Certainly the ice was very late breaking up this year. The men of Rampart stood about in groups in the small hours of the morning of the 16th of May; as usual, smoking, yarning, speculating, inventing elaborate joshes. Somebody remembered that certain cheechalkos had gone to bed at midnight. Now this was unprecedented, even impertinent. If the river is not open by the middle of May, your Sour-dough may go to bed—only he doesn't. Still, he may do as he lists. But your cheechalko—why, this is the hour of his initiation. It was as if a man should yawn at his marriage or refuse to sleep at his funeral. The offenders were some of those Woodworth fellows, who, with a dozen or so others, had built shacks below "the street" yet well above the river. At two in the morning Sour-dough Saunders knocked them up.
"The ice is goin' out!"
In a flash the sleepers stood at the door.
"Only a josh." One showed fight.
"Well, it's true what I'm tellin' yer," persisted Saunders seriously: "the ice is goin' out, and it's goin' soon, and when you're washed out o' yer bunks ye needn't blame me, fur I warned yer."
"You don't mean the flood'll come up here?"
"Mebbe you've arranged so she won't this year."
The cheechalkos consulted. In the end, four of them occupied the next two hours (to the infinite but masked amusement of the town) in floundering about in the mud, setting up tents in the boggy wood above the settlement, and with much pains transporting thither as many of their possessions as they did not lose in the bottomless pit of the mire.
When the business was ended, Minóok self-control gave way. The cheechalkos found themselves the laughing-stock of the town. The others, who had dared to build down on the bank, but who "hadn't scared worth a cent," sauntered up to the Gold Nugget to enjoy the increased esteem of the Sour-doughs, and the humiliation of the men who had thought "the Yukon was goin' over the Ramparts this year—haw, haw!"
It surprises the average mind to discover that one of civilization's most delicate weapons is in such use and is so potently dreaded among the roughest frontier spirits. No fine gentleman in a drawing-room, no sensitive girl, shrinks more from what Meredith calls "the comic laugh," none feels irony more keenly than your ordinary American pioneer. The men who had moved up into the soaking wood saw they had run a risk as great to them as the fabled danger of the river—the risk of the josher's irony, the dire humiliation of the laugh. If a man up here does you an injury, and you kill him, you haven't after all taken the ultimate revenge. You might have "got the laugh on him," and let him live to hear it.