"London, Jack - Tales of the klondyke" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jack)

"Then the Yukon empties into Bering Sea?" he asked.

"I do not know, but below there are Russians, many Russians.
Which is neither here nor there. You may go on and see for
yourself; you may go back to your brothers; but up the Koyukuk you
shall not go while the priests and fighting men do my bidding.
Thus do I command, I, Baptiste the Red, whose word is law and who
am head man over this people."

"And should I not go down to the Russians, or back to my
brothers?"

"Then shall you go swift-footed before your god, which is a bad
god, and the god of the white men."

The red sun shot up above the northern skyline, dripping and
bloody. Baptiste the Red came to his feet, nodded curtly, and
went back to his camp amid the crimson shadows and the singing of
the robins.

Hay Stockard finished his pipe by the fire, picturing in smoke and
coal the unknown upper reaches of the Koyukuk, the strange stream
which ended here its arctic travels and merged its waters with the
muddy Yukon flood. Somewhere up there, if the dying words of a
ship-wrecked sailorman who had made the fearful overland journey
were to be believed, and if the vial of golden grains in his pouch
attested anything,--somewhere up there, in that home of winter,
stood the Treasure House of the North. And as keeper of the gate,
Baptiste the Red, English half-breed and renegade, barred the way.

"Bah!" He kicked the embers apart and rose to his full height,
arms lazily outstretched, facing the flushing north with careless
soul.


II


Hay Stockard swore, harshly, in the rugged monosyllables of his
mother tongue. His wife lifted her gaze from the pots and pans,
and followed his in a keen scrutiny of the river. She was a woman
of the Teslin Country, wise in the ways of her husband's
vernacular when it grew intensive. From the slipping of a snow-
shoe thong to the forefront of sudden death, she could gauge
occasion by the pitch and volume of his blasphemy. So she knew
the present occasion merited attention. A long canoe, with
paddles flashing back the rays of the westering sun, was crossing
the current from above and urging in for the eddy. Hay Stockard
watched it intently. Three men rose and dipped, rose and dipped,