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[Illustration: HICKS DREW HIS AND SLAPPED ME OVER THE HEAD WITH IT, EVEN
AS MY FINGER CURLED ON THE TRIGGER.
_Frontispiece. Page 161._]
RAW GOLD
A NOVEL
BY
BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR
_Illustrations by_
CLARENCE H. ROWE
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Copyright, 1907, by
STREET & SMITH
Copyright, 1908, by
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
Issued June, 1908
_Raw Gold_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Long Arm of the Law 7
II. A Reminiscent Hour 18
III. Birds of Prey 30
IV. A Tale Half Told 59
V. Mounted Again 50
VI. Stony Crossing 58
VII. Thirty Days in Irons 69
VIII. Lyn 85
IX. An Idle Afternoon 103
X. The Vanishing Act, and the Fruits Thereof 116
XI. The Gentleman Who Rode in the Lead 130
XII. We Lose Again 146
XIII. Outlawed 163
XIV. A Close Call 179
XV. Piegan Takes a Hand 197
XVI. In the Camp of the Enemy 214
XVII. A Master-stroke of Villainy 226
XVIII. Honor Among Thieves 240
XIX. The Bison 251
XX. The Mouth of Sage Creek 258
XXI. An Elemental Ally 271
XXII. Speechless Hicks 283
XXIII. The Spoils of War 294
XXIV. The Pipe of Peace 303
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Hicks drew his and slapped me over the head with it, even as my
finger curled on the trigger Frontispiece 161
Bedded in the soft earth underneath lay the slim buckskin sacks 159
"There's been too much blood shed over that wretched gold already.
Let them have it" 212
A war for the open road against an enemy whose only weapon was
his unswerving bulk 256
RAW GOLD.
CHAPTER I.
THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW.
How many of us, I wonder, can look back over the misty, half-forgotten
years and not see a few that stand out clear and golden, sharp-cut
against the sky-line of memory? Years that we wish we could live again,
so that we might revel in every full-blooded hour. For we so seldom get
the proper focus on things until we look at them through the clarifying
telescope of Time; and then one realizes with a pang that he can't
back-track into the past and take his old place in the passing show.
Would we, if we could? It's an idle question, I know; wise men and musty
philosophers say that regrets are foolish. But I speak for myself only
when I say that I would gladly wheedle old, gray-bearded _Tempus_ into
making the wheels click backward till I could see again the
buffalo-herds darkening the green of Northwestern prairies. They and the
blanket Indian have passed, and the cowpuncher and Texas longhorns that
replaced them will soon be little more than a vivid memory. Already the
man with the plow is tearing up the brown sod that was a stamping-ground
for each in turn; the wheat-fields have doomed the sage-brush, and
truck-farms line the rivers where the wild cattle and the elk came down
to drink.
It was a big life while it lasted--primitive, exhilarating, spiced with
dangers that added zest to the game; the petty, sordid things of life
only came in on the iron trail. There was no place for them in the old
West, the dead-and-gone West that will soon be forgotten.
I expect nearly everybody between the Arctic Circle and the Isthmus of
Panama has heard more or less of the Northwest Mounted Police. They're
changing with the years, like everything else in this one-time buffalo
country, but when Canada sent them out to keep law and order in a
territory that was a City of Refuge for a lot of tough people who had
played their string out south of the line, they were, as a dry old
codger said about the Indian as a scalp-lifter, naturally fitted for the
task. And it was no light task, then, for six hundred men to keep the
peace on a thousand miles of frontier.
It doesn't seem long ago, but it was in '74 that they filed down the
gangway of a Missouri River boat, walking as straight and stiff as if
every mother's son of them had a ramrod under his tunic, and out on a
rickety wharf that was groaning under the weight of a king's ransom in
baled buffalo-hides.
"Huh!" old Piegan Smith grunted in my ear. "Look at 'em, with their
solemn faces. There'll be heaps uh fun in the Cypress Hills country when
they get t' runnin' the whisky-jacks out. Ain't they a queer-lookin'
bunch?"
They were a queer-looking lot to more than Piegan. Their uniforms fitted
as if they had grown into them; scarlet jackets buttoned to the throat,
black riding-breeches with a yellow stripe running down the outer seam
of each leg, and funny little round caps like the lid of a big
baking-powder can set on one side of their heads, held there by a narrow
strap that ran around the chin. But for all their comic-opera get-up,
there was many a man that snickered at them that day in Benton who
learned later to dread the flash of a scarlet jacket on the distant
hills.
They didn't linger long at Benton, but got under way and marched
overland to the Cypress Hills. On Battle Creek they built the first
post, Fort Walsh, and though in time they located others, Walsh remained
headquarters for the Northwest so long as buffalo-hunting and the Indian
trade endured. And Benton and Walsh were linked together by great
freight-trails thereafter, for the Mounted Police supplies came up the
Missouri and traveled by way of long bull-trains to their destination;
there was no other way then; Canada was a wilderness, and Benton with
its boats from St. Louis was the gateway to the whole Northwest.
Two years from the time Fort Walsh was built the La Pere outfit sent me
across the line in charge of a bunch of saddle-horses the M. P.
quartermaster had said he'd buy if they were good. I turned them over
the afternoon I reached Walsh, and inside of forty-eight hours I was
headed home with the sale-money--ten thousand dollars--in big bills, so
that I could strap it round my middle. I remember that on the hill south
of the post the three of us, two horse-wranglers and myself, flipped a
dollar to see whether we kept to the Assiniboine trail or struck across
country. It was a mighty simple transaction, but it produced some
startling results for me, that same coin-spinning. The eagle came
uppermost, and the eagle meant the open prairie for us. So we aimed for
Stony Crossing, and let our horses jog; there were three of us, well
mounted, and we had plenty of grub on a pack-horse; it seemed that our
homeward trip should be a pleasant jaunt. It certainly never entered my
head that I should soon have ample opportunity to see how high the
"Riders of the Plains" stacked up when they undertook to enforce
Canadian law and keep intact the peace and dignity of the Crown.
We had started early that morning, and by the time we thought of camping
for dinner we saw ahead of us what we could tell was a white man's camp.
It wasn't far, so we kept on, and presently it developed that we had
accidentally come upon old Piegan Smith. He was lying there ostensibly
resting his stock from the hard buffalo-running of the past winter, but
I knew the old rascal's horses were more weary from a load of moonshine
whisky they had lately jerked into the heart of the territory. But he
was there, anyway, and half a dozen choice spirits with him, and when
we'd said "Howdy" all around they proceeded to spring a keg of whisky on
us.
Now, the whole Northwest groaned beneath a cast-iron prohibition law at
that time, and for some years thereafter. No booze of any description
was supposed to be sold in that portion of the Queen's domain. If you
got so thirsty you couldn't stand it any longer, you could petition the
governing power of the Territory for what was known as a "permit," which
same document granted you leave and license to have in your possession
one gallon of whisky. If you were a person of irreproachable character,
and your humble petition reached his excellency when he was amiably
disposed, you might, in the course of a few weeks, get the desired
permission--but, any way you figured it, whisky was hard to get, and
when you got it it came mighty high.
Naturally, that sort of thing didn't appeal to many of the
high-stomached children of fortune who ranged up and down the
Territory--being nearly all Americans, born with the notion that it is a
white man's incontestable right to drink whatever he pleases whenever it
pleases him. Consequently, every mother's son of them who knew how
rustled a "worm," took up his post in some well-hidden coulée close to
the line, and inaugurated a small-sized distillery. Others, with less
skill but just as much ambition, delivered it in four-horse loads to
the traders, who in turn "boot-legged" it to whosoever would buy. Some
of them got rich at it, too; which wasn't strange, when you consider
that everybody had a big thirst and plenty of money to gratify it. I've
seen barrels of moonshine whisky, so new and rank that two drinks of it
would make a jack-rabbit spit in a bull-dog's face, sold on the quiet
for six and seven dollars a quart--and a twenty-dollar gold piece was
small money for a gallon.
All this, of course, was strictly against the peace and dignity of the
powers that were, and so the red-coated men rode the high divides with
their eagle eye peeled for any one who looked like a whisky-runner. And
whenever they did locate a man with the contraband in his possession,
that gentleman was due to have his outfit confiscated and get a chance
to ponder the error of his ways in the seclusion of a Mounted Police
guardhouse if he didn't make an exceedingly fast getaway.
We all took a drink when these buffalo-hunters produced the "red-eye."
So far as the right or wrong of having contraband whisky was concerned,
I don't think any one gave it a second thought. The patriarchal decree
of the government was a good deal of a joke on the plains,
anyway--except when you were caught defying it! Then Piegan Smith set
the keg on the ground by the fire where everybody could help himself as
he took the notion, and I laid down by a wagon while dinner was being
cooked.
After six weeks of hard saddle-work, it struck me just right to lie
there in the shade with a cool breeze fanning my face, and before long I
was headed smoothly for the Dreamland pastures. I hadn't dozed very long
when somebody scattered my drowsiness with an angry yelp, and I raised
up on one elbow to see what was the trouble.
Most of the hunters were bunched on one side of the fire, and they were
looking pretty sour at a thin, trim-looking Mounted Policeman who was
standing with his back to me, holding the whisky-keg up to his nose. A
little way off stood his horse, bridle-reins dragging, surveying the
little group with his ears pricked up as if he, too, could smell the
whisky. The trooper sniffed a moment and set the keg down.
"Gentlemen," he asked, in a soft, drawly voice that had a mighty
familiar note that puzzled me, "have you a permit to have whisky in your
possession?"
Nobody said a word. There was really nothing they could say. He had them
dead to rights, for it was smuggled whisky, and they knew that policeman
was simply asking as a matter of form, and that his next move would be
to empty the refreshments on the ground; if they got rusty about it he
_might_ haze the whole bunch of us into Fort Walsh--and that meant each
of us contributing a big, fat fine to the Queen's exchequer.
"You know the law," he continued, in that same mild tone. "Where is your
authority to have this stuff?"
Then the clash almost came. If old Piegan Smith hadn't been sampling the
contents of that keg so industriously he would never have made a break.
For a hot-tempered, lawless sort of an old reprobate, he had good
judgment, which a man surely needed if he wanted to live out his
allotted span in the vicinity of the forty-ninth parallel those troubled
days. But he'd put enough of the fiery stuff under his belt to make him
touchy as a parlor-match, and when the trooper, getting no answer,
flipped the keg over on its side and the whisky trickled out among the
grass-roots, Piegan forgot that he was in an alien land where the law is
upheld to the last, least letter and the arm of it is long and
unrelenting.
"Here's my authority, yuh blasted runt," he yelled, and jerked his
six-shooter to a level with the policeman's breast. "Back off from that
keg, or I'll hang your hide to dry on my wagon-wheel in a holy minute!"