THE MOUNTAINEERS' SNUG CABIN.
The two hunters, red and white, who had taken eight days to ascend
the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, were only one reaching a
reasonable approach to the level of the plateau of the Yellowstone
Basin.
A little above them shone the snow line belting the giants of granite,
and here the timberline spread in brown. The breath of numberless icy
caverns murmured of the stupendous crystal founts, sources of powerful
streams which would be on their way to enrich regions remote.
The declining sun glimmered along the smooth steeps and glittered on
the jagged ones, reflected from ice, softened by snows, sparkling in
torrents as the scattered diamonds leaped so far that finally they were
dissipated in humid dust.
Through all the difficulties of the way, where no trodden way existed,
the two guides and guards of the little train proceeded with the
perfection of experience to be acquired only by bearing fatigues and
danger with which that magnificent mountain chain abounds.
In fact, it was impossible, even among the host of Western pioneers,
more numerous than those imagine who never can see them collected, to
find two mountain men more keen, skilled, and resolute than "Old Jim"
Ridge and "Cherokee Bill."
Ridge was a taller man than ordinarily met, even in the West; but too
well proportioned, though a little spare, to reveal to the careless
eye how enviably he was gifted by nature. His features were handsome,
though worn and weather-beaten; after a course of Turkish baths and
fine toilet appliances, he would have eclipsed the showiest cavaliers
in a Paris, London, or Vienna opera house ball. His forehead, high and
broad, was creased rather by play of emotions than effect of age. His
blue eyes were mild enough in repose to charm the most timid maid; but
in action they became fierce and sharp as a buffalo's at bay. They were
eyes that could follow a trail without his getting out of the saddle or
leaning over much. His nose was long, rather curved than straight, with
pliant nostrils which rose and fell freely in his liberal respiration
for the supply of a massive chest. The mouth was full of teeth, strong,
sound and white, as only garnish those who are mostly meat eaters; the
lips were red, but almost concealed in a moustache and beard, trimmed
rarely, yet well kept, of a warm flaxen striped with silver; this tint
also gleamed in his long locks from under a blue fox skin cap. Erect,
something like a Mars who inclined towards Apollo rather than Hercules,
sturdy, firm, energetic, any beholder knew that he stood before an
exceptional man, full of goodness, courage, and simple belief in man
being no merely inspired _animal_.
In "citizen's dress" he would have seemed confined; hence, his hunting
costume suited him far better. It was--from the fur cap mentioned to
the moccasins fortified with rawhide soles--composed of a leather
frock, caught in at the waist to support his small arms by its belt,
fringed with its own buckskin; a red flannel shirt, with a black
silk neckerchief carelessly fastened by a diamond pin of California
gold, such as an ingenious miner himself may shape; the leggings were
also of buckskin, fringed like the frock, and similarly so "worked
up in grease" as to have lost the tendency to stretch in the wet
which plays the mischief with leather garments. Balancing a sword
bayonet on one hip, not unlike a machete, hung a hatchet, whilst his
six-shooters were of a size that promised damage at a longish range.
His gun was peculiar. It was a "yager," or short rifle of the old
United States dragoons, sending a large ball; he had had it converted
into a breechloader, a "fourteen shoot," with the availability to
reserve the store and load at the muzzle with any particular charge
independently. The stock was fortified with homemade rawhide bands.
Thanks to long and continual practice, knowing how to humour all "her
leetle peculiarities," as he would affectionately say, the rifle was
used by him afoot or on horse, offhanded or in a rest, with long and
calculated aim or at a snap shot with a fatality that made it dreaded.
As often as by any other title, Jim Ridge was called "the Yager of the
Yellowstone." As far south as the mysterious sun-worshipping Indians'
secluded homes, this name was the backbone of camp stories, in which
our mountaineer's marksmanship was not unduly praised.
Jim Ridge looked the man to make history, but his time had not come, he
would have modestly said, if reproached therefore.
As for his comrade, he was clad as an Indian rover, with better
underclothing and equipments than the red man obtains. His gun was
a formidable and costly Winchester rifle. He was tall and slender,
rather forbidding and haughty, gloomy and imperturbable; but his
small beadlike black eyes sparkled with daring cunning and a kind of
nourished hatred. Spite of his savage airs and war paint, the close
observer must have perceived that he had enjoyed civilisation at one
period. He was not an "unwashed Injin." Indeed, Cherokee Bill was the
best pupil in a St. Louis college, where his intelligence, courtesy
quite charming, kindliness, and devotion to study gained the esteem
of his tutor and the respect of the white students, who, Southerners
though they were, never objected to his blood.
One day, when he was about eighteen, an old Indian woman, whom he
passed at the college gate, followed him to a lonely street, and called
him affectionately. It was his mother, whom he had rarely seen, and
whose latest absence had lasted nearly a year. She had not wasted those
ten months; they were spent on his behalf.
She was a Cherokee, daughter of a chief; she had been united gladly to
the celebrated South and Northwestern trapper and mountain adventurer,
Bill Williams, one of those excellent shots whose gains in the fur
trade were seldom capped by any other three, though "there were giants
in those days"--1830-50. There was no doubt that he possessed some
secret knowledge of the winter refuges of the wild animals valuable in
commerce. Hither he went, always alone, to slay the pick at leisure.
Quaint, hearty, "whole-souled," "Old Bill" Williams had not an enemy,
spite of this "certainty," and even the hunters who tried to follow him
and discover the sources of his fortune, would turn away laughingly
when, at some mountain pass, where one man could keep back a multitude,
they would abruptly run up against Williams' trusty rifle, and hear him
challenge.
"D'ye h'ar, now, boys! Go 'way from fooling with the old mossback when
he has his shooting iron loaded--it may hurt some o' ye; mind that,
boys!"
Nevertheless, at last, Bill Williams failed to come to St. Louis or
Santa Fe with the well-known pack; and, as year after year passed,
the old hunters would sadly shake their frosting brows and feelingly
mutter, "Old Billy's gone up, sure! 'Tell 'ee for a true thing, they've
rubbed out the old marksman. See! H'yar goes for a sign on my stock;
I've a bullet for the nigger that sent him under, mind that!"
At length the mountains yielded up the mystery in part. Bill Williams'
squaw, penetrating snow filled gorges where, assuredly, no woman had
ever stepped, came into a glade where a skeleton of a horse gleamed
yellow like old alabaster in the icy crust. In a snowbank, half fallen
open like a split nut, was visible a kind of human figure, mummified
by dry cold. It was the veteran trapper. He was in the position of a
hunter awaiting a prowling foe ambushed in the shrub, his rifle in
advance, his shrunken face still leaning out eagerly. In the leather
shirt and breast, almost as tanned with sun and wind, was a bullet's
wound: the squaw could even chisel it out of the frozen flesh, where
blood had long since ceased to flow. That was the only clue to the
tracker and slayer of the trapper, and that was the single token and
heritage which altered the entire course of young Williams' life.
School and cities saw him no more; he took to the wilds, and lived on
the warpath as far as the still unpunished murderer of his father was
concerned.
He was rich, like Jim Ridge, for they had penetrated the very "mother
pocket" of the Rocky Mountains' gold store; but he, no more than his
pure white partner, would renounce the existence of peril, but also of
independence.
Suddenly a deep "Hugh!" of attention from Cherokee Bill attracted the
white man's ear.
"What?" said he, peering around, but seeing nothing to alarm him; nor
had the animals, usually acute observers, perceived anything even novel.
"A solitary man," answered Bill, who spoke good English, of course.
Ridge shook his head, not in doubt of his comrade's ability, but in
self-blame.
On the highlands, nothing but long habit endows one with the power
to calculate distances exactly. Rarefaction gives the atmosphere a
clearness which seems to bring the horizon to hand--the sight is
extended indefinitely, and masses of shadows in vast valleys look
like mere specks in the expanses of light, so that the space between
the standpoint and a distant object is usually mistaken. There are
also fantastic effects from the vapour being frozen or expanded, and
presenting apparently solid forms, where, in fact, unsubstantially
reigns.
"I am going for him," proceeded Cherokee Bill; "after all, it's no
odds--we are 'to home!'" with a smile at his own imitation of the
Yankee twang.
Wrapping his gun in his buffalo robes, taken off his pony, the
half-breed slid down the declivity at the side of the "road," so
to flatter it, and scrambling along an icy torrent of lovely blue
water, suddenly sprang in under the cascade from an arching rock and
disappeared.
Ridge did not even glance after him; besides, he had arrived, indeed.
He suddenly took the bell mare by the bridle, and swerved her into an
apparently impenetrable thicket--a "wind-slash," where the maze of
deadwood was increased by the prostration of many tough evergreens,
blown down by an irresistible tornado. But there had been traced here
a kind of way, through which the pack animals insinuated themselves
with the sureness of a cat, brushing off nothing of their loads. As
for the two horses, they were more familiar with the strange path, and
threaded its sinuosities like dogs tunnelling under the walls of a meat
smokehouse. It is probable they scented their stable, and knew rest
and food would shortly reward them for terrible toil and tribulation.
Having pierced the tunnel of vegetation, there was one of stone, still
more curious.
It was an almost regular tube, in black lava stone, four feet wide,
seven or eight in height, smooth as glass mostly. Invisible fissures,
however, must have supplied sweet air, for it was not hard breathing
in all the extent, nearer three quarters of a mile than a half on the
straight. No human hand had fashioned it; one must presume that, in
the days when Vulcan swayed over Neptune on the earth, a torrent of
lava was rushing down the steeps, when, suddenly, an immense snowfall
smothered the fiery river and chilled it into a casing of stone around
a still molten interior. That inner flow had continued, and left the
tubular crust intact.
The ground was a fine sand, heavy with iron, so that it did not rise
far. At the end of this channel a star suddenly gleamed, welcome in the
complete darkness, into which, assuredly, the bravest of men would have
hesitated to follow a foe. It was the outer air again, filling a basin,
rock-engirt to a great height. In this lonely spot there was not a
scrap of moss, not one blade of grass, and no shrub, however hardy. The
calcined "blossom rock" wore a yellow hue, streaked with red and black;
but here and there rose separate boulders of quartz, disintegrated by
time and rain and whirling winds, which danced these Titanic blocks
like thistles, and squeezed out those dull misshapen lumps. Those lumps
were gold, however; this was a "mother-source"--one of those nests of
Fortune for which the confirmed gold seeker quits home, family, wealth
itself in other mines that content the less ravenous. Ridge traversed
this placer--no pleasure to him, lonely Man of the Mountain--with a
foot as reckless as those of the string of animals. The night was
coming. He hurried them on into a second but short subterranean
passage, with a couple of turnings, which finally opened into a cavern.
At its far end a natural doorway afforded a view of the deep blue sky,
where the brilliant stars seemed all of a sudden to be strewn. In those
few moments the sun had gone down, and darkness come.
Ridge laid aside his gun, and started a fire, already laid, in a cavity
of the grotto. The walls gleamed back the rising firelight; here amber
studs in coal, there patches of mica-schist, varied gold and silver in
hue.
After unpacking the animals, whose stores he carefully placed in caves,
he sent them after the bell mare and the hunting horses, in through
a channel to a sort of enclosed pasturage. Returning, he put some
jerked meat down to broil, some roots to roast like so many potatoes,
and added to the setting-out of a rude but hearty meal several of the
delicacies brought in the train from Oregon. He was calmly smoking,
reclining at great ease, with the air of one who felt he had earned the
repose, lulled by the sweet murmur of underground streams, pouring out
of ancient glaciers. The approach of footsteps made him glance round.
The steps he knew to be Cherokee Bill's; so it was their being heavier
than usual that alone roused him.
The half-breed was carrying a man over his shoulder with no more
delicacy than if it had been a deer's carcase.
"Got him, Bill!" remarked Ridge.
"I should smile not to capture such a tenderfoot," was the rejoinder,
as he flung his human prize upon the cavern floor.