A SHEER SWINDLE.
It is hard to sever the idea of a journey's end from ideas of rest and
comfort. A is the starting-point, B the goal, and no matter how distant,
no matter how wild the region in which B lies, the mind of the traveller
from A to B is sure to picture B as a centre of creature comforts and a
haven of luxurious rest.
Thus it was then that Steve and Corbett hurried through the lengthening
shadows, eager for the city that was to come, their eyes strained to
catch a glow of colour, and their ears alert for the first hum which
should tell of the presence of their fellow-men.
After the gloom of the northern forests, the silence of the pack-trail,
and the monotony of forced marches, they were ready to welcome any light
however garish, any revelry however mad it might be. Life and light and
noise were what both hankered after as a relief from the silence and
solitude of the last few days, and it is this natural craving for change
in the minds of men who have been too much alone, which accounts for
half the wild revels of the frontier towns.
As a matter of history, the first impression made by Williams Creek upon
the sensitive mind of the artist Chance was one of disappointment.
Perhaps it was that the heavy shadows of the mountains drowned all
colour, or that the day was nearly over and the dance-house not yet
open; whatever the cause Williams Creek struck Chance with a chill. It
was a miserable, mean-looking little place for so much gold to come
from. In his visions of the mines Steve had dwelt too much upon the
glitter of the metal, and too little on the dirt and bare rock from
which the gold has to be extracted; extracted, too, by hard labour,
about the hardest labour probably which the bodies of men were ever made
to undergo.
As his eyes gradually took in the details of the scene, Steve Chance
remembered Cruickshank's glowing word-pictures of the mines, and his own
gaudy map of them, and remembering these things a great fear fell upon
him. Steve had accomplished a pilgrimage over a road upon which stronger
men had died, and brave men turned back, and now the shrine of his
golden god lay at his feet, and this is what it looked like.
In the shadow of a spur of wooded mountains, lay a narrow strip of land
which might by comparison be called flat. It was lower than the bald
mountains which were at its back, so the melted snows of last winter had
trickled into it, until the whole place was a damp, miserable bog,
through the centre of which the waters had worn themselves a bed, and
made a creek.
There were many such bogs and many such creeks about the foothills of
the bald mountains, but these were for the most part hidden by an
abundant growth of pine, or adorned by a wealth of long grass and the
glory of yellow lily and blue larkspur. But this bog was less fortunate
than its fellows. Gold had been found in the creek which ran through it,
so that instead of the spring flowers and the pines, there were bare
patches of yellow mud, stumps rough and untrained where trees had stood,
tunnels in the hillside, great wooden gutters mounted high in the air to
carry off the stream from its bed and pour it into all manner of
unexpected places, piles of boulders and rubbish, so new and unadorned
by weed or flower that you knew instinctively that nature had had no
hand in their arrangement.
And everywhere amongst this brutal digging and hewing there were new log
huts, frame shanties, wet untidy tents, and shelters made of odds and
ends, shelters so mean that an African Bushman would have turned up his
nose at them. Instead of the telegraph and telephone wires that run
overhead in ordinary cities, there were in the mining camp innumerable
flumes, long wooden boxes or gutters, to carry water from point to
point. These gutters were everywhere. They ran over the tops of the
houses, they came winding down for miles along precipitous side-hills,
and they ran recklessly across the main street; for traffic there was
none in those days, or at any rate none which could not step over, or
would not pass round the miners' ditch. In 1862 rights of way were
disregarded up in Cariboo, but an inch of water if it could be used for
gold-washing was a matter of much moment.
"I say, Ned, this looks more like a Chinese camp than a white man's,
doesn't it?" remarked Steve with a shudder.
"What did you expect, Steve,--a second San Francisco?"
"Not that; but this place looks so dead and seems so still."
"Silence, they say, is the criterion of pace," quoted Ned; "but I can
hear the noise of the rockers and the rattle of the gravel in the
sluices. It looks to me as if men were at work here in grim
earnest.--Good-day. How goes it, sir?"
The last part of Corbett's speech was addressed to a man of whom he just
caught sight at that moment, standing in a deep cutting by the side of
the trail, and busily employed in shovelling gravel into a sluice-box at
his side.
"Day," grunted the miner, not pausing to lift his head to look at the
man who addressed him until he had finished his task.
"Are things booming here still?" asked Chance.
"Booming, you bet! Why, have you just come up from the river?" and the
man straightened his back with an effort and jerked his head in the
general direction of the Frazer.
"That's what," replied Steve, dropping naturally into the brief idioms
of the place.
"Seen anything of the bacon train?" asked the miner after a pause,
during which he had again ministered to the wants of his sluice-box.
"The bacon train! What's that?"
"Brown's bacon train from Oregon. Guess you haven't, or you'd know about
it. Bacon is played out in Williams Creek, and we are all going it
straight on flour."
The thought of "going it straight on flour" was evidently too much for
Steve's new friend, for he actually groaned aloud, and dug his shovel
into the wall of his trench with as much energy as if he had been
driving it into the ribs of the truant Bacon Brown.
"That will suit us royally," ejaculated Ned. "We shall have a small
train here in a day or two, and there's a good deal of bacon amongst our
stores."
"You've got a train acomin'! By thunder! I thought I knowed your voices.
Ain't you them two Britishers as were along of Cruickshank?"
"Strike me pink if it isn't Rampike!" cried Steve, and the next minute
the old gentleman who had helped Steve in his little game of poker
climbed out of the mud-pie he was making, and shook hands, even with the
Chinaman.
"But where's Roberts, and where's Cruickshank?" he asked.
Corbett told him.
"Wal, as you've left Roberts with him I suppose it's all right. Did you
meet any boys going back from these parts?"
"Only two, going back for grub," replied Ned.
"I guess they told you how short we were up here, and they are worse off
at Antler."
"No, they said very little to us. They had a bit of a yarn with
Cruickshank though. He was leading out and met them first. He didn't say
anything about the want of grub to us."
"That's a queer go. Why, it would almost have paid you to go to Antler
instead of coming here. You would get two dollars a pound for bacon up
there."
"Ah! but you see we were bound to be here for the 1st of June, because
of those claims we bought."
"Is that so? Bob did say summat about those claims. Do you know where
they are?"
"Here's our map," replied Corbett, producing the authorized map of Dewd
and Cruickshank, upon which the three claims had been duly marked. "Is
Dewd in the camp?" he added.
"I don't know; but come along, there goes Cameron's triangle. Let us go
and get some 'hash,' and we can find out about Dewd and the claims." And
so saying Rampike laid aside his shovel, put on his coat, and led the
way down to a big tent in the middle of the mining camp.
Here were gathered almost half the population of Williams Creek for
their evening meal, the other half having finished theirs and departed
to work upon the night-shift; for most of the claims were worked night
and day, their owners and the hired men dividing the twenty-four hours
amongst them.
Here, as on board the steamer, Rampike was evidently a man of some
account; one able to secure a place for himself and his chums in spite
of the rush made upon the food by the hungry mob in its shirt sleeves.
At first all three men were too busy with their knives and forks to
notice anyone or hear what men were saying about themselves, but in a
little while, when the edge of appetite was dulled, Ned caught the words
repeated over and over again--"Bacon Brown's men, I guess," and at last
had to answer point blank to a direct question, that he had "never heard
of Mr. Brown before."
"These fellows hain't seen Brown at all," added Rampike. "They're
looking for Dewd. Have you seen him anywhere around?"
At the mention of Dewd's name a broad grin passed over the faces of
those who heard it, and one man looked up and remarked that a good many
people had been inquiring kindly after Dewd lately. The speaker was a
common type amongst the miners, but in those early days his rough
clothes and refined speech struck Ned as contrasting strangely.
Truth to tell, he had been educated at Eton and Oxford, had thrown up a
good tutorship to come out here, and here he was happy as a king, though
all his classical education was thrown away, and his blue pantaloons
were patched fore and aft with bits of sacking once used to contain
those favourite brands of flour known respectively as "Self-rising" and
the "Golden Gate."
As he rose to his feet with the names of the brands printed in large
letters on either side of him, he looked something between a navvy and a
"sandwich man."
"Dewd," he went on, "has been playing poker lately a little too well to
please the boys. Say, O'Halloran, do you know where Dewd is?"
"Faith and I don't. If I did, Sandy M'Donald would give me half his
claim for the information. Hullo, have you got here already, sonny? I
was before ye though." And Ned's red-headed friend of fighting
proclivities held out his hand to him over the heads of his neighbours.
"What does Sandy want him for?" asked someone in the crowd.
"You'd betther ax Sandy. All I know is that he went gunning for him
early this morning, and if he wasn't so drunk that he can't walk he'd be
afther him still."
"Who's drunk, Pat,--Dewd or Sandy?"
"Oh, don't be foolish! Whoever heard of Dewd touching a drop of good
liquor. That's the worst of that mane shunk; he gets you blind drunk
first and robs you afther."
"What, have you been bitten too, O'Halloran?" asked the tutor; and while
the laugh was still going at the wry face poor Corny O'Halloran pulled,
Rampike and his three friends slipped quietly out of the room.
"I guess we may as well locate those claims of yourn right away,"
remarked Rampike as soon as they were clear of Cameron's tent, "so as
there'll be no trouble about securing them to-morrow. Not as I think any
one is likely to jump 'em. Let me see your map."
Ned handed over the map before alluded to.
"Why, look ye here, these claims are right alongside the Nugget, the
richest claim on the creek!" cried their friend, after studying the map
for a few minutes.
"Quite so, that is what gives them their exceptional value," remarked
Chance, quoting from memory Cruickshank's very words.
"Oh, that's what gives them their 'ceptional vally, is it, young man?"
sneered Rampike. "Wal, I guess they ought to have a 'ceptional vally' to
make it worth while working them there;" and Rampike, who was now
standing by the Nugget claim alongside the bed of the creek, pointed
upwards to where the bluffs, two hundred feet high, hung precipitously
over their heads.
It was no good arguing, no good swearing that the map must be wrong,
that Cruickshank had marked the wrong lots, that there was a mistake
somewhere.
"Just one of the colonel's mistakes, that's what it is. Come and see the
gold Commissioner, he'll straighten it out for you," retorted Rampike,
hurrying the three off into the presence of a big handsome man, whose
genial ways and handsome face made "the judge" a great favourite with
the miners.
All he could do he did, and was ready to go far beyond the obligations
of his office in his desire to help Cruickshank's victims. It was a very
common kind of fraud after all. The colonel had drawn a sufficiently
accurate map of the Williams Creek valley; he had even given accurately
every name upon that map, and moreover the claims which he had sold to
Corbett & Co. adjoined the Nugget claim, and had been regularly taken up
and bonded by his partner and himself. Cruickshank's story indeed was
true in every particular.
Gold was being taken out of the Nugget mine at the rate of several lbs.
per diem; why should it not be taken out of the claims which it
adjoined?
There was only one objection to Cruickshank's map,--he had not drawn it
in relief. There was only one objection to Corbett's claim--the surface
of it would have adjoined the surface of the Nugget claim had they both
been upon the same level, only,--only, you see, they were not. There was
a trifling difference of two hundred and fifty feet in the altitude of
the Nugget claim and the bluff adjoining it, and Corbett's claim was on
the top of that bluff. Now a claim on the top of a bluff, where no river
could ever have run to deposit gold, and whither no water could be
brought to wash for gold, was not considered worth two thousand dollars
even in Cariboo.