The two claims on Red Ruin became as honeycombed as a wasp’s nest. Day after day Angela watched the bare-armed, red-shirted figure at work, witnessing his failure with a set face. It became patent that the claims were bad ones, and that Red Ruin was living up to its name. All the labor of driving through matted undergrowth and frozen gravel was vain. “Hope long deferred maketh the heart sick,” and it made Angela’s sick. She knew that sooner or later Jim must accept the inevitable and abandon the quest—there. She hoped it would be soon. After all, failure meant the same as success—to her.

If Red Ruin failed, what else could he do but pack up and go home, as thousands of others were doing? The patched-up steamers that were now plying up the river were packed with a queer 158 gathering of “failures” and “successes.” Men who had staked all on this promising gamble were going back to the harness of civilization, sadder and wiser beings. The relatively few successful ones were making programmes for the future—a future in which an unaccustomed luxury figured prominently. Disease and famine were taking their toll of the participants in the great adventure. From all along the Yukon watershed came news of pestilence and panic. Scurvy raged in Circle City, and a hungry mob at Forty Mile was only quelled by troopers with loaded rifles. A boat coming up-river laden with 200 belated gold-mad men and women was stopped by the Commissioner, and all but those who had foresight enough to bring a twelve-months’ food supply were refused a landing, for the famine was acute.

These pitiful facts came to Angela’s ears. Even money could no longer purchase food. The knowledge put a terrible weapon into her hands. If she destroyed their food supply freedom was assured. For one hour she even contemplated this means of escape. Was it not for his good too? Could he hope to win where thousands had 159 failed? She tried to convince herself that it would be no act of treachery but one of kindness. The lie rankled in her brain. A revulsion of feeling came as she reflected upon the immediate past, for despite all her antagonism she could not but admire the indomitable will of him. Failure was written all over the two honeycombed claims, but it never daunted him. She heard the spade and ax ringing on the hard earth from early morning till late evening, and saw him swinging up the hill, a little grim, but otherwise unchanged.

She was impatiently waiting for him to confess his failure, but he never did. There was still some hundred feet of river front to be “tried out,” and Jim calmly went on boring his monotonous holes. It was maddening to watch him.

One morning two men came poling down the creek in a flat-bottomed boat packed with gear and food. They pulled up at sight of Jim. He recognized them as the owners of two claims farther up the creek.

“Still diggin’, pard?” queried one.

“Yep.”

“Wal, it’s sure a waste of time. There ain’t 160 no pay dirt on this yere creek. We got five hundred feet up yonder plum full of holes, and we ain’t shoveled out naught but muck.”

Jim stretched himself.

“’Tain’t panning out up to schedule,” he grunted, “but I’m going through with this bit afore I hit the trail again.”

“Better cut it, Cap,” said the second man. “I gotta hunch they didn’t call this Red Ruin for nothin’. See here, I found six abandoned claims half a mile up. I reckon the guys who pitched that lot over were the same as did the christening of this bit of water.”

Jim laughed carelessly. He had little doubt that the location was bad, but it went against his nature to quit before he had carried out his task. The first man stuck a wad of tobacco between his back teeth.

“That pardner o’ yourn don’t seem to take kindly to diggin’,” he ejaculated.

Jim stared at him, and then tightened his lips.

“No need to fly off the handle, Cap. I had a pard like him once, strong on paper but liked the other fellow to do the diggin’.”

“What the blazes are you talkin’ about?” 161 demanded Jim. “I ain’t inviting you to give opinions. What’s more, she ain’t a him. You go to hell—and quick about it!”

The man looked at his comrade and they both grinned. Jim put down the spade in a way that caused them to stare blankly.

“Wal, you’re some joker. Pete, am I blind? It’s no odds, anyway, and no offense meant, but by ginger! it’s the first time I’ve seen a woman smoke a two-dollar cigar.”

“What’s that?”

Jim suddenly felt dazed as a new explanation entered his mind. He stepped down towards the boat.

“What’s all this?” he inquired. “I’m kinder interested.”

The first man explained.

“I bin campin’ way back there. The other guys who abandoned them claims played hell with the timber—gormandized the whole lot—must have gone in for the timber business. So I bin cuttin’ spruce up there on the hill. Wal, I often seen you drilling holes in this muck, but damn me if I ever seen your pard put a hand to the spade. He seems to live in that darned tent. 162 I seen him twice hiking out—to Dawson, for a jag, I guess. Didn’t seem on the level to me——”

Jim’s mouth twitched. He had no doubt about the veracity of this statement. Someone had been visiting Angela, and she had said nothing of it.

“Didn’t know he went to Dawson,” he replied evasively. “Thanks for the information. I’ll sure talk to him about it.”

They nodded and began to pole down the creek and out into the river. Jim sat down on a pile of muck and mopped his brow. The tent was approachable from the river on the other side of the bluff. The spruce-trees that surrounded it hid it from the view of one working by the creek, though any occupant would have the advantage of seeing without being seen. He remembered reaching the tent a few days before, to find Angela singularly embarrassed. Was that the day on which the stranger had called? Despite his heartache he could think no wrong of her. She was lonely, pining for the life she had left. Between him and her loomed an apparently unbridgeable gulf. If she had found a friend in that 163 mixed crowd back in Dawson, hadn’t she a right to see him and speak with him? His heart answered in the affirmative, but it hurt just the same.

He said nothing to Angela on the subject, but carried on with his thankless task, with a strange mixture of pride and jealousy eating into his heart. When more wood was needed he innocently(?) hewed down two spruce-trees in close proximity to the tent, whose removal afforded him a view of the tent entrance from the scene of his daily “grind.”

For a whole week he kept his eyes intermittently on the brown bell-tent, but the stranger came not. He wondered if Angela had become aware of the increased vision afforded him by the felled trees, and was careful to keep her strange friend away. He noticed some slight change in her disposition—a queer light in her eye and a mocking ring in the monosyllabic replies which she gave to any questions he found it necessary to put to her.

Their conversation had not improved with time. If he addressed her at all it was with reference to the domestic arrangements. She, on 164 her part, never interrogated him on any subject. Every movement of her lips, and of her body, made it clear that she regarded him as a complete stranger under whose jailership certain circumstances had placed her. Her determination was scarcely less than his own. She meant to break his stubborn spirit—to arouse in him, if possible, a violent aversion to her presence. Already the summer was vanishing. The few birds—swallows, swifts, and yellow warblers—that had immigrated at the coming of spring were preparing for a long journey South. Cold winds were turning the leaves brown, and the whole landscape deepened into autumn glory. Angela noted the change with an impatience that was evident to any observer.

Jim, testing the last few yards of claim, pondered over the problem of her change of front. She even sang at times, in a way that only succeeded in deepening his suspicions. Was she singing on account of some happiness newly found?—some interest in life which lay beyond himself and the immediate surroundings?

It seemed to be the case, and the consciousness of this disturbing truth caused him acute mental 165 agony. Some other man could bring her happiness. Some other man had succeeded in breaking into that icy reserve against which all attempts on his part had been vain. Was it worth while continuing the drama? If he let her escape, forgetfulness might come. Time had its reward no less than its revenges. Why suffer, as he was suffering, all the agonies of burning, unrequited love. At nights, with that hateful curtain between them, he had writhed in anguish to hear the soft breathing within a foot or so of his head. More than once a mad desire to rise up and claim her as mate came to him, only to be cast aside as the better part of him prevailed over these primal instincts.

“She’s mine,” he argued, “mine by purchase, an’ if I was anything of a man I’d go and take her now.”

But just because he was a man he didn’t. She owed her sanctity to the fact that this rough son of Nature loved her with a love that seemed to rend his heart in twain. The thin canvas between them was as safe a partition as walls of granite. She might have found time to admire the quality of his love, considering the circumstances 166 prevailing, but her pride left scant room for any sentiment of that sort. She merely took these things for granted.

Jim, with the last hole bored in the iron earth, and the precious glint of gold still as absent as ever, gazed back at the tent with knitted brows. Red Ruin was a failure, as he had long known it to be. The future loomed dark and uncertain. There were no more creeks near Dawson worth the staking, but gold lay farther afield—over the vast repelling mountains. It would mean suffering, misery, for her. A winter in the Great Alone, harassed by blizzards, bitten by the intense cold, tracked by wolves and all the ferocious starved things of the foodless wilderness, was all he had to offer—that, and a burning love of which she seemed totally unconscious, or coldly indifferent. Why not let her go now? To see her suffer were but to multiply his own suffering a thousandfold, and yet she was his in the sight of God! He emitted a hard, guttural laugh as the mockery of the phrase was made clear to him.

He collected the gear and, slinging it across his shoulders, mounted the hill. Overhead a 167 long stream of birds was beating toward the South. He bade them a mute farewell, knowing that he would miss their silvern voices, and their morning wrangling among the spruce and hemlocks.

“I guess life might be beautiful enough,” he ruminated, “if one only had the things one wants, but the gittin’ of ’em is sure hell!”

He flung the pick and ax and washing-pan to the ground, and looked inside the tent. It was empty, and the cooking utensils were lying about as they were left at breakfast-time. Then he noticed that some of Angela’s clothes were missing. The latter fact removed any lingering doubts from his mind. If any further evidence were required, it existed in the shape of a pile of cigar ash on the duckboarding.

“So!” he muttered.

He walked outside and stood gazing over the autumn-tinted country. A stray bird twitted among the trees, but the great silence was settling down every hour as the feathered immigrants mounted from copse and dell into the blue vault of heaven.

“So!” he repeated, as though he were powerless 168 to find any fuller expression of his emotions. He went back into the tent and slipped a revolver into his holster, then with huge strides went over the hill towards Dawson.

He covered the five miles in less than fifty minutes, and entered the congested main street. The saloons were busy as usual, and there seemed to be more people than ever. A trading store was selling mackinaws, parkhas, and snow-shoes, as fast as they could be handled. “Old-timers” lounged in the doorway and grinned at the huge prices paid for these winter necessaries. Jim evaded the throng and made for the river bank. He guessed that Angela and her “friend” would not risk staying long in Dawson, and had doubtless timed their escape to catch the last boat down-river.

At that moment the Silas P. Young gave announcement of its departure by two long blasts from its steam-whistle. Jim came out on the river bank and saw the boat well out in the stream, its paddle churning up the muddy water. Near him was an old man waving a red handkerchief. He recognized Jim and stopped his signaling. 169

“So you’ve sent her home, pard? Wal, it’s a darn good——”

“What’s that?”

“Yore wife. I sent mine too. It’s going to be merry hell in this yere town afore the summer comes round——”

Jim stood petrified. He had half expected this, but now that he was face to face with it the blow came harder than he expected it to be. She was going—going out of his life for ever.... Perhaps it was as well that way. He turned to Hanky, the old man.

“Did you see her go?”

“Yep. I saw her go aboard.”

“Was—was there any other guy with her?”

“No—leastways, that fellow D’Arcy saw her off. Friend of yours, I take it?”

Jim nodded, scarcely trusting himself to speak. The name was unknown to him, but he remembered the man in the canoe who had spoken to Angela a few months before. It must be the same man—the man who had visited her at the camp, and who had dropped the cigar ash on the floor that morning. D’Arcy had triumphed, then! He concluded that the latter must be 170 aboard, though Hanky had not seen him go on the boat. He thought of Lord Featherstone and all those fine relations and friends of Angela’s. How they would chuckle when they heard that she had escaped from her “impossible husband”! His gorge rose as he visualized the scene. They had sold him something only to get it back again for nothing. It wasn’t straight dealing—it wasn’t on the level. They had bargained on this eventuality when they made the deal. They concluded it would be easy to hoodwink a “cowpuncher.”

“No, by God!” he muttered. “I ain’t lettin’ go.”

He turned to Hanky.

“You gotta hoss, Hank?”

“Sure!”

“Will you loan him to me for an hour or two? I’ll take care of him. I’m strong on hosses.”

“She’s yourn,” replied Hanky. “Come right along and I’ll fix you up. She’s stabled at Dan’s place.”

Ten minutes later Jim was mounted on the big black mare. He waved his hand to Hanky and went up the street like a streak of lightning.