PHON'S RETURN.
The day after Ned Corbett's sheep-hunt was too cold even to go and bring
in the carcase. A wind had risen, not much of a wind it is true, but
just enough to drive the cold right through a man like blades of sharp
steel, so that Ned and Steve and Rampike remained in the dug-out,
smoking and trying to keep warm, or from time to time going to the door
to watch the great river gradually yielding to the power of the frost.
The white scum of the day before had grown into blocks and hummocks of
ice, and these came down grinding and roaring through the mist. In one
more night the great Frazer would be fettered for the winter.
In the mist which hung over the freezing waters, everything assumed
unnatural proportions. Rocks loomed out like mountains, bushes like
forest trees, and a sneaking fox looked larger than a grizzly bear.
It was a weird scene, and it held Corbett and his companions fascinated
until the bitterness of the cold drove them back for a few moments to
their fire.
In this way they spent their day until nearly three o'clock, when the
light began to fail, and Corbett, who was at the door, cried to Rampike,
who was inside the hut:
"Great Scott, Jim, come here! What is that?"
"That" to which Corbett's pointing finger called attention was a strange
upright mass of ice, which came riding towards them upon a little floe,
a floe which later on was caught and whirled round and round in a
backwater of the river just below the cabin.
"A tree, ain't it, Steve?" said Jim, appealing to Chance, who had
followed him out. "A tree, I reckon, Ned, as has got wedged in somehow
among the drift."
"Yes, I guess it's a tree," Steve assented. "But what with the mist and
the way the thing dances around, it's mighty hard to tell what it is."
"Well, I'm getting as full of fancies as a woman," said Ned, "but I
could have sworn when I saw it first, that that thing was a man."
"A man? By heaven, it _is_ a man!" yelled Jim. "Look, look!" and with
white, scared face he stared at the thing as it came circling round
again in the endless, meaningless dance of the drift through the mist.
"If it's a man, it is no good standing here," said Corbett quickly.
"Bear a hand to drag him ashore." And snatching a rope from the inside
of the hut, he sprang down the steep bank to the shore, though the faces
of his followers showed plainly enough that, terrible as dead men always
are to the living, there was something about this river-waif which made
him a horror greater even than the dead who die on land.
By some strange chance the body (for it was a body) had got jammed
between two pieces of drift in such a manner that it stood upright,
waist-high above the flood, bowing and curtseying with every movement of
the water, but so coated with ice that, but for its general outline and
a rag of clothing which still fluttered from it, none could have guessed
its nature.
For a moment Corbett feared that it would break out of the backwater,
and be whirled down the stream before he could get his rope over it; but
no, the stream had not done with its plaything yet. The winter would be
a long one, and what matter if this wayfarer by the Frazer tarried even
a day and a night in the backwater? The rocks had stayed there for
hundreds of years. There was no hurry about such things. Round and round
in the same order came the hummocks, a bit of a wrecked canoe on one, on
the next only the wreck of a man. Round and round whirled the long loop
of Corbett's lariat, until the silent rider came bowing past him within
his reach. Then the rope flew out, and the long loop poised and settled
silently about the rider's neck. Quick as thought Ned was jerked upon
his knees, and for a moment it seemed as if the angry river would suck
him in and add him to the number of its ghastly dancers. But Ned was
young and strong and loved life, so that he stayed himself against a
great boulder and called aloud for help.
"Hold on to the rope!" he yelled to his comrade. "The thing fights like
a salmon!"
Do you know what it is to feel the electric thrill which travels all
down your spine when you stick in a good fish? do you know how his every
struggle vibrates along your own nerves, until your heart almost stops
with excitement? If you do, you may be able to picture what those three
men felt as the frozen corpse plunged and struggled on the rope, now
sucked down by the under-tow, now springing beneath the buffets of the
drifting ice. Ned shuddered and felt sick as he braced himself against
its unholy strength; but the Shropshire breed is like the bull-dog's,
once fast in anything it will never let go whilst life lasts; so that in
spite of the river, and the fear which chilled his marrow, Ned persisted
until he drew his ghastly capture hand over hand to shore.
There is something very horrible in the helpless way in which the head
of a drowned man rolls about when you lay him down once more upon dry
land, but even that is not so ghastly as were the actions of the warped
and rigid mummy which Corbett and his friends carried to their cabin.
From the waist up the body was stiff and straight, but below the waist
the legs had been frozen into such strange curves and angles, that when
they laid it down upon the floor the corpse went rolling and bumping
over and over, and then lay rocking to and fro as if it would never be
still. Every gust of wind set it in motion again, and the horror of the
thing grew to such an extent that Ned at last rose, saying:
"I can't stand this, boys; the thing seems to be laughing at us. Let's
fix it in a chair so as to keep it still until morning."
"And what are you going to do with it, then?" asked Chance.
"Bury it, I suppose, Steve. Oughtn't we to?"
"Wal, I don't want to dictate to no man, but ef you're goin' to make a
practice of bringing corpses to this shanty, I quit," remarked Jim, who
had been strongly opposed to robbing the Frazer of its prey from the
first.
"Don't cut up rough, old chap. If your body was going down in that
seething hell of waters, you'd be glad if anyone would drag you ashore
and give you decent burial. Let it bide until to-morrow, Jim, and I'll
bury it myself."
"Very well. That's a go. Now just lend a hand to cinch him on to this
chair for the night, so as he won't be crawlin' around in the dark;" and
old Jim with Ned's assistance fastened the body into a chair which stood
by the rough deal board which served them for a table, and there left
it.
Why is it that, to even the boldest men, the dead are so very terrible?
Is it their inhuman calm, their silence, or the mystery to which they
alone hold the key, that awes and chills the hottest human heart?
Whatever the cause of it, the nameless terror exists, and neither strong
Ned Corbett, nor scoffing Chance, nor hard old Jim were proof against
it. With that _thing_ sitting in their one seat waiting for the morning
to come that it might be buried, all three men crept away into the
furthest corner of their tiny shack, and, trembling at every log which
creaked and sputtered on the hearth, covered their heads with their
blankets and prayed for daylight to come.
But the hours of the night are longer than those of the day. The
lesson-books say that the twenty-four hours are all of the same length,
just sixty minutes of sixty seconds in each, but the lesson-books lie.
Who that has lain awake from midnight till dawn will believe that the
six hours before sunrise are no longer than the six which succeed
sunset? Of course they are longer, but the hours of that one night in
the hillside above the fast-freezing Frazer were the longest since God
made the world.
Down below the listeners could hear the grinding and roaring of the
frozen river, and the shriek of the rising night wind as it tore through
the deep canyons. Now and again a loud report echoed in the stillness as
an ice-crack spread from side to side of some frozen mountain lake, and
all night long there were inarticulate murmurs and groanings of water
prisoned beneath ice, and the long howling of starved wolves amongst the
snow.
The Indians believe that their dead hunters assume the forms of wolves,
and if so, the whole of the dead Chilcotins were out hunting, adding
their hideous voices to those other voices of the night, which had in
them nothing that was familiar, nothing that was in sympathy with man or
man's daily life. It seemed to the sleepless listeners that their own
souls had lost their way and strayed into some waste place, where it was
always winter and always night, and then as they strained their ears so
that they could hear the beat of each others' hearts, a terrible thing
happened.
It was only a chair which creaked, but the creaking of it seemed to
deaden every other sound, and nature herself held her breath to listen.
There it was again! Creak, creak, creak, and a scraping sound upon the
mud floor. Unless the ears of three men had gone crazy with fright, that
grisly visitor of theirs was pushing its chair along the floor as if it
would rise up and be gone. All through the night the noises went on: the
chair creaked, the feet of the dead moved upon the floor, and once in
the dim light of early dawn, one who dared to look for a moment, fancied
that he saw a long lean hand move slowly across the table.
Yet even fear yields at last to sleep, and before the full dawn came
there were four sleepers in that hut,--three who should wake and one who
should sleep on for ever, and all four comrades, who for a little while
had pursued that will-o'-the-wisp, Wealth, together.
For the dead man was Phon!
The ice shroud which had hidden him before had melted in the night, and
the strength of the frost had gone out of his poor dead limbs, and in
the searching white light of the day he lay huddled up on the chair, his
head fallen forward upon the table, and his body a limp mass of faded
blue rags.
Even before Ned raised his head they all knew him, and when Ned pointed
silently to a little dark spot at the nape of the dead man's neck, no
one expressed any surprise.
There had been just such another mark at the nape of dead Robert
Roberts' neck.
"Two!" groaned Rampike. "My God, two of 'em, and we ain't beginning to
get level with him yet!"
Before they saw the corpse upon the previous evening the men had been
sitting, according to their wont, round their rough table smoking and
poring over Chance's old map of British Columbia.
That map was the nearest approach to a book in their possession, and
they often studied it and made yarns about it; but the night of Phon's
arrival all three had bent over it with more than their ordinary
interest, because Ned had told them of his fancy that he had recognized
a certain valley from the main ridge. It was just in front of this map
that the corpse had been placed, when Rampike had cinched it into its
chair for the night.
"I guess we had better clear 'em all away," said the old man after a
pause, and with a comprehensive wave of his hand he indicated the corpse
and the map, the cups and the half-smoked pipes which still littered the
table.
Ned and Steve came to their comrade's assistance, and the three made as
if they would lift Phon from his seat, but at the very first touch all
shrank back, while Chance cried out:
"Look at its hand! Look, look, it is writing!"
Like men in a nightmare the three stood, unable to move or to speak,
whilst that long lean hand which lay upon the map moved slowly along.
Like the finger of a clock, or a shadow upon a dial, it crept along
slowly, slowly, and ever as it went they heard the grating of one long
untrimmed nail against the canvas.
It seemed to the onlookers that the hand took hours to travel across
three inches of the map, and then the limp body gave a lurch and slid
with a soft heavy thud to the ground.
The slight movement caused by Jim's first touch had disturbed the
balance of the body, out of which all the rigid strength of the frost
had now gone, so that the slackened muscles left to themselves shrank up
and collapsed. This was what really happened, but to Rampike and the
rest it seemed that the dead wrote.
"That's jest what he's come for. Thet's the way to Pete's Crik as he's
bin a showin' you, and thet's where you'll find the man as shot him and
old Rob. Bear a hand, we can carry him out now. I guess there ain't no
call for him here any longer." And so saying Rampike took hold of the
corpse, and with Ned's assistance bore it out and laid it down upon the
snow.
Upon the map upon which Phon's dead hand had rested there was a fine wet
line drawn by his nail--a line which led from the very spot where the
dug-out stood upon the bank of the Frazer, to a point upon the right
bank of the Chilcotin, a good deal to the north of the spot at which
Corbett believed that the gold-camp lay.
Steve Chance took a pencil, and whilst the others bore out the body he
marked the line carefully, that it might not dry up and vanish away.
Even as he did so, a wild cry which he knew well came from the bench
above the cabin. It began in a low key, and rose higher and higher until
it was like the wail of a banshee, then it died away sullenly, and Steve
heard Rampike's voice outside the cabin calling to him:
"Come along and lend a hand, Steve. If we don't bury him pretty soon
those blasted wolves will get him."
Steve hurried out, and together the three tried hard to make some sort
of a grave for Phon in the hillside. They might as well have tried to
dig into adamant.
"It ain't no good," growled Rampike at length; "and if you jest bury him
in the snow the wolves'll get him. Not as it matters much."
"We'd better put him back in the Frazer than leave him here," said Ned.
"That's so. He cain't stay in the cabin now as he's thawed out, but I
ain't sure as we can get him back agen into the river."
Jim was right.
The earth which the Chinaman had robbed of its hidden treasure refused
to receive him; the friends he had lived amongst would have none of him,
now that death's seal was upon him; and even the river, which had spewed
him up upon its banks, had now closed its portals against him, so that
it was only after half an hour's hard labour that Chance and Corbett
were able to hew out a hole in the solid ice, through which to send back
its dead to the Frazer.
For one moment Ned Corbett stood with his hat in his hand, looking up to
the sky, wondering whither the spark of life had gone and commending it
to its Creator, and then he pushed the body head first through the hole.
The ice round the spot where the three men stood was clear and still
fairly thin, so that they saw, or thought that they saw, a face pressed
against it for a moment, staring with wild eyes towards the world of the
living, and then the stream caught it and it shot down and was gone.
The man had dreamed all his life of the golden secrets which lay in the
bed of the mighty Frazer. He had looked forward to the days when he
should carry the golden spoils of British Columbia to his own sunny
land; but fate had mastered him, and though his body might roll amongst
those golden sands, and his dead hands touch the heavy nuggets, it would
profit him nothing. The dead have no need of gold!