Smoke Bellew by Jack London (best books to read in life TXT) 📕
"How much you make that one pack?"
"Fifty dollar."
Here Kit slid out of the conversation. A young woman, standing inthe doorway, had caught his eye. Unlike other women landing fromthe steamers, she was neither short-skirted nor bloomer-clad. Shewas dressed as any woman travelling anywhere would be dressed.What struck him was the justness of her being there, a feeling thatsomehow she belonged. Moreover, she was young and pretty. Thebright beauty and colour of her oval face held him, and he lookedover-long--looked till she resented, and her own eyes, long-lashedand dark, met his in cool survey.
From his face they travelled in evident amusement down to the bigrevolver at his thigh. Then her eyes came back to his, and in themwas amused contempt. It struck him like a blow. She turned to theman beside her and indicated Kit. The man glanced him over with thesame amused contempt.
"Chechako," the girl said.
The man, who looked like a tramp in his cheap
Read free book «Smoke Bellew by Jack London (best books to read in life TXT) 📕» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: Jack London
- Performer: -
Read book online «Smoke Bellew by Jack London (best books to read in life TXT) 📕». Author - Jack London
He dreamed. The Yukon ran dry. In its bed, among muddy pools of water and ice-scoured rocks, he wandered, picking up fat nugget-gold. The weight of it grew to be a burden to him, till he discovered that it was good to eat. And greedily he ate. After all, of what worth was gold that men should prize it so, save that it was good to eat?
He awoke to another sun. His brain was strangely clear. No longer did his eyesight blur. The familiar palpitation that had vexed him through all his frame was gone. The juices of his body seemed to sing, as if the spring had entered in. Blessed well-being had come to him. He turned to awaken Labiskwee, and saw, and remembered. He looked for the food flung out on the snow. It was gone. And he knew that in delirium and dream it had been the Yukon nugget-gold. In delirium and dream he had taken heart of life from the life sacrifice of Labiskwee, who had put her heart in his hand and opened his eyes to woman and wonder.
He was surprised at the ease of his movements, astounded that he was able to drag her fur-wrapped body to the exposed thawed gravel-bank, which he undermined with the ax and caved upon her.
Three days, with no further food, he fought west. In the mid third day he fell beneath a lone spruce beside a wide stream that ran open and which he knew must be the Klondike. Ere blackness conquered him, he unlashed his pack, said good-by to the bright world, and rolled himself in the robes.
Chirping, sleepy noises awoke him. The long twilight was on. Above him, among the spruce boughs, were ptarmigan. Hunger bit him into instant action, though the action was infinitely slow. Five minutes passed before he was able to get his rifle to his shoulder, and a second five minutes passed ere he dared, lying on his back and aiming straight upward, to pull the trigger. It was a clean miss. No bird fell, but no bird flew. They ruffled and rustled stupidly and drowsily. His shoulder pained him. A second shot was spoiled by the involuntary wince he made as he pulled trigger. Somewhere, in the last three days, though he had no recollection how, he must have fallen and injured it.
The ptarmigan had not flown. He doubled and redoubled the robe that had covered him, and humped it in the hollow between his right arm and his side. Resting the butt of the rifle on the fur, he fired again, and a bird fell. He clutched it greedily and found that he had shot most of the meat out of it. The large-caliber bullet had left little else than a mess of mangled feathers. Still the ptarmigan did not fly, and he decided that it was heads or nothing. He fired only at heads. He reloaded and reloaded the magazine. He missed; he hit; and the stupid ptarmigan, that were loath to fly, fell upon him in a rain of food—lives disrupted that his life might feed and live. There had been nine of them, and in the end he clipped the head of the ninth, and lay and laughed and wept he knew not why.
The first he ate raw. Then he rested and slept, while his life assimilated the life of it. In the darkness he awoke, hungry, with strength to build a fire. And until early dawn he cooked and ate, crunching the bones to powder between his long-idle teeth. He slept, awoke in the darkness of another night, and slept again to another sun.
He noted with surprise that the fire crackled with fresh fuel and that a blackened coffee-pot steamed on the edge of the coals. Beside the fire, within arm’s length, sat Shorty, smoking a brown-paper cigarette and intently watching him. Smoke’s lips moved, but a throat paralysis seemed to come upon him, while his chest was suffused with the menace of tears. He reached out his hand for the cigarette and drew the smoke deep into his lungs again and again.
“I have not smoked for a long time,” he said at last, in a low calm voice. “For a very long time.”
“Nor eaten, from your looks,” Shorty added gruffly.
Smoke nodded and waved his hand at the ptarmigan feathers that lay all about.
“Not until recently,” he returned. “Do you know, I’d like a cup of coffee. It will taste strange. Also flapjacks and a strip of bacon.”
“And beans?” Shorty tempted.
“They would taste heavenly. I find I am quite hungry again.”
While the one cooked and the other ate, they told briefly what had happened to them in the days since their separation.
“The Klondike was breakin’ up,” Shorty concluded his recital, “an’ we just had to wait for open water. Two polin’ boats, six other men—you know ‘em all, an’ crackerjacks—an’ all kinds of outfit. An’ we’ve sure been a-comin’—polin’, linin’ up, and portagin’. But the falls’ll stick ‘em a solid week. That’s where I left ‘em a-cuttin’ a trail over the tops of the bluffs for the boats. I just had a sure natural hunch to keep a-comin’. So I fills a pack with grub an’ starts. I knew I’d find you a-driftin’ an’ all in.”
Smoke nodded, and put forth his hand in a silent grip. “Well, let’s get started,” he said.
“Started hell!” Shorty exploded. “We stay right here an’ rest you up an’ feed you up for a couple of days.”
Smoke shook his head.
“If you could just see yourself,” Shorty protested.
And what he saw was not nice. Smoke’s face, wherever the skin showed, was black and purple and scabbed from repeated frost-bite. The cheeks were fallen in, so that, despite the covering of beard, the upper rows of teeth ridged the shrunken flesh. Across the forehead and about the deep-sunk eyes, the skin was stretched drum-tight, while the scraggly beard, that should have been golden, was singed by fire and filthy with camp-smoke.
“Better pack up,” Smoke said. “I’m going on.”
“But you’re feeble as a kid baby. You can’t hike. What’s the rush?”
“Shorty, I am going after the biggest thing in the Klondike, and I can’t wait. That’s all. Start packing. It’s the biggest thing in the world. It’s bigger than lakes of gold and mountains of gold, bigger than adventure, and meat-eating, and bear-killing.”
Shorty sat with bulging eyes. “In the name of the Lord, what is it?” he queried huskily. “Or are you just simple loco?”
“No, I’m all right. Perhaps a fellow has to stop eating in order to see things. At any rate, I have seen things I never dreamed were in the world. I know what a woman is,—now.
Shorty’s mouth opened, and about the lips and in the light of the eyes was the whimsical advertisement of the sneer forthcoming.
“Don’t, please,” Smoke said gently. “You don’t know. I do.”
Shorty gulped and changed his thought. “Huh! I don’t need no hunch to guess HER name. The rest of ‘em has gone up to the drainin’ of Surprise Lake, but Joy Gastell allowed she wouldn’t go. She’s stickin’ around Dawson, waitin’ to see if I come back with you. An’ she sure swears, if I don’t, she’ll sell her holdin’s an’ hire a army of gun-fighters, an’ go into the Caribou Country an’ knock the everlastin’ stuffin’ outa old Snass an’ his whole gang. An’ if you’ll hold your horses a couple of shakes, I reckon I’ll get packed up an’ ready to hike along with you.”
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, SMOKE BELLEW ***
This file should be named smkbl10a.txt or smkbl10a.zip Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, smkbl11.txt VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, smkbl10aa.txt
Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we usually do not keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing. Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections, even years after the official publication date.
Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement. The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment and editing by those who wish to do so.
Most people start at our Web sites at: http://gutenberg.net or http://promo.net/pg
These Web sites include award-winning information about Project Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement can get to them as follows, and just download by date. This is also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04
Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want, as it appears in our Newsletters.
Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. Our projected audience is one hundred million readers. If the value per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2 million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text files per month: 1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+ We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002 If they reach just 1-2% of the world’s population then the total will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year’s end.
The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks! This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers, which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
eBooks Year Month
1 1971 July 10 1991 January 100 1994 January 1000 1997 August 1500 1998 October 2000 1999 December 2500 2000 December 3000 2001 November 4000 2001 October/November 6000 2002 December* 9000 2003 November* 10000 2004 January*
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
We need your donations more than ever!
As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones that have responded.
As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states. Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
In answer to various questions we have received on this:
We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally request donations in all 50 states.
Comments (0)