The Ice Goes Out

A story of Alaska, in which honest men and crooks propose, but inscrutable Nature disposes

The hand of winter was on the Northcountry. The sap had not started to run. Valley, stream and mountain, in the grip of the ice, lay like something dead.

And then it changed. Slowly the sun began to swing north, and long before the sap began to run, or the first flight of birds, men began discussing the ice pool.

The ice pool!

Not January 1, but the break-up, marked the beginning of the Northern year. Welch and several others would handle it this year. They had handled it for several years and given satisfaction. The ice pool was the great sporting event that survived. The Nome Sweepstakes and other dog racing events had lost their importance; had dwindled as Nome itself had dwindled. But the break-up each spring was the nearest thing to a lottery that remained under the American flag.

Sometime late in April or early in May the ice went out. Men sent in their money and with it the day, hour, minute and even second they believed the ice would go. Luck governed the contest, for no man could tell the exact hour. The man coming nearest to the moment of the break-up won the pot, less the expense of holding the event.

Leach spilled the contents of his poke on the rough cabin table.

“Enough,” he muttered, “to buy twenty ice pool chances. This year I’m going to win! Each year I’ve come nearer; each year the pool has been larger, but this year I win!”

“Don’t be too sure,” Atridge, his partner, observed.

Leach stretched himself and stepped outside. The air was almost balmy; the sky a deep blue; the mountains stood out sharp and clear. The sap was running in the willows, but then a willow is a foolish sort of tree and frequently buds too soon. The creek on which their cabin was located was frozen down to its gravel bottom. Leach looked into the sky and a peculiar hardness grew in the muscles around his jaw. A flock of geese was flying northward to some open body of salt water. A willow may be foolish, but geese know.

“This year,” he repeated, “I win the ice pool!”

Atridge did not speak for several seconds.

“I think,” he finally said, “I get you. But don’t you mean this year we win the ice pool?”

“Yes, if you want to go in on it—fifty-fifty. Otherwise I’m counting on you to keep your mouth shut!”

“I’m with you; what’s your plan?”

“We can’t lose. I’ve worked it all out. Last winter when you thought I was brooding and maybe had cabin fever I was figuring to win the pool!”

“What’s your plan?” Atridge repeated.

“Easy! Blow the safe in Welch’s store and go down the river ahead of the breakup. What chances has the marshal with the whole country flooded. I know of a dozen cabins in the lower country where we can hide out. Nobody will know whether we’ve wintered there or just arrived. Nobody knows we’re here! And we won’t show ourselves in the camp.”

Like most prospectors he spoke of any thriving town as a camp. Originally it had been a gold camp. From it a town had grown.

They camped on the outskirts of the community a week later. Excitement was on the increase. It was late April and money was coming from every part of the world. From traders and Eskimos in the North; from trappers, miners and business men throughout Alaska to men of poverty and wealth alike who chanced to be spending their declining years in warmer climates. To some it merely meant thumbing a bill off a large roll; to others it meant a sacrifice. Back of it all was the sporting blood of another day prompting them to take a chance; whispering that they had as good a chance to win as the next fellow. Loudly they might declare they knew they didn’t have a chance, but the faint voice of hope whispered—

“But, maybe you have.”

Con Welch opened up his place of business to find the mailbox crammed with envelopes. One, larger than the other, attracted his attention. He opened it. A small poke of gold dropped into his hand. With it a note which read:

“From the lower river country, eh?” Welsh mused. Coming by messenger there was, of course, no date or postmark. “Hang it. I wished that Siwash had showed up in daytime. I’d like to have asked him some questions about the lower river country. Well, Leach, here’s hoping. Twenty chances will give you the edge on a lot of others, but the man with one chance often wins.”

He opened a safe, already crammed with gold dust and bills, added the contents of the poke, entered the name and times in a large book and filed the letter away.

Men were already working on the ice. In the center of the river a tripod had been erected. Just below it a wire had been strung across the river. On the town side the wire was connected to a clock as well as a siren. When the ice moved the tripod was carried against the wire. The clock registered the exact time and the scream of the siren proclaimed the ice was going. Then the camp went mad.

The last of the entries arrived that day. The contest was now in the lap of Mother Nature.

Con Welch’s safe was closed and locked until the great day when the winner appeared to collect. Robbery? The thought never occurred to any one in camp. There hadn’t been a theft in years. Escape was too difficult in a land where all movements of humanity must of necessity converge at the neck of the bottle—the steamers connecting the country with the outside world.

No telegraph line reached the camp, and yet, by a curiously circuitous method the miners learned that the ice was beginning to break far up the river. White Horse sent word to Vancouver and a Vancouver radio station broadcasted the news. A local set picked it up. The camp waited. A day or two; perhaps only a matter of hours, and the question would be settled.

A low boom startled Con Welch. He opened his eyes and listened.

“There goes the ice!” he cried, and rushed to the window. The tripod had not moved. He rubbed his eyes and waited. “Must have been dreaming. That sure sounded like ice breaking!”

He returned to the warmth of his blankets and dozed off. At six o’clock his telephone rang. A voice came crisply over the wire:

“Con, this is Kenmore speaking. How much money did you have in that safe?”

“Roughly, twenty-five thousand dollars. Why?”

“She’s been blown. Get down here as quick as you can!”

A mob had surrounded his store when Con Welch arrived. Each man had made his guess on when the ice would go out. Each felt himself robbed of twenty-five thousand dollars. The men buzzed like hornets and they were as greatly aroused.

“I’ve got a dozen men circling the camp,” Kenmore, the marshal, explained. “If they’ve taken a trail out of camp we’ll catch them! Your place ain’t so badly wrecked as it looks. The job was done by men who know how to use powder, but don’t know much about safes!”

Con nodded.

“Half the men in camp can use powder!”

Even as they talked a deputy hurried up.

“We’ve found a trail. It ain’t much, but they went out over the ice. There’s at least two of em!”

Twenty men were standing about, ready for the trail and spoiling for a chance to take part, backed by authority. Kenmore picked his men.

“We’ll travel light,” he announced, “and have others follow us up with grub. We’re taking to the ice before she goes!”

They fairly raced down the frozen surface. A half hour gained now was equal to several hours hard work once the ice was gone.

An hour later they caught the scream of a siren behind them. It was a sound that never ceased to thrill them. Other whistles in camp took it up and with it came the ringing of bells and the crack of pistols and rifles.

“I wonder who won,” a deputy wondered.

“It won’t make any difference,” Kenmore replied, “if we don’t overhaul the crooks!”

Something cracked ahead of them. They ran swiftly and leaped an opening in the ice. Water began to pour through, spreading slowly over the smooth surface. It would be a tough job, returning. An hour later they reached Boulder Creek and Kenmore threw up his hands and groaned. “They knew what they were doing. Timed things just right. We’ve got to quit the ice!”

“There’s a bend in the river,” one of them shouted. “If we cut across it will save something!”

“Lead off!” the marshal ordered.

The roar grew louder. First the explosive sound of breaking ice, then the grinding of millions of ice cakes as the flood waters lifted the ice bodily and carried it toward the sea. Here it stranded on bars and piled cake on cake until a dam had been formed. There it broke through the banks and relieved for a moment of pressure, while the country was flooded.

They crossed the bend in the river and, instead of the smooth surface they had desired, a churning, ice dotted flood filled the course to the banks. They ran madly, taking turns at trail breaking; helping one another over the bad places. Minutes counted. It was a tossup whether they could cross the flat country ahead before the water flooded it.

They cut across to the stream once more and followed along the bank. Here the river had broken through a low mountain range after ages of effort. Walls were of granite, scraped by the ice of thousands of years. A panting deputy cried out with excitement—

“Look at that!”

Ice had choked the gorge and the river was climbing the sheer walls. But in the midst, leaping from cake to cake, were two figures. They seemed tiny, when compared with the vastness of the breakup. They moved with desperation; falling, fighting, each for himself, but working toward the jam.

One man looked up and saw the posse, but a greater danger confronted him. Ice cakes were being sucked into a vortex that poured through an opening in the jam. He judged his situation carefully, leaped at the right moment and was on the jam proper. He did not look back at his companion, but climbed upwards, knowing that if he gained the top and the smooth ice beyond, the posse had no chance; knowing too, that if he failed, the river would demand its toll.

No word passed among the posse as it watched. They knew the ice, these men; knew that the might of the river was exerting tremendous pressure to overturn the jam; knew that in the end the river would succeed.

One of the men gained the top; the other was halfway up. For an instant the leading man was outlined sharply. He waved his hand in defiance and far beneath a cake of ice weighing tons groaned in agony, then burst.

A man in the posse cried out at the drama, The river had won. The whole jam was moving. Cakes and blocks shifted and the tiny figure of a man was hurled into the stream an instant before the jam overturned. Another dot, a thing of arms and legs, fighting a river, remained on top of the shifting ice a moment, clawed for a niche on the bank and then fell back. The river, with its burden of ice moved on toward the sea.

The youngest member of the posse stood where the jam had once held the flood waters of an empire in check.

“Do you suppose...?” he ventured.

“No,” the marshal answered, pointing to a spruce log three feet through at the butt. It was a sound timber from heart to bark but it was now a pulpy mass being destroyed by the ice. “The only thing that’ll ever be found, son, is the gold nuggets. And maybe the river will keep even them. The rest will be destroyed. Well, boys, let’s go back and report. Somebody’s out twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Eagerness to learn who won the pool spurred them on, long after muscles cried for relief. Near camp, a supply party met them.

“Got the crooks?” one of them inquired, slipping a pack from his broad shoulders.

“No. They’ve gone down with the ice. Say, who won this year?”

“Kind of an empty victory,” the packer replied. “According to Con Welsh’s book it was a feller named Leach.”

In the distance the ice ground its way to the sea.