by Max Brand
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I’ve got to go to work,” he told me. “My job is at The Joint, and Alec goes with me. Do you play cards?”
“Not for money.”
“Do you drink?”
“Not yet.”
“Then you’d better come along with me,” he said. “Mind you, in The Joint, keep your ears open and your mouth shut. There’ll be plenty to see and hear, but nothing worth answering back or repeating. You understand?”
“Yes,” I said, my eyes beginning to open.
And that was how I went with him to The Joint, which was the great beginning, for me.
V. BETWEEN DOG AND MASTER
SO MANY PEOPLE have heard of The Joint that there’s no use in describing its three great rooms or the crowd in them. It averaged, I suppose, the toughest lot of men ever gathered together evening by evening, in any part of the world, at any time in the world’s history.
My own first impression was a tangled one of wild eyes and wild faces seen through swirls of cigarette and cigar and pipe smoke. Music screeched and throbbed and groaned in the dance hall adjoining, but Massey had sent me to a corner table of the main barroom, and there I kept my place, and my eyes grew so big that they ached as I watched the movements in the throng.
The place was pretty well packed. At every second or third table there was a card game with raw gold piled up for stakes, and raw whisky at every table to encourage a liberal spirit among the gamesters. After I had been in my chair for a time, a waiter came by and asked what I would have, and I said that I was only waiting.
He seemed amazed. He put his fists on his hip bones and glared at me.
“You’re only waitin’, are you?” he said. “There ain’t any waitin’ in The Joint, you loony. There’s only comin’ and goin’.”
He hooked his finger over his shoulder, and I stood up to go. But go where?
Massey had told me to sit at that table and not to budge, and much as I dreaded that long, lanky, formidable waiter, I dreaded Massey a good deal more.
“Hump along, kid, hump along,” he said, with another jerk of his thumb.
“But Massey told me to wait here,” I explained timidly.
The waiter was amazed.
“Massey? Hugh Massey?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m gunna find out dang pronto,” declared the waiter, “and if it’s a lie, you’ll go through that door on your head!”
He retired. Two men at the next table laughed jeeringly at me, and I shrank smaller and smaller in my chair.
Presently, as I looked about the room, I saw Massey himself walking toward me, and I heaved a great sigh of relief. But he seemed to be paying no attention to me. He was following Alec the Great, who wandered along between the tables looking with an almost human intelligence into the faces of the men.
I could hear them muttering to one another as he went by, and some of the words reached me.
“That’s that dang mind-readin’ dog,” said one of them.
“Mind-readin, and man-killin’,” said another.
Then Alec spotted me.
I noticed that every one of those people — even the gamblers in the midst of their hands — looked up and spoke to the dog, but no hand was stretched out to pat him, and he went up to no one. It gave me a little chill of excitement, therefore, when he saw me and came straight to my chair. He put his chin on my knee and I stroked his head, as proud of that sign of acquaintanceship and friendliness as though a great man had talked to me.
Massey went on without a word of greeting, and the dog went with him, as a matter of course. But that hardly mattered now. For Alec’s little call had been enough to identify me as a person of importance, as it were, and the men at the neighboring tables looked at me with a good deal of respect.
One of them with a ten days’ beard and an old slouch hat on his head turned in his chair and said: “You’re a friend of Massey, kid?”
I nodded. I supposed that I was a friend of Massey’s, if a one-day acquaintance could be counted that far.
“Come over here and have a drink,” he said, with a smile of invitation.
I told him that I didn’t drink, and he remained turned about, staring at me. Finally he began to nod.
“That’s right,” he said. “Wait till your whiskers begin to thicken up a little. This stuff would dissolve tundra moss at fifty below. You keep to dogs and Massey s, and leave the liquor alone!”
This remark of his apparently went as a good joke among the others, and they laughed heartily at it. I wondered if they would have been so free if Massey had been around.
There was plenty to keep my eyes and ears busy, just as Massey had said there would be and, aside from that remark, I did not speak to a soul in the room. The waiter, who evidently had been to Massey and heard enough to put his mind at ease, favored me with a nod and a smile now, as he went by my table. When several men wanted to sit down with me, he warned them off briefly.
“That’s Massey’s table,” he said.
“Why, there’s a kid here already,” said one of them.
“He belongs to Massey,” said the waiter, and there was no further argument.
It did not surprise me, however, that Massey had such power. Every one in Nome had heard more or less about his exploits. And everybody in Nome knew that he was working as a bouncer in The Joint, not so much because of the money he could make there, as because he loved trouble in all its forms.
Later on in the evening, an announcer came through, bawling out that Alexander the Great was going to do a brand-new trick that night. This caused a great commotion, and every one stood up on tables or crowded around the narrow open space which made an aisle down the center of the room.
Half a dozen little stools were put there at a wide distance apart from one another, and then Massey came in with Alec. He announced that Alec would make the trip down the aisle by jumping from one of those stools to the other.
That did not sound very hard until one looked at the tops of the stools and saw that they were hardly six inches in diameter — not room enough for the dog to get all four of his paws on them without crowding his big feet close together.
Alec, when the word was given, had to make three efforts before he managed to get on top of the first stool. There he balanced for a moment, wavering, and half a dozen voices called out, offering bets that he would never complete the trip. The bets were taken, and they ran high. I think one of those silly miners offered five hundred dollars, and was snapped up before the words were out of his mouth.
No stakes were posted. There was not time for that and, besides, even in Nome, there was what one might call “Far Northern” honesty. A man’s word was as good as his bond — for a time, at least.
After Alec had regained his balance, he jumped high in the air and came down on the next stool. But though he landed fair and true on the top of it, with his four feet bunched together, the shock of a hundred and twenty pounds of dog skidded that stool across the floor.
Alec staggered on this unstable footing.
He stuck out his head, wavered from side to side, and lost his grip with two feet at once. Luckily, they were on opposite sides. He regained his steady balance and there went up an Indian whoop of triumph from that assembly of miners, thugs, thieves, yeggs, and gamblers.
I noticed that the man who had bet five hundred against the dog yelled more loudly than any one else in praise of Alec’s skill. He was certainly a good sport.
Alec went on to the third stool, which did not skid at all, and he immediately leaped again to the fourth, which made a heavy sheer to the left and ahead.
He toppled. I felt sure that he was a goner, but in some manner he managed to right himself.
I heard Massey shout something to him, I couldn’t make out what, and Alec gave one small waggle of his tail to show that he had heard. It was like a smile, you might say, from a busy acrobat to a friend in the audience. You could see by the gleaming eye
s of Alec that he loved this business.
Off he popped onto the fifth stool, but then a wail of anxiety went up from every one. My own throat ached, and I realized that I had been yelling for Alec all the while. The noise in that place was past belief.
The reason was that the fifth stool skidded not at all, but the solid impact of the dog’s weight was too much for it, and one leg crashed.
It knocked Alec completely off balance, of course, but without trying to rebalance himself, like a wise-footed dog on breaking ice, he leaped again, firmly kicking the stool headlong behind him.
His trajectory was low. He hit that sixth stool with a whang and knocked it spinning into the wall.
But by good luck, the turn of the stool allowed him to whang against the wall sideways, and though the shock made him grunt as though he had been kicked by a heavy foot, there he stuck on top of his foothold until the voice of Massey called him down.
He had had such a severe bang that he wobbled a little as he trotted back to Massey.
Every one was shouting and yelling and clapping hands, and in general raising a ruction on account of that dog, and Alec certainly deserved some notice, but what I fastened my attention to was the face of Massey as the dog came up to him.
He looked like cold iron but, just as Alec got to him, I saw for a quarter of a second a single touch of a smile. There was love in that smile. And it reassured me about Massey more than a hundred praises from a hundred men. For I saw that he really loved Alec, and a man who can love a dog cannot really be all bad, or all hard.
When we settled back into our chairs again, there was a great uproar of voices still going on, and everything was in praise of the greatness of Alec. I myself was hoarse from shouting. And I never heard so many fine things said in a short time about any animal — or any man, for that matter! People said that Alec could learn as fast as a human, and it seemed almost true, for he was a very young dog to have such a pocketful of tricks.
That was not the only excitement this evening, however. Not by a jugful!
We had hardly got well quieted down again, and the betting debts paid, when the announcer came in and climbed up on the bar.
He made a speech to us. The speech ran something like this: “Gentlemen, we’re pretty far north. Some of you may say that we’re too far north for comfort. But what is the major part of a man’s comfort? Why, a warm house and a good wife, I suppose.”
A few cynical remarks were shouted in answer to this, but the speech was allowed to go on, because the theme promised to be unique.
“Gentlemen,” said the announcer, “we’re so far north that prices have changed.”
“So has the whisky!” some one bawled out.
The announcer was not perturbed. He went on:
“Prices have changed, and a lot of other things have changed, too. There are places down in God’s country where wives come cheap. There are places where they can be had for the asking. And there’s many a girl that can’t even be given away!”
The crowd laughed amiably. They began to feel expectant. Something was coming that was out of the ordinary, or they could be sure that so much preparation would not have preceded it. Effects were not carelessly thrown away in The Joint, or over the varnished surface of the bar so recklessly marred with heel marks.
“But up here in the Far North,” said the speaker, “a woman has a good deal of value. Outside of cooking and sewing for a man, she can talk back to him with something more than a bark, and that’s all the conversation that a good many of us have six months of the year. Now, boys, even if you were to no more than pay the freight on the shipment of a girl, it would total up to a tidy lot. Even if you got a hundred and forty pounds of statue, it would be worth something. So what is a hundred and forty pounds of lady worth, auctioned off here in The Joint?”
He made a pause. A yell of excitement followed the announcement. I listened, but I was not able to believe my ears.
He continued in the same manner as before:
“Right up here on this bar we’re gunna put a girl who’s willing to be auctioned off to the highest bidder to marry him and be his rightful wife. She’s gunna reserve the right to call the deal off if she don’t like the looks of the fellow who bids. That throws him off and the next highest is in line. But as for the price, she ain’t gunna say a word. She leaves that to you! Cliff, hand the lady up, will you?”
VI. ELEVEN THOUSAND BID
I WAS SO amazed that I hunched lower in my chair and gaped like a fish while Cliff Anson, the red-headed chief bartender of The Joint, assisted a girl to climb to the top of the bar.
I was so dazzled by the lights, and by the idea of this transaction, that I could hardly make her out, except that she was dressed in ordinary clothes, without any touch of color to set her off, and her hat was a little toward the back of her head. But I heard a gasp of excitement from the men in that big room, and by this I knew that there was something extraordinary about her.
I rubbed my eyes, looked again, and, by Heaven, it was the red-headed girl whom I had seen crying that same morning in my lodging house! That fairly knocked the breath out of me. It seemed to me that I saw her lighted by the golden glow of the money which she had offered me in her hand not so many hours before. Now she was here, reduced to this. I stared at her with all my heart and soul.
She was trying to smile, but the smile hardly came, and then went again. There was not a speck of rouge on her face, and the result was that she was burning red one minute and white as a ghost the next. I thought she was going to faint, and I was close to it myself, there was something so horrible in this idea. For she was mighty pretty. Even with the tears and all that morning, and the dirty, dusky light of the room against her, she had seemed pretty. But here she shone through the smoke of The Joint by her own light, as it were. She had one hand against her breast, drawing her coat together, and that hand was white enough to have touched the heart of a savage. But the heart of Nome was more savage than a wilderness.
A voice was shouting in me, straining at my throat. I wanted to leap onto my chair and yell at them that this was no girl to treat roughly, that if they had half an eye they could see for themselves that only some terrible need had forced her to do a thing like this.
Well, just then a Canuck shouted out — he was as lean as a greyhound and as soiled as a wolverine: “I’ll start it off. I’ll offer fifty dollars!”
There was a little, bald-headed man right in front of the Canuck. He turned, flashed his hand into the Canuck’s face, and, in a moment, down went that fellow — whack! — against the floor.
“A good thing,” said somebody near me. “Even if the girl’s a rattlehead and foolish, she don’t need to be insulted like that!”
The whole crowd seemed to agree with that remark, and the Canuck was helped toward the door at the end of fifty heavy boots, at least. He went out with a crash, and the door swung shut, letting in a good gulp of sweet cold air into the room.
Then I saw the ugly face, and the tall hat, and the bedraggled long hair of the Doctor — who owned The Joint — rising near the bar.
He said: “There ain’t gunna be no ruction about this auctioning, boys. The first low crack that I hear, the gent that makes it gets the run, and the auction is off. They’s gunna be order. You can make as much noise as you like, but it’s gotta be decent noise. The lady’ 11 be respected in The Joint, I say. Massey, are you back there?”
Every head flashed around. I did not see Massey, but the mention of that name was enough to insure law and order in any Nome crowd, no matter how big or how wild.
“Now, gents,” said the announcer, “we’ll listen to a real offer. How much am I bid?”
There was a general movement closer to the bar but, when the people came to a certain distance from it, they paused abruptly. Massey was in there, leaning on the back of a chair, and facing them, showing no disposition to budge. And near him was Doctor Borg, himself. They kept the people at a respectful distance.
&
nbsp; And that poor girl, her eyes getting bigger and bluer every moment, looked desperately across the sea of rough faces, and gripped her hands suddenly together. But she did not climb down from the bar. Whatever was driving her, it kept her in her place there, on show before them all.
Someone I could not see offered fifteen hundred dollars. That was really the opening bid, and in two minutes the price was up to five thousand! It kept right on, but at this price the bidding settled down suddenly to two bidders.
One was a huge man — one of the biggest I ever saw. He must have been seven or eight inches over six feet, and he was built in proportion. He had a huge head, and a great, dark, inexpressive block of a face to crown the pile. His voice was like the rest of him, a deep, husky bass that boomed and echoed through that room in an amazing way.
He was the first man to go above five thousand.
The other bidder, who went to six at once, was an opposite type. He was young, clean-shaven, with a blond head of hair and a really handsome face.
The first glance at him made me pray that he would win out in the contest. He stood near the central stove, with his fine head thrown back a little, and his eyes never for an instant, until the end, wavered from the face of the girl.
I watched her, too, begin to look back at him. It was pretty plain to see where her preference lay, but that towering big man kept right on. The way he bid made me think that I could see the fashion he would have of marching through the snow, with long, regular, stride, never faltering, holding on like grim death.
They went up to eight thousand dollars in a very short time.
The bidding went like this:
“Eight thousand!” from “Blondy.”
“And fifty,” says the big man in his deep, sullen, bell-like voice.
“Eight thousand five hundred!”
“And fifty!”
“Nine thousand!” said the blond lad.
“And fifty,” said the big man.
Blondy dropped his head and struck his hand across his face.