Chapter IX

Alone in his room, Jeff found perfectly logical explanations for many mysterious things. He conceded that Molly was somewhat superior, in intelligence and charm, to most girls of her class, and thus he had enjoyed the journey with her and had found certain things about her to like and even to admire. To-night, however, he had been the victim of a strangely seductive atmosphere; he had been so taken with the beauty and brilliance of the ball that he had lost certain powers of discrimination, and had simply seen Molly through the colored glass of romance. Probably she did not dance half so divinely as he had thought. Now he put his mind to it, he decided that her costume had been too daring altogether. He wished he had not devoted so much time and interest to her, but had looked more carefully about the dance floor. He might have met some one whom he would be really honored to know.

He went to sleep thinking upon these things, and wakened with the Alaskan sun shining genially through the window of his stateroom. He dressed, breakfasted, and went out for a daylight view of the city.

No wonder Sitkan life was gay! This was the golden age of the town; and the fur trade had made it a real metropolis. There were office buildings, shops, and stores, workshops of all kinds such as laundries, bakeries, joineries, and foundries; there was a sawmill, and at the edge of the town a flour mill run by water power. The seminary would have done credit to a European city; and the cathedral, built as usual in the form of a cross and having three sanctuaries and three altars, brought a vision of the Old World to the benighted Aleut who knelt in its chapel.

He was not surprised to learn that its chime of bells was a gift from the Church at Moscow, that priceless sacred paintings adorned its chapels, and that the silver and gold in the _repoussé_ work of the icons and of the vestments and sacred vessels—the accumulation of a century—were worth a king’s ransom.

On his walk through the town he visited public gardens and arbors; and he saw with relief that if he ever fell wounded in a duel with Baron Karl, there was a well-equipped hospital where he might be cured. While no other house in the city could compare with the Governor’s mansion, the officers of the post had pleasant quarters, and the soldiers were billeted in comfortable barracks. Block-houses and a stockade protected the town from Indian attack.

To the west of the hill stood the carefully guarded fur warehouse, and through Yanovisk’s kindness, a guide was appointed to take him through it. Thereafter it was not hard to explain Sitkan prosperity, or to understand why the eyes of all nations were now turned north. No wonder Seward had dreamed of the northern march of his flag. Alaska was the last, great prize for which the great powers played desperate poker, and now Jeff knew why.

Heaped in glossy piles was the treasure that had brought the Russians across the seas. For this, they had enslaved an entire people, all but annihilated a great tribe, built forts in the wilderness. The Muscovite was never a home-maker. He came to America to plunder, and here was his spoil.

There were bales of beaver, rich brown pelts almost circular in shape, and covered with a shining guard hair that had once been jeweled with water drops. Wherever trees grew and water ran men had gone to procure them; and when the story of Alaska is finally written it must be on parchment made of beaver leather. The picture that came to Jeff’s mind was of a lonely, yellow marsh in the midst of the wood, of wide, deep canals dug with unthinkable labor, of tall trees humbled and felled by the patient encroachments of nibbling teeth, of engineering feats which men will always wonder at, and never understand.

There were land otter, glossy brown and rich; full of lights as he moved them in his hands. The inland waters had yielded these: wild, little streams, unnamed, racing forever through lost and hidden valleys; great rivers, wide and blue, on which the trappers’ birch-bark craft was but a black spot, hardly seen; roaring cataracts that humbled men to see; serene lakes imaging the shadow of a lone cormorant; still, dark, and mysterious sloughs where the deer drink, in the deep and silent woods.

There were martens—sables the Russians called them—lovely to touch, dusky as shadows in autumn woods. These came from the timbered country, and no Oriental weaver could dream of their beauty. There were fishers, to Jeff merely beautiful furs, but veritable voodoos to the old workman, once a trapper in the interior, who was guiding him through the warehouse. This man remembered many a day when a fisher had beat him along his trap line, robbing bait and leaving worthless scraps of fur in place of his precious trophies.

There were glossy mink, golden-brown, once the terror of bird and rodent; there were ermines, snowwhite and softer to the touch than any silk; there were muskrats from the bleak, frozen muskegs of the interior; there were spotted lynx whose mournful whine so often wakes the sleeping woodsman in his lonely camp: the fierce hunter with eyes that glow and go out and glow again in the deep gloom about the supper fire.

There were long-haired foxes, popular among the nobles of China and Russia but not well known in America—magnificent silvers, full of imprisoned moonbeams; blue foxes from the bleak, storm-swept Alaskan peninsula far to the west—deep, rich, lustrous blacks. There were red foxes by the thousand, and bale after bale of white foxes, immaculate as the wastes of snow through which they hunted. These came from the most northerly posts of the Company, pursued and trapped in the long, mysterious dusk of the Arctic night.

There was bale after bale of seals, sent from the far Pribilofs far to the westward. Up the rocky shores of those wintry islands came the sea herds, a roaring band whose numbers were almost beyond reckoning. No man knew what summons brought them, or how they had found the way; their great seasonal migration was no less a mystery to the unlettered Aleut who flayed them than to the wisest naturalist who came to study the cycle of their secret lives. On the windy beach they fought, mated, and played, and some of them returned to the sea. These huge bales represented a small part of those which did not return.

When Jeff had seen all these, and all the lesser furs such as wolverine, skunk, and bear, there still remained the fur that had made Alaskan history. In a separate room in the warehouse, under the care of a special guard, Jeff was shown a bale of long, lustrous pelts, like living things in the dusk of the rooms. Jeff had never dreamed of furs like these. When he chose one from the pile and held it up, it shimmered and gleamed with a hundred mysterious lights, and it rippled and twitched in indescribable beauty as he dropped it on the pile. Some of the skins were a deep, rich color, some almost black with silver tips.

“Sea otter,” the guide told him simply. “Any one of ’em is the price of murder.”

He told how in the beginning Russian adventurers had sailed across an unknown sea solely in the pursuit of these magnificent skins, even then worth more than their weight in gold in Chinese markets. Aleut villages had been wiped out for a bale of them; and the great Russian-American Company had been organized principally to deal in them. Still, no sea was too broad to cross if there was the rumor of a sea otter rookery beyond; no island was too unknown and far for the hunters to seek them; no reef so perilous but that it would be braved by the Aleutian _bidarkas_.

“They’re worth four hundred dollars a skin now, and the market’s going up all the time as the catch of skins decreases,” the old workman told him. “There’s quite a pile of money in that bale!”

“Marvelous, isn’t it?” Jeff agreed. “What a marvelous system behind it all!”

“It’s certainly a wonderful system—for the lords and ladies who own the Company.”

Jeff’s mind was still on the furs; and he did not notice the odd, meaningful tone in which the workman spoke. “I suppose the Company paid tremendous dividends until the Czar began putting on too many restrictions. But they deserved to—no one can belittle what they have done out here. Think of reaping such a harvest of gold out of this empty wilderness, these stormy seas! You must be proud to be a member of such an organization.”

“I ain’t a member of it. I am just a workman.”

“Just the same, you contribute to it. I don’t think many other countries could have done what Russia has done—the building of this gay city out here at the edge of the world; the development of such a profitable organization. I don’t believe even England could do it—at least they couldn’t make so much out of it. America’s attempt would be simply pitiful.”

“No. America couldn’t do it. I know America.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I ain’t a noble, to learn to talk English from a tutor. I spent five years in California—1849-1854. If America should happen to get hold of Alaska, Sitka might almost die out, and it might be a long time before it would come back again. At least, it would be just an Alaskan trading post instead of a European city. There wouldn’t be such a harvest of gold sent back for dividends. Just the same—I wish America owned it!”

“You do!” Jeff stared incredulously, but the old man was certainly in earnest. His dimmed eyes gleamed in his weather-beaten face.

“Oh, don’t I! If America did own it, Alaska wouldn’t be just a fur farm for a bunch of ladies and gentlemen back in Moscow and St. Petersburg. It would be a land of opportunity, not for lords and ladies who dance in fancy-dress costumes to the music of a military band, but for common men like me. What does the Company care for the country or the people? They’ve built this city not for colonization purposes, but just as a post to handle the furs that the driven people bring in. They haven’t tried to build an Alaskan city; they’ve made it just as near like a Russian city as they could, to pass the time pleasantly in, until they can enrich themselves, and then go back to Russia.”

“There is such a thing as loyalty, sir!” Jeff told him gravely.

“I am loyal to the Czar—God bless him—as long as I’m a Russian. It isn’t him that causes the trouble; it’s the rule of the nobles. I give this Company my best work; but if you think I have anything like the opportunities, the decent treatment, or the chance for advancement that I’d have if this was an American company, you’re badly mistaken. It was organized to take gold out of Alaska, and that’s what it is doing. Why shouldn’t it pay tremendous dividends? Any system based on slave labor is going to pay dividends. Why shouldn’t they build a nice cathedral when they know that the devotion of the natives to the priests of the Greek church is one of the main holds they have on ’em. They’ve got other systems too, now that the Czar has frowned on forced labor. Look at us white workers—we’re kept constantly in debt to the Company, and have as much chance of getting out as if we was in jail. We’re under the strictest kind of a military discipline. Not long ago Chief Big Eagle, a native who can mutter a little English and talk Russian pretty good—an intelligent fellow as these natives go—tried to get word out to the Czar about some evils that had been done to his tribe. The Czar is a good Czar, God bless him—liberal and fair to the people more than any Czar that has ever sat on the Russian throne—and Big Eagle thought he would take the native’s side against the Company, as he might have done if the message had ever got through. It was intercepted—and now you wait and see what happens to Big Eagle.”

“I suppose he’ll be given some sort of punishment for not sending his appeal through the proper channels. We have the same thing in our army.”

“It’s the military idea, all right. He’d had a fine chance for getting it through the regular channels. Yes, he will have some sort of punishment, as you say. I’d like to warn him, if I dared—tell him his message was intercepted so he could clear out—but I know what would happen to me if I got caught doing it. Mark my words—one of these days Big Eagle will show up missing. His family will be informed that his bidarka was wrecked while he was hunting sea otter for the Company. They’ll never see him again, and they’ll wonder, but they won’t dare ask questions. Maybe they’ll be told that he got lost in the woods, maybe that he was torn to pieces by a bear. Anyway, Big Eagle will be gone—likely assassinated, perhaps quietly shipped off—West!”

“Do you mean—Siberia!” Jeff’s voice showed incredulity. He had heard of the Siberian prisons, but he thoroughly disbelieved the stories told of them.

“Sure. He’ll be given a number, and that’s the last anybody will ever hear of him. The prison officials themselves won’t know his name. No one will ever inquire for him, and if they did he couldn’t be found. That’s part of the system—a mighty successful system, too—one that these fellows who go in for systems ought to admire. He’ll work over there, and after a while he’ll die when he’s worked out, and that will be the end of the story.”

“Do you mean—that sort of thing happens frequently?”

“It happens often enough to keep the system running. I shouldn’t be telling you these things. You could make me a lot of trouble if you wanted to—trouble such as you’d never dreamed of. I wouldn’t dare tell you, except—”

“Except why?”

Jeff was considerably stirred by now, and his face showed it. His black eyes seemed to shoot sparks, and rich color glowed high in his cheeks. He felt that the man’s answer would have deep meaning for him.

“Except that you are an American.”

The little disks of color deepened and spread in Jeff’s cheeks. “And does that make a great deal of difference to you?”

“I want to tell you it does.” The old man’s voice wavered as he tried to hide his fervor. “I know what Americans stand for—equality of opportunity, and a square deal for the common man!”

Jeff had no opportunity to think up a suitable answer. At this point in the talk Yanovisk came up, bearing an invitation for lunch at the Executive Mansion. As the two young men walked away together, the Count conversed in a courtly manner; but Jeff failed to observe the fine points of his manner and in fact had difficulty in giving him strict attention. It seemed that he had so many other things on his mind.