The day had been clear and cold, but a blanket of cloud formed across the face of the sky and the night came on warm and dark, with the hint of snow impending.The thermometer registered fifteen below zero, and in the Klondike-winter fifteen below is esteemed very warm.
At a few minutes before midnight, leaving Shorty with the dogs five hundred yards down the creek, Smoke joined the racers on Number Three.There were forty-five of them waiting the start for the thousand-thousand dollars Cyrus Johnson had left lying in the frozen gravel.Each man carried six stakes and a heavy wooden mallet, and was clad in a smock- like parka of heavy cotton drill.
Lieutenant Pollock, in a big bearskin coat, looked at his watch by the light of a fire.It lacked a minute of midnight.
"Make ready," he said, as he raised a revolver in his right hand and watched the second hand tick around.
Forty-five hoods were thrown back from the parkas.Forty-five pairs of hands unmittened, and forty-five pairs of moccasins pressed tensely into the packed snow.Also, forty-five stakes were thrust into the snow, and the same number of mallets lifted in the air.
The shots rang out, and the mallets fell.Cyrus Johnson's right to the million had expired.To prevent confusion, Lieutenant Pollock had insisted that the lower centre-stake be driven first, next the south-eastern; and so on around the four sides, including the upper centre-stake on the way.
Smoke drove in his stake and was away with the leading dozen.Fires had been lighted at the corners, and by each fire stood a policeman, list in hand, checking off the names of the runners.A man was supposed to call out his name and show his face.There was to be no staking by proxy while the real racer was off and away down the creek.
At the first corner, beside Smoke's stake, Von Schroeder placed his.The mallets struck at the same instant.As they hammered, more arrived from behind and with such impetuosity as to get in one another's way and cause jostling and shoving.Squirming through the press and calling his name to the policeman, Smoke saw the Baron, struck in collision by one of the rushers, hurled clean off his feet into the snow.But Smoke did not wait.Others were still ahead of him.By the light of the vanishing fire he was certain that he saw the back, hugely looming, of Big Olaf, and at the south-western corner Big Olaf and he drove their stakes side by side.
It was no light work, this preliminary obstacle race.The boundaries of the claim totalled nearly a mile, and most of it was over the uneven surface of a snow-covered, niggerhead flat.All about Smoke men tripped and fell, and several times he pitched forward himself, jarringly, on hands and knees.Once, Big Olaf fell so immediately in front of him as to bring him down on top.
The upper centre-stake was driven by the edge of the bank, and down the bank the racers plunged, across the frozen creek-bed, and up the other side.Here, as Smoke clambered, a hand gripped his ankle and jerked him back.In the flickering light of a distant fire, it was impossible to see who had played the trick.But Arizona Bill, who had been treated similarly, rose to his feet and drove his fist with a crunch into the offender's face.Smoke saw and heard as he was scrambling to his feet, but before he could make another lunge for the bank a fist dropped him half-stunned into the snow.He staggered up, located the man, half-swung a hook for his jaw, then remembered Shorty's warning and refrained.The next moment, struck below the knees by a hurtling body, he went down again.
It was a foretaste of what would happen when the men reached their sleds.Men were pouring over the other bank and piling into the jam.They swarmed up the bank in bunches, and in bunches were dragged back by their impatient fellows.More blows were struck, curses rose from the panting chests of those who still had wind to spare, and Smoke, curiously visioning the face of Joy Gastell, hoped that the mallets would not be brought into play.Overthrown, trod upon, groping in the snow for his lost stakes, he at last crawled out of the crush and attacked the bank farther along.Others were doing this, and it was his luck to have many men in advance of him in the race for the northwestern corner.