The sleet storm passed in the middle of the night, and we headed out for Dulcimer at five o’clock. There was no one in the street as we took the sleds over the crackling ice and followed the trail west. It was a well-traveled trail and the going was easy; there was no one following us that I could see. For once there was no wind, and if it hadn’t been for the rasp of the sled runners there would have been absolute silence. For Alaska, at the start of winter, it was a lovely morning.
The dogs were rested and fed and soon we were moving at a five-mile pace. We stayed with the Yukon River for ten miles, then swung onto Campbell’s Creek, the last stage of the long road to Dulcimer. On the creek there were no ice jams; it was flat as a floor. All moisture had disappeared from the windless air and the temperature kept dropping all the time.
I kept trying to puzzle out what was going on. Why had Sullivan and his men come after us if Soapy Smith expected me to come back through Skagway? DuSang turned my stomach, but I decided he was telling the truth when he said he’d talked on the wire to the King of Crime. If Soapy wanted me dead, why hadn’t DuSang made a try in Fort Yukon? DuSang had the men to back him up, not that he needed anybody but himself. The half-breed might be a vicious bastard, but he looked like a man who wasn’t afraid of anything. I got no answers to any of my own questions, so I gave up. The answers would come soon enough—in Dulcimer.
With still three hours to go, we rested the dogs. It was colder than it had been, but without a wind it was bearable. I made a fire and Hella made coffee and we talked about what was to come. The woman at the hotel said there was a telegraph line in Dulcimer, strung there from Fort Yukon, and I was thinking about that. Nothing definite, just an idea, and I wasn’t sure I was going to do it.
“You think they’ll try to stop us?” Hella said.
“It depends,” I said. “A few soreheads won’t mean much. But if there is one man, some hardcase jailbird with a real hate for the judge, there could be trouble. DuSang didn’t say. I guess he had his reasons.”
Hella said, “I think DuSang is worse than any of them. I only saw him for a moment, but I could tell.”
“All it takes is one look to know that,” I said. “He’d be a good man in a fight. I just wouldn’t want him behind my back. I wouldn’t want him anywhere around, back or front. We don’t have to worry about DuSang right now. He had his chance last night and didn’t take it.”
Hella looked at me with clear, direct eyes with no fear in them. “Are you sorry you got into this, Jim?”
It was a simple and sensible question, honestly put, and I’d be a liar if I said I was pleased about the situation we were in. When I started out I figured all I’d have to deal with was the Slocum brothers—maybe. They could hire their thugs, but ordinary thugs don’t bother me much. But then Soapy Smith invited himself to the party for reasons I still didn’t understand.
“I’ll ask you a question before I answer,” I said. “Are you sorry you joined up with me?”
Hella wasn’t like me: she didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Oh no, Jim. Not sorry at all. Before I met you I lived in my own world, having nothing to do with anyone. I wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. Now I’m afraid, a little bit afraid, and I’m glad of it. I feel more human. You understand me, yes?”
“In a way,” I said. You understand, yes?” She smiled when I said that “yes” with a question mark after it. “But I’m not scared and I’m not sorry I got into this. It started out as a favor for a friend. Now I’m doing it for myself. Who the hell do they think they are, Smith and the Slocums, the rest of them?”
Hella laughed. Her laugh had a tinkling sound in the dead silence along the frozen creek. “The hell with them, Jim—we can do it.”
“Then let’s be on our way,” I said. “There’s just one more question I’d like to ask you before we start. You mind?”
Hella’s face took on a mildly concerned look. “Of course not, Jim.”
“How come you never say ‘mush’ to the dogs? All the other mushers say ‘mush.’ ”
“Mush is what you eat for breakfast, you fool,” Hella said, smiling.
We saw the smoke of Dulcimer in another two hours, and as we got close it looked worse than Dawson, worse than Fort Yukon, worse than anything I’d seen before, and that’s saying a lot. The whine of a steam sawmill greeted us: loud, screaming, hard on the ears. But it was the right kind of music for Dulcimer. The name itself was a joke. Now I don’t know what dulcimer music sounds like, never having heard it, but I’d always imagined it to be soft, soothing, sweet. The town of Dulcimer was just the opposite: hard, nervous, ugly. It straggled away on both sides of Campbell’s Creek, a disgrace to man, an insult to nature. Dawson, in its way, made some feeble pretense at being a town—Fort Yukon was the crippled stepchild of Dawson—but Dulcimer didn’t even try. There might have been uglier settlements in the world, but I doubt it.
We went up from the creek past piles of rusting tin cans and things I couldn’t put a name to. Hella wrinkled her nose. Dulcimer stank in the still, cold air. It would have smelled bad in a wind storm. And here the judge—a man with a beautiful wife and millions in the bank—had come to the end of his life.
I figured the judge’s body, if it still existed, would be at the carpenter shop that made the coffin. The shop was about two hundred yards from the beginning of the town, beyond a saloon sign. What surprised me was the high wooden fence that shut it off from the street, because carpenter shops in frontier settlements are just padlocked at night. Then I saw the crudely lettered sign over the gate that went into the place:
SEE THE BODY OF THE FAMOUS HANGING JUDGE PHINEAS SLOCUM ONLY 50C
Jesus Christ! The sons of bitches had put the old man’s corpse on display. Judge Phineas Slocum was part of a sideshow.
“Incredible!” Hella said, shaking her head in wonder. “They would do such a thing?”
“They’ve done it,” I said. “Let’s pay our fifty cents and take a look-see.”
We tied the dogs and went to the gate to be faced by a happy man with a button nose and a granite jaw. It was easy to see why he was so happy; a fair-sized nail barrel was nearly filled with money.
I gave him a dollar and he smiled with what teeth he had left. “Best show in town, folks. Yes siree, you’ll never see another like it. Over there in the shed where the other folks are standing.”
Well, I’ve seen things and I’ve seen things, but nothing like this layout. I saw it so I can say it. There was the judge, out of his coffin and frozen solid, standing—I guess they couldn’t bend him—behind a rough copy of a judge’s bench. He was propped up by a board behind him, so he leaned slightly backward; a sort of gavel had been forced into his dead hand. Behind him the wall had been covered with board and painted brown to give a paneled effect. Somewhere in this place God forgot they had found an American flag and nailed it to the fake courtroom paneling. They must have thawed the judge’s eyes and propped them open with toothpicks until they froze that way. They hadn’t made him smile; a hanging judge is supposed to look stern. All in all, he looked pretty good, Judge Phineas Slocum of the federal bench, retired.
The man with the button nose and the happy face hadn’t left out a thing. Instead of being just plain cheap pine, the judge’s coffin now shone with a thick coat of black varnish, and a tin plate giving the Judge’s name and his birth and death dates—no brass in Dulcimer—had been nailed to the lid. The son of a bitch had gone to a lot of trouble to make his sideshow look good. In a minute I was going to ruin his business for him. But that’s the way of the world. There’s always some spoilsport out there ready to put a crimp in your plans.
“Don’t dawdle, folks,” the sideshow man called out good naturedly to the people already there. “Give the rest of the people a chance to see the judge. Judge Phineas Slocum, folks, the man that sent more men to their deaths than any judge in the history of the world. Come on now, folks, you can always come back another day. Come back, bring your friends. In years to come, when you’re back in the States, rich and happy, you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren you saw Judge Phineas Slocum hold court. Move along now, friends, so’s I can let the others in and make some money in the doing of it.”
The yard, now filled with gawkers, began to empty out. Hella and I were last to go to the gate. The proprietor smiled at us. Two more satisfied customers, he thought.
“Get your money’s worth, did you?” he wanted to know.
“Close it down,” I said. “You’ve made your last dollar off the dead man.”
His smiled faded. “What the hell are you saying? Who the hell are you?”
“A friend of the family,” I said. “The judge’s widow sent me to bring him home and that’s what I’m going to do. Don’t look so sour. You’ve made a pile.”
“You’re just trying to start your own show.” I guess the man was thinking of all the work that had gone into this ghoulish exhibition.
Holding the rifle with my right hand, I dug inside my coat until I found the letter from Cynthia. It was wrapped in waterproof paper. I shoved it at the man without opening it.
“Read it if you can read,” I said. “It’s got the Slocum name—Mrs. Phineas Slocum printed at the top. Try to tear it up and I’ll tear you up, understand?”
He could read all right. He knew it was real because where in hell would I get embossed stationery in the wilds of Alaska? Still, he hated to give up that moneymaking corpse. He looked over at the judge in his courtroom. I guess the judge looked as stiff-necked and solemn as he had in life.
“You mean you’re taking him back in the spring?” he said. “Of course you are. What else can you do? Tell you what. I’ll split fifty-fifty till spring. That’s a good deal, mister.”
“Put him back in his coffin,” I said. “Do it now or the Slocums will have the law on you.”
He looked surprised. “What law? There’s no law here.”
I didn’t want to start trouble, not in Dulcimer. “You think the Slocums can’t send some law after you? The Slocums could find you at the North Pole. I’d hate to have all those millions after me. Back in the coffin, all right?”
“Who’s going to pay me for all the work?”
“Nobody. You’ve been paid enough. You made the coffin?”
“Damn right I did. You going to pay me for that?”
“I’ll pay for the coffin,” I said. “How much?” I knew the cheap pine coffin was going to cost as much as a bronze casket.
“A hundred dollars,” he said. “A hundred for the coffin. A hundred for storage. I think that’s fair.”
“It isn’t fair. You’ll get fifty for everything. I could charge you instead of the other way around. Take fifty or take nothing.”
Outside the gate another crowd of fools were waiting to get in. “What’s the hold-up, Smiley?” one man called out. “You in business or ain’t you?”
“Close the gate. Tell them it’s over,” I ordered. “Talk nice or they could get mad enough to burn the place.” The crowd went away grumbling, but they went away. “All right,” I said. “Now that it’s quiet, you want to make a deal about storing the judge the rest of his stay in Dulcimer?”
“Not for no fifty dollars,” he said sourly. “You want him, he’s yours.”
“Course he is,” I said. “I don’t just want you to store him, I want you to guard him.”
“From what? Termites?” The son of a bitch thought that was funny.
“From anything. Pay is a hundred dollars. You can’t say no to that.”
“I can but I won’t.” The talk of money had restored some of his good humor. “Money in advance.”
“Half in advance. I want you to keep that gate locked until I knock on it. You got a weapon?”
“In this country? What do you think? Sawed-off, 10-gauge. I don’t figure to get shot for no hundred. You’ll be close to hand?”
I said that’s where I’d be. “Anybody tries to take the judge, fire off a cartridge then get out of harm’s way.”
“Count on that,” the man said. “You want to give me a hand getting the old boy back in his box?”
It took very little doing to put Phineas Slocum in his shipping crate. The body was stiff as a board and not much heavier, for which I was glad. I had forgotten to ask Cynthia how much the judge weighed, and I was happy to see he wasn’t one of those jowly, swag-bellied old men you often see up on the bench.
Staples, that’s the name he gave, was nailing down the lid of the coffin when Hella and I went away from there. “It is all craziness,” Hella said.
I had to agree. “So it is and we’re in the middle of it. You want a drink so we can test the waters of this muddy creek? I think I’ll have to send a message to the governor after all.”
“What message?”
“A message that won’t bring any help but might do some good: ‘Dear Governor: I’m trying to bring out the body of a federal judge and they’re making it tough for me. Send troops.’ How does that sound?”
Hella laughed on the way to the nearest saloon. “Crazy, like the rest of this. Alaska is not even a territory yet and he is not really a governor.”
“Then what is Alaska?”
“A possession of the United States.”
“That’ll do,” I said, and we both laughed.
Some of the men who had been turned away from Staples’s side show were in the saloon and they scowled at us, figuring that we had something to do with lowering the curtain. The saloon was a dirty, noisy pesthole with mud inches deep on the rough plank floor. With the door closed and the stove going full blast, it smelled as if a herd of goats lived there. Goats would have probably smelled better. Again, Hella was the center of interest; if she had been fat, warty and ugly she would have attracted attention. But... well... she wasn’t.
The man behind the bar looked like an ape with clothes on. Coarse hair grew low on his forehead; the backs of his hands were thick with the same kind of hair. He grunted at us.
“Whiskey,” I said. “Two big ones. Where’s the telegraph office?”
“How would I know?” he said. But when he came back with the whiskey his curiosity had gotten the better of him.
“It got something to do with the judge?” he asked in a voice that was very like his apish appearance. The ears of the men closest to us seemed to grow bigger. Some went so far as to stop staring at Hella.
“Could be that,” I said. “You still don’t know where I can find the telegraph office?”
“That was just a joke, mister.”
The bartender looked like the last man on earth to make a joke. He didn’t even look mean, just dumb. The eavesdroppers were all but cupping their hands to their ears.
“Then maybe you can tell me?” I said.
“Oh sure,” he said. “Down the street past a store that says Naylor’s Supplies. There’s a flag.”
I expected half the saloon to follow along when we went out. As it was, about a dozen men came out and stared after us. Hella laughed in her reckless way. “You are going to send that message the way you said it to me?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “The message will be the same but in different words. It’ll be all over town inside of an hour. Least I hope it will. I wish to hell the judge had the decency to die on the Canadian side of the line. Nobody is crazy enough to fool with the Mounties.”
We took the two teams down the telegraph office and found the telegrapher dozing over his hand-set. I guess the telegraph line had been strung to Dulcimer so agents for the big mining companies could report on how the gold strike was going. Farfetched though it seemed, a man in this cesspool of a town could talk to another man in Chicago or New York or anywhere. I just wanted to send a message to Fairbanks.
The sleepy telegrapher gave me a message form and a pencil. I didn’t ask the governor to send troops; all I asked for was an escort to see me to Skagway with the judge’s body. I said I was acting on orders from the Secretary of the Interior who had empowered me to seek any and all help I needed from federal officials in Alaska. It was all bullshit, naturally, but you should have seen that telegrapher’s eyebrows go up when he read it over.
He read the last part aloud; the last line was: WILL WAIT HERE FOR ESCORT.
“You’ll have a long wait,” the telegrapher said. “You know how far Fairbanks is from here?”
“Makes no difference, I’ll wait,” I said.
“What are you doing?” Hella asked when we got outside. “You are so full of tricks I cannot keep up with you. What do you mean—‘Will wait?’ ”
I said, “It means we’ll leave long before first light in the morning. It may work, it may not—it’s a try. Real badmen aren’t much afraid of federal law. Most other men are because it’s the one kind of law that’ll keep after you. Maybe this so-called governor, whatever he is, will send an escort, only we won’t take that chance. Let’s go see how our friend is doing, then we’ll start making plans for the morning.”
Staples was working in his carpenter shop when we got there, but there was a ten-gauge close by. He had removed the courtroom bench and the rest of the junk. All that remained now was the judge’s shiny black coffin with the name plate cut from a flattened tin can.
“I ain’t going to sit up all night with that thing,” Staples said, waving a chisel at the coffin outside in the cold. “My charge is for guarding during the hours of daylight. You want to guard him at night, you come here and do it yourself.”
“I’ll be here,” I said, glad I didn’t have to bring up the subject myself.
Staples wanted to get back at me in some way, so he said, “And no smoking around the lumber. Burn me out and there’s not enough money to pay for it.”
“Anybody been around asking about me or the judge?” I asked.
“Nobody. You be here eight o’clock or I’ll just walk off and the hell with it. I wish to hell I’d never seen that dead man. You’re probably thinking I stole his wallet. No such thing, mister. Old boy dropped dead out on the creeks and whoever stole his poke wasn’t me.”
“Makes no matter,” I said. “I’ll be here eight o’clock on the button. Go easy with that ten-gauge when I bang on the gate.
“We’ll have to make do with the supplies we bought from Ginnis,” I told Hella. “If we start loading up now they’ll know we mean to pull out rightaway. We’ll have to shoot what we can’t trap.”
“There is enough to last us for a while,” Hella said. “It will not look suspicious if we buy a lot for the dogs.” That made sense because the usual thing was to buy hundreds of pounds of dog meat at one time. Hella said not to buy any more fish for the dogs. It didn’t give them the strength that came from meat, and naturally they didn’t like it as much.
What we did buy was a good tent that we set up not far from Staples’s place. After the dog meat was loaded on the sleds we cooked a meal and fixed up the tent with a wood floor as if we planned a long stay in Dulcimer. Men drifted by to look at Hella, but no one spoke to us. There was no sign of DuSang. Some of the men who stared at us might be working for DuSang; there was no way to tell.
“We’ll head out when it’s time and keep on going through the night.” Hella nodded her agreement. “If we can get a good start they may not be ready to follow us into the mountains.”
“It would not be too hard to follow us for a while,” Hella said. “Bad weather will be better than good if they do follow us. But DuSang looks like a man who has endured many hardships. I can tell he was not always a storekeeper. You think he will pursue us?”
I nodded. “He will when he finds out we’re not going back by way of the river. Smith thinks we are, so does DuSang. For now he does. I hope that’s what he thinks. My guess is Smith wants me to do all the work, get the body back to Skagway, then he figures he’ll take it away from me.”
“But what about Sullivan? The other men we killed?”
“Sullivan may have decided to go into business for himself. Or Smith sent him as insurance. Or he was working for the Slocum brothers behind Smith’s back.” Hella laughed. “Or what else, Jim?”
“Or nothing. I just don’t know. If we can get over the mountains to Valdez it won’t matter who’s working for who. Once we’re on an ore ship bound for the States, there isn’t a damn thing they can do. You’ll like Frisco. I know you don’t like cities. Neither do I, but you can have a good time in a city if you don’t stay too long. How long is it since you wore a dress and a pair of shoes?”
“Two hundred years,” Hella said. “I cannot remember, Jim. I think I would look funny in a dress and ladies’ shoes.”
I couldn’t see much of her, bundled-up as she was. But then I’d seen her without clothes of any kind. “Like hell you would. You were made to wear fine dresses, silk bloomers, everything.”
“Bloomers!” Hella blushed. “Do not make fun of me, Jim.”
“Just speaking the truth,” I said. “I want you to wear silk bloomers so I can take them off. I want to run my hand under your silk bloomers and see what I find underneath.”
“That would be nice,” Hella agreed. “I want to feel your hand under my bloomers.” Suddenly she looked fierce. “There will be so little time once we start to run. Oh, I hate those men for that. I think we should go into our tent now. Eight o’clock is still hours away. You think so too, yes?”
I thought so too, yes.
Dulcimer was a busy little place, but we were just as busy once we were in the tent with the flap laced and the blankets unrolled. There, right in the middle of town, with boots clumping past in the frozen street, we took off just enough clothes to make it work. But any way we did it was all right with me: in a four-poster bed with silk sheets or in a wind-shaken tent beside a dirty street. We didn’t talk at all because there was no need.
When I went outside at fifteen minutes to it was snowing hard.