CHAPTER I
HOW THE TROUBLE STARTED

“Well glory be! an’ if it ain’t Jack Heaton hisself. An’ right glad am I to see yuh, Jack. Bill will be mighty glad, too, for he’s that bugs on goin’ to South America for them di-am-onds. Sure he’s been talkin’ o’ nothin’ else these last two weeks gone Saturday. An’ how are yuh anyhow, Jack?”

It was Mrs. Adams, Bill’s warm-hearted and courageous mother, who had answered the bell and was greeting Jack in this whole-souled fashion.

Since the boys had returned from Mexico and had come into possession of all that money for the services they had rendered the American Consolidated Oil Company, Inc., the Adamses, mother and son, had risen in the world not only figuratively but very literally, for instead of living in a shanty hard by the gas-house under the viaduct which spans Manhattan Street, they had moved into a five room apartment on Claremont Avenue—and a front apartment overlooking the Hudson River at that. No wonder, then, that Mrs. Adams was emitting her good nature in all directions like rays of radium and that of all persons Jack was an especial target for them.

“Bill’s in the parlor, Jack; go right in,” she said with emphasis on the parlor, for it was the only one she had ever been the mistress of in all her hardworking life.

“Well, Bill, what do you think you’re doing, getting ready to go after a yegg or rehearsing for a movie?” asked Jack as he reached the front room, which by the grace of landlords and popular usage is known as the parlor, where he found his pal engaged in the gentle pastime of snapping a six-gun.

Bill cut short his exercises with the weapon that had seen such hard service in Mexico so recently and he laughed lightly, though no one except his closest friends would have been aware of it.

“Nary one, Jack, but I’ve had one o’ them hunch things that you used to get and it’s the one best bet as how me and you are goin’ to the wilds o’ the Amazon and capture some o’ them chunks o’ mud similar like and appertainin’ to the one you wears on your mitt. So I was just limberin’ up my trigger finger a bit with a little action.”

“Oh, you were, were you,” remarked Jack with a mild touch of sarcasm in his voice.

“Yes, an’ I was just thinkin’ about ’phonin’ you to find out how soon we could get under way. You see, I haven’t done a tap to make a dollar since our landfall and owin’ to the high cost o’ livin’—we’re over two hundred feet above Manhattan Street now—my pile’s nosin’ down like a submarine and it’ll soon be restin’ on the bottom and we’ll be back where we come from. So I’m askin’ you, not only as man to man but as my pal, when do we start?”

“We don’t head that way this time,” replied Jack, “we head north, with a capital N.”

“Whad’a mean we head north?” asked Bill in utter amazement.

“That’s exactly what I came over to see you about, Bill. I’ve had half-a-dozen jobs offered me since we came back but routine work is entirely out of my line so what’s the use in wasting someone else’s good money and my own good time. No, I’ve tried it and I can’t be a good man Friday for any business concern—not even for my dad’s.

“So you see you and I are in the same class—everything going out and nothing coming in and I’ve been wondering a lot lately what we could scare up that would make a noise like a million dollars. Say Bill, did you ever read Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild’?” Jack put the question without notice.

“‘Call o’ the Wild’?” mused Bill, turning the phrase over in his dome of thought; “I’ve heard all kinds o’ calls o’ wild men an’ wild women but never do I remember any wild call by this blokie Jack London. Who is this guy anyway?”

“There’s no use talking to a fellow like that,” thought Jack, but then, as in dozens of other instances in the past, he patiently explained who Jack London was and repeated the tale as told by that past master of fiction, for the benefit of his less well-read pal.

“Now the point I’m driving at is this,” he went on. “Jack London tells us that white men who were prospecting in the land of the Yeehats, a tribe of Indians in the gold country of Alaska, found diggings where there was gold, gold, nothing but gold, I tell you, and they packed it in moosehide sacks so that they could get it back to civilization. Then the Yeehats came upon and killed them and the shining yellow metal fell into their hands. The gold must still be up there, and you can’t dispute it either.”

At this recital Bill’s big blue eyes bulged out like those of a spider watching a fly. He had caught the drift of what Jack was saying and if there is any one thing that will set an inert imagination to functioning quicker or fix the attention of the human mind faster than another it is the mordant of seeking out this precious metal that we call gold. Then he blinked his eyes and shook his head.

“It sounds to me,” he said finally, which in the lingo of the cowboy, means that he had his doubts. “If this is a yarn this London feller wrote how do we know that he didn’t make up the Yeehats and the gold just like he made up the rest of it,” Bill wanted to know, and not without reason.

“I’ll tell you how. That book was given to me for a birthday present when I was about ten years old and whenever I wanted to read a good story I took it up just as everybody, from the rag-picker to the president, re-reads ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘Treasure Island.’ So one fine day, not long after we got back from the oil-fields I spied the book and read it again; then all of a sudden this ending about the Yeehats and the gold in sacks struck me that there might be some truth lurking behind the fiction like a greaser behind a giant cactus or a Siwash behind a totem pole.”

“But how can we find out for sure?”

“I have found out already. I wrote to the Secretary of the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington and to the Minister of the Interior of Canada, and they sent me handbooks that tell all about the Indians of Alaska and the Yukon Territory and I’ve got the real dope on them.”

Bill had a high regard for Jack’s way of boring into things and this scheme of going to the governments for information about the Indians up there in the far Northland seemed to his untrained mind to approach very closely to a high order of genius. Still he was not entirely convinced.

“That shows that the climax of London’s book relating to the Yeehats is straight from the shoulder, doesn’t it?” Jack wound up.

“That part about the Yeehats is all right but how about the gold? Because a tribe of Indians called the Yeehats lived up there doesn’t say that pioneer prospectors actually found the nuggets, got it, piled it up in sacks ready to bring back where they could spend it and then were killed off by the Indians. Mind you, Jack, I’m not sayin’ as how it couldn’t have happened but I’m only sayin’ as how I’d like to know for sure afore we goes, see?”

“Well first of all there’s the Yeehats—” Jack began to explain all over again.

“That part about the Yeehats is all O.K.; there’s no blinkin’ at facts. No one I’ll say, no not even a bookmaker could think up such an outlandish name as Yeehat even to splice it to a redskin for a name, but any one who couldn’t think about gold in chunks would be lonesome if he had a brain,” argued Bill.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” called out Jack. “First of all never call a man who writes books a bookmaker. A man who puts his pen to paper and writes down various things for other folks to read is a maker of books while a man that takes bets at a race track is a bookmaker. Now don’t get these two professions mixed up again.”

“The trouble with you, Jack, is that you can’t see the woods because o’ the trees, as you used to tell me down in Mexico when I picked you up on some point that didn’t have anything to do with the case. What’s the diff I’d like to know, whether he was a maker o’ books as you calls him or a bookmaker as I calls him. Well go on with your ratkillin’.”

“What I was going to say when you sidetracked me was that when a writer writes a book every idea that goes into it really comes from some outside source and consequently all this stuff that we call inspiration and imagination is more or less bunk. This being true, I hold that what London wrote about the prospectors, the gold they found, the moosehide sacks of it they piled up and the Yeehats, were not just mere fleeting fancies which were conjured up in his brain to serve his purpose for the story but hard and fast facts that he had heard about when he was up above there in Alaska.”

“I knows what you say and I guess I knows what you’re talking about, but as against the book that tells about the Yeehats and the sacks o’ gold in the land where the rainbow ends give me the straight tip on the di-am-onds that Jack Heaton got from the cannibal princess where the rainbow begins,” plugged in Bill, still bent on the diamond project.

“Don’t you see, Bill, it will take a mint of money to outfit that diamond hunting expedition—why, we’d have to take a small army with us to cope with those Amazonian savages while as I told you before they’re all Christianized, peace-loving folks in the far north—too cold to be anything else. Why, we couldn’t begin to finance this diamond proposition between us even if we put every dollar we have to our names in it,” Jack drove his argument home and he could see that the force of his logic and oratory was beginning to have the desired effect on his hard-headed pal.

“Couldn’t you get the directors of the American Consolidated Oil Company to take a flyer and back us in the di-am-ond venture,” further persisted Bill.

“I might be able to get them to see it but those old four-per-centers are long on sure things and very short on anything that looks like a gamble. I’d hate to have any of them go into anything with us that was not as sure of succeeding as to-morrow’s sun is sure of rising, for if we ever went down there and failed to bring back a boat load of diamonds as large as the Koohinoor, or Mountain of Light as it is called, they’d think they’d been stung by a nest of hornets and if we didn’t bring back any at all they’d want to throw us into the Atlantic Ocean.”

“They’re sure enough dead-game sports,” Bill commented sadly, “but there’s one thing certain and that is if I don’t make a ten-strike soon I’ll have to get a job as a longshoreman and me mudder and me ’ull be movin’ down to the shanty. Get me?”

“As a longshoreman only gets ten dollars a day for six or eight hours’ work I guess the job at that might net you enough to keep the coyote from sleeping in the vestibule of your apartment. If I wasn’t too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work I’d get a job on the docks myself. As things now stand I’m going to Alaska and I’ll bring back so much gold that if I threw it on the market there’d be a slump in the price of it,” orated Jack boastfully, as he rubbed his hands together in pleasurable anticipation like a miserable young Shylock. But the magic of gold is apt to make misers of even the most generous folks.

“Yuh lads come now and have a bite to eat,” sang out Mrs. Adams cheerily and the two youngsters went through an arched hole in the wall that connected, yet separated the parlor from the dining room, though this may sound a bit paradoxical. The latter room was decorated with a plate rail around the wall and a great vari-colored dome lamp hanging from the ceiling.

Under the lamp was a table laid with a cloth as white, silver as bright and china as fine as would be found, Jack opined, up or down the Avenue or even over on Riverside Drive. Bill’s mother was almost as proud of her new home and its fixtures as she was of her boy and that is saying all of it. As for Jack, why she thought he was the smartest boy in the world; yes, she truly did, and whatever he said went with her.

Their apartment was tastily furnished and comfortable, and he was glad to know that he had been, in a measure, indirectly responsible for it. It has often been said that travel is the great educator but the possession of money goes a mighty long ways toward making gentlemen out of coal heavers and ladies out of scrub women. True there was still some room for improvement in the way Bill and his mother handled “English as she is spoke” but no improvement was needed in their hearts.

“So yuh lads are goin’ to South America for di-am-onds, are yuh,” said Mrs. Adams when they were seated. “Well, it ’ud be a fine and ge-glorious thing if you’d fetch home a couple of scuttles of them baubles and throw them to those as can afford ’em at so much per throw,” and her eyes reflected the happy thought which she had voiced, as a Kimberly blue-white stone reflects the light of the sun. “But do yuh know Jack,” she added pensively, “I’d a deal ruther have me boy Bill livin’ with me in the shanty than to have him riskin’ his young life down there on the equator with those man-eaters.”

“You can rest easy in your mind on that score, Mrs. Adams,” Jack assured her, “for I’ve nearly persuaded Bill to give up this South American venture and join me in an expedition to the Alaskan gold fields, to search for a few sacks of nuggets.”

“Ilasker, Ilasker? No, I never heard of the place before. It must not have been on the map when I went to school,” thought Mrs. Adams out loud.

“You’ve heard of the Yukon?” suggested Jack.

“Yukon, Yukon? I can’t say that I have, but,” and her eyes brightened as though she had solved a jigsaw puzzle, “I have heard of the Klondike.”

“That accounts for it then,” said Jack, “for the Klondike is a gold district and it is named from the Klondike River which it is on. The Klondike River is in the Yukon Territory, which belongs to Canada, and this is directly east of Alaska. The Klondike River is really only a stream, perhaps not over a hundred feet wide, but so rich were the early gold fields there that practically all of the Yukon Territory and a part of Alaska to boot has been called the Klondike country. Such is the fame and power of gold.”

“We own Ilasker, don’t we Jack?” Bill wanted to know.

“Yes, though she used to belong to Russia but the U. S. bought her about fifty years ago for seven million, two hundred thousand dollars. Since then she has produced three hundred million dollars worth of gold. Some bargain, what say, Bill?”

“I’ll say it was,” replied his pal.

“It came about this way,” continued Jack, “when she was owned by Russia she was a losing deal for that country because in the first place she was too far away from the seat of government and there was no wire or wireless communication at that time between them; and in the second place Russia hadn’t any more of a notion as to how to govern her than she has of governing herself now.

“When the Civil War was on Russia was a good friend of the Union and helped us in every way she could, even to loaning us her warships. As Russia wanted to dispose of Alaska and Uncle Sam wanted to pay something for the services she had rendered, Mr. Seward, who was Secretary of State in President Lincoln’s Cabinet, bought the territory, which was then considered entirely worthless, from her.

“The International boundary line that divides Alaska from Canada was in dispute between the United States and Great Britain almost from the time we got her from Russia but neither country did any worrying over it for Alaska was not supposed to be worth arguing about. But when gold was discovered on the Yukon River in 1896 and at Cape Nome in 1898 there was a great stampede, just as there was to California in ’49. Then it was that both the United States and Great Britain got busy and a commission met in London, England, in 1903 to settle the matter, which was done to the satisfaction of both countries.”

“How far away are these gold fields that you and Bill are goin’ to?” Mrs. Adams asked; “are they as far away as the di-am-ond fields of South America?”

“I should say about the same distance, Mrs. Adams, and that is in the neighborhood of some five thousand miles.”

“It’s sure some little ways off,” chipped in Bill, “but distance doesn’t count; what we wants is the yellow butter, hey Buddie?”

“That’s what we’re after; other folks have found it and we stand as good a chance as they did. Are you with me, Bill?”

“It sounds to me, Jack, but I’ll go with youse to Ilasker on your hunch even if we have to walk back.”

“Good!” ejaculated Jack; “I guessed you would from the start. And so you see all of this six-gun practice is tommyrot, for the men of the frozen north are different from those of the burnt-up south, for whether they are Americans, French-Canadians, Indians or half-breeds, they are all white men—white at heart—and you’ll never have any use for a side arm up there.”

“It must be a orful nice country, but if you don’t mind I’m going to tote mine along just the same.”

“Then it’s all settled, is it, Bill?”

“I’m right there, pal o’ mine, every time.”

The boys struck hands and their new adventure was on.

CHAPTER II
HO! FOR THE GOLD COUNTRY!

“Now that I’ve declared myself in on this game I wants to know something about how it is supposed to be played,” said Bill, who, having once thrown his pet scheme overboard went into the new one heart and soul. “How big a country is this here Ilasker and to what part do we hike?”

Now Bill was like lots of other born and bred “Noo” Yorkers in that wherever there was an a the end of a word he invariably substituted er for it. As Bill’s mother had excused herself and made her exit, Jack took it upon himself to set his pal to rights.

“Not Ile-ask’-her, Bill, but A-las’-ka; get that? A-las’-ka!”

“All right, A-las’-ker then; have it any way,” groused Bill who, though he always wanted to know the right of every thing and had insisted time and time again that Jack correct him whenever he said or did anything that was not “accordin’ to Hoyle,” as he put it, still he was a little peeved when his pal did so, and in this respect he was not unlike the common run of folks whether of low or high degree.

“It’s a larger country than you’d think. Here are two maps of her that I’ve brought along,” said Jack as he produced, unfolded and spread the large sheets on the floor. This done, both he and Bill dropped to the correct prone position for shooting—that is lying flat on their stomachs with their faces downward—a position of great value in skirmishes on the border, but one seldom needed in civilized New York, unless it be to size up a map to the best advantage.

“This smaller one will give you an idea of how big she really is,” continued Jack; “it shows Alaska laid on top of the United States, that is compared with her. You see the main part of her is nearly square and she is hemmed in by the Pacific and Arctic Oceans all round except on her eastern boundary which is the Yukon Territory of Canada.

“If you lay the square part of Alaska over the middle part of the United States as this map shows, it will cover about all of Illinois, Wisconsin, Montana, Iowa, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma; then that handle of coast land, which is less than a hundred miles wide and some five hundred miles long, extends southeast along the western edge of Canada and this strip would reach clear across Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean, while pushing out to the southwest is the Alaska Peninsula and beyond it the Aleutian Islands.

“The peninsula is nearly five hundred miles long and the islands are strung out for another five hundred miles or more, so that the tail end of them would touch the Pacific Ocean in California. You see for size, Texas, which we think is a pretty big state, isn’t in it with Alaska.”

“It’s almost big enough to get lost in,” reflected Bill dryly.

“Now this large one is a government map of Alaska and I’ll show you exactly where we are headed for. See that red cross I’ve marked there just below the Arctic Circle on the Big Black River? Well, that’s our destination and when we reach it we’ll be in the land of the Yeehats. At any rate that is where they once lived, for from what I have gathered they were wiped out of existence some years ago. Once we get into their country it’s up to us to find out where the gold is cached.”1

“But suppose the Yeehats, or some other tribe of Indians, are still there and that they’ve got the gold corralled, what then?” Bill wanted to know.

“Oh well, we’ll have to treat with them according to the exigencies of the case. The first thing we must do though is to get there, the next is to locate the gold and when this preliminary but important work is done I think we can safely say that it is ours.”

“Ours not because we found it first but because we found it last,” Bill added to clinch the ownership.

“Exactly, or words to that effect.”

“Must be awful cold up there,” suggested Bill as his eyes wandered around the sub-Arctic region on the map.

“In summer it’s a mighty pleasant place but in winter it does get a little chilly, for sometimes the bottom nearly drops out of the thermometer and the quicksilver falls to fifty, sixty and even seventy degrees below zero; but you don’t mind a little thing like cold weather do you?”

“No,” replied Bill thoughtfully, “but I kicked all last winter to the superintendent of this here apartment buildin’ because the heat was only sixty-eight degrees while I likes it about seventy-two degrees. If I’d a-known we was goin’ on this here trip to the frigid zone I’d a-told him to bank the fires, or let ’em go out entirely, so I’d get used to it. Lettin’ that be as it may, what kind of an outfit do we want and do we get it here or when we gets up into that blarsted country?”

“We’ll take our rifles and I suppose we ought to have a shot-gun for small game, and while, as I have said before, the inhabitants, whatever may be their color or country, are all peace abiding folks still we ought to take our six-guns along so that we can protect our gold when we get back to civilized lands again.”

“An’ we’d better take our thermos bottles, solid alcohol cookin’ outfit, flash lamps, compasses and a pair of pliers with us, not forgettin’ me mouth-organ,” put in Bill.

“By all means,” allowed Jack; “as for the rest of it we can find out exactly what we need in the way of rations and equipment when we reach Dawson or Circle City. We don’t want to overload ourselves but there must be a-plenty of the necessaries, for, the way I figure it, we’ll probably have to stay the best part of a year in those parts.”

“When do we leave for this promised land o’ gold and sixty degrees below zero?” inquired impatient red-headed Bill.

“It’s about the right time of the year for us to be pilgriming now,” returned his partner; “that’s why I’m here.”

“How long will it take us to get up there?”

“Oh, about three weeks or so if we make connections and don’t lose too much time on the way.”

“Then I takes it the weather’ll still be warm when we arrives. We’ll get a canoe, or maybe a couple o’ them, and paddle up this Big Black River until we comes to the land of the Yeehats,” suggested Bill.

“No, that’s not my idea of it at all. You see, Bill, so much of the country where we are going is low that it is more or less wet all the time and it would make traveling overland in summer with our outfit a hard game. The way I’ve figured it out is that we ought to start from Circle City when winter sets in and travel by dogsled; then we can go up or down rivers, over them, cut cross country, yes, to the North Pole if we want to, and without any hard work on our part.

“Winter sets in early up there and by the time we reach Circle, get our outfit, learn the lay of the land, hear what all the old timers have to say and the first snow begins to fly, we’ll be just about ready to strike out.”

Bill shoved his hands in his pockets, went to the window and focused his eyes on a great warship that lay at anchor in the Hudson. He was wondering, not about the craft for he knew all about her and every other kind afloat; he likewise knew about some of those craft that navigated the land as for instance hawses, but this traveling in winter in search of gold with dog-sleds was a deep mystery to him.

“In winter the gold’ll be snowed under and we’d never find it I’m a-thinkin’,” he said thoughtfully.

“Take it from me, Bill, wherever the gold has been cached there will be signs that will point out the place as plain as the nose on your face. All we’ve got to do is to find the signs—uncovering the gold will be easy,” argued Jack.

“It sounds to me, Buddy, but if we’re goin’, the sooner the quicker says I.”

“The Twentieth Century Limited leaves the Grand Central Station at 2:45 in the afternoon and pulls into the LaSalle Street Station at Chicago the next morning in time so that we can make connection with the North Coast Limited of the Burlington Route which carries a Northern Pacific sleeper through to Seattle. How about leaving to-morrow afternoon?”

“All to the good; that’ll give me time to see me goil and tell her I’m goin’ to Ilasker,” for Bill, be it known had become very much smitten with Vera Clair, the little blond telephone girl down in the office of the American Consolidated Oil Company. And Vera, who could roll the number three under, over, through and above her tongue with the best of operators, and who also lived in Harlem, thought quite well of Bill, too.

“If you say that,” warned Jack, “Miss Clair will think you are going to ask her a very important question and you might find yourself in a somewhat embarrassing position.”

“What d’you mean ‘ ’barrassin’ position,’” questioned Bill sharply, blinking the while at Jack.

“Why she might think you meant you were going to pop the question—”

“Put the pedal on that soft stuff right where you are, or I’ll make youse put up your dooks, see, Buddy.”

“Then say A-las-ka, as I told you before, and you’ll be on the safe side,” again explained Jack.

“All right, A-las-ker then,” Bill attempted once more and Jack gave up trying to teach him how to pronounce it as a bad job.