for real caulking was assembled horsehair, forest moss, strips of linen, burlap they tamped the melange into the cracks, then sealed them with another outrageous mixture of wax, bear fat, tar and pitch, and when all was completed, young Tom Venn could send his first letter home to his grandmother:
Pop was killed when a spruce pole doubled back and ran him through. He died brave.
Missy and I are now in Canada so I think it's all right to give you our address, Dawson City, as I don't think anybody could arrest us here. I have built a boat twenty-three feet long and five and a half feet in the beam and in a test it floated like a duck.