Lost Face

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LOST FACE
by Jack London


Contents:

Lost Face
Trust
To Build a Fire
That Spot
Flush of Gold
The Passing of Marcus O'Brien
The Wit of Porportuk




LOST FACE


It was the end. Subienkow had travelled a long trail of bitterness and
horror, homing like a dove for the capitals of Europe, and here, farther
away than ever, in Russian America, the trail ceased. He sat in the
snow, arms tied behind him, waiting the torture. He stared curiously
before him at a huge Cossack, prone in the snow, moaning in his pain. The
men had finished handling the giant and turned him over to the women.
That they exceeded the fiendishness of the men, the man's cries attested.

Subienkow looked on, and shuddered. He was not afraid to die. He had
carried his life too long in his hands, on that weary trail from Warsaw
to Nulato, to shudder at mere dying. But he objected to the torture. It
offended his soul. And this offence, in turn, was not due to the mere
pain he must endure, but to the sorry spectacle the pain would make of
him. He knew that he would pray, and beg, and entreat, even as Big Ivan
and the others that had gone before. This would not be nice. To pass
out bravely and cleanly, with a smile and a jest--ah! that would have
been the way. But to lose control, to have his soul upset by the pangs
of the flesh, to screech and gibber like an ape, to become the veriest
beast--ah, that was what was so terrible.

There had been no chance to escape. From the beginning, when he dreamed
the fiery dream of Poland's independence, he had become a puppet in the
hands of Fate. From the beginning, at Warsaw, at St. Petersburg, in the
Siberian mines, in Kamtchatka, on the crazy boats of the fur-thieves,
Fate had been driving him to this end. Without doubt, in the foundations
of the world was graved this end for him--for him, who was so fine and
sensitive, whose nerves scarcely sheltered under his skin, who was a
dreamer, and a poet, and an artist. Before he was dreamed of, it had
been determined that the quivering bundle of sensitiveness that
constituted him should be doomed to live in raw and howling savagery, and
to die in this far land of night, in this dark place beyond the last
boundaries of the world.

He sighed. So that thing before him was Big Ivan--Big Ivan the giant,
the man without nerves, the man of iron, the Cossack turned freebooter of
the seas, who was as phlegmatic as an ox, with a nervous system so low
that what was pain to ordinary men was scarcely a tickle to him. Well,
well, trust these Nulato Indians to find Big Ivan's nerves and trace them
to the roots of his quivering soul. They were certainly doing it. It
was inconceivable that a man could suffer so much and yet live. Big Ivan
was paying for his low order of nerves. Already he had lasted twice as
long as any of the others.

Subienkow felt that he could not stand the Cossack's sufferings much
longer. Why didn't Ivan die? He would go mad if that screaming did not
cease. But when it did cease, his turn would come. And there was Yakaga
awaiting him, too, grinning at him even now in anticipation--Yakaga, whom
only last week he had kicked out of the fort, and upon whose face he had
laid the lash of his dog-whip. Yakaga would attend to him. Doubtlessly
Yakaga was saving for him more refined tortures, more exquisite nerve-
racking. Ah! that must have been a good one, from the way Ivan screamed.
The squaws bending over him stepped back with laughter and clapping of
hands. Subienkow saw the monstrous thing that had been perpetrated, and
began to laugh hysterically. The Indians looked at him in wonderment
that he should laugh. But Subienkow could not stop.

This would never do. He controlled himself, the spasmodic twitchings
slowly dying away. He strove to think of other things, and began reading
back in his own life. He remembered his mother and his father, and the
little spotted pony, and the French tutor who had taught him dancing and
sneaked him an old worn copy of Voltaire. Once more he saw Paris, and
dreary London, and gay Vienna, and Rome. And once more he saw that wild
group of youths who had dreamed, even as he, the dream of an independent
Poland with a king of Poland on the throne at Warsaw. Ah, there it was
that the long trail began. Well, he had lasted longest. One by one,
beginning with the two executed at St. Petersburg, he took up the count
of the passing of those brave spirits. Here one had been beaten to death
by a jailer, and there, on that bloodstained highway of the exiles, where
they had marched for endless months, beaten and maltreated by their
Cossack guards, another had dropped by the way. Always it had been
savagery--brutal, bestial savagery. They had died--of fever, in the
mines, under the knout. The last two had died after the escape, in the
battle with the Cossacks, and he alone had won to Kamtchatka with the
stolen papers and the money of a traveller he had left lying in the snow.

It had been nothing but savagery. All the years, with his heart in
studios, and theatres, and courts, he had been hemmed in by savagery. He
had purchased his life with blood. Everybody had killed. He had killed
that traveller for his passports. He had proved that he was a man of
parts by duelling with two Russian officers on a single day. He had had
to prove himself in order to win to a place among the fur-thieves. He
had had to win to that place. Behind him lay the thousand-years-long
road across all Siberia and Russia. He could not escape that way. The
only way was ahead, across the dark and icy sea of Bering to Alaska. The
way had led from savagery to deeper savagery. On the scurvy-rotten ships
of the fur-thieves, out of food and out of water, buffeted by the
interminable storms of that stormy sea, men had become animals. Thrice
he had sailed east from Kamtchatka. And thrice, after all manner of
hardship and suffering, the survivors had come back to Kamtchatka. There
had been no outlet for escape, and he could not go back the way he had
come, for the mines and the knout awaited him.

Again, the fourth and last time, he had sailed east. He had been with
those who first found the fabled Seal Islands; but he had not returned
with them to share the wealth of furs in the mad orgies of Kamtchatka. He
had sworn never to go back. He knew that to win to those dear capitals
of Europe he must go on. So he had changed ships and remained in the
dark new land. His comrades were Slavonian hunters and Russian
adventurers, Mongols and Tartars and Siberian aborigines; and through the
savages of the new world they had cut a path of blood. They had
massacred whole villages that refused to furnish the fur-tribute; and
they, in turn, had been massacred by ships' companies. He, with one
Finn, had been the sole survivor of such a company. They had spent a
winter of solitude and starvation on a lonely Aleutian isle, and their
rescue in the spring by another fur-ship had been one chance in a
thousand.

But always the terrible savagery had hemmed him in. Passing from ship to
ship, and ever refusing to return, he had come to the ship that explored
south. All down the Alaska coast they had encountered nothing but hosts
of savages. Every anchorage among the beetling islands or under the
frowning cliffs of the mainland had meant a battle or a storm. Either
the gales blew, threatening destruction, or the war canoes came off,
manned by howling natives with the war-paint on their faces, who came to
learn the bloody virtues of the sea-rovers' gunpowder. South, south they
had coasted, clear to the myth-land of California. Here, it was said,
were Spanish adventurers who had fought their way up from Mexico. He had
had hopes of those Spanish adventurers. Escaping to them, the rest would
have been easy--a year or two, what did it matter more or less--and he
would win to Mexico, then a ship, and Europe would be his. But they had
met no Spaniards. Only had they encountered the same impregnable wall of
savagery. The denizens of the confines of the world, painted for war,
had driven them back from the shores. At last, when one boat was cut off
and every man killed, the commander had abandoned the quest and sailed
back to the north.

The years had passed. He had served under Tebenkoff when Michaelovski
Redoubt was built. He had spent two years in the Kuskokwim country. Two
summers, in the month of June, he had managed to be at the head of
Kotzebue Sound. Here, at this time, the tribes assembled for barter;
here were to be found spotted deerskins from Siberia, ivory from the
Diomedes, walrus skins from the shores of the Arctic, strange stone
lamps, passing in trade from tribe to tribe, no one knew whence, and,
once, a hunting-knife of English make; and here, Subienkow knew, was the
school in which to learn geography. For he met Eskimos from Norton
Sound, from King Island and St. Lawrence Island, from Cape Prince of
Wales, and Point Barrow. Such places had other names, and their
distances were measured in days.

It was a vast region these trading savages came from, and a vaster region
from which, by repeated trade, their stone lamps and that steel knife had
come. Subienkow bullied, and cajoled, and bribed. Every far-journeyer
or strange tribesman was brought before him. Perils unaccountable and
unthinkable were mentioned, as well as wild beasts, hostile tribes,
impenetrable forests, and mighty mountain ranges; but always from beyond
came the rumour and the tale of white-skinned men, blue of eye and fair
of hair, who fought like devils and who sought always for furs. They
were to the east--far, far to the east. No one had seen them. It was
the word that had been passed along.

It was a hard school. One could not learn geography very well through
the medium of strange dialects, from dark minds that mingled fact and
fable and that measured distances by "sleeps" that varied according to
the difficulty of the going. But at last came the whisper that gave
Subienkow courage. In the east lay a great river where were these blue-
eyed men. The river was called the Yukon. South of Michaelovski Redoubt
emptied another great river which the Russians knew as the Kwikpak. These
two rivers were one, ran the whisper.

Subienkow returned to Michaelovski. For a year he urged an expedition up
the Kwikpak. Then arose Malakoff, the Russian half-breed, to lead the
wildest and most ferocious of the hell's broth of mongrel adventurers who
had crossed from Kamtchatka. Subienkow was his lieutenant. They
threaded the mazes of the great delta of the Kwikpak, picked up the first
low hills on the northern bank, and for half a thousand miles, in skin
canoes loaded to the gunwales with trade-goods and ammunition, fought
their way against the five-knot current of a river that ran from two to
ten miles wide in a channel many fathoms deep. Malakoff decided to build
the fort at Nulato. Subienkow urged to go farther. But he quickly
reconciled himself to Nulato. The long winter was coming on. It would
be better to wait. Early the following summer, when the ice was gone, he
would disappear up the Kwikpak and work his way to the Hudson Bay
Company's posts. Malakoff had never heard the whisper that the Kwikpak
was the Yukon, and Subienkow did not tell him.

Came the building of the fort. It was enforced labour. The tiered walls
of logs arose to the sighs and groans of the Nulato Indians. The lash
was laid upon their backs, and it was the iron hand of the freebooters of
the sea that laid on the lash. There were Indians that ran away, and
when they were caught they were brought back and spread-eagled before the
fort, where they and their tribe learned the efficacy of the knout. Two
died under it; others were injured for life; and the rest took the lesson
to heart and ran away no more. The snow was flying ere the fort was
finished, and then it was the time for furs. A heavy tribute was laid
upon the tribe. Blows and lashings continued, and that the tribute
should be paid, the women and children were held as hostages and treated
with the barbarity that only the fur-thieves knew.

Well, it had been a sowing of blood, and now was come the harvest. The
fort was gone. In the light of its burning, half the fur-thieves had
been cut down. The other half had passed under the torture. Only
Subienkow remained, or Subienkow and Big Ivan, if that whimpering,
moaning thing in the snow could be called Big Ivan. Subienkow caught
Yakaga grinning at him. There was no gainsaying Yakaga. The mark of the
lash was still on his face. After all, Subienkow could not blame him,
but he disliked the thought of what Yakaga would do to him. He thought
of appealing to Makamuk, the head-chief; but his judgment told him that
such appeal was useless. Then, too, he thought of bursting his bonds and
dying fighting. Such an end would be quick. But he could not break his
bonds. Caribou thongs were stronger than he. Still devising, another
thought came to him. He signed for Makamuk, and that an interpreter who
knew the coast dialect should be brought.

"Oh, Makamuk," he said, "I am not minded to die. I am a great man, and
it were foolishness for me to die. In truth, I shall not die. I am not
like these other carrion."

He looked at the moaning thing that had once been Big Ivan, and stirred
it contemptuously with his toe.

"I am too wise to die. Behold, I have a great medicine. I alone know
this medicine. Since I am not going to die, I shall exchange this
medicine with you."

"What is this medicine?" Makamuk demanded.

"It is a strange medicine."

Subienkow debated with himself for a moment, as if loth to part with the
secret.

"I will tell you. A little bit of this medicine rubbed on the skin makes
the skin hard like a rock, hard like iron, so that no cutting weapon can
cut it. The strongest blow of a cutting weapon is a vain thing against
it. A bone knife becomes like a piece of mud; and it will turn the edge
of the iron knives we have brought among you. What will you give me for
the secret of the medicine?"

"I will give you your life," Makamuk made answer through the interpreter.

Subienkow laughed scornfully.

"And you shall be a slave in my house until you die."

The Pole laughed more scornfully.

"Untie my hands and feet and let us talk," he said.

The chief made the sign; and when he was loosed Subienkow rolled a
cigarette and lighted it.

"This is foolish talk," said Makamuk. "There is no such medicine. It
cannot be. A cutting edge is stronger than any medicine."

The chief was incredulous, and yet he wavered. He had seen too many
deviltries of fur-thieves that worked. He could not wholly doubt.

"I will give you your life; but you shall not be a slave," he announced.

"More than that."

Subienkow played his game as coolly as if he were bartering for a
foxskin.

"It is a very great medicine. It has saved my life many times. I want a
sled and dogs, and six of your hunters to travel with me down the river
and give me safety to one day's sleep from Michaelovski Redoubt."

"You must live here, and teach us all of your deviltries," was the reply.

Subienkow shrugged his shoulders and remained silent. He blew cigarette
smoke out on the icy air, and curiously regarded what remained of the big
Cossack.

"That scar!" Makamuk said suddenly, pointing to the Pole's neck, where a
livid mark advertised the slash of a knife in a Kamtchatkan brawl. "The
medicine is not good. The cutting edge was stronger than the medicine."

"It was a strong man that drove the stroke." (Subienkow considered.)
"Stronger than you, stronger than your strongest hunter, stronger than
he."

Again, with the toe of his moccasin, he touched the Cossack--a grisly
spectacle, no longer conscious--yet in whose dismembered body the pain-
racked life clung and was loth to go.

"Also, the medicine was weak. For at that place there were no berries of
a certain kind, of which I see you have plenty in this country. The
medicine here will be strong."

"I will let you go down river," said Makamuk; "and the sled and the dogs
and the six hunters to give you safety shall be yours."

"You are slow," was the cool rejoinder. "You have committed an offence
against my medicine in that you did not at once accept my terms. Behold,
I now demand more. I want one hundred beaver skins." (Makamuk sneered.)

"I want one hundred pounds of dried fish." (Makamuk nodded, for fish
were plentiful and cheap.) "I want two sleds--one for me and one for my
furs and fish. And my rifle must be returned to me. If you do not like
the price, in a little while the price will grow."

Yakaga whispered to the chief.

"But how can I know your medicine is true medicine?" Makamuk asked.

"It is very easy. First, I shall go into the woods--"

Again Yakaga whispered to Makamuk, who made a suspicious dissent.

"You can send twenty hunters with me," Subienkow went on. "You see, I
must get the berries and the roots with which to make the medicine. Then,
when you have brought the two sleds and loaded on them the fish and the
beaver skins and the rifle, and when you have told off the six hunters
who will go with me--then, when all is ready, I will rub the medicine on
my neck, so, and lay my neck there on that log. Then can your strongest
hunter take the axe and strike three times on my neck. You yourself can
strike the three times."

Makamuk stood with gaping mouth, drinking in this latest and most
wonderful magic of the fur-thieves.

"But first," the Pole added hastily, "between each blow I must put on
fresh medicine. The axe is heavy and sharp, and I want no mistakes."

"All that you have asked shall be yours," Makamuk cried in a rush of
acceptance. "Proceed to make your medicine."

Subienkow concealed his elation. He was playing a desperate game, and
there must be no slips. He spoke arrogantly.

"You have been slow. My medicine is offended. To make the offence clean
you must give me your daughter."

He pointed to the girl, an unwholesome creature, with a cast in one eye
and a bristling wolf-tooth. Makamuk was angry, but the Pole remained
imperturbable, rolling and lighting another cigarette.

"Make haste," he threatened. "If you are not quick, I shall demand yet
more."

In the silence that followed, the dreary northland scene faded before
him, and he saw once more his native land, and France, and, once, as he
glanced at the wolf-toothed girl, he remembered another girl, a singer
and a dancer, whom he had known when first as a youth he came to Paris.

"What do you want with the girl?" Makamuk asked.

"To go down the river with me." Subienkow glanced over her critically.
"She will make a good wife, and it is an honour worthy of my medicine to
be married to your blood."

Again he remembered the singer and dancer and hummed aloud a song she had
taught him. He lived the old life over, but in a detached, impersonal
sort of way, looking at the memory-pictures of his own life as if they
were pictures in a book of anybody's life. The chief's voice, abruptly
breaking the silence, startled him

"It shall be done," said Makamuk. "The girl shall go down the river with
you. But be it understood that I myself strike the three blows with the
axe on your neck."

"But each time I shall put on the medicine," Subienkow answered, with a
show of ill-concealed anxiety.

"You shall put the medicine on between each blow. Here are the hunters
who shall see you do not escape. Go into the forest and gather your
medicine."

Makamuk had been convinced of the worth of the medicine by the Pole's
rapacity. Surely nothing less than the greatest of medicines could
enable a man in the shadow of death to stand up and drive an old-woman's
bargain.

"Besides," whispered Yakaga, when the Pole, with his guard, had
disappeared among the spruce trees, "when you have learned the medicine
you can easily destroy him."

"But how can I destroy him?" Makamuk argued. "His medicine will not let
me destroy him."

"There will be some part where he has not rubbed the medicine," was
Yakaga's reply. "We will destroy him through that part. It may be his
ears. Very well; we will thrust a spear in one ear and out the other. Or
it may be his eyes. Surely the medicine will be much too strong to rub
on his eyes."

The chief nodded. "You are wise, Yakaga. If he possesses no other devil-
things, we will then destroy him."

Subienkow did not waste time in gathering the ingredients for his
medicine, he selected whatsoever came to hand such as spruce needles, the
inner bark of the willow, a strip of birch bark, and a quantity of moss-
berries, which he made the hunters dig up for him from beneath the snow.
A few frozen roots completed his supply, and he led the way back to camp.

Makamuk and Yakaga crouched beside him, noting the quantities and kinds
of the ingredients he dropped into the pot of boiling water.

"You must be careful that the moss-berries go in first," he explained.

"And--oh, yes, one other thing--the finger of a man. Here, Yakaga, let
me cut off your finger."

But Yakaga put his hands behind him and scowled.

"Just a small finger," Subienkow pleaded.

"Yakaga, give him your finger," Makamuk commanded.

"There be plenty of fingers lying around," Yakaga grunted, indicating the
human wreckage in the snow of the score of persons who had been tortured
to death.

"It must be the finger of a live man," the Pole objected.

"Then shall you have the finger of a live man." Yakaga strode over to
the Cossack and sliced off a finger.

"He is not yet dead," he announced, flinging the bloody trophy in the
snow at the Pole's feet. "Also, it is a good finger, because it is
large."

Subienkow dropped it into the fire under the pot and began to sing. It
was a French love-song that with great solemnity he sang into the brew.

"Without these words I utter into it, the medicine is worthless," he
explained. "The words are the chiefest strength of it. Behold, it is
ready."

"Name the words slowly, that I may know them," Makamuk commanded.

"Not until after the test. When the axe flies back three times from my
neck, then will I give you the secret of the words."

"But if the medicine is not good medicine?" Makamuk queried anxiously.

Subienkow turned upon him wrathfully.

"My medicine is always good. However, if it is not good, then do by me
as you have done to the others. Cut me up a bit at a time, even as you
have cut him up." He pointed to the Cossack. "The medicine is now cool.
Thus, I rub it on my neck, saying this further medicine."

With great gravity he slowly intoned a line of the "Marseillaise," at the
same time rubbing the villainous brew thoroughly into his neck.

An outcry interrupted his play-acting. The giant Cossack, with a last
resurgence of his tremendous vitality, had arisen to his knees. Laughter
and cries of surprise and applause arose from the Nulatos, as Big Ivan
began flinging himself about in the snow with mighty spasms.

Subienkow was made sick by the sight, but he mastered his qualms and made
believe to be angry.

"This will not do," he said. "Finish him, and then we will make the
test. Here, you, Yakaga, see that his noise ceases."

While this was being done, Subienkow turned to Makamuk.

"And remember, you are to strike hard. This is not baby-work. Here,
take the axe and strike the log, so that I can see you strike like a
man."

Makamuk obeyed, striking twice, precisely and with vigour, cutting out a
large chip.

"It is well." Subienkow looked about him at the circle of savage faces
that somehow seemed to symbolize the wall of savagery that had hemmed him
about ever since the Czar's police had first arrested him in Warsaw.
"Take your axe, Makamuk, and stand so. I shall lie down. When I raise
my hand, strike, and strike with all your might. And be careful that no
one stands behind you. The medicine is good, and the axe may bounce from
off my neck and right out of your hands."

He looked at the two sleds, with the dogs in harness, loaded with furs
and fish. His rifle lay on top of the beaver skins. The six hunters who
were to act as his guard stood by the sleds.

"Where is the girl?" the Pole demanded. "Bring her up to the sleds
before the test goes on."

When this had been carried out, Subienkow lay down in the snow, resting
his head on the log like a tired child about to sleep. He had lived so
many dreary years that he was indeed tired.

"I laugh at you and your strength, O Makamuk," he said. "Strike, and
strike hard."

He lifted his hand. Makamuk swung the axe, a broadaxe for the squaring
of logs. The bright steel flashed through the frosty air, poised for a
perceptible instant above Makamuk's head, then descended upon Subienkow's
bare neck. Clear through flesh and bone it cut its way, biting deeply
into the log beneath. The amazed savages saw the head bounce a yard away
from the blood-spouting trunk.

There was a great bewilderment and silence, while slowly it began to dawn
in their minds that there had been no medicine. The fur-thief had
outwitted them. Alone, of all their prisoners, he had escaped the
torture. That had been the stake for which he played. A great roar of
laughter went up. Makamuk bowed his head in shame. The fur-thief had
fooled him. He had lost face before all his people. Still they
continued to roar out their laughter. Makamuk turned, and with bowed
head stalked away. He knew that thenceforth he would be no longer known
as Makamuk. He would be Lost Face; the record of his shame would be with
him until he died; and whenever the tribes gathered in the spring for the
salmon, or in the summer for the trading, the story would pass back and
forth across the camp-fires of how the fur-thief died peaceably, at a
single stroke, by the hand of Lost Face.