The Thaw At Slisco’s
by
The storm broke at Salmon Lake, and we ran for Slisco’s road-house. It whipped out from the mountains, all tore into strips coming through the saw-teeth, lashing us off the glare ice and driving us up against the river banks among the willows. Cold? Well, some! My bottle of painkiller froze slushy, like lemon punch.
There’s nothing like a warm shack, with a cache full of grub, when the peaks smoke and the black snow-clouds roar down the gulch.
Other “mushers” were ahead of us at the road-house, freighters from Kougarok, an outfit from Teller going after booze, the mail-carrier, and, who do you reckon?–Annie Black. First time I had seen her since she was run out of Dawson for claim jumping.
Her and me hadn’t been essential to one another since I won that suit over a water right on Eldorado.
“Hello, Annie,” says I, clawing the ice out of my whiskers; “finding plenty of claims down here to relocate?”
“Shut up, you perjured pup,” says she, full of disappointing affabilities; “I don’t want any dealings with a lying, thieving hypocrite like you, Billy Joyce.”
Annie lacks the sporting instinct; she ain’t got the disposition for cup-racing. Never knew her to win a case, and yet she’s the instigatress of more emotional activities than all the marked cards and home distilled liquor in Alaska.
“See here,” says I, “a prairie dog and a rattler can hole up together, but humans has got to be congenial, so, seein’ as we’re all stuck to live in the same room till this blizzard blizzes out, let’s forget our troubles. I’m as game a Hibernian as the next, but I don’t hibernate till there’s a blaze of mutual respect going.”
“Blaze away,” says she, “though I leave it to the crowd if you don’t look and act like a liar and a grave robber.” Her speech is sure full of artless hostilities.
Ain’t ever seen her? Lord! I thought everybody knew Annie Black. She drifted into camp one day, tall, slab-sided, ornery to the view, and raising fifty or upwards; disposition uncertain as frozen dynamite. Her ground plans and elevations looked like she was laid out for a man, but the specifications hadn’t been follered. We ain’t consumed by curiosity regarding the etymology of every stranger that drifts in, and as long as he totes his own pack, does his assessments, and writes his location notices proper, it goes. Leastways, it went till she hit town. In a month she had the brotherly love of that camp gritting its teeth and throwing back twisters. ‘Twas all legitimate, too, and there never was a pennyweight of scandal connected with her name. No, sir! Far’s conduct goes, she’s always been the shinin’ female example of this country; but them qualities let her out.
First move was to jump Bat Ruggles’s town lot. He had four courses of logs laid for a cabin when “Scotty” Bell came in from the hills with $1800 in coarse gold that he’d rocked out of a prospect shaft on Bat’s Moose’s Creek claim.
Naturally Bat made general proclamation of thirst, and our town kinder dozed violently into a joyful three days’ reverie, during which period of coma the recording time on Bat’s lot ran out.
He returns from his “hootch-hunt” to complete the shack, and finds Annie overseeing some “Siwashes” put a pole roof on it. Of course he promotes a race-war immediate, playing the white “open” and the red to lose, so to speak, when she up an’ spanks his face, addressing expurgated, motherly cuss-words at him like he’d been a bad boy and swallered his spoon, or dug an eye out of the kitten. Bat realizes he’s against a strange system and draws out of the game.
A week later she jumps No. 3, Gold Bottom, because Donnelly stuck a pick in his foot and couldn’t stay to finish the assessment.