Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
Then he returned to the article and read it word for word, very
slowly and very carefully. He could no longer doubt. Beyond
dispute, Corry Hutchinson had married Mabel Holmes. "One of the
Bonanza kings," it described him, "a partner with Lawrence
Pentfield (whom San Francisco society has not yet forgotten), and
interested with that gentleman in other rich, Klondike properties."
Further, and at the end, he read, "It is whispered that Mr. and
Mrs. Hutchinson will, after a brief trip east to Detroit, make
their real honeymoon journey into the fascinating Klondike
country."
"I'll be back again; keep my place for me," Pentfield said, rising
to his feet and taking his sack, which meantime had hit the blower
and came back lighter by five hundred dollars.
He went down the street and bought a Seattle paper. It contained
the same facts, though somewhat condensed. Corry and Mabel were
indubitably married. Pentfield returned to the Opera House and
resumed his seat in the game. He asked to have the limit removed.
"Trying to get action," Nick Inwood laughed, as he nodded assent to
the dealer. "I was going down to the A. C. store, but now I guess
I'll stay and watch you do your worst."
This Lawrence Pentfield did at the end of two hours' plunging, when
the dealer bit the end off a fresh cigar and struck a match as he
announced that the bank was broken. Pentfield cashed in for forty
thousand, shook hands with Nick Inwood, and stated that it was the
last time he would ever play at his game or at anybody's else's.
No one knew nor guessed that he had been hit, much less hit hard.
There was no apparent change in his manner. For a week he went
about his work much as he had always done, when he read an account
of the marriage in a Portland paper. Then he called in a friend to
take charge of his mine and departed up the Yukon behind his dogs.
He held to the Salt Water trail till White River was reached, into
which he turned. Five days later he came upon a hunting camp of
the White River Indians. In the evening there was a feast, and he
sat in honour beside the chief; and next morning he headed his dogs
back toward the Yukon. But he no longer travelled alone. A young
squaw fed his dogs for him that night and helped to pitch camp.
She had been mauled by a bear in her childhood and suffered from a
slight limp. Her name was Lashka, and she was diffident at first
with the strange white man that had come out of the Unknown,
married her with scarcely a look or word, and now was carrying her
back with him into the Unknown.
But Lashka's was better fortune than falls to most Indian girls
that mate with white men in the Northland. No sooner was Dawson
reached than the barbaric marriage that had joined them was re-
solemnized, in the white man's fashion, before a priest. From
Dawson, which to her was all a marvel and a dream, she was taken
directly to the Bonanza claim and installed in the square-hewed
cabin on the hill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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