THE IRRESISTIBLE BAIT.
The band of gold grabbers, whose prisoner Miss Maclan had become, had
met the snowstorm supinely. They had, besides, obeyed their prudent
leader by remaining buried in its protective mantle until the day was
broken. The ravine crest had quickly been banked up, so that shielded
them; and the marshland, offering no poor resistance to the tempest,
had turned no gusts back. They had suffered the least of any exposed
in that time of anguish. The danger over, they set to cleaning the
camp with coarse jokes, and thronged to breakfast at a bugle call,
after having worked on a cup of coffee alone with the wolfish appetite
of sojourners in that high latitude. They were well provisioned, none
of the wormy "crackers," rank pork, and burnt horse bean coffee of
commerce, but good flour bread, deer and bear meat, and honest salt
pork. Captain Kidd would have lost half the troop in this onerous
wintry expedition with an inferior table.
For the leaders a marquee had been erected, raised of the canvas that
sheltered them nightly, in which a folding table stood on picket pins
for legs, so that the guests could squat around. Well loaded with
hearty fare and various liquors, it was the article of furniture most
prominent.
The captain and his lieutenants were received by a youth of eighteen,
who took their rifles with the address of an experienced servant, and a
Negro.
As soon as he arrived Kidd bade the latter withdraw.
"_¡Vamos!_ 'moosey!" he cried, "For your big ears are not wanted. _The
Drudge_ will do the waiting. Tell the señora to breakfast with her new
toy! I have a business conference to make with my partners. Mind, none
of your sneaking curiosity, or I'll sell you to the Blackfeet for a
slave. They are swarming out there!"
The Negro dived under a flap of canvas with a terrified face, as much
afraid of his threat as of his master, thus evading a tin plate that
was wantonly skimmed after him, and might have cut his head.
"Sit to it, gentlemen," said Kidd, rubbing his hands, "and don't let
the good things get cold."
They had not waited for this apology for grace to begin the meal like
so many carnivora. For about a quarter of an hour no one uttered a
word except "Pass the mustard," "Don't let that bottle go to sleep
thar!" and so on, whilst "Drudge" was kept on the trot.
He was only about eighteen, we repeat; but he appeared older from being
tall, large in the joints, muscular, and especially from the resolution
on his manly countenance; he was sallow, and his restless eyes dark.
He seemed a prey to incurable melancholy. Though he was too crafty to
let his true sentiments be exposed, it was clear that he served these
ruffians with inward repugnance, not to say hatred. Two of them in
particular filled him with disgust, and they always spoke in a scornful
and threatening tone; they even struck him and kicked him, as if they
considered him their thrall. These were "Quarry Dick" and "Lottery
Paul," Kidd's next men, of whom Mr. Filditch has made an unflattering
mention. Their more intimate acquaintance is about to be given.
The chief was the first to break the silence with a remark that summed
up the prevailing sentiment, no doubt, as all growled or grinned
approvingly.
"The storm was no feather," he said, "but it has blown over nicely. Old
Nick has taken first-rate care of his chicks."
"I don't think anything less would have pulled us through so far," said
his right hand neighbour sarcastically.
"And so he ought. We work mighty hard for him, you bet!" said his
opposite, emphatically.
"To say nothing of what we are going to do pretty soon 'on,'" concluded
the one facing the captain, upon which all four laughed.
"Yes, it's blown over, and our old friends in Texas are catching it
about this time. I hope it will wash the slate of some of my unpaid
scores in barrooms I could tell you of! But care killed a cat; I'll
have none of that in my tumbler. There's only one thing kept me awake
last night, and that was not the thought of the storm."
"What, my friend Corky Joe?" inquired the captain, who seemed to feel
peculiar affection for this lieutenant.
This singular, or even comic title, that of the wolverine, otherwise
_carcajieu_ of the Canadian trappers, the wickedest wild beast of
Northwest American _fauna_, seemed no misnomer for a daredevil,
spirited, malicious, alert, quick to whip out a knife or draw a pistol
to back his impudent and defiant speech. The finest shot with either
hand was he, the best horseman and the most tireless and reliable
sentinel of the band.
"I only would like to know who cut off our friends in the narrow ways."
"Oh, as for that, the girl whom we brought in alone knows; but I
am sure they knew we were 'no good settlers,' to have laid our
representatives low. I am reserving the questioning of that girl till
our more important 'talk' is over. Light your pipes, gentlemen, if you
are done polishing your eyeteeth, and let us hold the council."
"There's one thing sure," observed the Frenchman, "the more I look
on this forsaken country, through smoke or with a clear eye, whither
the Cap. has brought us, the more firmly I wish I had it well behind
me. It's enough to make a man wish he was a grizzly; nothing else can
thrive here."
"Come, come, Frenchy," remonstrated the leader, "we are no more
delighted than you. It is not here I mean to lay out Kiddville! But
there is no other way to the port whereto I steer."
"Port! More like alkali water; there's not an ounce of anything worth
a man's stooping to pick up over all the tracks we've crossed. The
fact is, the hangers round Varina have 'stuffed' you with yarns of the
wonderland which gets farther away the nearer you come to it! Gammon
about the valley covered with surface gold! I know what gold bearing
earth is, having been in Californy in the good old years!" with a smack
of the lips. "This volcanic tract is burnt out. Any metal has long
since melted and run away miles below. Either you have swallowed the
old trapper's drunken mouthings for gospel, or you have let Corky Joe
here get you in a coil! The bigger lies he tells, the more you like
him, I believe! I wouldn't copper his layout one _sou!_ You hear me!"
"You keep my name out of it!" cried the individual alluded to, with an
unfriendly tone.
"I'll kick you out of it if you lead us astray! I am not to be bluffed
off by you, ugly face! This is a free country, ain't it? And my opinion
is that you fawn on the chief to have the longest pull at his bottle of
select brandy!"
Scarcely were the words spoken before the Wolverine reached across the
low board with a gleaming bowie knife. Luckily, the Frenchman knew the
man he had taunted, and threw himself back, which gave Kidd time to
shove himself between.
"Put up your knives," he roared. "What do you friends want to waste a
stab and a cut for when we are literally surrounded by the enemy? It's
only when we have eaten the last round of horseflesh that we should
carve one another, and we have not come to that corner yet. Come, come,
don't rile _me_ with your snarling!"
"All right, old man, that's past now," returned the Parisian, "only
we'll come to a settlement before we come to the settlement, or I am
much mistaken--"
"Still at it, confound you!" cried the captain, laying his hand on his
revolver butt.
"Oh, no, that's only a leetle friendly caution. Here's his health! All
I have to say is that if you had listened to Dick and me, who wanted to
'clean up' the new mines at Deadman, Wyoming, instead of this uncombed
savage, the _carcajieu_, who bolsters you up in your obstinate fit to
keep on going ahead, we should not be where snowstorms rage. Why, you
knew us down south, but the Wolverine was no acquaintance of yours a
month before you gathered the gang; my pile on that for a fact!"
"That's so, Paul," returned the leader, dreamily.
"Why not even have gone through the Mormon country? We all know they
are 'temperance folk'; but, bless you! It's next door to a teetotal
town that one drinks the best tarantula juice."
"That's true!" said Dick.
"I daresay," replied the chief bandit, "that I have gone a trifle out
of my way, but you ought to know that I was bound to leave no 'pointer'
on my path as to my true aim. Things were getting too hot for us on
the border--we are well out of sheriffs' and vigilance committees'
curiosity. I do not like there being so many folks afoot just where I
believed we should find a desert, but perhaps last night's blizzard has
scattered them like so many loose pebbles. What do you think of our
scrape?" he demanded of Corky Joe.
"About as bad as they make 'em," was the unhesitating answer.
"What's your opinion, Dick?"
The English ex-convict shook his head sulkily.
"It's a beast of a country," he grumbled. "There's more snow falls in
an hour here than would fill St. James' Park for a week! It will be
almost a treat to be a roast at a redskin's torture fire."
"I concur," added Lottery Paul, laughing. "All right, Quarryman, we are
two of a pair, and I'll stick to you when you say we must claw out of
this trap."
"What's the use of this bullying bounce?" cried the captain, "We are
all in the same box, aren't we?"
"I don't know so much about that. Paul and me are new to this wild
tramping business, and never came to such passes as these deuced
mountain passes before. The Californian Sierra is molehills to it!"
"In short," took up the Frenchman, "we believe your gold mine is a
fraud. Your course so far tends to take us over the Rockies, where many
a better man has left his bones, and though a solid chunk of gold as
big as a house awaits me yonder, I have my reasons not to go over to
the Pacific coast."
"Same here," subjoined the English felon, scowling.
"What I go on to say is, every step forward means harder fare--the
tracts you assured us were desolate are growing Injins, your gold mine
does not show up, and so, give us a couple of hundred dollars apiece
for having escorted you so far, and we'll march off on our own hooks."
"That's my say, too," coincided Dick, delighted with the Parisian's
eloquence.
"I have heard you out," proceeded the captain, smoothing his brow with
an effort. "Now, hearken to me. You are green to these parts--very
well. From my youth up I have heard stories of a Wonderland on whose
threshold we now are. The Indians regard it with awe, and only peer
into it from afar; but trapper and hunter have penetrated it by design
or hazard, and all their tales cannot be campfire lies. Moreover, they
have brought palpable evidences to the border. At Santa Fe I gambled
with a trapper, whose jacket was bright with diamond buttons, stones
that he found in a marvellous garden where the berries were turned
to petrifaction as they grew; the chokecherries were rubies, the
blueberries turquoises, the pigeon berries garnets, the Indian pears
flawless crystal. He had collected a pouchful in half an hour, for
which a Jew at St. Peter's gave him eight hundred dollars as they were
turned over to him in the rough."
"Did you ever meet 'Oregon Ol,'[1] in your rustling about? He's a
Nor'wester who has traversed this region more than most; he never
wants for gold, and he hardly takes a trap out with him, and often
brings back the powder he started with. And Marcellin's Choctaw
Boy, and Hopeful Ed., and Simmins the Knifer, all familiar with the
Yellowstone River to its uppermost forks. They have lined their pockets
without handling the spade, on surface flakes alone. And Jim Ridge,
the father of the Old Birds of the Sierras--with his copper face
companion the Cherokee!" he went on, with a deep and sudden frown and
a baleful glance, "Look at their equipments, at the way they buy the
cream of everything, and take two or three trains a year up into the
highlands. What is all that for? Provisioning themselves for staking
out all the best spots in an auriferous region--the motherland of the
gold and silver of which mere washings go down thither by driblets!
Those mountaineers are leagued with the Yager, and they have found
an enormously rich hole in the Yellowstone Basin. There's enough to
make each of us twenty times, ay, fifty times a millionaire, and those
dozen hunters selfishly stand us off! Go your way, if you are bent on
it, without any dollars from me. I will persevere, though I am left
alone, in striving to wrest this secret from that crew. I tell you,
boys, I have had enough of a hard life with the prospect of walking off
a mule's back till a rope round my neck brings me to a short stop. I
want, with the worst kind of want, to go see Europe with a big draft
on the Bank of England, and have some of these Eye-talian princelings
black my boots before I die in 'em."
Then, seeing that he had kindled his hearers with cupidity, he
concluded:
"Who loves gold galore, comes along with Mr. Pirate King!"
"I catch on," cried Joe, as if inspirited.
"They do say, though, that the Yellowstone Valley is haunted--spirits
of Injin devils guard the incalculable treasures, spit hot poison at
the invader, smother him in scalding mud, shower rocks upon him from
tall bluffs--so if you are afraid of what hasn't daunted Old Jim and
his band, why, leave me and Joe to have the first chop 'rise' on you
when we meet in Nevada City, me and Joe regularly bulging out with
whisky, good hotel grub, and gold and diamonds, and you scraping the
gutter for the dimes swept out of the stores! Look here! If in ten days
we are not knee deep in golden sands, in a vale where eternal summer
reigns, then lead me out and shoot me!"
There was a pause: the Frenchman's eyes blazed like fanned coals,
the Englishman panted noisily and ground his teeth with a bulldog's
anticipatory glee.
"We are on a sure soft thing now," pursued the captain, clinching
the nail which he had driven home. "I don't know how it is, but I
am confident our vein of bad luck has fined out to a hair, and that
fortune is going to do a smile."
"All right," said Dick, after a glance at the Frenchman, who nodded,
"we'll tail on for ten days."
"Then another drink round. Joe, pick me out four or five fellows
who can use snowshoes without laying themselves up with the _mal du
racquet_ (snowshoe lameness), and let them scout about to see if the
Indian sign crops up over the new snows."
The lieutenant having left the tent, the captain pulled out a map on
sheepskin, and explained in detail where he surmised the treasure of
the trappers to be, and where he also hoped to surprise Jim Ridge in
his mountain recess. His enthusiastic promises and the effect of the
liquors restored the recalcitrant pair to good-humoured allegiance.
In two hours' time, one of the scouts returned, pleading that his
snowshoes were unable to help him over a snow coated _ciénaga_, or bad
swampy stretch, where he would have sunk and been smothered. But, in
the captain's ear, he whispered a communication which set that worthy
to reflection. At the end of it, he directed Lottery Paul to take the
rackets and go off investigating in a certain direction, ordered Joe to
keep good guard over the camp, and took Dick with him on an exploration
of his own.
Installed without any hostile spies at his elbow as provisional
commander, Corkey Joe smiled to himself, and muttering: "Nothing could
have been better; hang them all three!" he proceeded towards the rocks,
where Drudge was standing on guard over a mysterious doorway.
[Footnote 1: See The Treasure of Pearls in this series.]