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It was joined by another, and still another, until there was such a sound that Alan knew Tautuk and Amuk Toolik and Topkok and Tatpan and all the others were splitting their throats in welcome, and with it very soon came a series of explosions that set the earth athrill under their feet. "Bums!" growled Stampede. "She's got Chink lanterns hanging up all about, too.
Like phantom teams they silently sped far out over the frozen waters of Bering Sea, threading their way between huge ice hummocks that rose, grotesque and ghostly, in the misty grayness of the Arctic twilight. Through the chill dusk they toiled up the steep slopes of Topkok Hill, through treacherous defiles, over perilous hidden glaciers, toward Solomon and safety. It was any one's race.
Of course, among such an assortment of persons, there were a number of murders, suicides, and indulgences in "gun-play," and it was not precisely the proper thing in the small hours to stroll carelessly about the place. Early in the spring of 1900 a "strike" had been made at Topkok, a small stretch of beach some thirty miles east of Nome, near the mouth of a dry creek called Daniel's.
When I went to give Jennie her lesson I heard her father and another man talking of a party of five persons who have been taken out to sea on the ice, near Topkok. They started about three days ago from here, and one was the sick woman who has been at the hotel, all on their way to Nome by dog-team. There were two women and three men, two dog-teams and sleds.
Three men engaged in rescuing the survivors of the big wreck of the night previous, had been swept from the barge alongside, and gone down in the boiling surf. Searching parties were out trying to locate a number of men who had started two days before, during a lull in the storm, against the warnings of friends, for Topkok to the east. They were never again seen.
This was the fifth day after the fight in the kloof; and on the sixth he sat up in his bed, bolstered with pillows, and Stampede came to see him, and then Keok and Nawadlook and Tatpan and Topkok and Wegaruk, his old housekeeper, and only for a few minutes at a time was Mary away from him.
Having stopped at Topkok for some additional passengers, who came aboard with satchels of gold-dust, the Elmore was off Nome at six o'clock the following evening, bobbing like a cork in the now fast increasing storm.
At Solomon's I met a man who had spent some years with Peary in his arctic explorations, and I sat up far into the night drawing interesting narratives out of him. So far as Topkok we were still retracing our steps, but once over the great bluff, which gave no view this time owing to the mist which accompanies this soft weather, we were on new ground, our course lying wholly along the beach.
Five or six hours' run over good trails, with no greater inconvenience than the acceleration of our pace by the wind on down grades, until the sled frequently overran the dogs with entanglements and spillings, brought us to the seacoast at Topkok, and a noble view opened up as we climbed the great bluff.
The thermometer is above zero, and the weather is pleasant. Two men from Topkok came in to see the Recorder's books, and searched all through them without finding what they wanted and expected to find, and then went away with sober and disappointed faces.
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