"Father Christmas!" was the hail.And then: "Three rousing cheers for Father Christmas!"Two miles beyond Crater Lake lay Happy Camp - so named because here was found the uppermost fringe of the timber line, where men might warm themselves by fire again.Scarcely could it be called timber, for it was a dwarf rock-spruce that never raised its loftiest branches higher than a foot above the moss, and that twisted and grovelled like a pig-vegetable under the moss.Here, on the trail leading into Happy Camp, in the first sunshine of half a dozen days, Old Tarwater rested his pack against a huge boulder and caught his breath.Around this boulder the trail passed, laden men toiling slowly forward and men with empty pack-straps limping rapidly back for fresh loads.Twice Old Tarwater essayed to rise and go on, and each time, warned by his shakiness, sank back to recover more strength.From around the boulder he heard voices in greeting, recognized Charles Crayton's voice, and realized that at last they had met up with Young Liverpool.Quickly, Charles plunged into business, and Tarwater heard with great distinctness every word of Charles' unflattering description of him and the proposition to give him passage to Dawson.
"A dam fool proposition," was Liverpool's judgment, when Charles had concluded."An old granddad of seventy! If he's on his last legs, why in hell did you hook up with him? If there's going to be a famine, and it looks like it, we need every ounce of grub for ourselves.We only out-fitted for four, not five.""It's all right," Tarwater heard Charles assuring the other."Don't get excited.The old codger agreed to leave the final decision to you when we caught up with you.All you've got to do is put your foot down and say no.""You mean it's up to me to turn the old one down, after your encouraging him and taking advantage of his work clear from Dyea here?" "It's a hard trail, Liverpool, and only the men that are hard will getthrough," Charles strove to palliate.
"And I'm to do the dirty work?" Liverpool complained, while Tarwater's heart sank.
"That's just about the size of it," Charles said."You've got the deciding."Then old Tarwater's heart uprose again as the air was rent by a cyclone of profanity, from the midst of which crackled sentences like: - "Dirty skunks!...See you in hell first!...My mind's made up!...Hell's fire and corruption!...The old codger goes down the Yukon with us, stack on that, my hearty!...Hard? You don't know what hard is unless I show you!...I'll bust the whole outfit to hell and gone if any of you try to side- track him!...Just try to side-track him, that is all, and you'll think the Day of Judgment and all God's blastingness has hit the camp in one chunk!"Such was the invigoratingness of Liverpool's flow of speech that, quite without consciousness of effort, the old man arose easily under his load and strode on toward Happy Camp.
From Happy Camp to Long Lake, from Long Lake to Deep Lake, and from Deep Lake up over the enormous hog-back and down to Linderman, the man-killing race against winter kept on.Men broke their hearts and backs and wept beside the trail in sheer exhaustion.But winter never faltered.The fall gales blew, and amid bitter soaking rains and ever-increasing snow flurries, Tarwater and the party to which he was attached piled the last of their outfit on the beach.
There was no rest.Across the lake, a mile above a roaring torrent, they located a patch of spruce and built their saw-pit.Here, by hand, with an inadequate whipsaw, they sawed the spruce- trunks into lumber.They worked night and day.Thrice, on the night-shift, underneath in the saw- pit, Old Tarwater fainted.By day he cooked as well, and, in the betweenwhiles, helped Anson in the building of the boat beside the torrent as the green planks came down.
The days grew shorter.The wind shifted into the north and blew unending gales.In the mornings the weary men crawled from their blankets and in their socks thawed out their frozen shoes by the fire Tarwater always had burning for them.Ever arose the increasing tale of famine on the Inside.The last grub steamboats up from Bering Sea were stalled by low water at the beginning of the Yukon Flats hundreds of miles north of Dawson.In fact, they lay at the old Hudson Bay Company's post at Fort Yukon inside the Arctic Circle.Flour in Dawson was up to two dollars a pound, but no one would sell.Bonanza and Eldorado Kings, with money to burn, were leaving for the Outside because they could buy no grub.Miners' Committees were confiscating all grub and putting the population on strict rations.A man who held out an ounce of grub was shot like a dog.A score had been so executed already.
And, under a strain which had broken so many younger men, Old Tarwater began to break.His cough had become terrible, and had not his exhausted comrades slept like the dead, he would have kept them awake nights.Also, he began to take chills, so that he dressed up to go to bed.When he had finished so dressing, not a rag of garment remained in his clothes bag.All he possessed was on his back and swathed around his gaunt old form.
"Gee!" said Big Bill."If he puts all he's got on now, when it ain't lower than twenty above, what'll he do later on when it goes down to fifty and sixty below?"They lined the rough-made boat down the mountain torrent, nearly losing it a dozen times, and rowed across the south end of Lake Lindermanin the thick of a fall blizzard.Next morning they planned to load and start, squarely into the teeth of the north, on their perilous traverse of half a thousand miles of lakes and rapids and box canyons.But before he went to bed that night, Young Liverpool was out over the camp.He returned to find his whole party asleep.Rousing Tarwater, he talked with him in low tones.
