“One thing sure, we’ll get in practice here for the long winter that is ahead of us,” reflected Jack philosophically.
“It wouldn’t be half-bad if we had a ’phone connection with the American Consolidated Oil Company back in Noo York, but where are we? Five thousand miles away and not even a wireless station nearer than Eagle. ‘I blazes!’ as Grizzly Hank down at Juneau says,” groused Bill. His indisposition was curious in that no matter how strenuous the tide of battle might be he had never a word to say, but inaction always behaved as an irritant to his nervous system.
Came soon the loud jangling of a bell and they knew it for a call to supper. They followed where it led and sat down to their first meal in Circle, and it was good. There were ten or a dozen men at the table with them and up here at the very outpost of civilization, where men are what they are, they all fell into loud and easy conversation.
“We’re in the hands of white men, as I said we’d be, back there in New York,” Jack told his partner when they were again in their room.
Just as they were about to turn in they thought they heard a phonograph going, and as “music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” they went down into the big hall to be soothed.
While in pre-Klondike days it was of nightly occurrence to find four or five hundred people gathered in the hall, there were now congregated perhaps some twenty-five or thirty men, and these were made up of Americans, French-Canadians, Indians, half-breeds, and a Chinaman or two, to say nothing of the bear.
A few of those who composed this agglomeration of humanity, were the scum of the earth but most of them were men of strong character and sterling worth. Considering that they were on the very edge of things they were bound to be a rough and ready lot but taken all in all they were well behaved and peaceably inclined—all except one and he was Black Pete.
While the crowd by no means filled the void of the big hall, still it breathed enough of life into the stagnated atmosphere to take off the sharp edges of their lonesomeness.
Now instead of a phonograph they discovered that the source of the music originated in a tall, rangy miner with a big bushy mustache, who was sitting on the platform and sawing away on a fiddle as if his whole soul was in it. Near the platform some kind of a disturbance was going on around which the onlookers had formed themselves into a ring. Whatever it was they were greatly interested and from the roars of laughter they were evidently enjoying it hugely.
Jack and Bill elbowed their way deep enough into the ring to see what the frolic was and what they saw they concluded was about as good as an act in a side-show. In a word it was a team of dancers executing with great precision and solemnity the “bear-trot”, or “bear-hug”, or “bear-something-or-other”, for a young French-Canadian and a big brown bear, who stood erect on his hind legs, when he was as tall as his keeper, were executing a most ludicrous, albeit, a lumbering sort of dance.