The girl shook her head while her blue eyes were turned on the broad expanse of water where it vanished in the south. Perhaps it was the trend of their talk which had attracted her gaze in that direction.
“Surely we could quit if—we had the notion,” she said, after a moment’s reflection. “But what if we did? I mean how would it help? Maybe I don’t know. Placer? What if we made Placer where there’s food and trade? What could we do? There’s Mum, and my six little brothers and sisters, running up like a step-ladder from inches to feet. Then there’s Usak, an Indian man who’s got no equal as a pelt hunter and trailman. Here we’re lords over a limitless territory. We’ve a herd of deer that runs into thousands, and reindeer are the beginning and end of everything to the Eskimo, but wouldn’t be worth dog meat in Placer. Show me. I’m ready to think. We can go on making out right here if we only make one trip a year to Placer. If we quit, I guess there’d be nothing but the dance halls of Placer you’ve told me about for me and my little sisters as they grow up, while Usak, with a temper like a she-wolf, would run foul of half the city in a week. No. You said a thing once to me, Ben, that’s stuck in my stupid head since. What was it? ‘The North’s big, an’ free, an’ open, an’ clean. The longer you know it the more you’ll curse it. But the feller who’s bred to it can’t go back on it. There’s no place on God’s earth for him outside it but the hell of perdition.’ I guess that fits my notion of—Say, there’s an outfit coming up out of the south.”
The girl broke off.
She stood pointing out over the water where the river seemed to rise out of the distance between two low hill breasts. A group of canoes, infinitely small in the distance, had suddenly leapt into view.
The man became absorbed in the unaccustomed vision. He raised a gnarled hand, broad and muscular for all its leanness, and shaded his eyes from the sun-glare. After a moment he dropped it to his side. A grim, cynical light shone in his eyes.
“Cheechakos,” he said in profound contempt.
“How d’you know?” The girl was full of that interest and curiosity bred of the solitude in which she lived.
“They’re loaded down with truck so they look like swamping. It’s a big outfit, an’ they look mighty like they’ve bought up haf the dry goods the gold city can scratch together. Yes. They’re Cheechakos, sure. An’ they’re huntin’ the gold trail. I can locate ’em at a hundred miles. I’ve seen ’em come, but most generally go, on every blamed river runnin’ north of Dawson.”
The girl laughed lightly.
“To listen to you, Ben, folk might guess you hadn’t feeling softer than tamarack for a thing in the world. I want to laugh sure. Sometimes I feel I could shake you till the bones rattled in your tough old body. Then I remember. An’ I—I don’t want to do a thing but laff. If you’re not through with your outfit, and beating it down the river by the time those folk happen along I’ll gamble a caribou cow to a gopher you’ll be handing them just anything you reckon they need, if it’s only the wise old talk I know you’re full up to the brim with. You can’t bluff me.”