第26章 FOR THE LOVE OF A MAN(4)

"And break it out, and walk off with it for a hundred yards," John Thornton said cooly.

"Well," Matthewson said, slowly and deliberately, so that all could hear, "I've got a thousand dollars that says he can't.And there it is."So saying, he slammed a sack of gold dust of the size of a bologna sausage down upon the bar.

Nobody spoke.Thornton's bluff, if bluff it was, had been called.He could feel a flush of warm blood creeping up his face.His tongue had tricked him.He did not know whether Buck could start a thousand pounds.Half a ton! The enormousness of it appalled him.He had great faith in Buck's strength and had often thought him capable of starting such a load; but never, as now, had he faced the possibility of it, the eyes of a dozen men fixed upon him, silent and waiting.Further, he had no thousand dollars;nor had Hans and Pete.

"I've got a sled standing outside now, with twenty fifty-pound sacks of flour on it," Matthewson went on with brutal directness; "so don't let that hinder you."Thornton did not reply.He did not know what to say.He glanced from face to face in the absent way of a man who has lost the power of thought and is seeking somewhere to find the thing that will start it going again.

The face of Jim O'Brien, a Mastodon king and old-time comrade, caught his eyes.It was a cue to him, seeming to rouse him to do what he would never have dreamed of doing.

"Can you lend me a thousand?" he asked, almost in a whisper.

"Sure," answered O'Brien, thumping down a plethoric sack by the side of Matthewson's."Though it's little faith I'm having, John, that the beast can do the trick."The Eldorado emptied its occupants into the street to see the test.

The tables were deserted, and the dealers and gamekeepers came forth to see the outcome of the wager and to lay odds.Several hundred men, furred and mittened, banked around the sled within easy distance.Matthewson's sled, loaded with a thousand pounds of flour, had been standing for a couple of hours, and in the intense cold --it was sixty below zero--the runners had frozen fast to the hard-packed snow.Men offered odds of two to one that Buck could not budge the sled.A quibble arose concerning the phrase "break out." O'Brien contended it was Thornton's privilege to knock the runners loose, leaving Buck to "break it out" from a dead standstill.Matthewson insisted that the phrase included breaking the runners from the frozen grip of the snow.A majority of the men who had witnessed the making of the bet decided in his favor, whereat the odds went up to three to one against Buck.

There were no takers.Not a man believed him capable of the feat.Thornton had been hurried into the wager, heavy with doubt; and now that he looked at the sled itself, the concrete fact, with the regular team of ten dogs curled up in the snow before it, the more impossible the task appeared.

Matthewson waxed jubilant.

"Three to one!" he proclaimed."I'll lay you another thousand at that figure, Thornton, what do you say?"Thornton's doubt was strong in his face, but his fighting spirit was aroused--the fighting spirit that soars above odds, fails to recognize the impossible, and is deaf to all save the clamor for battle.He called Hans and Pete to him.Their sacks were slim, and with his own the three partners could rake together only two hundred dollars.In the ebb of their fortunes, this sum was their total capital; yet they laid it unhesitatingly against Matthewson's six hundred.