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The mad race with winter was on, and the boats tore along in a desperate string. "W-w-we can't stop to save our souls!" one of the correspondents chattered, from cold, not fright. "That's right! Keep her down the middle, old man!" the other encouraged. Rasmunsen replied with an idiotic grin.
With the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken to Pelly, there was no longer any need for the smoke wreath to linger in his wake; and Rasmunsen, crouching over lonely fire, saw a motley string of sleds go by. First came the courier and the half-breed who had hauled him out from Bennett; then mail-carriers for Circle City, two sleds of them, and a mixed following of ingoing Klondikers.
"W-w-watch out, old man," cried he of the chattering teeth. Rasmunsen grinned and tightened his aching grip on the sweep. Scores of times had the send of the sea caught the big square stern of the Alma and thrown her off from dead before it till the after leach of the spritsail fluttered hollowly, and each time, and only with all his strength, had he forced her back.
As the end of the lake came in sight, the waves began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence that the correspondents no longer chopped ice but flung the water out with buckets. Even this would not do, and, after a shouted conference with Rasmunsen, they attacked the baggage. Flour, bacon, beans, blankets, cooking-stove, ropes, odds and ends, everything they could get hands on, flew overboard.
"You'd better take the money." But the man refused and backed away. "I'll come back," he said, "when you've taken stock, and get what's comin'." Rasmunsen rolled the chopping-block into the cabin and carried in the eggs. He went about it quite calmly. He took up the hand-axe, and, one by one, chopped the eggs in half. These halves he examined carefully and let fall to the floor.
"Keep off! Keep off!" Rasmunsen screamed. But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the remaining correspondent clambered aboard. Rasmunsen was over the eggs like a cat and in the bow of the Alma, striving with numb fingers to bend the hauling-lines together. "Come on!" a red-whiskered man yelled at him. "I've a thousand dozen eggs here," he shouted back. "Gimme a tow! I'll pay you!"
But Rasmunsen was clean grit, and at fifty cents found takers, who, two days later, set his eggs down intact at Linderman. But fifty cents a pound is a thousand dollars a ton, and his fifteen hundred pounds had exhausted his emergency fund and left him stranded at the Tantalus point where each day he saw the fresh-whipsawed boats departing for Dawson.
But on the morning Rasmunsen shoved off with his correspondents, his two rivals followed suit. 'How many you got?" one of them, a lean little New Englander, called out. "One thousand dozen," Rasmunsen answered proudly. "Huh! I'll go you even stakes I beat you in with my eight hundred."
"We'll catch him before Cariboo Crossing," they assured Rasmunsen, as they ran up the sail and the Alma took the first icy spray over her bow. Now Rasmunsen all his life had been prone to cowardice on water, but he clung to the kicking steering-oar with set face and determined jaw.
"Eggs," Rasmunsen answered huskily, hardly able to pitch his voice above a whisper. "Eggs! Whoopee! Whoopee!" He sprang up into the air, gyrated madly, and finished with half-a-dozen war steps. "You don't say all of 'em?" "All of 'em." "Say, you must be the Egg Man." He walked around and viewed Rasmunsen from the other side. "Come, now, ain't you the Egg Man?"
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