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It would have been pleasant to spend Christmas with them, but we were due two hundred and fifty miles away, at Bettles, for that feast, if by any means we could get there. So we lingered but the two days necessary to equip ourselves.
In the second week of our stay at Bettles, while Divine service was in progress in the store building, crowded with whites and natives, the door opened and, with an inrush of cold air that condensed the moisture at that end of the room into a cloud and shot along the floor like steam from an engine exhaust, there entered an Indian covered with rime, his whole head-gear one mass of white frost, his snow-shoes, just removed, under his arm, and a beaded moose-skin wallet over his shoulder.
"Yep," Bettles retorted, "an' Daylight'll do the second thousand back again on end in thirty days more, and I got five hundred dollars that says so, and damn the blizzards." To emphasize his remarks, he pulled out a gold-sack the size of a bologna sausage and thumped it down on the bar. Doc Watson thumped his own sack alongside. "Hold on!" Daylight cried. "Bettles's right, and I want in on this.
And when two twin 'Sun-Dogs' and a 'Frost Queen' followed suit, a second assistant was dispatched to the aid of the man at the scales. Bettles came off trail in the midst of the excitement, descending upon them in a hurricane of frost.
At last the howl of a wolf-dog cracked the silence from the direction of Forty-Mile. The weird sound swelled with all the pathos of a breaking heart, then died away in a long-drawn sob. 'Well I be danged! Bettles turned up the collar of his mackinaw jacket and stared about him helplessly. 'It's a gloryus game yer runnin', Kid, cried Lon McFane.
"D" Company, however, pushed forward further in the mist, and, though there was plenty of machine gun fire, it was unaimed and did no damage. The leading Platoon, under 2nd Lieut. Bettles, crossed a valley and started to climb the rise beyond, on the top of which they expected to find the main Avesnes Road.
Twenty-three children died at Fort Yukon in the summer of 1904, half a dozen at Circle in the following winter, though that outbreak was grappled with from the first; and all along the river the loss of life was terrible. There was no question that we must give up all hope of reaching Bettles for Christmas and stay and do what we could for these people.
Aliens from a dozen lands, they toasted each and all. It was the Englishman, Prince, who pledged 'Uncle Sam, the precocious infant of the New World'; the Yankee, Bettles, who drank to 'The Queen, God bless her'; and together, Savoy and Meyers, the German trader, clanged their cups to Alsace and Lorraine.
So well is this established, that during "50°-below spells" at Fairbanks, impatient, weather-bound travellers and freighters would busy the hospital telephone with inquiries about the barometer, the hospital having the only barometer in the country. After another long, cold run, on the night of Friday, the 12th of January, we reached Bettles, the place we had planned to spend Christmas at.
While their rough-hewn, obsolete ethics recognized the individual prerogative of wiping out blow with blow, they could not bear to think of two good comrades, such as Bettles and McFane, meeting in deadly battle. Deeming the man who would not fight on provocation a dastard, when brought to the test it seemed wrong that he should fight.