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The Trail of a Sourdough
THE MINER'S REASONS
A furious blizzard was raging. Six or eight miners of various ages were huddled around the stove in a little road-house where they were likely to remain storm-bound for several days.
"Chuck some more wood into that bloomin' fire and fill up my pipe if you fellers want a yarn from me," said one, when they had besieged him for a story with which to pass the time.
"Never mind the bumper, pard, you know it's the last of March when no live mining camp in this country has a thing but empty bottles to bump with. Behold the size of the glass dump outside yonder if you don't believe me", remarked the keeper of the place in vindication of his house; but with sore regret in his voice.
"The story, the story! We want the story", sang out one and another by the stove, "the fire is just a whoopin' and 'twill soon be goin' out".
"Well, then, here goes," said the miner addressed. "It happened two years ago. I sold one of my Nome claims for fifteen hundred dollars with slight prospecting, and after blowin' in a good third or more of the money concluded to buy a thousand dollar outfit and go to Norton Sound. It was late in October; the storms came on, and the upshot of it was that we were ship-wrecked off the coast and were finally put in at a small camp nearly a hundred miles from where we wanted to winter. I had taken two men with me named Long and Hartley, and though we saved, by hard fightin' in one way and another, the most of our supplies, we were without shelter, except a couple of tents, with an Arctic winter--our first in this country, upon us.
"Gee-Whilikins! Boys, it makes my black hair white to think of it! What we suffered for two months in those tents was awful; for the camp was full and there was not a vacant cabin anywhere. If there had been, you know we were absolutely without money to buy or build with. How I cursed myself for havin' foolishly spent hundreds of dollars on 'box rustlers' at the Casino,--but that is another story, boys, so we'll pass it.
"In our new camp we had many Eskimos and all kinds of people. Among others there was a little blue-eyed woman perhaps thirty years of age; maybe more--maybe less. She was also evidently not where she had intended to be, just like ourselves, but was a teacher, left over from some stranded expedition, probably. Anyhow, there she was, and there we were. We a-livin' in the tents, and the thermometer forty degrees below zero. The teacher was stayin' with some of the Missionary folks only a quarter of a mile away, and she was all right.
"In December the dogs of the camp began to go mad. Every few days one or two had to be killed. Some men, you know, don't water their dogs once in six weeks, if at all, and as everything is froze hard in winter, the poor brutes go mad, exactly as in summer in the States, from heat.
"One night, Long and I smoked in the little road-house close by, but Hartley went to his bunk in the tent and turned in. He had not slept, but lay with closed eyes, he said, tryin' hard to get warm under his fur robe; when the tent flap was brushed aside, and in rushed a mad dog, snapping and foaming. At the first movement Hartley supposed we had returned to go to bed, but was instantly undeceived as the crazy brute made directly for him.
"Hartley threw out his hands and leaped from his bunk, seizing an axe that lay upon the floor. With that he made for the dog, and finally drove him from the tent; but only after he had been badly bitten in several places.
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