"I've traversed the toe-twisting tundra
Where reindeer root round for their feed!" etc.
Would that there were some way of gathering together the fugitive stories and poems, replete with wit and humor, with pathos and tragedy, which are a part of Alaska's unwritten history! Many a time have I been guilty of hanging around a road-house, saloon or "joint" of some kind for no reason on earth except that I knew I should hear a good story or two from some wandering wayfarer who had just come in off the trail. And at such times I have often recalled the familiar song (peculiarly true to life in Alaska) the chorus of which runs:
"Sometimes you're glad,
Sometimes you're sad,
When you play in the game of life!"
I have heard in these miners' gatherings tales of tragedies almost unbelievable, comedies which would furnish excellent vehicles for the talents of Charlie Chaplin and not a few love stories worthy of a Dickens, a Hugo or a Tolstoi. But they were no sooner told than forgotten as no one was at hand to record them.
I well recall an evening when I joined a group who sat smoking beside a stove in one of the road-houses. There was conversation, but one usually loquacious individual sat silently and smoked his pipe. Whenever he had appeared there before he had always been accompanied by an older man. They seemed inseparable companions. I had a feeling that something tragic had happened and that he would relate it before the evening was over. So I decided to "stick around." Presently some one asked him where his partner was. He did not reply immediately, but presently took his pipe from between his teeth and speaking in the vernacular of the country said:
"He won't be here no more."
"You mean——?"
"Yep."
We were all interested immediately but forebore to ask questions. Presently he went on.
"We were just comin' along the trail. His foot slipped an' down he went into the crevasse. I hollered down, an' I heerd him answer. So I climbed down as far as I could, an' I could see him, an' talk to him. His face was jammed right in the ice an' was already freezin'. We couldn't do nothin' but just look at each other. Then he says, 'You might as well go on!' An' I says, 'I'm damned ef I do!' I untied the packs an' got all the rope we had, but it wouldn't reach him. 'I'll go git some more rope,' I says to him, but I knowed it'd be too late. 'Go on!' he says. 'Don't let the dark git you out here. You can't do nothin' fer me!' I knowed he was right. But I hated like hell to leave him. I'd 'a stayed ef it'd done any good. But it wouldn't. To-day I got some more rope an' went back. But——. The ice down where he was had opened again an' I could see straight down fer two hundred feet. He wuzn't there!"