RAMPIKE'S WINTER QUARTERS.
"Hallo, there! Hallo!" cried Steve as soon as his eyes fell upon the man
and his rocker; but Steve's voice was so pitiably weak and small in a
country where mud-banks are built like mountains, that it did not even
wake an echo.
"Come along, Steve; it's no good shouting for half an hour yet. Look out
for the prickly pears!" said Ned, and so saying he plunged into a little
ravine, whose beggarly barrenness cried aloud to winter to come and hide
it from the face of the sun.
"It's all very well to tell a man to look out for them," answered Steve
in the peevish voice of sickness, "but there is nothing else to step on.
It's all thorns and sharp stones in this confounded country."
"Never mind, stick to it, old chap."
"Just what I am doing, worse luck to it," muttered Steve, trying to tear
himself away from a patch of little cacti upon which he had
inadvertently sat down.
Ned turned and saw Steve's plight, and the white woe-begone face of his
comrade only heightened the comedy of the position. So that there, at
the last gasp, sick and worn-out, these two failures, with their
stomachs empty and their soles full of thorns, stood and laughed until
the tears rolled down their cheeks.
From the next step in the bench which led to the river Ned joined his
deep bass to Steve's, and together they shouted their loudest to attract
the man's attention. In vain. Whoever he was the man worked on, bending
over his rocker, with the gold fever at his heart and the boom of the
great river in his ears.
"It's no good, we must go right down to him," said Ned; and five minutes
later he and Steve stood together upon the bar on which the man was at
work. But so intent was he upon his rocking, or so silent was the
approach of his visitors' bare and bleeding feet over the great
boulders, that it was not until Ned's shadow fell upon him that the
gold-worker was aware of a stranger's presence.
Then quick as thought he sprang to his feet, snatching up a Winchester
as he did so, and covering his men with it before he had time to look
into their faces.
"Stand off!" he roared, "or by 'Mity I'll let light through you!" and
for the moment it seemed a mere toss-up whether he would shoot or not.
But the men he spoke to were as reckless of life as he was. Hardship had
taught them that a human life is not such a wonderfully big stake as the
fat townsmen seem to think.
"You're in a tearing hurry to shoot, ain't you?" asked Steve coolly.
"How would it be if we were to talk first? Don't you know us, Rampike?"
At the first sound of Steve's voice the miner had dropped his rifle into
the hollow of his arm, and now he came forward, and holding out a huge
hairy paw, yellow with river mud, said simply, "Shake."
It was not a very effusive greeting, but men don't "gush" much in the
upper country, and yet that glimpse of a friendly face, and grip of a
friendly hand, acted as a wonderful restorative upon the tired natures
of both Steve and Ned. The sky itself seemed to get clearer and the
mountain air less chill now that they had run against a "pal" once more.
"Wal, sonny, did you strike Pete's Creek?" was old Rampike's first
question after they had all three "shaken some."
"We did so," answered Steve.
"Any 'pay' up there?"
"I should smile," replied the Yankee, using the slang of his country,
and throwing down the belt of dust which he had clung to through all his
wanderings.
"Why, this is free gold!"
"You bet it is; and there is enough for everyone we know and to spare,"
added Steve, "where that came from."
For a minute or two Rampike only turned the gold over and over in his
hands and said nothing. At last he asked:
"Did you git Cruickshank?"
"No, never saw him," answered Ned.
"Praise the Lord you ain't got everything. I ain't sure as I wouldn't
ruther look at him through the back-sights of this here, than find a
crik like yourn;" and the old man passed his hand caressingly along the
barrel of his "44.70."
"But, say, you look mighty hard set. Have you any grub along with you?"
"Not an ounce of flour, and this is the last of our meat;" and so saying
Ned pulled out of his pocket the ration which he had kept for Chance.
"It's pretty lucky that I'm well heeled in the way of provisions, ain't
it, else we'd all starve. Wal, come along up to the 'dug-out;'" and so
saying he picked up his coat and rifle and led up to the bluff, until
all three stood before the door of his winter residence.
Next to the homes of the pre-historic cavemen, and a few rude
stone-heaps in which the Caucasian Ossetes live, the "dug-outs" along
the Frazer river are the most miserable abodes ever fashioned for
themselves by men. And yet these holes in the hill, with doors and roofs
aflush with the hillside, are better adapted to resist the intense cold
of a British Columbian winter than either frame-shack or log-hut.
"Come right in, lads," said Rampike, putting his foot against the planks
which served him for a door, and thus rudely clearing the way for his
visitors into a little dark interior with walls and floor of Frazer
river mud.
A rough table, a solitary chair, and a kind of bench furnished the hovel
somewhat more luxuriously than might have been expected, but unless you
took a deep interest in geology the walls and general surroundings in
Rampike's reception-room were distinctly crude and unpleasant.
If, however, you cared for geology, you could study specimens of the
Frazer river system through the wide chinks between the boards which
walled the room without even leaving your chair. Indeed, there was more
"bed rock," as Rampike called it, than boarding in the composition of
his walls.
But neither geology nor furniture attracted any attention from Steve or
Ned. When they entered the cabin their eyes lit upon two things only,
and it was a good hour before they took any real interest in anything
else. The two centres of attraction were a frying-pan and a billy, round
which all three men knelt and served, making themselves into cooks,
stokers, or bellows, until the billy sang on the hearth and the bacon
hissed in the pan.
Then for a while there was silence, and this story does not begin again
until someone struck a match upon the seat of his pants. I believe it
was Rampike, because, having had more experience than Steve, he could
bolt his food faster. I know that it was not Ned, for he could never
finish his meal until about the end of Steve's first pipe. Steve said it
was because the Englishman eat so much. Ned said that in England men eat
their food, in America they "swallered down their grub." "Swallerin'
down your grub," he said, "was a faster but less satisfactory process
than eating your food." But as I wish to remain upon friendly terms with
both disputants, I cannot enter into this matter.
"Do you reckon to go in again this fall?" asked Rampike, without any
prelude but a puff of tobacco smoke.
"To the creek?" said Ned, reaching across his neighbour for the billy.
"Yes, we must go in, and that soon."
"What's your hurry? Steve here cain't travel, and you're pretty nigh
played out though you are hard; and as for the gold, that'll stay right
there till spring."
"You forget that there were three of us at Antler. Phon is up at the
creek now."
"Phon! What, that Chinee! Is he up at the crik?"
"If he is alive he is," answered Ned. "He may have starved for all I
know."
"Starved! not he; but you'll never see _that_ heathen agen. He'd live on
dirt or nothin' at all, any Chinee can do that; but you bet your life he
ain't up there now. He's just skipped out to Victoria by some other road
with all the dust he can pack along. That's what Phon has done."
"You don't know him, Jim, and you aren't fair to him. No westerner ever
is fair to a Chinaman. Phon will stay by the creek. My only fear is that
we sha'n't be able to find the creek."
"Not find the crik, you say! Why, Ned Corbett, _you_ ain't no bloomin'
tenderfoot in the woods, are you? You ain't likely to forgit your way to
the bank when the whole business belongs to you?"
"Perhaps not, but I've been blind for a week;" and then answering the
inquiry in Rampike's eyes, Ned lighted his pipe and told the whole story
of his own and Steve Chance's wanderings, from the time when they struck
Pete's Creek until their return to the Frazer.
Now and again Rampike broke in upon the thread of the narrative with
some pertinent question, or a comment as forcible as a kick from a mule,
but he managed to keep his pipe going pretty steadily until Ned came to
Steve's feat in "blazing." Then the old man's wrath broke out, and his
pipe even dropped from his mouth. For a moment he looked at Steve in
speechless indignation, and then he expressed himself thus:
"Strike me pink," he said, "ef a real down-easter ain't a bigger born
fool in the woods than any bloomin' Britisher I ever heerd tell on.
That's so."
After this there was a pause, during which Steve snored peacefully, and
old Rampike, having made an exhaustive examination of the bowl of his
pipe, proceeded to refill it with chips from his plug of T. & B.
At length Ned began again:
"You've been looking for the creek yourself, haven't you?"
"No. I stayed right here, making wages on that bar there."
"I wonder who made those camps then which we found along the divide. I
can't think that those were Indian camps;" and Ned told his companion of
the camps which he and Steve had stumbled upon during their search for
Pete's Creek, as well as of that glove found by the bear tracks.
"Bear tracks!" growled Rampike, "not they. A softy who would blaze the
wrong side of a tree wouldn't know bear tracks from the tracks of a
gal's shoe with a French heel to it. Cruickshank's tracks, that's what
_they_ was, and ef you don't see more of 'em before you get your gold
out of Pete's Crik you may call me the biggest liar in Cariboo!"
"You don't mean to say that you think Cruickshank would dare to dog
_us_?"
"Dog _you_! That man would dog the devil for gold."
This was a new idea to Ned. If there was any truth in it, then all
Phon's stories of faces seen in the pool, of eyes which watched the
gold, of figures which rustled ever so lightly over the dry sal-lal on
the canyon's edge, when all save Phon and the night owls slept, all
these stories might be something more than the imaginings of a crazed
Chinaman's brain.
For a while Ned sat silently smoking and looking thoughtfully into the
embers. Then he rose, and knocking the ashes out of his pipe said:
"I am going to look for Phon to-morrow if Steve seems well enough to be
left here. Shall you come?"
"Yes, I reckon I may as well. You cain't hev all the sport, sonny. I'm
ruther partial to gunning myself."