Quid non mortalia pectora cogis
Auri sacra fames?
| CHAPTER I. A NIGHT IN TOWN |
| CHAPTER II. AT THE WEST GULCH |
| CHAPTER III. KATRINE'S NEIGHBOURS |
| CHAPTER IV. GOD'S GIFT |
| CHAPTER V. GOLD-PLATED |
| CHAPTER VI. MAMMON'S PAY |
| L'ENVOI. |
Night had fallen over Alaska—black, uncompromising night; a veil ofimpenetrable darkness had dropped upon the snow wastes and theice-fields and the fettered Yukon, sleeping under its ice-chains, andupon the cruel passes where the trails had been made by tracks of blood.Day by day, as long as the light of day—God's glorious gift to man—hadlasted, these trails across the passes, between the snowy peaks, thepeaks themselves, had been the theatre of hideous scenes of humancruelty, of human lust and greed, of human egoism. Day by day a slow[Pg 10]terrible stream of humanity had wound like a dark and sluggish riverthrough these passes, bringing with it sweat and toil and agony, tortureand suffering and death. As long as the brilliant sun in the placidazure of the summer heavens above had guided them, bands of men hadlaboured and fought and struggled over these passes, deaf to all pity ormercy or justice, deaf to all but the clamour of greed within them thatwas driving them on, trampling down the weak and the old, crushing thefallen, each man clutching and grasping his own, hoarding his strengthand even refusing a hand to his neighbour, starving the patient beastsof burden they had brought with them, friends who were willing to sharetheir toil without sharing their reward, driving on the poor staggeringstrengthless brutes with open knives, and clubbing them to death whenthey fell beneath their loads with piteous eyes, or leaving them tofreeze slowly where they lay, pressing forward, hurrying, fighting,[Pg 11]slaughtering, so the men went into the gold camps all the summer, andthe passes were the silent witnesses of the horror of it all and of theinnocent blood shed. Then Nature herself intervened, and winter camedown like a black curtain on the world, and the passes closed up behindthe men and were filled with drifts of snow that covered the bones andthe blood and the deep miry slides, marked with slipping tracks wherestruggling, gasping lives had gone out, and the river closed up behindthe men and the ice thickened there daily, and the men were in the campsand there was no way out.
And now, in the darkness of the winter night, in the coldness in whichno man could live, there was peace. There was no sound, for the snow onthe tall pine