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Updated: July 5, 2025
These days at the end of March, when the sun shines more than twelve hours in the twenty-four, are too long for the ordinary winter day's twenty-five miles or so, and yet not quite long enough, even if man and dogs could stand it, to double the stage; so that there is much daylight leisure at road-houses.
Cabins may usually be found to camp in, but there are no road-houses. What travel still takes place is local. The journey divided itself into two roughly equal parts, a hundred and fifty miles through the Lower Ramparts, and a hundred and fifty miles through the Yukon Flats, almost all of it on the surface of the river.
Fascinating road-houses of stucco walls curtained behind a profusion of clambering roses tempt one to pause and take his ease to the tinkle of guitars and mandolins. But Aunt Sarah and the girls, ever bent upon reaching the next cathedral with a stained glass window or the next dingy canvas of a saint sitting on a cloud, were scarcely amenable to the lure of road-house temptation.
They were going off to New York or Harrisburg or Washington on jaunting parties. They were seen in happy converse at road-houses or country hotels in season with their wives or their women favorites, and he was not, as yet, of this happy throng. Naturally now that he was promised something, he was interested and compliant. What might he not get?
The cost of transporting supplies to the road-houses on this trail justified the high prices charged one dollar and a half for a poor meal of rabbits and beans and bacon, or ptarmigan and beans and bacon, and one dollar for a lunch of coffee, bread and butter, and dried fruit.
Our way now left the Kuskokwim and struck across country to a point just below the junction of the forks, and then across country again to a tributary of the right bank, the Takotna; with a general northerly direction. Road-houses there indeed were, in the crudity and discomfort of their first season, and other evidences of the proximity of the white man.
To Foster, who was the first to reach the veranda, Foster who had been so long accustomed to faring at Alaska road-houses, to making his own camp, on occasion, with a single helper in the frosty solitudes, that view through the French window must have seemed like a scene from the Arabian Nights. Involuntarily he stopped, and suddenly the luxurious interior became a setting for one living figure.
He avoided the main highway and wandered along by-roads, zigzagging and circling about. He idled at inns, sometime for days in one place, often in small towns, oftener at road-houses between. He was then near Atina. At intervals during June and July Vocco gave Brinnaria reports about Almo.
The driver was always a crack whip, a man who called himself an 'old-timer, though often his years numbered fewer than twenty. Most of the drivers, however, knew the trail from having packed in on shanks's mare and camped under the stars. At the log taverns known as road-houses travellers could sleep for the night and obtain meals.
"Do you know that many thousands of labouring people spend their Sundays drinking and carousing about the low country road-houses because the game is played at such places on Sunday? They go there because they never get a chance to see it played in the city.
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