One morning, not long afterwards, Donaldson came into my cabin on Hunker creek in evident distress. McLeod hadn't come out as usual to his work that morning, and he had gone to see what was wrong and found him in his bunk hardly able to speak. He had taken "a stroke." A neighbouring miner watched by the sick man while Donaldson hitched up his dogs and raced to Dawson for medical aid. Donaldson went off down the trail and I hurried up the gulch to my old friend. He lingered for two or three days. The doctor could do nothing for him but to ease his last moments.
I stayed near him until the end came. When he tried to speak his utterance was indistinct and what few words I could make out showed that his mind was wandering. Sometimes he was on the trail or in the camp, but oftenest he was home again in the far away land he loved, and in boyhood days among folk we did not know save one, known only to me, whose name was continually on his lips.
He had a lucid interval just before he died and for a minute or two he thought and spoke clearly. I told him that death was near. Was there anything that we could do for him? "Not very much," he said, "I want Donaldson to have all I own. He's been a good partner. Bury my box with me. I'm not afraid to go now. It's just another prospecting trip to an unknown land and I have a Great Guide. He won't forsake an old prospector. He was one Himself, I'm thinking, when He came seeking us. He will keep a firm grip of me now that the trail is growing dark. I'm not afraid."
These were his last words, and as he slipped away, we, who were gathered in the dimly-lighted little cabin, felt somehow that the Guide he spoke of was right at hand. He would surely keep "a firm grip" of the old miner on his last prospecting trip, even if strange storms were blowing, and it was black dark when they crossed the Great Divide. It would come morning too in that land when night was past, and when the new day dawned I know he would soon find the one whom he had "loved long since and lost awhile."
XVI.
Soapy Smith, the Skagway Bandit
My billet on the hospital ship Araguaya was very comfortable and my duties agreeable, but every time we reached port on the Canadian side of the Atlantic I had an impulse to desert the ship and become a stowaway on the hospital-train bound for British Columbia. It was there my wife and boy lived and I hadn't seen them for three years. However I got the chance at last to go without breaking regulations, for when I requested it, leave was readily granted me to stay ashore over one round-trip of the boat. This was supplemented by my taking the place of an absent conducting officer on the western train. So my transportation cost me nothing, except the congenial task of making myself generally useful to the returning soldiers.
We had crossed the prairies, dropping many of our crowd at way points, and were climbing slowly along after supper up through a lonely stretch of mountains, when someone in the car where I was "visiting" gave it as his opinion that this would be a good piece of road on which to stage a train-robbery. This, of course, led to the mention of gun-men that they had known or heard of, men of the same ilk as Jesse James and Bill Miner. I contributed the story of Soapy Smith, the man who pulled off the most remarkably prolonged hold-up of which I have ever read. In the most approved dime-novel style he terrorized a town, not for a few days or weeks, but for six months.
* * * * *
"You'll have to see the spot where Soapy died." The Skagway man who said this was rather proud of the celebrity which the bandit had brought to the place. I had come by the steamboat the nine hundred miles north from Vancouver, and was forced to spend a day in Skagway before going over the White Pass on my way to Dawson. A resident of the town was taking me around showing me the sights of this mushroom camp. It was humming with life and packed with people. The rush to the goldfields was then at its height. I judged by my friend's tone that he expected me to be deeply impressed with this particular sight. So down to the sea we went and out on the wharf. As we walked down he outlined the story of Smith's career in the camp. On the pier he showed me a dark stain, covering about a square foot, made by the life-blood of the man who for half-a-year forced Skagway to pay him tribute in hard cash. He was the leader of a group of men who robbed and cheated in wholesale style, and when it was necessary, in getting their victim's money, did not stop at murder. No one had attempted successfully to interfere with him. Reputable merchants were all intimidated into handing him their "life-insurance premiums" whenever he asked for them. His reputation as a "killer" was such that on the fourth of July, when good Americans celebrate their freedom, he rode at the head of the procession on a white horse! Very few complained loudly enough for Soapy to hear. Without question his nerve is to be admired. I have never heard or read in the annals of the west anything to equal his record in that Alaskan port. Desperadoes have ridden into towns, "shot them up," took what they wanted and got away with it. But this man and his gang lived openly in a town of several thousands and in the most brazen fashion ran the place for months, although he was known as a crook, gunman, and leader of a gang of thugs. Skagway, it is true, was simply an eddy in a stream running into the gold-fields. In their mad haste to get on and over the Pass people wouldn't take time to straighten out the morals of the camp. The Soapy Smith business was especially uninviting as something to mix into. "It isn't my funeral," they would say, "and I don't want it to be."