CRUICKSHANK AT LAST!
After the burial of Phon there was no more rest for the men in the
"dug-out." The Frazer was frozen hard, and offered a firm white way by
which the three outcasts might return to some place where there were
warmth and light and the voices of their fellow-men. But none of the
three cared to profit by this way of escape. To them a mist seemed
always to hang over the river, and the voices of the dead came to them
through it; and to Ned Corbett it seemed that day and night one mournful
old tune rang in his ears, and day and night Rampike polished his rifle
and thought of the "pal" he had lost, and the murderer who had escaped
him.
"It ain't no manner of use, Ned," he said one day towards the end of
winter, when the ice was already breaking up. "I know as I might jest as
well stay another month, and then go with you to look for this crik. But
I cain't do it. Somethin' keeps callin' to me to git, and I mean makin'
a start to-morrow whether you and Steve come or stay."
They had been together all through the dreary winter, and had hoped to
go out together in the spring, back to that summer land by the sea from
which they had all come. They were weary for awhile of the rush and
struggle for wealth, and were pining for the smell of the salt waves and
the drowsy lap of the sea upon the shore. They had talked over these
things together when the noonday was dark with falling snow, and now
that spring was at hand they little liked the idea of being parted.
"Hold hard, old man," said Corbett. "Let us see if we can't arrange to
go together. Which way do you think of going?"
"Thar's only one way, the way as _he_ showed us," answered Rampike,
nodding over his shoulder towards the river down which Phon had gone to
his rest.
For a few minutes Corbett made no answer, but sat staring fixedly out of
the little window at the Frazer.
"It's infernal foolishness," he said at last--"infernal foolishness, I
know, and yet I feel as you do, Jim. I shall never rest until I have
tried Phon's way. I'm getting as superstitious as a Siwash."
"Superstitious is a mighty long word, but it don't amount to much.
There's a heap of things happens as you cain't account for."
"Perhaps," assented Ned, and then took up once more Steve's ragged map
of British Columbia, and studied for the hundredth time the course
traced upon it by the dead man's nail.
"It runs south-south-east from here," he said.
"Yes, I know, and that'll be clar up that bluff and on to the divide,
and then over a lot of gulches, I reckon, until we strike the Chilcotin.
It'll be a pretty rough trail, you bet."
"Well, rough or smooth, Jim, if Steve doesn't mind waiting here for us,
I'll come with you and start as soon as you please. What do you say,
Steve?"
Now Steve Chance, as the reader knows, was by nature a decent obliging
fellow, and, moreover, Steve had had all the rough travel that he cared
about for years to come, so he answered readily enough.
"If you'll pass me your word that you'll be back inside of three weeks,
I'll stay. But you don't expect to see Cruickshank, I hope?"
"I know as we shall see him," said Rampike quietly. "Summat tells me as
_his_ time's up."
The very next day Rampike and Corbett started up the bluffs above the
dug-out. Down below them the ice in the Frazer was already beginning to
"run," but the snow on the mountain-sides lay hard and unmelted still,
so that travelling without snowshoes was fatiguing in the last degree.
From the top of the ridge the two men got a good view of the country
through which they had to travel. The mountains, as far as they could
see, followed the course of the Frazer until its junction with the
Chilcotin, where they bent into a kind of elbow; in fact the two rivers
and their attendant mountains formed two sides of a triangle, between
which lay gulches and ravines innumerable, and the base of this triangle
was the course laid out for them by Phon.
"Looks as if that Chinee corpse had bin laughin' at us after all,"
muttered Rampike. "A man would want wings to cross that country."
"Never mind, let's try it, Jim," said Corbett; and together the two men
pressed on, floundering sometimes up to their armpits in the deep snow,
and sometimes finding an easy way where the country at first sight
appeared impassable.
On the third day of their journey, towards evening, they entered a
narrow snow-choked canyon, which seemed to lead through the second main
ridge of mountains to the Chilcotin.
As they entered this canyon Ned Corbett paused and looked searchingly up
and down it, as if looking for some sign to distinguish it from its
fellows.
But he found none. Like a hundred others which they had seen, this
gully was deep and narrow and full of snow. The pines which grew on its
sides seemed only just able to keep their heads above the white flood.
Somewhere far down below, no doubt, there was a creek, which sang and
flashed in the summer sunlight; but it was buried now out of sight by
the snow and gagged by the frost.
"Do you think you know this here place, Ned?" asked Rampike, who had
been watching his comrade's face.
"I _feel_ as if I did, and yet I can't see anything, Jim, that I could
swear to."
"Is that so? Well, it's no matter, because we must stick to this canyon
anyway. It leads out on to the Chilcotin," replied the old man, and so
saying he led on.
After a while he paused.
"Say, Ned, is that a sheep-trail across there on the other side?"
Ned looked hard in the direction indicated, shading his eyes with his
hand to get a better view.
"It looks more like a bear's trail," he replied, "only the bears are all
holed up still."
"It's pretty well used, whatever it is, and I guess we should find it a
sight better travelling there than it is here. Shall we try it?"
As it happened the snow was exceptionally deep where the two men stood,
so that they sank up to their knees at every step. A beaten trail of any
kind would therefore save them an infinite amount of labour.
"Yes, let's," said Ned, with the brusqueness of a man who needs all his
breath for other uses.
To get to the trail Corbett and Rampike had to cross the canyon, and in
places this was almost impossible, both men sinking from time to time
almost out of sight in the snow.
Twice Rampike voted that they should give up the attempt, and twice
Corbett persuaded him to go on.
At last, sweating and trembling with exertion, they got clear of the
worst of the snow and stood upon the edge of the trail.
For a moment no one noticed anything. They were both too tired to use
their eyes even. Then a sudden gleam of triumph flashed into Rampike's
face, and he swore savagely between his teeth, as he was wont to do when
anything moved him deeply. Bending over the trail he scrutinized it
carefully, fingering the soiled snow, and making an impression with his
own foot that he might compare it with the tracks before him.
When he raised his face to Corbett's he had regained all his old
coolness, but there was a cold glitter in his eyes which spoke of
repressed excitement.
"What is it, Jim?" asked Corbett.
"What is it? Don't you see? It's the trail of the bar we've bin' huntin'
this long while, that's what it is. I suppose we'd better toss for the
shot."
The trail was the trail of a man. The moment Corbett looked carefully at
it he saw that; and yet, cold-blooded as it seemed to him afterwards, he
never hesitated for a moment, but when Rampike produced a coin and sent
it spinning into the air, cried "Heads!" with all the eagerness of a boy
tossing for first innings in a cricket match.
"Tails it is! That thar is a lucky coin to me," said Rampike; "that's
why I always pack it around." And so saying he replaced an old English
shilling in his pocket and began examining the lock of his Winchester,
whilst Ned looked anxiously up and down the valley as if he expected
every moment to see their foe come into sight.
"Oh, no fear of his comin' just yet awhile," said Jim, noticing his
comrade's glances. "He went up the canyon about an hour ago, and I don't
reckon as he'll be along this way agen before morning. I wonder what
he's up to, anyway?"
To men like Rampike and Corbett the testimony of the trail upon which
they stood put some facts beyond all dispute. That some man who wore
moccasins used it at least twice a day, and had so used it for a month
past, they knew as certainly as they knew anything. That he had passed
along the trail within the hour they also knew, and that he was
Cruickshank they guessed with a confidence which left no room for doubt.
"I guess, Ned, as this here must be Pete's Crik as we've got into."
"That is what I've been thinking for some time," replied Ned.
"Then that's his trail to the diggings from the river. But what does he
want at the river so often? That licks me."
As Ned had no explanation to offer, the two stood silent for a moment,
until the old man's eyes fell upon the tracks which he and Ned had made
across the canyon.
"If we don't hide those we shall scare our game," he muttered. "Lend a
hand, Ned, to cover some of them up."
"I guess that'll do," he admitted, after half an hour's hard work.
"Looks as if a bar had come across until he smelled them tracks of his
and then turned back agen. Cruickshank 'll never notice, anyway, so we
may as well foller this trail to the river. Step careful into his
tracks, Ned. I'd like to see what he has been at on the river."
These were the last words spoken by either Corbett or Rampike for quite
half an hour, during which they followed one another in Indian file,
stepping carefully into the same footprints, so that to anyone but a
skilled tracker, it would appear at first sight that only one man had
used the trail.
At the end of half an hour they paused. The roaring of a great river was
in their ears, and the grinding of a drift ice.
"That's the Chilcotin," whispered Corbett.
"The Frazer, more like," replied Rampike. "Yes, I thought as much," he
added a moment later as he came round a corner of the bluff round which
the trail ran. "We've struck the junction of them two rivers. This creek
runs in pretty nigh the mouth of the Chilcotin."
Almost whilst he was yet speaking, Corbett caught the speaker by the
belt and dragged him down in the snow at his side.
In spite of the suddenness and roughness of such treatment the old man
uttered no protest. The question he wanted to ask was in his eyes as he
turned his head cautiously and looked into his comrade's face, but with
his lips he made no sound.
Putting his lips to Jim's ear, Ned whispered: "There's a canoe just
below us on the beach, lie still whilst I take a look at it;" and then
he crawled away upon his belly until he could peer from behind a boulder
on the sky-line, at the valley below.
In that valley, between steep banks and piles of great ice-worn
boulders, the last two hundred yards of the Chilcotin river rushed by to
join the Frazer, and amongst these boulders, at the very edge of the
open water, lay a rough Indian canoe.
At the side of the canoe the trail stopped.
"So that's the carcase as we have to watch," said Rampike's voice in
Ned's ear. "There's no need to keep down, lad, he ain't here. Let's go
along the trail and take a look." And so saying Rampike rose and walked
down to the canoe.
The sight which there met his eyes and Ned's struck both men dumb for a
while with wonder.
What they saw was the work of one man, in one winter, without proper
tools, without sufficient food, and with the awful odds against him of
place and weather.
"The devil fights hard for his own," muttered Ned; and indeed it seemed
as if one man, unaided by supernatural powers, could not have
accomplished what this man had done.
Corbett forgot that the greed of gold is almost a supernatural power.
Out of the trunk of a tree, felled by his own hands, the man who dwelt
in this snow-choked canyon had made himself a canoe, his one tool the
blade of his axe. The canoe so built was neither beautiful nor strong,
but it was just strong enough for a fearless man to risk his life in,
and beautiful enough, when it had its cargo on board, to tempt nine men
out of ten to risk their souls to obtain it.
For the cargo of that canoe was the world's desire--the omnipotent,
all-purchasing gold! In a hundred small sacks this cargo was stored
away, each sack made either of deer-skin or the clothes of the man who
made them. He had risked his life and sacrificed the blood of others to
get the yellow dust, and now he gave the very clothes from off his back,
in spite of the bitter winter cold, to make sacks to save it in. As Ned
looked and counted the sacks, and thought of old Roberts and Phon, of
the money wasted and the toil unrewarded, he sighed. For the first time
he regretted that he had lost the toss.
"Wal, come on, Ned," said Rampike, breaking in upon this train of
thought suddenly, "I'm goin' to watch right here. It's mighty lucky as
we came when we did. That fellow means to skip as soon as ever the river
clears."
Ned said nothing, but in silence followed his companion to a lair behind
a great block of gray stone, from which they could look down upon the
trail opposite to them.
"I guess it's safest here, though if the ice breaks up a bit more we
sha'n't be able to get back if we want to," said Rampike; for in order
to reach a position which commanded Cruickshank's trail, Rampike had led
the way across the river, stepping warily across the ice, which was
already split up into great pieces, which ground against each other and
moved slowly with the stream.
"It's not more than a hundred yards, I reckon, and I'll back her to
shoot good that far, even by moonlight," were the last words which
Rampike muttered as he drew a bead upon an imaginary figure on the trail
across the river, and after this silence came and wrapped the two men
round.
All through the gloaming and the night, even until the dawn, there was
only a great gray stone which stood upon one side of the Chilcotin and
looked down upon the trail on the other side.
There was no movement anywhere save the movement of the ice in the river
and of the moon as she rose and sank again in the clear night sky, nor
was there any sound save the grinding of the ice as it broke into
smaller and yet smaller pieces, and was borne along to join the hurtling
mass which was hurrying down the Frazer.
At first the shadows crept out into the valley, and one who was watching
them gripped his rifle hard, and his breath came thick and fast. Again
the moon rose and the shadows fled, and all was white and motionless and
dumb. After this it grew darker again; the moon had gone and a chill
wind made the watchers shiver, and one of them drew a white thread out
of the material of his coat, and doubled it and tied it round the muzzle
of his rifle, so that it made a great knot where the sight was,
serviceable instead of a sight in the half darkness. The wind was cold,
and the watchers' clothes were rigid with frost, but Rampike's fingers
scarcely trembled as he tied that knot, and his face was firm and cold
as ice.
At last there was a sound far away up the canyon. "Crunch crunch, crunch
crunch," it sounded with a regularity unlike any sound in nature. It was
no rolling of the rocks, no creaking of the frozen pines, not even the
tread of any beast of prey. It was the step of a man, and colonel or no
colonel, the man whose tread echoed in that wintry dawn, brought with
him to his doom some traces of that early training which had come to him
from the drill-sergeant. In the streets of a great city a hundred men
may pass and no one hears their tread, or knows that he hears it, and
yet in spite of the roaring of the rivers and the grinding of the ice,
this one man's tread, even in the snow, seemed like the tread of an
army, and the sound of it grew and grew until Corbett knew that the
heavens heard it, and that its vibrations were echoed in hell.
At the last they saw him, this man richer than all other men, this man
yellow with gold and crimson with other men's blood, and what they saw
was a wan, ragged figure, worn to a mere skeleton, its shoulders bent,
plodding heavily along with the last load of yellow dust, stolen from
Pete's Creek, hanging heavily in its hands.
For a moment Corbett doubted if this could really be that same stalwart,
smooth-tongued knave who had jockeyed him out of his dollars for three
useless claims, but a sharp metallic "clink" upon the rock beside him
called him back to himself and reminded him that Rampike had no doubts
even if he had.
Inch by inch Ned saw the long barrel of the Winchester pushed out over
the rock, until it rested firmly, its deadly muzzle dark in the dim
light of dawn.
Slowly Rampike lowered his head until his cheek lay against the cold
metal and his eye trained the weapon upon the man who for gold had not
hesitated to kill two of his fellows.
One more beat of his heart and he too would feel the kiss of the cold
lead and go whither those others had gone.
"My God, I can't do it!--Cruickshank!" cried Corbett, and as he cried
out he sprang to his feet and threw up Rampike's rifle.
"Cruickshank!" the cry startled the silence, so that all nature seemed
to shudder at the sound, and "Cruickshank!" "Cruickshank!" the rocks
repeated until the sound died away amongst the snows at the head of the
canyon.
At the first sound of that cry he whose name it was stopped, and as he
turned to look across the river the white light of dawn came down and
struck him across the face, so that those who looked could see the lines
graven on it by fear and hunger and remorse, and then his hands went
wildly up towards heaven and he fell.
The path which he had trodden so often crossed at this place a sheer
slope of hardened snow, in which he had cut footsteps for himself,
narrow indeed, but sufficient for the safety of a careful man. Until now
he had never slipped or dreamed of slipping, and yet now with that cry
in his ear, with the last load of gold in his hand, with the river
almost clear enough for flight, he slipped and fell. Those who looked
saw only a face full of mad fear, they heard only the clang of the metal
wash-pan, which he wore as miners wear it, at his belt, and then, quick
as the first ray of the dawn shoots across the mountain-side,
Cruickshank shot down that ice-slope, and with a dull heavy plunge, sank
in the ice-choked river.
For minutes, which seemed hours, the two men who lay behind the rock
neither spoke nor moved, only they stared with wide eyes at the empty
trail where he had stood, and the jostling hummocks of ice in the river
amongst which he sank.
"Wal," said Rampike at last, "that's all, and I guess we take the pot."
And he turned to where the canoe full of gold, the price of three men's
lives, lay alone in the gray light of dawn.
Even as he spoke the canoe moved. Some will say that the ice on which it
rested had been sucked away by the rising river, and that so, it slid
down naturally and was borne along with all the other river waifs,--dead
pines and dead men's bodies.
But Rampike, who saw the thing, says that hands like the hands of the
dead laid hold upon it and drew it away.
Then they watched it drift out amongst the ice into the Frazer, and
there for a while the great river played with it, and moaned and laughed
over it by turns, and then it sank, and the gold that was in it, and the
sin which that gold begot, are a portion of the load which the old river
is so glad to lay down as she rushes into the salt sea beyond the
sand-heads at New Westminster.
_L'envoi._
My story is told, and the days which I wrote of have passed away, but
something is still left to remind old-timers of the rush of '62. Pete's
Creek is still yielding a fair return for work done upon it by a
company, whose chairman is our old friend, Steve Chance, but such
pockets as that found under Phon's boulder have never been found again.
As for Ned Corbett, he is a rancher now on those yellow Chilcotin
uplands, and the gold which pleases him best is that left by the sun
upon his miles and miles of sweet mountain grass. If others have more
gold, Ned has all that gold can purchase by the Frazer or elsewhere,
work which he loves, and such health, spirits, and moderate wealth as
should satisfy an honest man.
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|Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. |
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