THE SHADOWS BEGIN TO FALL.
When Corbett woke, the first beams of the rising moon were throwing an
uncertain light over the forest paths, and the children of night were
still abroad, the quiet-footed deer taking advantage of the moonlight to
make an early breakfast before the sun and man rose together to annoy
them.
The camp-fire had just been made up afresh, and a frying-pan, full of
great rashers, was hissing merrily upon it, while a kettle full of
strong hot coffee stood beside it, ready to wash the rashers down.
Men want warming when they rise at midnight from these forest slumbers,
and Roberts, knowing that it would be long ere his friends broke their
fast again, had been up and busy for the last half-hour, building a real
nor'-west fire, and preparing a generous breakfast.
Cruickshank too was up, if not to speed the parting, at any rate to see
them safely off the premises, a smile of unusual benevolence on his dark
face.
Between them, he and Roberts put up the travellers' packs, taking each
man's blankets as he got out of them, and rolling in them such light
rations as would just last for a four days' trip. In twenty minutes from
the time when they crawled out of their blankets, the three stood ready
to start.
"Are you all set?" asked Cruickshank.
"All set," replied Chance.
"Then the sooner you 'get' the better. It will be as much as your
heathen can do to make the journey in time, I'll bet."
"Why, is the trail a very bad one?"
"Oh, it's all much like this, but it's most of it uphill, and there may
be some snow on the top. But you can't miss your way with all these
tracks in front."
"You will be in yourself a day or two after us, won't you?" asked
Corbett.
"Yes. If you don't make very good time I daresay I shall, although the
snow may delay the ponies some. But don't you worry about them. I'll
take care of the ponies, you can trust me for that."
"Then, if you will be in so soon, I won't trouble to take anything
except one blanket and my rifle," remarked Ned.
"Oh, take your rocker. It looks more business-like; and, besides, all
the millionaires go in with 'nothing but a rocker-iron for their whole
kit, and come out worth their weight in gold.'"
There was a mocking ring in Cruickshank's voice as he said this, at
variance with his oily smile, but Steve Chance took his words in good
faith. Steve still believed in the likelihood of his becoming a
millionaire at one stroke of the miner's pick.
"I guess you're right, colonel. I'll take my rocker-iron, whatever else
I leave behind. Lend a hand to fix it on to my pack, will you?" and
then, when Cruickshank had done this, Steve added with a laugh: "I shall
consider you entitled to (what shall we say?) one per cent on the
profits of the mine when in full swing, for your services, colonel."
"Don't promise too much, Chance. You don't know what sort of a gold-mine
you are giving away yet;" and the speaker bent over a refractory strap
in Steve's pack to hide an ugly gleam of white teeth, which might have
had a meaning even for such an unsuspicious fool as Ned Corbett, who at
this moment picked up his Winchester and held out his hand to
Cruickshank.
"Good-bye, colonel," he said. "What with the claims and the packs, we
have trusted you now with every dollar we have in the world. Lucky for
us that we are trusting to the honour of a soldier and a gentleman,
isn't it? Good-bye to you."
It was the kindliest speech Ned had ever made to Cruickshank. Weeks of
companionship, and the man's readiness to atone for his mistake, had had
their effect upon Corbett's generous nature; but its warmth was lost
upon the colonel.
Either he really did not see, or else he affected not to see the
outstretched hand; in any case he did not take it, and Ned went away
without exchanging that silent grip (which a writer of to-day has aptly
called "an Englishman's oath") with the man to whom he had intrusted his
last dollar.
As for old Roberts, he followed his friends for a couple of hundred
yards upon their way, and then wrung their hands until the bones
cracked.
"Give this to Rampike when you see him, Ned. I guess he'll be at
Williams Creek, or Antler; Williams Creek most likely," said the old
poet in parting, and handed a note with some little inclosure in it to
Ned.
"All right, I won't forget. Till we meet again, Rob;" and Corbett waved
his cap to him.
"Till we meet again!" Roberts repeated after him, and stood looking
vacantly along the trail until Steve and Corbett passed out of sight.
Then he, too, turned and tramped back to camp, cheering himself as he
went with a stave of his favourite ditty.
The last the lads heard of their comrade on that morning was the
crashing of a dry twig or two beneath old Roberts' feet, and the refrain
of his song as it died away in the distance--
"Riding, riding, riding on my old pack-mule."
Ned Corbett could not imagine how he had ever thought that air a lively
one. It was stupidly mournful this morning, or else the woods and the
distance played strange tricks with the singer's voice. But if Ned was
affected by an imaginary minor key in his old friend's singing, a
glimpse at the camp he had left would not have done much to restore his
cheerfulness.
The embers had died down, and looked almost as gray and sullen as the
face of the man who sat and scowled at them from a log alongside. The
only living thing in camp besides the colonel was one of those impudent
gray birds, which the up-country folk call "whisky-jacks." Of course he
had come to see what he could steal. That is the nature of jays, and the
whisky-jack is the Canadian jay. At first the bird stood with his head
on one side eyeing the colonel, uncertain whether it would be safe to
come any closer or not. But there was a fine piece of bacon-rind at the
colonel's feet, so the bird plucked up his courage and hopped a few
paces nearer. He had measured his distance to an inch, and with one eye
on the colonel and one on the bacon, was just straining his neck to the
utmost to drive his beak into the succulent morsel, when the man whom he
thought was asleep discharged a furious kick at an unoffending log, and
clenching his fist ground out between his teeth muttered:
"A soldier and a gentleman! a soldier and a gentleman! Yes, but it came
a bit too late, Mr. Edward Corbett. Hang it, I wish you had stayed
behind instead of that fool, Roberts."
Of course the "whisky-jack" did not understand the other biped's
language, but he was a bird of the world, and instinct told him that his
companion in camp was dangerous; so, though the bacon-rind still lay
there, he flitted off to a tree hard by, and spent the next half-hour in
heaping abuse upon the colonel from a safe distance.
That "whisky-jack" grew to be a very wise bird, and in his old days used
to tell many strange stories about human bipeds and the Balm-of-Gilead
camp.
But there was half a mile of brush between Ned and their old camp, so he
saw nothing of all this; and after the fresh morning air had roused him,
and the exercise had set his blood going through his veins at its normal
pace, he went unconcernedly on his way, talking to Steve as long as
there was room enough for the two to walk side by side, and then
gradually forging ahead, and setting that young Yankee a step which kept
him extended, and made poor little Phon follow at a trot.
Though Ned and Steve had grown used to isolation upon the trail with
ten laden beasts between the two, they made several attempts upon this
particular morning to carry on a broken conversation, or lighten the
road with snatches of song.
Perhaps it was that they were making unconscious efforts to drive away a
feeling of depression, which sometimes comes over men's natures with as
little warning as a storm over an April sky.
But their efforts were in vain; nature was too strong for them. In the
great silence amid these funereal pines their voices seemed to fall at
their own feet, and ere long the forest had mastered them, as it masters
the Indians, and the birds, and the wild dumb beasts which wander about
in its fastnesses. The only creature which retains its loquacity in a
pine-forest is the squirrel, and he is always too busy to cultivate
sentiment of any kind.
Cruickshank had warned them that the trail led uphill, and it
undoubtedly did so. At first the three swung along over trails brown
with the fallen pine needles of last year, soft to the foot and level to
the tread, with great expanses of fruit bushes upon either side,--bushes
that in another month or two would be laden with a repast spread only
for the bear and the birds. Salmon-berry and rasp-berry, soap-berry and
service-berry, and two or three different kinds of bilberry were there,
as well as half a dozen others which neither Ned nor Steve knew by
sight. But the season of berries was not yet, so they wetted their
parched lips with their tongues and passed on with a sigh.
Then the road began to go uphill. They knew that by the way they kept
tripping over the sticks and by the increased weight of their packs. By
and by Steve thought they would come to a level place at the top, and
there they would lie down for a while and rest. But that top never came,
or at least the sun was going round to the south, and it had not come
yet. And then the air began to grow more chill, and the trees to change.
There were no more bushes, or but very few of them; and the trees, which
were black dismal-looking balsams, were draped with beard-moss, the
winter food of the cariboo, and there was snow in little patches at
their feet. When the sun had gone round to the west the snow had grown
more plentiful, and there were glades amongst the balsams, and at last
Steve was glad, for they had got up to the top of the divide.
But he was wrong again, for again the trail rose, and this time through
a belt of timber which the wind had laid upturned across their path.
Heavens! how heavy the packs grew then, and how their limbs ached with
stepping over log after log, bruising their shins against one and
stumbling head-first over another. At first Steve growled at every
spiked-bough which caught and held him, and groaned at every sharp stake
which cut into the hollow of his foot. But anger in the woods soon gives
place to a sullen stoicism. It is useless to quarrel with the
unresponsive pines. The mountains and the great trees look down upon
man's insignificance, and his feeble curse dies upon his lips, frozen by
the terrible sphinx-like silence of a cold passionless nature.
As long as the sunlight lasted the three kept up their spirits fairly
well. The glades in their winter dress, with the sunlight gleaming upon
the dazzling snow and flashing from the white plumes of the pines, were
cheery enough, and took Corbett's thoughts back to Christmas in the old
country; besides, there were great tracks across one glade--tracks like
the tracks of a cow, and Ned was interested in recognizing the
footprints of the beast which has given its name to Cariboo.
But when the sun went, everything changed. A great gloom fell like a
pall upon man and nature: the glitter which made a gem of every lakelet
was gone, and the swamps, which had looked like the homes of an ideal
Father Christmas, relapsed into dim shadowy places over whose soft
floors murder might creep unheard, whilst the balsam pines stood rigid
and black, like hearse plumes against the evening sky.
"Ned, we can't get out of this confounded mountain to-night, can we?"
asked Chance.
"No, old man, I don't think we can," replied Ned, straining his eyes
along the trail, which still led upwards.
"Then I propose that we camp;" and Chance suited the action to the word,
by heaving his pack off his shoulders and dropping on to it with a sigh
of relief.
Perhaps the three sat in silence for five minutes (it certainly was not
more), asking only for leave to let the aching muscles rest awhile;
though even this seemed too much to ask, for long before their muscles
had ceased to throb, before Steve's panting breath had begun to come
again in regular cadence, the chill of a winter night took hold upon
them, stiffened their clothes, and would shortly have frozen them to
their seats.
"This is deuced nice for May, isn't it, Steve?" remarked Ned with a
shiver. "Lend me the axe, Phon; it is in your pack. If we don't make a
fire we shall freeze before morning. Steve, you might cut some brush,
old chap, and you and Phon might beat down some of the snow into a floor
to camp on. I'll go and get wood enough to last all night;" and Corbett
walked off to commence operations upon a burnt "pine stick," still
standing full of pitch and hard as a nail. But Ned was used to his axe,
and the cold acted on him as a spur to a willing horse, so that he hewed
away, making the chips fly and the axe ring until he had quite a stack
of logs alongside the shelter which Steve had built up.
Then the sticks began to crackle and snap like Chinese fireworks, and
the makers of the huge fire were glad enough to stand at a respectful
distance lest their clothes should be scorched upon their backs. That is
the worst of a pine fire. It never gives out a comfortable glow, but
either leaves you shivering or scorches you.
Having toasted themselves on both sides, the three travellers found a
place where they would be safe from the wood smoke, and still standing
pulled out the rations set apart for the first day's supper, and ate the
cold bacon and heavy damper slowly, knowing that there was no second
course coming.
When you are reduced to two slices of bread and one of bacon for a full
meal, with only two such meals in the day, and twelve hours of
abstinence and hard labour between them, it is wonderful how even coarse
store bacon improves in flavour. I have even known men who would
criticise the cooking at a London club, to collect the stale crumbs from
their pockets and eat them with apparent relish in the woods, though the
crumbs were thick with fluff and tobacco dust! As they stood there
munching, Ned said:
"I suppose, Steve, we did wisely in coming on?"
"What else could we have done, Ned?"
"Yes, that's it. What else could we have done? And yet--"
"And yet?" repeated Steve questioningly. "What is your trouble, Ned?"
"Do you remember my saying, when I bought the claims, that with
Cruickshank under our eyes all the time we should have a good security
for our money?"
"Yes, and now you have let him go. I see what you mean; but you can rely
upon Roberts, can't you?"
"As I would upon myself," replied Corbett shortly. "But still I have
broken my resolution."
"Oh, well, that is no great matter; and besides, I don't believe that
the colonel would do a crooked thing any more than we would."
"He-he! He-he-he!"
It was a strangely-harsh cackle was Phon's apology for a laugh, and
coming so rarely and so unexpectedly, it made the two speakers start.
But they could get nothing out of the man when they talked to him. He
was utterly tired out, and in another few minutes lay fast asleep by the
fire.
"I am afraid that quaint little friend of ours doesn't care much for the
colonel," remarked Ned.
"Oh, Phon! Phon thinks he is the devil. He told me so;" and Steve
laughed carelessly.
What did it matter what a Chinaman thought! A little yellow-skinned,
pig-tailed fellow like Phon was not likely to have found out anything
which had escaped Steve's Yankee smartness.