Bonanza

While we ate our breakfast of bacon and biscuits a few ravens hovered, as though surprised to see us, and their hoarse croaking mingled dismally with the subdued roar of the wind from the great blow-pipe. Some chick-adees hopped about the grass and examined us fearlessly. The defile was filled with gossamers. A golden haze made it difficult to see any distance along the coulee, and out of this haze two figures loomed. Presently we discovered the rascally sailors.

“Didn’t I tell ye to keep away?” shouted MacCaskill.

“Captain,” called Jim Morrison, “them soldiers are a-comin’! I saw ’em on the flats, an’ Gedeon seen ’em too.”

“They’re a-comin’ for to take us,” began Leblanc, who was himself again; but MacCaskill began to growl.

“How many of ’em?” he demanded.

“All three, major,” answered Morrison, trying to wheedle himself towards our supplies.

“You two durned fellers have give us away!”

“We never did, colonel. Gospel! We never did. We wouldn’t want er—”

“Shut your stoke-hole. Make your own tracks!”

After which the factor addressed me.

“Let’s get, Rupe. If that Hanafin finds us, we’ll have the whole world buzzin’ around next week.”

We made a cache of our supplies, and tracked for the canyon. I had allowed MacCaskill to believe that Olaffson had been the thief of the previous day, and had instructed Akshelah not to speak of our visit to Redpath. Because I was myself young and strong, I pitied the old adventurer who had made such a complete failure of his life. I wanted the others to believe him dead.

We tracked along the canyon, through the semi-darkness and the moist wind, until we reached the spruce. The trees were skeletons, ragged and uncouth, and the logs very small. The hot air shrieked and crept with insects. I had never known mosquitos so large or so virulent, and they choked and blinded us with their millions. Akshelah wrapped up her head; MacCaskill cursed; my own tanned skin pricked in a thousand places. Suddenly we stumbled over a pile of stones.

Large water-worn pebbles, with pieces of rock as white as milk, had been heaped into a long mound. At one end faintly appeared a design, formed simply by a spruce divided some four feet above ground, with a smaller and shorter piece of the same tree tied by some rotten rope across.

“A grave,” said the factor, his voice barely audible through the mosquitos.

There was no need to say more, because we knew what lay buried there. We came out of the spruce, and over shingle, between the colossal walls, rounded a spur of rock, which jutted out like a horn, and were confronted by a wet precipice, honey-combed by small holes, each of which whistled and hissed as it discharged a separate volume of wind. Overhead we could just make out a fringe of spruce, like far-away storm-clouds.

“Wings for three,” said MacCaskill morosely.

“Can’t we find any way round?”

“Likely,” growled MacCaskill. “P’r’aps we’d best start right now, around by Alaska, and down the Yukon to the Porcupine, and out to M‘Pherson. Then come along the MacKenzie, till we strike the Slave and the Athabasca. Do it in a year, if we have luck.”

“Where’s Mosquito Pass?” I said, mindful of what Redpath had told me.

“Where? Right here, I guess.”

“Then where’s the hole?”

“Ask a prophet.”

I examined the face of the cliff, which was largely composed of streaked granite; near the ground moss grew to a depth of more than a foot, and a few small trees, very short and bushy, sprang out in clumps. I forced myself into one of the narrow inlets, where there was a strong odour of decayed matter, but I saw no signs of a way out, and the mosquitos covered my face. When I forced myself out, one of the small trees caught me. It must have been very lightly rooted, for when I pulled it came away from its crevice.

“We’ll be bit to the bone if we do strike the hole,” said MacCaskill, who was in the mood to grumble. “See them wind-pipes! If ye got inter one, ye might fancy yourself a durned shell inside a gun. Golden Jerusalem!” His face altered wonderfully, and his eyes began to stare. “Don’t drop it! You’re wastin’ it, ye fool! Look-a-here! Coarse, coarse as yaller sugar!”

When he gripped at the roots of the little tree I was still holding, I began to understand.

Golden grains gleamed about the brown dirt still adhering to the roots. The factor shook this dirt away, but there was no water handy to wash out the handful.

“There’s two dollars here, I guess,” he chuckled, while before my eyes was the vision of my father flinging the buckskin bag of stones and dirt into the Yellow Sands, and in my ears came his sad voice giving me my first and only lesson.

MacCaskill put the dirt into his hat, and scrambled about the precipice with the agility of a chipmunk.

“We must find that hole, Rupe!” he shouted through the hot wind. “And when we’re through, we’ll want to close the pass up, so as no one’ll be able to follow. See? Golden gates! Come over here and help look, you gal. You ain’t mope-eyed.”

Akshelah’s wonderful eyes looked back, and she called to me quietly. She directed my glance, and immediately I discovered Inspector Hanafin leaning against the spur of rock, watching us, and smoking his pipe.

He stirred when he caught my eye, and came towards us, his bright colours rather dingy after his rapid crossing of the Bad Lands.

“Hard at it, eh?” he said, in his delightful voice, while MacCaskill started round violently.

“I thought you had gone away on the Firefly,” I said, and MacCaskill growled.

“The Firefly hasn’t gone away,” said Hanafin. “Do you know that this is unexplored territory?” he went on, examining the contents of MacCaskill’s hat, and stirring the dirt lightly with a long finger.

My partner was sulky at having his plans spoilt, and admitted as much in his most morose fashion. But Hanafin laughed.

“You haven’t come here after Redpath,” complained MacCaskill. “You just came followin’ us.”

“I belong to the Force,” interrupted Hanafin, stroking the yellow stripe down his leg. “If I think you have made a discovery of gold, it is my duty to follow you. Now, you had better tell me what you know.”

“You’ll report it, and we’ll have half the world here.”

The inspector twirled a ring upon his third finger.

“You ought to be old enough to know that you can’t keep a gold-find private property. Let us suppose that you and Petrie strike something rich to-day. This is unexplored territory, and you are alone. Next week you would have seen fifty men here, the following week one hundred, the next a thousand, and next month a city. We don’t need wires to telegraph such news as a gold-find. As a matter of fact, it’s lucky for you that I have come, because I can establish you as legal miners. Are you going to tell me what you know?”

“I hate to do it,” muttered MacCaskill.

The inspector pulled out a note-book and made some entries. The bed of shingle on which we were standing lay outside the channel of wind. The heat, however, was terrible, and the mosquitos thick as dust. Hanafin turned abruptly.

“Heard anything of Redpath?”

I felt his eyes upon me, while I tried to think out a reply in my slow-witted fashion; but the next moment I heard his cheerful laugh.

“So he has got here,” said the soldier. Again he bent his head, but as he was writing, observed: “I’m ready to listen, MacCaskill.”

My partner still demurred.

“You three here; Redpath and his Icelander; the two sailors; my two boys and myself. Add them up. Ten already for the new mining camp. Lennie and company on their way. We shall soon be crowded.”

MacCaskill gasped.

“All that crowd comin’?”

“Of course,” said the inspector. “When we were camping in the electric hollow any half-blind fool could have seen that you knew of something. It wasn’t hard to understand that those two sailors were on the good thing, too, for they were hanging about you men like shadows. I didn’t talk. Lennie and his lot didn’t talk, but anyone could have told that they had made up their minds to desert the Carillon and follow you inside. By morning you had gone, following the tracks of Redpath and his blackguard; the two sailors had gone, following your tracks; I came, following their tracks; Lennie and Co. are following the tracks of all of us. That’s how a mining camp grows, my friend.”

“I pass,” said MacCaskill unhappily, and he told the inspector all the story.

“Good,” said the handsome Englishman, when he had done. He looked about, stroking his brown moustache, and went on: “This might be made a regular death-trap for us. Don’t you see?” He was addressing me. “One man hidden in that spruce could pick us off as he liked. We can only advance. Rock behind; the canyon upon either side. What a place to drive an enemy into!”

“Redpath has lost his shooter!” I exclaimed heedlessly. “It fell off him in the mud.”

“That is the information I wanted,” said Hanafin. “Don’t be alarmed,” he added to MacCaskill. “Norman is posted upon the far side of the spruce; Carey, my other boy, at the entrance into the canyon.” He gave a last pull at his pipe. “Now to find the pass.”

Akshelah had been standing beside me very quietly. Now she broke silence for the first time.

“Is it the Mosquito Hole?” she said composedly.

We all turned to her.

“There,” she said, pointing away to the far left side, where there was no moss and no small trees, but merely rugged rock.

“Well, you see more than I can, my girl,” said Hanafin.

We came across the shingle and a bed of sand to where there was thick wet moss. Under the cliff, streaked with its red and yellow rivulets of slime, we looked up from ledge to ledge, and from point to point. There was not the smallest indication of any hole.

MacCaskill began to growl again, and Hanafin was puzzled, but Akshelah looked at me and laughed.

“You see?” she said, making the slightest upward movement of her head.

I did not see, and I was about to confess as much, when the sound of a million insect trumpets reached my ears. Then I perceived a great boulder coming from the face of the cliff, like a misshapen nose, and to that I pointed with the cry of discovery. The other two remained as much in the dark as ever.

“Watch the mosquitos!” I called.

The insects were streaming steadily over the summit of the boulder, like smoke out of a stove-pipe.

“You’re a world-beater, girl!” exclaimed Inspector Hanafin.

The others helped me to ascend the almost perpendicular cliff, where it was very hard to find and secure a safe footing. However, I was doing something that I understood, and I soon attained the big boulder, which did not project as a part of the cliff, but merely reposed as a separate fragment within a cavity. It might have been lowered there to cover and conceal the entrance to the hole. I shouted down this information to my companions.

“See!” said the inspector, pointing over me. “That rock broke off, and fell exactly upon the hole, which caught it as a cup would catch a ball.”

I put my head back, and saw that he had hit on the truth. The scar made by the separation was obvious some way above. Behind the great fragment opened an aperture into which I might have inserted my head. Here the villainous mosquitos were pouring in and out.

“Could we work a lever?” called Hanafin.

It was impossible, because the force would have to be exerted against the opposite side, and there was no foothold there.

“Use your muscles, Rupe!” called MacCaskill.

He spoke half in jest, but I took the remark in earnest. Having secured safe foothold, I dug my hands into the crevices of the rock, and bent back with all my might. A movement followed, a sullen, shifting motion, and a wave of heat passed through me. Then the effort died out, the rock settled back grimly, and the air became solid with mosquitos.

“That boy could lift an ox!” I overheard Hanafin muttering.

MacCaskill was excited again.

“Stay with it, Rupe! Don’t be beat! He’s a bigger than Jake Peterssen, but he won’t scrap back!”

I was excited, too. I became far more anxious to shift that great rock than to enter the land of Bonanza. By that time I had learnt sufficient to be proud of my strength, because I understood that it was abnormal. I pulled off my coat, strapped my waist tighter, worked my feet into the ledge, dug my hands into the unyielding surface, and bent over the black monster, which was quite as black as the negro I had conquered at Gull, though far less terrible. I strained, until the surrounding atmosphere became dark, and something screamed into my ears.

There was again a motion, but whether the rock was coming to me or I moving to the rock, I did not know. Though I saw nothing, I became in some way aware that my muscles stood out themselves like projections of rock, and I felt that the sight was unnatural. Then the monster appeared to rise out of his bed and come upon me, with a rending and a tearing, threatening to crush me. Something was giving and parting. Was it from the roots of the boulder, or from my own vitals? I felt nothing whatever, no pain, not even an ordinary strain.

I understood the cause. Of course, it was because I had released my grip, and the great rock had conquered me. It would be impossible to try again, because my limbs were quivering, and there was no more strength left in my body than in that of an infant.

A ray of red light flashed out of the far-away darkness, and I understood that I had fallen to one side, in order that I might escape some terrible creature, which was crashing upon me to crush out my life. An avalanche swept past with a cold breath, and I began to fall, quite easily and contentedly, until something which I took to be a cloud received and held me, and floated away lightly, still holding me, and rocking gently up and down.