The Faith of Men

J >> Jack London >> The Faith of Men


"Now for the dog," said Webster Shaw, sometime mining engineer. "You'll
have to rope him, Slackwater."

Leclere grinned. Slackwater took a chew of tobacco, rove a running
noose, and proceeded leisurely to coil a few turns in his hand. He
paused once or twice to brush particularly offensive mosquitoes from off
his face. Everybody was brushing mosquitoes, except Leclere, about whose
head a small cloud was visible. Even Batard, lying full-stretched on the
ground with his fore paws rubbed the pests away from eyes and mouth.

But while Slackwater waited for Batard to lift his head, a faint call
came from the quiet air, and a man was seen waving his arms and running
across the flat from Sunrise. It was the storekeeper.

"C-call 'er off, boys," he panted, as he came in among them.

"Little Sandy and Bernadotte's jes' got in," he explained with returning
breath. "Landed down below an' come up by the short cut. Got the Beaver
with 'm. Picked 'm up in his canoe, stuck in a back channel, with a
couple of bullet-holes in 'm. Other buck was Klok Kutz, the one that
knocked spots out of his squaw and dusted."

"Eh? W'at Ah say? Eh?" Leclere cried exultantly. "Dat de one fo' sure!
Ah know. Ah spik true."

"The thing to do is to teach these damned Siwashes a little manners,"
spoke Webster Shaw. "They're getting fat and sassy, and we'll have to
bring them down a peg. Round in all the bucks and string up the Beaver
for an object lesson. That's the programme. Come on and let's see what
he's got to say for himself."

"Heh, _M'sieu_!" Leclere called, as the crowd began to melt away through
the twilight in the direction of Sunrise. "Ah lak ver' moch to see de
fon."

"Oh, we'll turn you loose when we come back," Webster Shaw shouted over
his shoulder. "In the meantime meditate on your sins and the ways of
Providence. It will do you good, so be grateful."

As is the way with men who are accustomed to great hazards, whose nerves
are healthy and trained in patience, so it was with Leclere who settled
himself to the long wait--which is to say that he reconciled his mind to
it. There was no settling of the body, for the taut rope forced him to
stand rigidly erect. The least relaxation of the leg muscles pressed the
rough-fibred noose into his neck, while the upright position caused him
much pain in his wounded shoulder. He projected his under lip and
expelled his breath upwards along his face to blow the mosquitoes away
from his eyes. But the situation had its compensation. To be snatched
from the maw of death was well worth a little bodily suffering, only it
was unfortunate that he should miss the hanging of the Beaver.

And so he mused, till his eyes chanced to fall upon Batard, head between
fore paws and stretched on the ground asleep. And their Leclere ceased
to muse. He studied the animal closely, striving to sense if the sleep
were real or feigned. Batard's sides were heaving regularly, but Leclere
felt that the breath came and went a shade too quickly; also he felt that
there was a vigilance or alertness to every hair that belied unshackling
sleep. He would have given his Sunrise claim to be assured that the dog
was not awake, and once, when one of his joints cracked, he looked
quickly and guiltily at Batard to see if he roused. He did not rouse
then but a few minutes later he got up slowly and lazily, stretched, and
looked carefully about him.

"_Sacredam_," said Leclere under his breath.

Assured that no one was in sight or hearing, Batard sat down, curled his
upper lip almost into a smile, looked up at Leclere, and licked his
chops.

"Ah see my feenish," the man said, and laughed sardonically aloud.

Batard came nearer, the useless ear wabbling, the good ear cocked forward
with devilish comprehension. He thrust his head on one side quizzically,
and advanced with mincing, playful steps. He rubbed his body gently
against the box till it shook and shook again. Leclere teetered
carefully to maintain his equilibrium.

"Batard," he said calmly, "look out. Ah keel you."

Batard snarled at the word and shook the box with greater force. Then he
upreared, and with his fore paws threw his weight against it higher up.
Leclere kicked out with one foot, but the rope bit into his neck and
checked so abruptly as nearly to overbalance him.

"Hi, ya! _Chook_! _Mush-on_!" he screamed.

Batard retreated, for twenty feet or so, with a fiendish levity in his
bearing that Leclere could not mistake. He remembered the dog often
breaking the scum of ice on the water hole by lifting up and throwing his
weight upon it; and remembering, he understood what he now had in mind.
Batard faced about and paused. He showed his white teeth in a grin,
which Leclere answered; and then hurled his body through the air, in full
charge, straight for the box.

Fifteen minutes later, Slackwater Charley and Webster Shaw returning,
caught a glimpse of a ghostly pendulum swinging back and forth in the dim
light. As they hurriedly drew in closer, they made out the man's inert
body, and a live thing that clung to it, and shook and worried, and gave
to it the swaying motion.

"Hi, ya! _Chook_! you Spawn of Hell!" yelled Webster Shaw.

But Batard glared at him, and snarled threateningly, without loosing his
jaws.

Slackwater Charley got out his revolver, but his hand was shaking, as
with a chill, and he fumbled.

"Here you take it," he said, passing the weapon over.

Webster Shaw laughed shortly, drew a sight between the gleaming eyes, and
pressed the trigger. Batard's body twitched with the shock, threshed the
ground spasmodically for a moment, and went suddenly limp. But his teeth
still held fast locked.




THE STORY OF JEES UCK


There have been renunciations and renunciations. But, in its essence,
renunciation is ever the same. And the paradox of it is, that men and
women forego the dearest thing in the world for something dearer. It was
never otherwise. Thus it was when Abel brought of the firstlings of his
flock and of the fat thereof. The firstlings and the fat thereof were to
him the dearest things in the world; yet he gave them over that he might
be on good terms with God. So it was with Abraham when he prepared to
offer up his son Isaac on a stone. Isaac was very dear to him; but God,
in incomprehensible ways, was yet dearer. It may be that Abraham feared
the Lord. But whether that be true or not it has since been determined
by a few billion people that he loved the Lord and desired to serve him.

And since it has been determined that love is service, and since to
renounce is to serve, then Jees Uck, who was merely a woman of a swart-
skinned breed, loved with a great love. She was unversed in history,
having learned to read only the signs of weather and of game; so she had
never heard of Abel nor of Abraham; nor, having escaped the good sisters
at Holy Cross, had she been told the story of Ruth, the Moabitess, who
renounced her very God for the sake of a stranger woman from a strange
land. Jees Uck had learned only one way of renouncing, and that was with
a club as the dynamic factor, in much the same manner as a dog is made to
renounce a stolen marrow-bone. Yet, when the time came, she proved
herself capable of rising to the height of the fair-faced royal races and
of renouncing in right regal fashion.

So this is the story of Jees Uck, which is also the story of Neil Bonner,
and Kitty Bonner, and a couple of Neil Bonner's progeny. Jees Uck was of
a swart-skinned breed, it is true, but she was not an Indian; nor was she
an Eskimo; nor even an Innuit. Going backward into mouth tradition,
there appears the figure of one Skolkz, a Toyaat Indian of the Yukon, who
journeyed down in his youth to the Great Delta where dwell the Innuits,
and where he foregathered with a woman remembered as Olillie. Now the
woman Olillie had been bred from an Eskimo mother by an Innuit man. And
from Skolkz and Olillie came Halie, who was one-half Toyaat Indian, one-
quarter Innuit, and one-quarter Eskimo. And Halie was the grandmother of
Jees Uck.

Now Halie, in whom three stocks had been bastardized, who cherished no
prejudice against further admixture, mated with a Russian fur trader
called Shpack, also known in his time as the Big Fat. Shpack is herein
classed Russian for lack of a more adequate term; for Shpack's father, a
Slavonic convict from the Lower Provinces, had escaped from the
quicksilver mines into Northern Siberia, where he knew Zimba, who was a
woman of the Deer People and who became the mother of Shpack, who became
the grandfather of Jees Uck.

Now had not Shpack been captured in his boyhood by the Sea People, who
fringe the rim of the Arctic Sea with their misery, he would not have
become the grandfather of Jees Uck and there would be no story at all.
But he _was_ captured by the Sea People, from whom he escaped to
Kamchatka, and thence, on a Norwegian whale-ship, to the Baltic. Not
long after that he turned up in St. Petersburg, and the years were not
many till he went drifting east over the same weary road his father had
measured with blood and groans a half-century before. But Shpack was a
free man, in the employ of the great Russian Fur Company. And in that
employ he fared farther and farther east, until he crossed Bering Sea
into Russian America; and at Pastolik, which is hard by the Great Delta
of the Yukon, became the husband of Halie, who was the grandmother of
Jees Uck. Out of this union came the woman-child, Tukesan.

Shpack, under the orders of the Company, made a canoe voyage of a few
hundred miles up the Yukon to the post of Nulato. With him he took Halie
and the babe Tukesan. This was in 1850, and in 1850 it was that the
river Indians fell upon Nulato and wiped it from the face of the earth.
And that was the end of Shpack and Halie. On that terrible night Tukesan
disappeared. To this day the Toyaats aver they had no hand in the
trouble; but, be that as it may, the fact remains that the babe Tukesan
grew up among them.

Tukesan was married successively to two Toyaat brothers, to both of whom
she was barren. Because of this, other women shook their heads, and no
third Toyaat man could be found to dare matrimony with the childless
widow. But at this time, many hundred miles above, at Fort Yukon, was a
man, Spike O'Brien. Fort Yukon was a Hudson Bay Company post, and Spike
O'Brien one of the Company's servants. He was a good servant, but he
achieved an opinion that the service was bad, and in the course of time
vindicated that opinion by deserting. It was a year's journey, by the
chain of posts, back to York Factory on Hudson's Bay. Further, being
Company posts, he knew he could not evade the Company's clutches. Nothing
retained but to go down the Yukon. It was true no white man had ever
gone down the Yukon, and no white man knew whether the Yukon emptied into
the Arctic Ocean or Bering Sea; but Spike O'Brien was a Celt, and the
promise of danger was a lure he had ever followed.

A few weeks later, somewhat battered, rather famished, and about dead
with river-fever, he drove the nose of his canoe into the earth bank by
the village of the Toyaats and promptly fainted away. While getting his
strength back, in the weeks that followed, he looked upon Tukesan and
found her good. Like the father of Shpack, who lived to a ripe old age
among the Siberian Deer People, Spike O'Brien might have left his aged
bones with the Toyaats. But romance gripped his heart-strings and would
not let him stay. As he had journeyed from York Factory to Fort Yukon,
so, first among men, might he journey from Fort Yukon to the sea and win
the honour of being the first man to make the North-West Passage by land.
So he departed down the river, won the honour, and was unannaled and
unsung. In after years he ran a sailors' boarding-house in San
Francisco, where he became esteemed a most remarkable liar by virtue of
the gospel truths he told. But a child was born to Tukesan, who had been
childless. And this child was Jees Uck. Her lineage has been traced at
length to show that she was neither Indian, nor Eskimo, nor Innuit, nor
much of anything else; also to show what waifs of the generations we are,
all of us, and the strange meanderings of the seed from which we spring.

What with the vagrant blood in her and the heritage compounded of many
races, Jees Uck developed a wonderful young beauty. Bizarre, perhaps, it
was, and Oriental enough to puzzle any passing ethnologist. A lithe and
slender grace characterized her. Beyond a quickened lilt to the
imagination, the contribution of the Celt was in no wise apparent. It
might possibly have put the warm blood under her skin, which made her
face less swart and her body fairer; but that, in turn, might have come
from Shpack, the Big Fat, who inherited the colour of his Slavonic
father. And, finally, she had great, blazing black eyes--the half-caste
eye, round, full-orbed, and sensuous, which marks the collision of the
dark races with the light. Also, the white blood in her, combined with
her knowledge that it was in her, made her, in a way, ambitious.
Otherwise by upbringing and in outlook on life, she was wholly and
utterly a Toyaat Indian.

One winter, when she was a young woman, Neil Bonner came into her life.
But he came into her life, as he had come into the country, somewhat
reluctantly. In fact, it was very much against his will, coming into the
country. Between a father who clipped coupons and cultivated roses, and
a mother who loved the social round, Neil Bonner had gone rather wild. He
was not vicious, but a man with meat in his belly and without work in the
world has to expend his energy somehow, and Neil Bonner was such a man.
And he expended his energy in such a fashion and to such extent that when
the inevitable climax came, his father, Neil Bonner, senior, crawled out
of his roses in a panic and looked on his son with a wondering eye. Then
he hied himself away to a crony of kindred pursuits, with whom he was
wont to confer over coupons and roses, and between the two the destiny of
young Neil Bonner was made manifest. He must go away, on probation, to
live down his harmless follies in order that he might live up to their
own excellent standard.

This determined upon, and young Neil a little repentant and a great deal
ashamed, the rest was easy. The cronies were heavy stockholders in the
P. C. Company. The P. C. Company owned fleets of river-steamers and
ocean-going craft, and, in addition to farming the sea, exploited a
hundred thousand square miles or so of the land that, on the maps of
geographers, usually occupies the white spaces. So the P. C. Company
sent young Neil Bonner north, where the white spaces are, to do its work
and to learn to be good like his father. "Five years of simplicity,
close to the soil and far from temptation, will make a man of him," said
old Neil Bonner, and forthwith crawled back among his roses. Young Neil
set his jaw, pitched his chin at the proper angle, and went to work. As
an underling he did his work well and gained the commendation of his
superiors. Not that he delighted in the work, but that it was the one
thing that prevented him from going mad.

The first year he wished he was dead. The second year he cursed God. The
third year he was divided between the two emotions, and in the confusion
quarrelled with a man in authority. He had the best of the quarrel,
though the man in authority had the last word,--a word that sent Neil
Bonner into an exile that made his old billet appear as paradise. But he
went without a whimper, for the North had succeeded in making him into a
man.

Here and there, on the white spaces on the map, little circlets like the
letter "o" are to be found, and, appended to these circlets, on one side
or the other, are names such as "Fort Hamilton," "Yanana Station,"
"Twenty Mile," thus leading one to imagine that the white spaces are
plentifully besprinkled with towns and villages. But it is a vain
imagining. Twenty Mile, which is very like the rest of the posts, is a
log building the size of a corner grocery with rooms to let up-stairs. A
long-legged cache on stilts may be found in the back yard; also a couple
of outhouses. The back yard is unfenced, and extends to the sky-line and
an unascertainable bit beyond. There are no other houses in sight,
though the Toyaats sometimes pitch a winter camp a mile or two down the
Yukon. And this is Twenty Mile, one tentacle of the many-tentacled P. C.
Company. Here the agent, with an assistant, barters with the Indians for
their furs, and does an erratic trade on a gold-dust basis with the
wandering miners. Here, also, the agent and his assistant yearn all
winter for the spring, and when the spring comes, camp blasphemously on
the roof while the Yukon washes out the establishment. And here, also,
in the fourth year of his sojourn in the land, came Neil Bonner to take
charge.

He had displaced no agent; for the man that previously ran the post had
made away with himself; "because of the rigours of the place," said the
assistant, who still remained; though the Toyaats, by their fires, had
another version. The assistant was a shrunken-shouldered, hollow-chested
man, with a cadaverous face and cavernous cheeks that his sparse black
beard could not hide. He coughed much, as though consumption gripped his
lungs, while his eyes had that mad, fevered light common to consumptives
in the last stage. Pentley was his name--Amos Pentley--and Bonner did
not like him, though he felt a pity for the forlorn and hopeless devil.
They did not get along together, these two men who, of all men, should
have been on good terms in the face of the cold and silence and darkness
of the long winter.

In the end, Bonner concluded that Amos was partly demented, and left him
alone, doing all the work himself except the cooking. Even then, Amos
had nothing but bitter looks and an undisguised hatred for him. This was
a great loss to Bonner; for the smiling face of one of his own kind, the
cheery word, the sympathy of comradeship shared with misfortune--these
things meant much; and the winter was yet young when he began to realize
the added reasons, with such an assistant, that the previous agent had
found to impel his own hand against his life.

It was very lonely at Twenty Mile. The bleak vastness stretched away on
every side to the horizon. The snow, which was really frost, flung its
mantle over the land and buried everything in the silence of death. For
days it was clear and cold, the thermometer steadily recording forty to
fifty degrees below zero. Then a change came over the face of things.
What little moisture had oozed into the atmosphere gathered into dull
grey, formless clouds; it became quite warm, the thermometer rising to
twenty below; and the moisture fell out of the sky in hard frost-granules
that hissed like dry sugar or driving sand when kicked underfoot. After
that it became clear and cold again, until enough moisture had gathered
to blanket the earth from the cold of outer space. That was all. Nothing
happened. No storms, no churning waters and threshing forests, nothing
but the machine-like precipitation of accumulated moisture. Possibly the
most notable thing that occurred through the weary weeks was the gliding
of the temperature up to the unprecedented height of fifteen below. To
atone for this, outer space smote the earth with its cold till the
mercury froze and the spirit thermometer remained more than seventy below
for a fortnight, when it burst. There was no telling how much colder it
was after that. Another occurrence, monotonous in its regularity, was
the lengthening of the nights, till day became a mere blink of light
between the darkness.

Neil Bonner was a social animal. The very follies for which he was doing
penance had been bred of his excessive sociability. And here, in the
fourth year of his exile, he found himself in company--which were to
travesty the word--with a morose and speechless creature in whose sombre
eyes smouldered a hatred as bitter as it was unwarranted. And Bonner, to
whom speech and fellowship were as the breath of life, went about as a
ghost might go, tantalized by the gregarious revelries of some former
life. In the day his lips were compressed, his face stern; but in the
night he clenched his hands, rolled about in his blankets, and cried
aloud like a little child. And he would remember a certain man in
authority and curse him through the long hours. Also, he cursed God. But
God understands. He cannot find it in his heart to blame weak mortals
who blaspheme in Alaska.

And here, to the post of Twenty Mile, came Jees Uck, to trade for flour
and bacon, and beads, and bright scarlet cloths for her fancy work. And
further, and unwittingly, she came to the post of Twenty Mile to make a
lonely man more lonely, make him reach out empty arms in his sleep. For
Neil Bonner was only a man. When she first came into the store, he
looked at her long, as a thirsty man may look at a flowing well. And
she, with the heritage bequeathed her by Spike O'Brien, imagined daringly
and smiled up into his eyes, not as the swart-skinned peoples should
smile at the royal races, but as a woman smiles at a man. The thing was
inevitable; only, he did not see it, and fought against her as fiercely
and passionately as he was drawn towards her. And she? She was Jees
Uck, by upbringing wholly and utterly a Toyaat Indian woman.

She came often to the post to trade. And often she sat by the big wood
stove and chatted in broken English with Neil Bonner. And he came to
look for her coming; and on the days she did not come he was worried and
restless. Sometimes he stopped to think, and then she was met coldly,
with a resolve that perplexed and piqued her, and which, she was
convinced, was not sincere. But more often he did not dare to think, and
then all went well and there were smiles and laughter. And Amos Pentley,
gasping like a stranded catfish, his hollow cough a-reek with the grave,
looked upon it all and grinned. He, who loved life, could not live, and
it rankled his soul that others should be able to live. Wherefore he
hated Bonner, who was so very much alive and into whose eyes sprang joy
at the sight of Jees Uck. As for Amos, the very thought of the girl was
sufficient to send his blood pounding up into a hemorrhage.

Jees Uck, whose mind was simple, who thought elementally and was unused
to weighing life in its subtler quantities, read Amos Pentley like a
book. She warned Bonner, openly and bluntly, in few words; but the
complexities of higher existence confused the situation to him, and he
laughed at her evident anxiety. To him, Amos was a poor, miserable
devil, tottering desperately into the grave. And Bonner, who had
suffered much, found it easy to forgive greatly.

But one morning, during a bitter snap, he got up from the breakfast-table
and went into the store. Jees Uck was already there, rosy from the
trail, to buy a sack of flour. A few minutes later, he was out in the
snow lashing the flour on her sled. As he bent over he noticed a
stiffness in his neck and felt a premonition of impending physical
misfortune. And as he put the last half-hitch into the lashing and
attempted to straighten up, a quick spasm seized him and he sank into the
snow. Tense and quivering, head jerked back, limbs extended, back arched
and mouth twisted and distorted, he appeared as though being racked limb
from limb. Without cry or sound, Jees Uck was in the snow beside him;
but he clutched both her wrists spasmodically, and as long as the
convulsion endured she was helpless. In a few moments the spasm relaxed
and he was left weak and fainting, his forehead beaded with sweat, and
his lips flecked with foam.

"Quick!" he muttered, in a strange, hoarse voice. "Quick! Inside!"

He started to crawl on hands and knees, but she raised him up, and,
supported by her young arm, he made faster progress. As he entered the
store the spasm seized him again, and his body writhed irresistibly away
from her and rolled and curled on the floor. Amos Pentley came and
looked on with curious eyes.

"Oh, Amos!" she cried in an agony of apprehension and helplessness, "him
die, you think?" But Amos shrugged his shoulders and continued to look
on.

Bonner's body went slack, the tense muscles easing down and an expression
of relief coming into his face. "Quick!" he gritted between his teeth,
his mouth twisting with the on-coming of the next spasm and with his
effort to control it. "Quick, Jees Uck! The medicine! Never mind! Drag
me!"

She knew where the medicine-chest stood, at the rear of the room beyond
the stove, and thither, by the legs, she dragged the struggling man. As
the spasm passed he began, very faint and very sick, to overhaul the
chest. He had seen dogs die exhibiting symptoms similar to his own, and
he knew what should be done. He held up a vial of chloral hydrate, but
his fingers were too weak and nerveless to draw the cork. This Jees Uck
did for him, while he was plunged into another convulsion. As he came
out of it he found the open bottle proffered him, and looked into the
great black eyes of the woman and read what men have always read in the
Mate-woman's eyes. Taking a full dose of the stuff, he sank back until
another spasm had passed. Then he raised himself limply on his elbow.