Jack Heaton Gold Seeker

“Well glory be! an’ if it ain’t Jack Heaton hisself. An’ right glad am I to see yuh, Jack. Bill will be mighty glad, too, for he’s that bugs on goin’ to South America for them di-am-onds. Sure he’s been talkin’ o’ nothin’ else these last two weeks gone Saturday. An’ how are yuh anyhow, Jack?”

It was Mrs. Adams, Bill’s warm-hearted and courageous mother, who had answered the bell and was greeting Jack in this whole-souled fashion.

Since the boys had returned from Mexico and had come into possession of all that money for the services they had rendered the American Consolidated Oil Company, Inc., the Adamses, mother and son, had risen in the world not only figuratively but very literally, for instead of living in a shanty hard by the gas-house under the viaduct which spans Manhattan Street, they had moved into a five room apartment on Claremont Avenue—and a front apartment overlooking the Hudson River at that. No wonder, then, that Mrs. Adams was emitting her good nature in all directions like rays of radium and that of all persons Jack was an especial target for them.

“Bill’s in the parlor, Jack; go right in,” she said with emphasis on the parlor, for it was the only one she had ever been the mistress of in all her hardworking life.

“Well, Bill, what do you think you’re doing, getting ready to go after a yegg or rehearsing for a movie?” asked Jack as he reached the front room, which by the grace of landlords and popular usage is known as the parlor, where he found his pal engaged in the gentle pastime of snapping a six-gun.

Bill cut short his exercises with the weapon that had seen such hard service in Mexico so recently and he laughed lightly, though no one except his closest friends would have been aware of it.

“Nary one, Jack, but I’ve had one o’ them hunch things that you used to get and it’s the one best bet as how me and you are goin’ to the wilds o’ the Amazon and capture some o’ them chunks o’ mud similar like and appertainin’ to the one you wears on your mitt. So I was just limberin’ up my trigger finger a bit with a little action.”

“Oh, you were, were you,” remarked Jack with a mild touch of sarcasm in his voice.

“Yes, an’ I was just thinkin’ about ’phonin’ you to find out how soon we could get under way. You see, I haven’t done a tap to make a dollar since our landfall and owin’ to the high cost o’ livin’—we’re over two hundred feet above Manhattan Street now—my pile’s nosin’ down like a submarine and it’ll soon be restin’ on the bottom and we’ll be back where we come from. So I’m askin’ you, not only as man to man but as my pal, when do we start?”

“We don’t head that way this time,” replied Jack, “we head north, with a capital N.”

“Whad’a mean we head north?” asked Bill in utter amazement.

“That’s exactly what I came over to see you about, Bill. I’ve had half-a-dozen jobs offered me since we came back but routine work is entirely out of my line so what’s the use in wasting someone else’s good money and my own good time. No, I’ve tried it and I can’t be a good man Friday for any business concern—not even for my dad’s.

“So you see you and I are in the same class—everything going out and nothing coming in and I’ve been wondering a lot lately what we could scare up that would make a noise like a million dollars. Say Bill, did you ever read Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild’?” Jack put the question without notice.

“‘Call o’ the Wild’?” mused Bill, turning the phrase over in his dome of thought; “I’ve heard all kinds o’ calls o’ wild men an’ wild women but never do I remember any wild call by this blokie Jack London. Who is this guy anyway?”

“There’s no use talking to a fellow like that,” thought Jack, but then, as in dozens of other instances in the past, he patiently explained who Jack London was and repeated the tale as told by that past master of fiction, for the benefit of his less well-read pal.

“Now the point I’m driving at is this,” he went on. “Jack London tells us that white men who were prospecting in the land of the Yeehats, a tribe of Indians in the gold country of Alaska, found diggings where there was gold, gold, nothing but gold, I tell you, and they packed it in moosehide sacks so that they could get it back to civilization. Then the Yeehats came upon and killed them and the shining yellow metal fell into their hands. The gold must still be up there, and you can’t dispute it either.”