Trust Page #3

"Trust" by Jack London is a novel that explores themes of loyalty, redemption, and the complexities of human relationships. The story follows the lives of a group of individuals who grapple with their dreams and aspirations amidst the challenges of society and their personal struggles. London's vivid prose and deep character development illuminate the interplay of trust and betrayal, ultimately examining what it means to rely on others in a world filled with uncertainty. The novel captures the essence of the human spirit and the quest for connection in the face of adversity.

								

painful trot, but he clenched his teeth and kept on, forgetting his pain
most of the time in the fervent heat with which he regarded the
gripsack. It was a severe handicap. He swung it from one hand to the
other, and back again. He tucked it under his arm. He threw one hand
over the opposite shoulder, and the bag bumped and pounded on his back
as he ran along. He could scarcely hold it in his bruised and swollen
fingers, and several times he dropped it. Once, in changing from one
hand to the other, it escaped his clutch and fell in front of him,
tripped him up, and threw him violently to the ground.

At the far end of the portage he bought an old set of pack-straps for a
dollar, and in them he swung the grip. Also, he chartered a launch to
run him the six miles to the upper end of Lake Linderman, where he
arrived at four in the afternoon. The Athenian was to sail from Dyea
next morning at seven. Dyea was twenty-eight miles away, and between
towered Chilcoot. He sat down to adjust his foot-gear for the long
climb, and woke up. He had dozed the instant he sat down, though he had
not slept thirty seconds. He was afraid his next doze might be longer,
so he finished fixing his foot-gear standing up. Even then he was
overpowered for a fleeting moment. He experienced the flash of
unconsciousness; becoming aware of it, in midair, as his relaxed body
was sinking to the ground and as he caught himself together, he
stiffened his muscles with a spasmodic wrench, and escaped the fall. The
sudden jerk back to consciousness left him sick and trembling. He beat
his head with the heel of his hand, knocking wakefulness into the numb
brain.

Jack Burns's pack-train was starting back light for Crater Lake, and
Churchill was invited to a mule. Burns wanted to put the gripsack on
another animal, but Churchill held on to it, carrying it on his
saddle-pommel. But he dozed, and the grip persisted in dropping off the
pommel, one side or the other, each time wakening him with a sickening
start. Then, in the early darkness, Churchill's mule brushed him against
a projecting branch that laid his cheek open. To cap it, the mule
blundered off the trail and fell, throwing rider and gripsack out upon
the rocks. After that, Churchill walked, or stumbled, rather, over the
apology for a trail, leading the mule. Stray and awful odors, drifting
from each side the trail, told of the horses that had died in the rush
for gold. But he did not mind. He was too sleepy. By the time Long Lake
was reached, however, he had recovered from his sleepiness; and at Deep
Lake he resigned the gripsack to Burns. But thereafter, by the light of
the dim stars, he kept his eyes on Burns. There were not going to be any
accidents with that bag.

At Crater Lake the pack-train went into camp, and Churchill, slinging
the grip on his back, started the steep climb for the summit. For the
first time, on that precipitous wall, he realized how tired he was. He
crept and crawled like a crab, burdened by the weight of his limbs. A
distinct and painful effort of will was required each time he lifted a
foot. An hallucination came to him that he was shod with lead, like a
deep-sea diver, and it was all he could do to resist the desire to reach
down and feel the lead. As for Bondell's gripsack, it was inconceivable
that forty pounds could weigh so much. It pressed him down like a
mountain, and he looked back with unbelief to the year before, when he
had climbed that same pass with a hundred and fifty pounds on his back,
If those loads had weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, then Bondell's
grip weighed five hundred.

The first rise of the divide from Crater Lake was across a small
glacier. Here was a well-defined trail. But above the glacier, which was
also above timber-line, was naught but a chaos of naked rock and
enormous boulders. There was no way of seeing the trail in the darkness,
and he blundered on, paying thrice the ordinary exertion for all that he
accomplished. He won the summit in the thick of howling wind and driving
snow, providentially stumbling upon a small, deserted tent, into which
he crawled. There he found and bolted some ancient fried potatoes and
half a dozen raw eggs.

When the snow ceased and the wind eased down, he began the almost
impossible descent. There was no trail, and he stumbled and blundered,
often finding himself, at the last moment, on the edge of rocky walls
and steep slopes the depth of which he had no way of judging. Part way
down, the stars clouded over again, and in the consequent obscurity he
slipped and rolled and slid for a hundred feet, landing bruised and
bleeding on the bottom of a large shallow hole. From all about him arose
the stench of dead horses. The hole was handy to the trail, and the
packers had made a practice of tumbling into it their broken and dying
animals. The stench overpowered him, making him deathly sick, and as in
a nightmare he scrambled out. Halfway up, he recollected Bondell's
gripsack. It had fallen into the hole with him; the pack-strap had
evidently broken, and he had forgotten it. Back he went into the
pestilential charnel-pit, where he crawled around on hands and knees and
groped for half an hour. Altogether he encountered and counted seventeen
dead horses (and one horse still alive that he shot with his revolver)
before he found Bondell's grip. Looking back upon a life that had not
been without valor and achievement, he unhesitatingly declared to
himself that this return after the grip was the most heroic act he had
ever performed. So heroic was it that he was twice on the verge of
fainting before he crawled out of the hole.

By the time he had descended to the Scales, the steep pitch of Chilcoot
was past, and the way became easier. Not that it was an easy way,
however, in the best of places; but it became a really possible trail,
along which he could have made good time if he had not been worn out, if
he had had light with which to pick his steps, and if it had not been
for Bondell's gripsack. To him, in his exhausted condition, it was the
last straw. Having barely strength to carry himself along, the
additional weight of the grip was sufficient to throw him nearly every
time he tripped or stumbled. And when he escaped tripping, branches
reached out in the darkness, hooked the grip between his shoulders, and
held him back.

His mind was made up that if he missed the Athenian it would be the
fault of the gripsack. In fact, only two things remained in his
consciousness--Bondell's grip and the steamer. He knew only those two
things, and they became identified, in a way, with some stern mission
upon which he had journeyed and toiled for centuries. He walked and
struggled on as in a dream. A part of the dream was his arrival at Sheep
Camp. He stumbled into a saloon, slid his shoulders out of the straps,
and started to deposit the grip at his feet. But it slipped from his
fingers and struck the floor with a heavy thud that was not unnoticed by
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