"Where do I go from here?" he repeated slowly, as he sank into a chair beside his table, and swallowed a stiff drink of whiskey. And, "Where do I go from here?" he babbled meaninglessly, three hours later when, very drunk, his head settled slowly forward upon his folded arms, and he slept.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PLOTTING OF CAMILLO BILL
With the rapidly lengthening days the sodden snow thawed and was carried away by the creeks which were running waist-deep on top of the ice. New snow fell, lay dazzling white for a day or two, and then under the ever increasing heat of the sun, it, too, turned sodden, and sullen, and grey, and added its water to the ever increasing torrent of the creeks. Bare patches of ground showed upon south slopes. The ice in the creeks let go, and was borne down by the torrents in grinding, jamming floes. Then, the big river broke up. Wild geese and ducks appeared heading northward. Wild flowers in a riot of blazing color followed up the mountain sides upon the heels of the retreating snow-banks. And with bewildering swiftness, the Yukon country leaped from winter into summer.
From his little cabin Carter Brent noted the kaleidoscopic change of seasons, and promised himself that as soon as the creeks receded into their normal beds he would hit the gold trail. He ate
little, drank much, and spent most of his days in reading from some books left him by a wandering Englishman who had come in overland from the North-west territories, where for a year or more he had prowled aimlessly among the Hudson's Bay posts, and the outposts of the Mounted. The books were, for the most part, government reports, geological, and geodetical, upon the Canadian North.
"She said I am a bum," he muttered to himself one evening as he laid aside his book, and in the gathering darkness walked to the door and watched the last play of sunlight upon the distant glittering peaks. "But, I'll show her—I'll show her where I'll go from here. I'm as good a man as I ever was." This statement that he had at first made to others, he now found necessary to make to himself. A dozen times a day he would solemnly assure himself that he was as good a man as he ever was, and that when he got ready to hit the trail he would show them.
The sunlight faded from the peaks, and as he turned from the doorway, his eyes fell upon his pack straps that hung from their peg on the wall. Reaching for his hat, he stepped to the door and peered out to make sure that no one was watching. Then he stooped and fixed his straps to a half-sack of flour which he judged would weigh about fifty pounds. After some difficulty he got the pack onto his back and started for the bank of the river, a quarter of
a mile away. A hundred yards from the cabin he stopped for breath. His shoulders ached, and the muscles of his neck felt as though they were being torn from their moorings as he pushed his forehead against the tump-line. With the sweat starting from every pore he essayed a few more steps, stumbled, and in clumsily catching his balance, his hat fell off. As he stooped to recover it, the weight of the pack forced him down and down until he was flat on his belly with his face in the mud. For a long time he lay, panting, until the night-breeze chilled the sweat on his skin, and he shivered. Then he struggled to rise, gained his hands and knees and could get no farther. Again and again he tried to rise to his feet, but the weight of the pack held him down. He remembered that between the Chilkoot and Lake Lindermann he had risen out of the mud with a hundred pounds on his shoulders, and thought nothing of it. He wriggled from the straps and carrying, and resting, staggered back to his cabin and sank into a chair. He took a big drink and felt better. "It's the fever," he assured himself, "It left me weak. I'll be all right in a day or so. I'm as good a man as I ever was—only, a little out of practice."
After that Brent stayed closer than ever to his cabin until the day came when there was not enough dust left in his little buckskin sack to pay for a quart of hooch. He bought a pint, and as he drank it in his cabin, decided he must go to work, until