But Mary cut him off.Seizing the day's paper from the kitchen table, she flourished it savagely under her aged progenitor's nose.
"What do those Klondikers say? There it is in cold print.Only the young and robust can stand the Klondike.It's worse than the north pole.And they've left their dead a-plenty there themselves.Look at theirpictures.You're forty years older 'n the oldest of them."John Tarwater did look, but his eyes strayed to other photographs on the highly sensational front page.
"And look at the photys of them nuggets they brought down," he said."I know gold.Didn't I gopher twenty thousand outa the Merced? And wouldn't it a-ben a hundred thousand if that cloudburst hadn't busted my wing-dam? Now if I was only in the Klondike - ""Crazy as a loon," William sneered in open aside to the rest.
"A nice way to talk to your father," Old Man Tarwater censured mildly."My father'd have walloped the tar out of me with a single-tree if I'd spoke to him that way.""But you ARE crazy, father - " William began.
"Reckon you're right, son.And that's where my father wasn't crazy.He'd a-done it.""The old man's been reading some of them magazine articles about men who succeeded after forty," Annie jibed.
"And why not, daughter?" he asked."And why can't a man succeed after he's seventy? I was only seventy this year.And mebbe I could succeed if only I could get to the Klondike - ""Which you ain't going to get to," Mary shut him off.
"Oh, well, then," he sighed, "seein's I ain't, I might just as well go to bed."He stood up, tall, gaunt, great-boned and gnarled, a splendid ruin of a man.His ragged hair and whiskers were not grey but snowy white, as were the tufts of hair that stood out on the backs of his huge bony fingers.He moved toward the door, opened it, sighed, and paused with a backward look.
"Just the same," he murmured plaintively, "the bottoms of my feet is itching something terrible."Long before the family stirred next morning, his horses fed and harnessed by lantern light, breakfast cooked and eaten by lamp fight, Old Man Tarwater was off and away down Tarwater Valley on the road to Kelterville.Two things were unusual about this usual trip which he had made a thousand and forty times since taking the mail contract.He didnot drive to Kelterville, but turned off on the main road south to Santa Rosa.Even more remarkable than this was the paper-wrapped parcel between his feet.It contained his one decent black suit, which Mary had been long reluctant to see him wear any more, not because it was shabby, but because, as he guessed what was at the back of her mind, it was decent enough to bury him in.
And at Santa Rosa, in a second-hand clothes shop, he sold the suit outright for two dollars and a half.From the same obliging shopman he received four dollars for the wedding ring of his long- dead wife.The span of horses and the wagon he disposed of for seventy-five dollars, although twenty-five was all he received down in cash.Chancing to meet Alton Granger on the street, to whom never before had he mentioned the ten dollars loaned him in '74, he reminded Alton Granger of the little affair, and was promptly paid.Also, of all unbelievable men to be in funds, he so found the town drunkard for whom he had bought many a drink in the old and palmy days.And from him John Tarwater borrowed a dollar.Finally, he took the afternoon train to San Francisco.
A dozen days later, carrying a half-empty canvas sack of blankets and old clothes, he landed on the beach of Dyea in the thick of the great Klondike Rush.The beach was screaming bedlam.Ten thousand tons of outfit lay heaped and scattered, and twice ten thousand men struggled with it and clamoured about it.Freight, by Indian-back, over Chilcoot to Lake Linderman, had jumped from sixteen to thirty cents a pound, which latter was a rate of six hundred dollars a ton.And the sub-arctic winter gloomed near at hand.All knew it, and all knew that of the twenty thousand of them very few would get across the passes, leaving the rest to winter and wait for the late spring thaw.
Such the beach old John Tarwater stepped upon; and straight across the beach and up the trail toward Chilcoot he headed, cackling his ancient chant, a very Grandfather Argus himself, with no outfit worry in the world, for he did not possess any outfit.That night he slept on the flats, five miles above Dyea, at the head of canoe navigation.Here the Dyea River became a rushing mountain torrent, plunging out of a dark canyon from the glaciers that fed it far above.
And here, early next morning, he beheld a little man weighing no more than a hundred, staggering along a foot-log under all of a hundred pounds of flour strapped on his back.Also, he beheld the little man stumble off the log and fall face-downward in a quiet eddy where the water was two feet deep and proceed quietly to drown.It was no desire of his to take death so easily, but the flour on his back weighed as much as he and would not let him up.
"Thank you, old man," he said to Tarwater, when the latter had dragged him up into the air and ashore.
While he unlaced his shoes and ran the water out, they had further talk.Next, he fished out a ten-dollar gold-piece and offered it to his rescuer.
Old Tarwater shook his head and shivered, for the ice-water had wet him to his knees.
"But I reckon I wouldn't object to settin' down to a friendly meal with you.""Ain't had breakfast?" the little man, who was past forty and who had said his name was Anson, queried with a glance frankly curious.
