II

"PARDNERS"

"Looks like you'd say somethin' about them pancakes instead of settin'

there shovelin'."

"Haven't I told you regular every morning for six months that they was

great pancakes? Couldn't you let me off for once?"

The two partners glared at each other across the clumsy table of hewn

pine. They looked like two wild men, as black eyes flashed anger, even

hate, into black eyes. Their hair was long and uneven, their features

disguised by black beards of many weeks' growth. Their miners' boots

were but ludicrous remnants tied on with buckskin thongs. Their clothes

hung in rags, and they ate with the animal-like haste and carelessness

of those who live alone.

The smaller of the two men rose abruptly, and, with a vicious kick at

the box upon which he had been sitting, landed it halfway across the

room. His cheeks and nose were pallid above his beard, his thin nostrils

dilated, and his hand shook as he reached for his rifle in the gun rack

made of deer horns nailed above the kitchen door. He was slender and

wiry of build, quick and nervous in his movements, yet they were almost

noiseless, and he walked with the padded soft-footedness of the preying

animal.

Bruce Burt lounged to the cabin door and looked after "Slim" Naudain as

he went to the river. Then he stepped outside, stooping to avoid

striking his head. He leaned his broad shoulder against the door jamb

and watched "Slim" bail the leaky boat and untie it from the willows.

While he filled and lighted his pipe, Bruce's eyes followed his partner

as he seated himself upon the rotten thwart and shoved into the river

with home-made oars that were little more than paddles. The river caught

him with the strength of a hundred eager hands, and whirled him,

paddling like a madman, broadside to the current. It bore him swiftly to

the roaring white rapids some fifty yards below, and the fire died in

Bruce's pipe as, breathless, he watched the bobbing boat.

"Slim'll cross in that water-coffin once too often," he muttered, and

Bruce himself was the best boatman the length of the dangerous river.

There were times when he felt that he almost hated Slim Naudain, and

this was one of them, yet fine lines of anxiety drew about his eyes as

he watched the first lolling tongue of the rapids reach for the tiny

boat. If it filled, Slim was gone, for no human being could swim in the

roaring, white stretch where the great, green river reared, curled back,

and broke into iridescent foam. The boat went out of sight, rose, bobbed

for an instant on a crest, then disappeared.

Bruce said finally, in relief:

"He's made it again."

He watched Slim make a noose in the painter, throw it over a bowlder,

wipe the water from his rifle with his shirt sleeve, and start to

scramble up the steep mountainside.

"The runt of something good--that feller," Bruce added, with somber

eyes. "I ought to pull out of here. It's no use, we can't hit it off any

more."

He closed the cabin door against thieving pack rats, and went down to

the river, where his old-fashioned California rocker stood at the

water's edge. He started to work, still thinking of Slim.

Invariably he injected the same comment into his speculations regarding

his partner: "The runt of something good." It was the "something good"

in Slim, the ear-marks of good breeding, and the peculiar fascination of

blue blood run riot, which had first attracted him in Meadows, the

mountain town one hundred and fifty miles above. This prospecting trip

had been Bruce's own proposal, and he tried to remember this when the

friction was greatest.

Slim, however, had jumped at his suggestion that they build a barge and

work the small sand bars along the river which were enriched with fine

gold from some mysterious source above by each high water. They were to

labor together and share and share alike. This was understood between

them before they left Meadows, but the plan did not work out because

Slim failed to do his part. Save for an occasional day of desultory

work, he spent his time in the mountains, killing game for which they

had no use, trapping animals whose pelts were worthless during the

summer months. He seemed to kill for the pleasure he found in killing.

Protests from Bruce were useless, and this wanton slaughter added day by

day to the dislike he felt for his partner, to the resentment which now

was ever smoldering in his heart.

Bruce wondered often at his own self-control. He carried scars of knife

and bullet which bore mute testimony to the fact that with his childhood

he had not outgrown his quick and violent temper. In mining camps, from

Mexico to the Stikine and Alaska in the North, he was known as a

"scrapper," with any weapon of his opponent's choice.

Perhaps it was because he could have throttled Slim with his thumb and

finger, have shaken the life out of him with one hand, that Bruce

forbore; perhaps it was because he saw in Slim's erratic, surly moods a

something not quite normal, a something which made him sometimes wonder

if his partner was well balanced. At any rate, he bore his shirking, his

insults, and his deliberate selfishness with a patience that would have

made his old companions stare.

The bar of sand and gravel upon which their cabin stood, and where Bruce

now was working, was half a mile in width and a mile and a half or so in

length. He had followed a pay streak into the bank, timbering the tunnel

as he went, and he wheeled his dirt from this tunnel to his rocker in a

crude wheelbarrow of his own make.

He filled his gold pan from the wheelbarrow, and dumped it into the

grizzly, taking from each pan the brightest-colored pebble he could find

to place on the pile with others so that when the day's work was done he

could tell how many pans he had washed and so form some idea as to how

the dirt was running per cubic yard.

His dipper was a ten-pound lard can with a handle ingeniously attached,

and as he dipped water from the river into the grizzly, the steady,

mechanical motion of the rocker and dipper had the regularity of a

machine. If he touched the dirt with so much as his finger tips he

washed them carefully over the grizzly lest some tiny particle be lost.

Bruce was as good a rocker as a Chinaman, and than that there is no

higher praise.

When the black sand began to coat the Brussels-carpet apron, Bruce

stooped over the rocker frequently and looked at the shining yellow

specks.

"She's looking fine to-day! She's running five dollars to the cubic yard

if she's running a cent!" he ejaculated each time that he straightened

up after an inspection of the sand, and the fire of hope and enthusiasm,

which is close to the surface in every true miner and prospector, shone

in his eyes. Sometimes he frowned at the rocker and expressed his

disapproval aloud, for years in isolated places had given him the habit

of loneliness, and he talked often to himself. "It hasn't got slope

enough, and I knew it when I was making it. I don't believe I'm saving

more than seventy per cent. I'll tell you, hombre, grade is everything

with this fine gold and heavy sand."

While he rocked he lifted his eyes and searched the sides of the

mountains across the river. It seemed a trifle less lonely if

occasionally he caught a glimpse of Slim, no bigger than an insect,

crawling over the rocks and around the peaks. Yet each time that he saw

him Bruce's heavy black eyebrows came together in a troubled frown, for

the sight reminded him of the increasing frequency of their quarrels.

"If he hadn't soldiered," he muttered as he saw Slim climbing out of a

gulch, "he could have had a good little grub-stake for winter. Winter's

going to come quick, the way the willows are turning black. Let it come.

I've got to pull out, anyhow, as things are going. But"--his eyes

kindled as he looked at the high bank into which his tunnel ran--"I

certainly am getting into great dirt."

It was obvious that the sand bar where he was placering had once been

the river bed, but when the mighty stream, in the course of centuries,

cut into the mountain opposite it changed the channel, leaving bed rock

and bowlders, which eventually were covered by sand and gravel deposited

by the spring floods. In this deposit there was enough flour-gold to

enable any good placer miner to make days' wages by rocking the rich

streaks along the bars and banks.

This particular sand bar rose from a depth of five feet near the water's

edge to a height of two hundred feet or more against the mountain at the

back. There was enough of it carrying fine gold to inflame the

imagination of the most conservative and set the least speculative to

calculating. A dozen times a day Bruce looked at it and said to himself:

"If only there was some way of getting water on it!"

For many miles on that side of the river there was no mountain stream to

flume, no possibility of bringing it, even from a long distance, through

a ditch, so the slow and laborious process he was employing seemed the

only method of recovering the gold that was but an infinitesimal

proportion of what he believed the big bar contained.

While he worked, the sun came up warm, and then grew dim with a kind of

haze.

"A storm's brewing," he told himself. "The first big snow is long

overdue, so we'll get it right when it comes."

His friends, the kingfishers, who had lived all summer in a hole at the

top of the bank, had long since gone, and the camp-robbers, who scolded

him incessantly, sat silent in the tall pine trees near the cabin. He

noticed that the eagle that nested in an inaccessible peak across the

river swooped for home and stayed there. The redsides and the bull

trout in the river would no longer bite, and he remembered now that the

coyote who denned among the rocks well up the mountain had howled last

night as if possessed: all signs of storm and winter.

By noon a penetrating chill had crept into the air, and Bruce looked

oftener across the river.

"It's just like him to stay out and sleep under a rock all night with a

storm coming," he told himself uneasily.

This would be no new thing for Slim in one of his ugly moods, and

ordinarily it did not matter, for he kept his pockets well filled with

strips of jerked elk and venison, while in the rags of his heavy flannel

shirt he seemed as impervious to cold as he was to heat.

Chancing to glance over his shoulder and raise his eyes to the side of

the mountain, which was separated from the one at the back of the bar by

a cañon, a smile of pleasure suddenly lighted Bruce's dark face, and he

stopped rocking.

"Old Felix and his family!" he chuckled. Whimsically he raised both arms

aloft in a gesture of welcome. "Ha--they see me!"

The band of mountain sheep picking their way down the rough side stopped

short and looked.

"It's all of a month since they've been down for salt." Then his face

fell. "By George, we're shy on salt!"

He turned to his rocker, and the sheep started down again, with Old

Felix in the lead, and behind him two yearlings, two ewes, and the

spring lamb.

Their visits were events in Bruce's uneventful life. He felt as

flattered by their confidence as one feels by the preference of a

child. His liking for animals amounted to a passion, and he had been

absurdly elated the first time he had enticed them to the salt, which he

had placed on a flat rock not far from the cabin door. For the first few

visits their soft black eyes, with their amber rims, had followed him

timorously, and they were ready to run at any unusual movement. Then,

one afternoon, they unexpectedly lay down in the soft dirt which banked

the cabin, and he was so pleased that he chuckled softly to himself all

the time they stayed.

Now he laid down his dipper, and started toward the house.

"I'll just take a look, anyhow, and see how much there is."

He eyed uncertainly the small bag of table salt which he took from the

soap-box cupboard nailed to the wall.

"There isn't much of it, that's a fact. I guess they'll have to wait."

He slammed the door of the improvised cupboard hard upon its leather

hinges made of a boot-top, and turned away.

"Aw, dog-gone it!" he cried, stopping short. "I haven't got the heart to

disappoint the poor little devils." He turned back and took the salt.

The sheep were just coming out of the cañon between the mountains when

Bruce stepped through the cabin door. Old Felix stopped and stood like a

statue--Old Felix, the Methuselah of the Bitter Roots, who wore the most

magnificent pair of horns that ever grew on a mountain sheep. Solid and

perfect they were, all of nineteen and three-quarters inches at the base

and tapering to needle points. Of incredible weight and size, he carried

them as lightly on his powerful neck as though they were but the shells

of horns. Now, as he stood with his tremulous nozzle outstretched,

sniffing, cautious, wily, old patriarch that he was, he made a picture

which, often as Bruce had seen it, thrilled him through and through.

Behind Old Felix were the frisking lamb and the mild-eyed ewes. They

would not come any closer, but they did not run.

"It wouldn't have lasted but a few days longer anyhow," Bruce murmured

half apologetically as he divided the salt and spread it on the rock. He

added: "I suppose Slim will be sore."

He returned to his work at the river, and the sheep licked the rock

bare; then they lay down in leisurely fashion beside the cabin, their

narrow jaws wagging ludicrously, their eyelids drooping sleepily, secure

in their feeling that all was well.

Bruce had thrust a cold biscuit in the pocket of his shirt, and this he

crumbled for the little bush birds that twittered and chirped in the

thicket of rosebushes which had pushed up through the rocks near the

sand bank.

They perked their heads and looked at him inquiringly when it was gone.

"My Gawd, fellers," he demanded humorously, "don't you ever get filled

up?"

As he rocked he watched the water ouzel teetering on a rock in the

river, joyously shaking from its back the spray which deluged it at

intervals. Bruce observed.

"I'd rather you'd be doing that than me, with the water as cold as it is

and," with a glance at the fast-clouding sky, "getting colder every

minute."

The sheep sensed the approaching storm, and started up the gulch to

their place of shelter under a protecting rim rock close to the peak.

When they were no longer there to watch and think about, Bruce's

thoughts rambled from one subject to another, as do the minds of lonely

persons.

While the water and sand were flowing evenly over the apron he fell to

wishing he had a potato. How long had it been--he threw back his head to

calculate--how many weeks since he had looked a potato in the eye?

Ha!--not a bad joke at that. He wished he might have said that aloud to

some one. He never joked with Slim any more.

He frowned a little as he bent over the grizzly and crushed a small lump

between his thumb and finger. He wandered if there was clay coming into

the pay streak. Clay gathered up the "colors" it touched like so much

quicksilver. Dog-gone, if it wasn't one thing it was another. If the

tunnel wasn't caving in, he struck a bowlder, and if there wasn't a

bowlder there was----

"Bang! bang! Bang! bang!" Then a fusillade of shots. Bruce straightened

up in astonishment and stared at the mountainside.

"Boom! boom!" The shots were muffled. They were shooting in the cañon.

Who was it? What was it? Suddenly he understood. The _sheep_! _His_

sheep! They were killing Old Felix and the rest! Magnificent Old

Felix--the placid ewes--the frisking lamb! What a bombardment! That

wasn't sport; 'twas slaughter!

His dark skin reddened, and his eyes blazed in excitement. He flung the

dipper from him and started toward the cabin on a run. They were killing

tame sheep--sheep that he had taught to lose their fear of man. Then

his footsteps slackened and he felt half sick as he remembered that the

big-game season was open and he had no legal right to interfere.

Bruce had not seen a human face save Slim's since the end of May, and it

now was late in October, but he had no desire to meet the hunters and

hear them boast of their achievement. Heavy-hearted, he wondered which

ones they got.

The hunters must have come over the old trail of the Sheep-eater

Indians--the one which wound along the backbone of the ridge. Rough

going, that. They were camped up there, and they must have a big pack

outfit, he reasoned, to get so far from supplies at this season of the

year.

He tried to work again, but found himself upset.

"Dog-gone," he said finally. "I'll slip up the cañon and see what

they've done. They may have left a wounded sheep for the cougars to

finish--if they did I can pack it down."

Bruce climbed for an hour or more up the bowlder-choked cañon before his

experienced eye saw signs of the hunters in two furrows where a pair of

heels had plowed down a bank of dirt. The cañon, as he knew, ended

abruptly in a perpendicular wall, and he soon saw that the frightened

sheep must have run headlong into the trap. He found the prints of their

tiny, flying hoofs, the indentations where the sharp points had dug deep

as they leaped. Empty shells, more shells--they must have been bum

shots--and then a drop of blood upon a rock. The drops came thicker, a

stream of blood, and then the slaughter pen. They had been shot down

against the wall without a single chance for their lives. The entire

band, save Old Felix, had been exterminated. Their limp and

still-bleeding carcasses, riddled and torn by soft-nosed bullets, lay

among the rocks. Wanton slaughter it was, without even the excuse of the

necessity of meat, since only a yearling's hind quarters were gone. Not

even the plea of killing for trophies could be offered, since the heads

of the ewes were valueless.

Bruce straightened the neck of a ewe as she lay with her head doubled

under her. It hurt him to see her so. He looked into her dull, glazed

eyes which had been so soft and bright as they had followed him at work

a little more than an hour before. He ran his hand over a sheep's white

"blanket," now red with blood, and stood staring down into the innocent

face of the diminutive lamb.

Then he raised his eyes in the direction in which he fancied the hunters

had gone. They shone black and vindictive through the mist of tears

which blinded him as he cried in a shaking voice:

"You butchers! You game hogs! I hope you starve and freeze back there in

the hills, as you deserve!"

A snow cloud, drab, thick, sagging ominously, moved slowly from the

northeast, and on a jutting point, sharply outlined against the sky,

motionless as the rock beneath him, stood Old Felix, splendid, solitary,

looking off across the sea of peaks in which he was alone.