Lost Face

J >> Jack London >> Lost Face


We spent the winter and spring, after our own outfit was across the pass,
freighting other people's outfits; and we made a fat stake. Also, we
made money out of Spot. If we sold him once, we sold him twenty times.
He always came back, and no one asked for their money. We didn't want
the money. We'd have paid handsomely for any one to take him off our
hands for keeps'. We had to get rid of him, and we couldn't give him
away, for that would have been suspicious. But he was such a fine looker
that we never had any difficulty in selling him. "Unbroke," we'd say,
and they'd pay any old price for him. We sold him as low as twenty-five
dollars, and once we got a hundred and fifty for him. That particular
party returned him in person, refused to take his money back, and the way
he abused us was something awful. He said it was cheap at the price to
tell us what he thought of us; and we felt he was so justified that we
never talked back. But to this day I've never quite regained all the old
self-respect that was mine before that man talked to me.

When the ice cleared out of the lakes and river, we put our outfit in a
Lake Bennett boat and started for Dawson. We had a good team of dogs,
and of course we piled them on top the outfit. That Spot was along--there
was no losing him; and a dozen times, the first day, he knocked one or
another of the dogs overboard in the course of fighting with them. It
was close quarters, and he didn't like being crowded.

"What that dog needs is space," Steve said the second day. "Let's maroon
him."

We did, running the boat in at Caribou Crossing for him to jump ashore.
Two of the other dogs, good dogs, followed him; and we lost two whole
days trying to find them. We never saw those two dogs again; but the
quietness and relief we enjoyed made us decide, like the man who refused
his hundred and fifty, that it was cheap at the price. For the first
time in months Steve and I laughed and whistled and sang. We were as
happy as clams. The dark days were over. The nightmare had been lifted.
That Spot was gone.

Three weeks later, one morning, Steve and I were standing on the river-
bank at Dawson. A small boat was just arriving from Lake Bennett. I saw
Steve give a start, and heard him say something that was not nice and
that was not under his breath. Then I looked; and there, in the bow of
the boat, with ears pricked up, sat Spot. Steve and I sneaked
immediately, like beaten curs, like cowards, like absconders from
justice. It was this last that the lieutenant of police thought when he
saw us sneaking. He surmised that there were law-officers in the boat
who were after us. He didn't wait to find out, but kept us in sight, and
in the M. & M. saloon got us in a corner. We had a merry time
explaining, for we refused to go back to the boat and meet Spot; and
finally he held us under guard of another policeman while he went to the
boat. After we got clear of him, we started for the cabin, and when we
arrived, there was that Spot sitting on the stoop waiting for us. Now
how did he know we lived there? There were forty thousand people in
Dawson that summer, and how did he _savve_ our cabin out of all the
cabins? How did he know we were in Dawson, anyway? I leave it to you.
But don't forget what I said about his intelligence and that immortal
something I have seen glimmering in his eyes.

There was no getting rid of him any more. There were too many people in
Dawson who had bought him up on Chilcoot, and the story got around. Half
a dozen times we put him on board steamboats going down the Yukon; but he
merely went ashore at the first landing and trotted back up the bank. We
couldn't sell him, we couldn't kill him (both Steve and I had tried), and
nobody else was able to kill him. He bore a charmed life. I've seen him
go down in a dogfight on the main street with fifty dogs on top of him,
and when they were separated, he'd appear on all his four legs, unharmed,
while two of the dogs that had been on top of him would be lying dead.

I saw him steal a chunk of moose-meat from Major Dinwiddie's cache so
heavy that he could just keep one jump ahead of Mrs. Dinwiddie's squaw
cook, who was after him with an axe. As he went up the hill, after the
squaw gave up, Major Dinwiddie himself came out and pumped his Winchester
into the landscape. He emptied his magazine twice, and never touched
that Spot. Then a policeman came along and arrested him for discharging
firearms inside the city limits. Major Dinwiddie paid his fine, and
Steve and I paid him for the moose-meat at the rate of a dollar a pound,
bones and all. That was what he paid for it. Meat was high that year.

I am only telling what I saw with my own eyes. And now I'll tell you
something also. I saw that Spot fall through a water-hole. The ice was
three and a half feet thick, and the current sucked him under like a
straw. Three hundred yards below was the big water-hole used by the
hospital. Spot crawled out of the hospital water-hole, licked off the
water, bit out the ice that had formed between his toes, trotted up the
bank, and whipped a big Newfoundland belonging to the Gold Commissioner.

In the fall of 1898, Steve and I poled up the Yukon on the last water,
bound for Stewart River. We took the dogs along, all except Spot. We
figured we'd been feeding him long enough. He'd cost us more time and
trouble and money and grub than we'd got by selling him on the
Chilcoot--especially grub. So Steve and I tied him down in the cabin and
pulled our freight. We camped that night at the mouth of Indian River,
and Steve and I were pretty facetious over having shaken him. Steve was
a funny cuss, and I was just sitting up in the blankets and laughing when
a tornado hit camp. The way that Spot walked into those dogs and gave
them what-for was hair-raising. Now how did he get loose? It's up to
you. I haven't any theory. And how did he get across the Klondike
River? That's another facer. And anyway, how did he know we had gone up
the Yukon? You see, we went by water, and he couldn't smell our tracks.
Steve and I began to get superstitious about that dog. He got on our
nerves, too; and, between you and me, we were just a mite afraid of him.

The freeze-up came on when we were at the mouth of Henderson Creek, and
we traded him off for two sacks of flour to an outfit that was bound up
White River after copper. Now that whole outfit was lost. Never trace
nor hide nor hair of men, dogs, sleds, or anything was ever found. They
dropped clean out of sight. It became one of the mysteries of the
country. Steve and I plugged away up the Stewart, and six weeks
afterward that Spot crawled into camp. He was a perambulating skeleton,
and could just drag along; but he got there. And what I want to know is,
who told him we were up the Stewart? We could have gone to a thousand
other places. How did he know? You tell me, and I'll tell you.

No losing him. At the Mayo he started a row with an Indian dog. The
buck who owned the dog took a swing at Spot with an axe, missed him, and
killed his own dog. Talk about magic and turning bullets aside--I, for
one, consider it a blamed sight harder to turn an axe aside with a big
buck at the other end of it. And I saw him do it with my own eyes. That
buck didn't want to kill his own dog. You've got to show me.

I told you about Spot breaking into our meat cache. It was nearly the
death of us. There wasn't any more meat to be killed, and meat was all
we had to live on. The moose had gone back several hundred miles and the
Indians with them. There we were. Spring was on, and we had to wait for
the river to break. We got pretty thin before we decided to eat the
dogs, and we decided to eat Spot first. Do you know what that dog did?
He sneaked. Now how did he know our minds were made up to eat him? We
sat up nights laying for him, but he never came back, and we ate the
other dogs. We ate the whole team.

And now for the sequel. You know what it is when a big river breaks up
and a few billion tons of ice go out, jamming and milling and grinding.
Just in the thick of it, when the Stewart went out, rumbling and roaring,
we sighted Spot out in the middle. He'd got caught as he was trying to
cross up above somewhere. Steve and I yelled and shouted and ran up and
down the bank, tossing our hats in the air. Sometimes we'd stop and hug
each other, we were that boisterous, for we saw Spot's finish. He didn't
have a chance in a million. He didn't have any chance at all. After the
ice-run, we got into a canoe and paddled down to the Yukon, and down the
Yukon to Dawson, stopping to feed up for a week at the cabins at the
mouth of Henderson Creek. And as we came in to the bank at Dawson, there
sat that Spot, waiting for us, his ears pricked up, his tail wagging, his
mouth smiling, extending a hearty welcome to us. Now how did he get out
of that ice? How did he know we were coming to Dawson, to the very hour
and minute, to be out there on the bank waiting for us?

The more I think of that Spot, the more I am convinced that there are
things in this world that go beyond science. On no scientific grounds
can that Spot be explained. It's psychic phenomena, or mysticism, or
something of that sort, I guess, with a lot of Theosophy thrown in. The
Klondike is a good country. I might have been there yet, and become a
millionaire, if it hadn't been for Spot. He got on my nerves. I stood
him for two years altogether, and then I guess my stamina broke. It was
the summer of 1899 when I pulled out. I didn't say anything to Steve. I
just sneaked. But I fixed it up all right. I wrote Steve a note, and
enclosed a package of "rough-on-rats," telling him what to do with it. I
was worn down to skin and bone by that Spot, and I was that nervous that
I'd jump and look around when there wasn't anybody within hailing
distance. But it was astonishing the way I recuperated when I got quit
of him. I got back twenty pounds before I arrived in San Francisco, and
by the time I'd crossed the ferry to Oakland I was my old self again, so
that even my wife looked in vain for any change in me.

Steve wrote to me once, and his letter seemed irritated. He took it kind
of hard because I'd left him with Spot. Also, he said he'd used the
"rough-on-rats," per directions, and that there was nothing doing. A
year went by. I was back in the office and prospering in all ways--even
getting a bit fat. And then Steve arrived. He didn't look me up. I
read his name in the steamer list, and wondered why. But I didn't wonder
long. I got up one morning and found that Spot chained to the gate-post
and holding up the milkman. Steve went north to Seattle, I learned, that
very morning. I didn't put on any more weight. My wife made me buy him
a collar and tag, and within an hour he showed his gratitude by killing
her pet Persian cat. There is no getting rid of that Spot. He will be
with me until I die, for he'll never die. My appetite is not so good
since he arrived, and my wife says I am looking peaked. Last night that
Spot got into Mr. Harvey's hen-house (Harvey is my next-door neighbour)
and killed nineteen of his fancy-bred chickens. I shall have to pay for
them. My neighbours on the other side quarrelled with my wife and then
moved out. Spot was the cause of it. And that is why I am disappointed
in Stephen Mackaye. I had no idea he was so mean a man.




FLUSH OF GOLD


Lon McFane was a bit grumpy, what of losing his tobacco pouch, or else he
might have told me, before we got to it, something about the cabin at
Surprise Lake. All day, turn and turn about, we had spelled each other
at going to the fore and breaking trail for the dogs. It was heavy
snowshoe work, and did not tend to make a man voluble, yet Lon McFane
might have found breath enough at noon, when we stopped to boil coffee,
with which to tell me. But he didn't. Surprise Lake? it was Surprise
Cabin to me. I had never heard of it before. I confess I was a bit
tired. I had been looking for Lon to stop and make camp any time for an
hour; but I had too much pride to suggest making camp or to ask him his
intentions; and yet he was my man, lured at a handsome wage to mush my
dogs for me and to obey my commands. I guess I was a bit grumpy myself.
He said nothing, and I was resolved to ask nothing, even if we tramped on
all night.

We came upon the cabin abruptly. For a week of trail we had met no one,
and, in my mind, there had been little likelihood of meeting any one for
a week to come. And yet there it was, right before my eyes, a cabin,
with a dim light in the window and smoke curling up from the chimney.

"Why didn't you tell me--" I began, but was interrupted by Lon, who
muttered--

"Surprise Lake--it lies up a small feeder half a mile on. It's only a
pond."

"Yes, but the cabin--who lives in it?"

"A woman," was the answer, and the next moment Lon had rapped on the
door, and a woman's voice bade him enter.

"Have you seen Dave recently?" she asked.

"Nope," Lon answered carelessly. "I've been in the other direction, down
Circle City way. Dave's up Dawson way, ain't he?"

The woman nodded, and Lon fell to unharnessing the dogs, while I unlashed
the sled and carried the camp outfit into the cabin. The cabin was a
large, one-room affair, and the woman was evidently alone in it. She
pointed to the stove, where water was already boiling, and Lon set about
the preparation of supper, while I opened the fish-bag and fed the dogs.
I looked for Lon to introduce us, and was vexed that he did not, for they
were evidently old friends.

"You are Lon McFane, aren't you?" I heard her ask him. "Why, I remember
you now. The last time I saw you it was on a steamboat, wasn't it? I
remember . . . "

Her speech seemed suddenly to be frozen by the spectacle of dread which,
I knew, from the tenor I saw mounting in her eyes, must be on her inner
vision. To my astonishment, Lon was affected by her words and manner.
His face showed desperate, for all his voice sounded hearty and genial,
as he said--

"The last time we met was at Dawson, Queen's Jubilee, or Birthday, or
something--don't you remember?--the canoe races in the river, and the
obstacle races down the main street?"

The terror faded out of her eyes and her whole body relaxed. "Oh, yes, I
do remember," she said. "And you won one of the canoe races."

"How's Dave been makin' it lately? Strikin' it as rich as ever, I
suppose?" Lon asked, with apparent irrelevance.

She smiled and nodded, and then, noticing that I had unlashed the bed
roll, she indicated the end of the cabin where I might spread it. Her
own bunk, I noticed, was made up at the opposite end.

"I thought it was Dave coming when I heard your dogs," she said.

After that she said nothing, contenting herself with watching Lon's
cooking operations, and listening the while as for the sound of dogs
along the trail. I lay back on the blankets and smoked and watched. Here
was mystery; I could make that much out, but no more could I make out.
Why in the deuce hadn't Lon given me the tip before we arrived? I looked
at her face, unnoticed by her, and the longer I looked the harder it was
to take my eyes away. It was a wonderfully beautiful face, unearthly, I
may say, with a light in it or an expression or something "that was never
on land or sea." Fear and terror had completely vanished, and it was a
placidly beautiful face--if by "placid" one can characterize that
intangible and occult something that I cannot say was a radiance or a
light any more than I can say it was an expression.

Abruptly, as if for the first time, she became aware of my presence.

"Have you seen Dave recently?" she asked me. It was on the tip of my
tongue to say "Dave who?" when Lon coughed in the smoke that arose from
the sizzling bacon. The bacon might have caused that cough, but I took
it as a hint and left my question unasked. "No, I haven't," I answered.
"I'm new in this part of the country--"

"But you don't mean to say," she interrupted, "that you've never heard of
Dave--of Big Dave Walsh?"

"You see," I apologised, "I'm new in the country. I've put in most of my
time in the Lower Country, down Nome way."

"Tell him about Dave," she said to Lon.

Lon seemed put out, but he began in that hearty, genial manner that I had
noticed before. It seemed a shade too hearty and genial, and it
irritated me.

"Oh, Dave is a fine man," he said. "He's a man, every inch of him, and
he stands six feet four in his socks. His word is as good as his bond.
The man lies who ever says Dave told a lie, and that man will have to
fight with me, too, as well--if there's anything left of him when Dave
gets done with him. For Dave is a fighter. Oh, yes, he's a scrapper
from way back. He got a grizzly with a '38 popgun. He got clawed some,
but he knew what he was doin'. He went into the cave on purpose to get
that grizzly. 'Fraid of nothing. Free an' easy with his money, or his
last shirt an' match when out of money. Why, he drained Surprise Lake
here in three weeks an' took out ninety thousand, didn't he?" She
flushed and nodded her head proudly. Through his recital she had
followed every word with keenest interest. "An' I must say," Lon went
on, "that I was disappointed sore on not meeting Dave here to-night."

Lon served supper at one end of the table of whip-sawed spruce, and we
fell to eating. A howling of the dogs took the woman to the door. She
opened it an inch and listened.

"Where is Dave Walsh?" I asked, in an undertone.

"Dead," Lon answered. "In hell, maybe. I don't know. Shut up."

"But you just said that you expected to meet him here to-night," I
challenged.

"Oh, shut up, can't you," was Lon's reply, in the same cautious
undertone.

The woman had closed the door and was returning, and I sat and meditated
upon the fact that this man who told me to shut up received from me a
salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a month and his board.

Lon washed the dishes, while I smoked and watched the woman. She seemed
more beautiful than ever--strangely and weirdly beautiful, it is true.
After looking at her steadfastly for five minutes, I was compelled to
come back to the real world and to glance at Lon McFane. This enabled me
to know, without discussion, that the woman, too, was real. At first I
had taken her for the wife of Dave Walsh; but if Dave Walsh were dead, as
Lon had said, then she could be only his widow.

It was early to bed, for we faced a long day on the morrow; and as Lon
crawled in beside me under the blankets, I ventured a question.

"That woman's crazy, isn't she?"

"Crazy as a loon," he answered.

And before I could formulate my next question, Lon McFane, I swear, was
off to sleep. He always went to sleep that way--just crawled into the
blankets, closed his eyes, and was off, a demure little heavy breathing
rising on the air. Lon never snored.

And in the morning it was quick breakfast, feed the dogs, load the sled,
and hit the trail. We said good-bye as we pulled out, and the woman
stood in the doorway and watched us off. I carried the vision of her
unearthly beauty away with me, just under my eyelids, and all I had to
do, any time, was to close them and see her again. The way was unbroken,
Surprise Lake being far off the travelled trails, and Lon and I took turn
about at beating down the feathery snow with our big, webbed shoes so
that the dogs could travel. "But you said you expected to meet Dave
Walsh at the cabin," trembled on the tip of my tongue a score of times. I
did not utter it. I could wait until we knocked off in the middle of the
day. And when the middle of the day came, we went right on, for, as Lon
explained, there was a camp of moose hunters at the forks of the Teelee,
and we could make there by dark. But we didn't make there by dark, for
Bright, the lead-dog, broke his shoulder-blade, and we lost an hour over
him before we shot him. Then, crossing a timber jam on the frozen bed of
the Teelee, the sled suffered a wrenching capsize, and it was a case of
make camp and repair the runner. I cooked supper and fed the dogs while
Lon made the repairs, and together we got in the night's supply of ice
and firewood. Then we sat on our blankets, our moccasins steaming on
upended sticks before the fire, and had our evening smoke.

"You didn't know her?" Lon queried suddenly. I shook my head.

"You noticed the colour of her hair and eyes and her complexion, well,
that's where she got her name--she was like the first warm glow of a
golden sunrise. She was called Flush of Gold. Ever heard of her?"

Somewhere I had a confused and misty remembrance of having heard the
name, yet it meant nothing to me. "Flush of Gold," I repeated; "sounds
like the name of a dance-house girl." Lon shook his head. "No, she was
a good woman, at least in that sense, though she sinned greatly just the
same."

"But why do you speak always of her in the past tense, as though she were
dead?"

"Because of the darkness on her soul that is the same as the darkness of
death. The Flush of Gold that I knew, that Dawson knew, and that Forty
Mile knew before that, is dead. That dumb, lunatic creature we saw last
night was not Flush of Gold."

"And Dave?" I queried.

"He built that cabin," Lon answered, "He built it for her . . . and for
himself. He is dead. She is waiting for him there. She half believes
he is not dead. But who can know the whim of a crazed mind? Maybe she
wholly believes he is not dead. At any rate, she waits for him there in
the cabin he built. Who would rouse the dead? Then who would rouse the
living that are dead? Not I, and that is why I let on to expect to meet
Dave Walsh there last night. I'll bet a stack that I'd a been more
surprised than she if I _had_ met him there last night."

"I do not understand," I said. "Begin at the beginning, as a white man
should, and tell me the whole tale."

And Lon began. "Victor Chauvet was an old Frenchman--born in the south
of France. He came to California in the days of gold. He was a pioneer.
He found no gold, but, instead, became a maker of bottled sunshine--in
short, a grape-grower and wine-maker. Also, he followed gold
excitements. That is what brought him to Alaska in the early days, and
over the Chilcoot and down the Yukon long before the Carmack strike. The
old town site of Ten Mile was Chauvet's. He carried the first mail into
Arctic City. He staked those coal-mines on the Porcupine a dozen years
ago. He grubstaked Loftus into the Nippennuck Country. Now it happened
that Victor Chauvet was a good Catholic, loving two things in this world,
wine and woman. Wine of all kinds he loved, but of woman, only one, and
she was the mother of Marie Chauvet."

Here I groaned aloud, having meditated beyond self-control over the fact
that I paid this man two hundred and fifty dollars a month.

"What's the matter now?" he demanded.

"Matter?" I complained. "I thought you were telling the story of Flush
of Gold. I don't want a biography of your old French wine-bibber."

Lon calmly lighted his pipe, took one good puff, then put the pipe aside.
"And you asked me to begin at the beginning," he said.

"Yes," said I; "the beginning."

"And the beginning of Flush of Gold is the old French wine-bibber, for he
was the father of Marie Chauvet, and Marie Chauvet was the Flush of Gold.
What more do you want? Victor Chauvet never had much luck to speak of.
He managed to live, and to get along, and to take good care of Marie, who
resembled the one woman he had loved. He took very good care of her.
Flush of Gold was the pet name he gave her. Flush of Gold Creek was
named after her--Flush of Gold town site, too. The old man was great on
town sites, only he never landed them.

"Now, honestly," Lon said, with one of his lightning changes, "you've
seen her, what do you think of her--of her looks, I mean? How does she
strike your beauty sense?"

"She is remarkably beautiful," I said. "I never saw anything like her in
my life. In spite of the fact, last night, that I guessed she was mad, I
could not keep my eyes off of her. It wasn't curiosity. It was wonder,
sheer wonder, she was so strangely beautiful."

"She was more strangely beautiful before the darkness fell upon her," Lon
said softly. "She was truly the Flush of Cold. She turned all men's
hearts . . . and heads. She recalls, with an effort, that I once won a
canoe race at Dawson--I, who once loved her, and was told by her of her
love for me. It was her beauty that made all men love her. She'd 'a'
got the apple from Paris, on application, and there wouldn't have been
any Trojan War, and to top it off she'd have thrown Paris down. And now
she lives in darkness, and she who was always fickle, for the first time
is constant--and constant to a shade, to a dead man she does not realize
is dead.

"And this is the way it was. You remember what I said last night of Dave
Walsh--Big Dave Walsh? He was all that I said, and more, many times
more. He came into this country in the late eighties--that's a pioneer
for you. He was twenty years old then. He was a young bull. When he
was twenty-five he could lift clear of the ground thirteen fifty-pound
sacks of flour. At first, each fall of the year, famine drove him out.
It was a lone land in those days. No river steamboats, no grub, nothing
but salmon bellies and rabbit tracks. But after famine chased him out
three years, he said he'd had enough of being chased; and the next year
he stayed. He lived on straight meat when he was lucky enough to get it;
he ate eleven dogs that winter; but he stayed. And the next winter he
stayed, and the next. He never did leave the country again. He was a
bull, a great bull. He could kill the strongest man in the country with
hard work. He could outpack a Chilcat Indian, he could outpaddle a
Stick, and he could travel all day with wet feet when the thermometer
registered fifty below zero, and that's going some, I tell you, for
vitality. You'd freeze your feet at twenty-five below if you wet them
and tried to keep on.