"JUMP OR I'LL SHOOT."
Three days after they left the Balm-of-Gilead camp, Ned Corbett and his
two friends stood upon a ridge of the bald mountains looking down upon
the promised land.
"So this is Eldorado, is it?"
Ned Corbett himself was the speaker, though probably those who had known
him at home or in Victoria would have hardly recognized him. All the
three gold-seekers had altered much in the last month, and standing in
the bright sunlight of early morning the changes wrought by hard work
and scanty food were very apparent.
Bronzed, and tired, and ragged, with a stubble of half-grown beards upon
their chins, with patches of sacking or deer-skin upon their trousers,
and worn-out moccasins on their feet, none of the three showed signs of
that golden future which was to come. Beggars they might be, but surely
Croesus never looked like this!
"We shall make it to-day, Ned," remarked Chance, taking off his cap to
let the cool mountain breeze fan his brow.
"We may, if we can drag him along, but he is very nearly dead beat;" and
the direction in which Ned glanced showed his companion that he was
speaking of a limp bundle of blue rags, which had collapsed in a heap at
the first sign of a halt.
"Why not leave Phon to follow us?" asked Steve in a low tone. Low though
the tone was, the bundle of blue rags moved, and a worn, shrivelled
face looked piteously up into Ned's.
"No, no, Steve," replied Corbett. "All right, Phon, I'll not leave you
behind, even if I have to pack you on my own shoulders."
Thus reassured, the Chinaman collapsed once more. There was not a muscle
in his body which felt capable of further endurance, and yet, with the
gold so near, and his mind full of superstitious horrors, he would have
crawled the rest of the journey upon his hands and knees rather than
have stayed behind.
"Thank goodness, there it is at last!" cried Corbett a minute later,
shading his eyes with his hand. "That smoke I expect rises from
somewhere near our claims;" and the speaker pointed to a faint column of
blue which was just distinguishable from the surrounding atmosphere.
"I believe you are right, Ned. Come, Phon, one more effort!" and Steve
helped the Chinaman on to his legs, though he himself was very nearly
worn out.
Ned took up the slender pack which Phon had carried until then, and
added it to the other two packs already upon his broad shoulders. After
all the three packs weighed very little, for Ned's companions had thrown
away everything except their blankets, and Steve would have even thrown
his blanket away had not Ned taken charge of it. Ned knew from
experience that so long as he sleeps fairly soft and warm at night a
man's strength will endure many days, but once you rob him of his rest,
the strongest man will collapse in a few hours.
As for their food, that was not hard to carry. Each man had a crust
still left in his pocket, and more than enough tobacco. Along the trail
there were plenty of streams full of good water, and if bread and water
and tobacco did not satisfy them, they would have to remain unsatisfied.
It had been a hard race against time, and the last lap still remained to
be run; but that smoke was the goal, and with the goal in sight even
Phon shuffled along a little faster, though he was so tired that,
whenever he stumbled he fell from sheer weakness.
The bald mountains so often alluded to in Cariboo story are ranges of
high upland, rising above the forest level, and entirely destitute of
timber at the top.
Here in late summer the sunnier slopes are slippery with a luxuriant
growth of long lush grasses and weeds, and ablaze with the vivid crimson
of the Indian pink. In early spring (and May is early spring in Cariboo)
there is still snow along the ridges, and even down below, though the
grasses are brilliantly green, the time of flowers has hardly yet come.
Here and there as the three hurried down they came across big boulders
of quartz gleaming in the sun. These were as welcome to Steve as the
last milestone on his road home to a weary pedestrian. Where the quartz
was, there would the gold be also, argued Steve, and the thought roused
him for a moment out of the mechanical gait into which he had fallen.
But he soon dropped into it again. A hill had risen and shut the column
of smoke out of his sight, and the trail was leading down again to the
timber.
Away far to the east a huge dome of snow gleamed whitely against the
sky-line. That was the outpost of the Rockies. But Steve had no eyes
even for the Rockies. All he saw was a sea of endless brown hills
rolling and creeping away fold upon fold in the distance, all so like
one to another from their bald ridges to the blue lakes at their feet,
that his head began to spin, and he almost thought that he must be
asleep, and this some nightmare country in which he wandered along a
road that had no end.
Luckily Ned roused him from this dreamy fit from time to time, or it
might well have happened that Steve's journey would have ended on this
side of Williams Creek in a rapid slide from the narrow trail to the
bottom of one of the little ravines along which it ran.
Both men were apparently thinking of the same subject. So that though
their sentences were short and elliptical, they had no difficulty in
understanding each other's meaning. Men don't waste words on such a
march as theirs.
"Another three hours ought to do it," Ned would mutter, shifting his
pack so as to give the rope a chance of galling him in a fresh place.
"If we get there by midnight, I reckon it would do."
"Yes, if we could find the claims."
"Ah, there is that about it! Have you got the map?"
"Yes. I've got that all right. Oh, we shall do it in good time;" and Ned
looked up at his only clock, the great red sun, which was now nearly
overhead.
The next moment Corbett's face fell. The path led round a bluff, beyond
which he expected to see the trail go winding gradually down to a little
group of tents and huts gathered about Williams Creek. Instead of that
he found himself face to face with one of those exasperating gulches
which so often bar the weary hunter's road home in the Frazer country.
The swelling uplands rolled on, it was true, sinking gradually to the
level of Williams Creek, and he could see the trail running from him to
his goal in fairly gentle sweeps, all except about half a mile of it,
and that half-mile lay right in front of him, and was invisible.
It had sunk, so it seemed to Ned, into the very bowels of the earth, and
another hundred yards brought him to the edge of the gulch and showed
him that this was the simple truth. As so often happens in this country
which ice has formed (smoothing it here and cutting great furrows
through it elsewhere), the downs ended without warning in a precipitous
cliff leading into a dark narrow ravine, along the bottom of which the
gold-seekers could just hear the murmur of a mountain stream.
It was useless to look up and down the ravine. There was no way over and
no way round. It was a regular trap. A threadlike trail, but well worn,
showed the only way by which the gulch could be crossed, and as Ned
looked at it he came to the conclusion that if there was another such
gulch between him and Williams Creek it would probably cost him all he
was worth, for no one in his party could hope to cross two such gulches
before nightfall.
"It's no good looking at it, come along, Steve!" he cried, and grasping
at any little bush within reach to steady his steps, Ned began the
descent.
Who ever first made that trail was in a hurry to get to Williams Creek.
The recklessness of the gold miner, determined to get to his gold, and
careless of life and limb in pursuit of it, was apparent in every yard
of that descent, which, despising all circuitous methods, plunged
headlong into the depths below.
Twice on the way down Steve only owed his life to the stout mountain
weeds to which his fingers clung when his feet forsook him, and once it
was only Ned's strong hand which prevented Phon from following a great
flat stone which his stumbling feet had sent tobogganing into the dark
gulf below.
For two or three minutes Ned had to hold on to Phon by the scruff of the
neck before he was quite certain that he was to be trusted to walk alone
again. Even Steve kept staring into that "dark-profound" into which the
stone had vanished in a way which Corbett did not relish. Though he had
never felt it himself, he knew all about that strange fascination which
seems to tempt some men, brave men too, to throw themselves out of a
railway-carriage, off a pier-head, or down a precipice, and therefore
Ned was not sorry to be at the bottom of that precipitous trail without
the loss of either Steve or Phon.
"Say, Ned, how does that strike you? It's a 'way-up' bridge, isn't it,
old man?" and the speaker pointed to a piece of civil engineering
characteristic of Cariboo.
Two tall pines had grown upon opposite edges of the narrow ravine in
which the gulch ended. From side to side this ravine was rather too
broad for a single pine to span, and far down below, somewhere in the
darkness of it, a stream roared and foamed along. The rocks were damp
with mist and spray, but the steep walls of the narrow place let in no
light by which the prisoned river could be seen. In order to cross this
place, men had loosened the roots of the two pines with pick and shovel,
until the trees sinking slowly towards each other had met over the
mid-stream. Then those who had loosened the roots did their best to make
them fast again, weighting them with rocks, and tethering them with
ropes. When they had done this they had lashed the tops of the trees
together, lopped off a few boughs, run a hand-rope over all, and called
the structure a bridge.
Over this bridge Ned and his comrades had now to pass, and as he looked
at the white face and quaking legs of Phon, and then up at the evening
sky, Ned turned to Steve and whispered in his ear: "Pull yourself
together, Steve. This is a pretty bad place, but we have got to get over
at once or not at all. That fellow will faint or go off his head before
long."
Luckily for Ned, Steve Chance had plenty of what the Yankees call
"sand."
"I'm ready, go ahead," he muttered, keeping his eyes as much as possible
averted from the abyss towards which they were clambering.
"I'll go first," said Corbett, when they had reached the roots of the
nearest pine; "then Phon, and you last, Steve." Then bending over his
friend he whispered, "Threaten to throw him in if he funks."
Of course the bridge in front of Corbett was not the ordinary way to
Williams Creek. Pack-trains had come to Williams Creek even in those
early days, and clever as pack-ponies are, they have not yet developed a
talent for tree climbing. So there was undoubtedly some other way to
Williams Creek. This was only a short cut, a route taken by pedestrians
who were in a hurry, and surely no pedestrians were ever in a much
greater hurry than Steve and Ned and Phon.
Consider! Their all was on the other side of that ravine; all their
invested wealth and all their hopes as well; all the reward for weeks of
weary travel, as well as rest, and shelter, and food. They had much to
gain in crossing that ravine, and the slowly sinking sun warned them
that they had no time to look for a better way round. They must take
that short cut or none. And yet when Ned got closer to the rough bridge
he liked it less than ever. Where the trees should have met and joined
together a terrible thing had happened. Ned could see it now quite
plainly from where he stood. A wind, he supposed, must have come howling
up the gulch in one of the dark days of winter, a wind so strong that
when the narrow gully had pent it in, it had gone rushing along,
smashing everything that it met in its furious course, and amongst other
things it had struck just the top of the arch of the bridge.
The result was that just at the highest point there was a gap, not a big
gap, indeed it was so small that some of the ropes still held and
stretched from tree to tree, but still a gap, six feet wide with no
bridge across it, and black, unfathomable darkness down below. Ned
Corbett was one of those men who only see the actual danger which has to
be faced, the thing which has to be done--that which is, and not that
which may be. For instance, Ned saw that he had to jump from one stout
bough to another, that he would have to cling to something with his
hands on the other side, and that it would not do to make a false step,
or to clutch at a rotten bough.
That was all he saw. So he leapt with confidence (he had taken twenty
worse leaps in an afternoon in the gymnasium at home for the fun of the
thing), and of course he alighted in safety, clambered down the other
pine-tree trunk, and landed safe and sound on the farther shore. He had
never stayed to think of the awful things which would have happened if
he had slipped; of that poor body of his which might have gone whirling
round and round through the darkness, until it plunged into the waters
out of sight of the sun and his fellow-men.
But all men are not made after this fashion. When Ned turned towards
the bridge he had just passed his face turned white, and his hands,
which had until then been so firm trembled. What he saw was this. Phon
had been driven ahead of Steve, as Corbett and Steve had arranged. As
long as the big broad trunk of the pine was beneath him, with plenty of
strong boughs all round him to cling to, Phon had listened to Steve and
obeyed him. Now it was different. Phon had come to the end of the pine,
to the place from which Corbett had leaped, and nothing which Steve
could say would move him another inch. Chinamen are not trained in
athletics as white men are, and to Phon that six-foot jump appeared to
be a simply impossible feat. Steve might threaten what he liked, but
jump Phon would not. The mere sight of the horrible darkness below made
his head reel, and his fingers cling to the rough pine like the fingers
of a drowning man to a plank.
And now Ned noticed a worse thing even than this Phon had been driven to
the very end of the tree by Steve, and Steve himself was close behind
him. The result was that the weight of two men had to be borne at once
by the thin end of what, after all, was but a small pine, and one
extended almost like a fishing-rod across the ravine. So the tree began
to bow with the weight, and then to lift itself again until it was
swinging and tossing, swaying more and more after every recoil, so that
at each swing Ned expected to see one or both of his friends tossed off
into the gulf below. There must come an end to such a scene as this
sooner or later, and Ned could see but one chance of saving his friend.
"Chance," he shouted, "hold tight! I am going to shoot that cursed
Chinaman!"
The miserable wretch heard and understood the words, and saw the
Winchester, the same which had sent the runaway cayuse spinning down the
stone-slide, come slowly up to Corbett's shoulder.
"Jump or I'll shoot! It's your last chance!" and Phon heard the clank of
the pump as his master forced up a cartridge into the barrel of his
rifle.
It was now death anyway. Phon realized that, and even at that moment his
memory showed him plainly a picture of that pinto mare, whose bruised
and battered body, with a great ghastly hole between the eyes, he had
seen by the edge of Seton Lake. That last thought decided him, and with
a scream of fear he sprang out, and managed to cling, more by sheer luck
than in any other way, to the pine on the Williams Creek side of the
ravine. When Ned grounded arms and reached out to help Phon across the
last few feet of the bridge he was wet through with perspiration, and
yet he was as cool as a new-made grave.
"Ned," said Steve five minutes later, "I would give all the gold in
Cariboo if I had it, rather than cross that place again!"--and he meant
it.
For a few minutes Steve's gold fever had abated, and in the terror of
death even the Chinaman had forgotten the yellow metal. And yet their
journey was now over, and within half an hour's walk of them lay the
claims they had bought, the wonderful spot of earth out of which they
were to dig their heart's desire, the key to all pleasures and the
master of nine men out of every ten--gold!
Ned laughed to himself. Was a steady head and the agility of a very
second-rate gymnast worth more than all the gold in Cariboo?
[Illustration: "WITH A SCREAM OF FEAR THE CHINAMAN SPRANG OUT."]