Bonanza

There were no October leaves to fall upon Hanafin City; the ragged spruce held its dark greenery, which looked black under the snow and glaze of ice, but all else was dead; not a bird flew, not an insect trumpeted, nothing marked the carpet of the covered cliffs. Where had the countless millions of mosquitos gone? Where the sable ravens, and the loons and divers? Nothing would be alive again until April. It was the time of the great silence.

Beginning at an hour before noon, and continuing until three, a glimmering of raw light visited us, a pale unhealthy ghost-light, without sun, and all the rest was night. Not darkness, because the aurora rose and set, and sometimes the uneven arch was white and brilliant; but generally it was smoky, and sometimes pale-blue and livid, and sometimes it was red and terrible. There it hung, swaying over us mysteriously, loaded with electricity, shivering, darting, whispering, and influencing our lives and movements by its moods. Everything was frozen. The temperature of eighty or ninety degrees of cold kept us working for warmth, and to rid ourselves of the superfluous electricity which that magnetic land poured into our bodies.

It was the close season for placer-mining, and there was only one thing we could do, namely, to drift out our pay streaks by burning. All the miners of Bonanza were thawing the frozen ground with fire, and they told me that this method of winter-mining had never been attempted before. First we cut away the moss and surface accumulations until solid ground was reached. In the hole thus made we would build a fire, and when this had died down we would throw out the ashes, and as much of the ground as had been thawed out, make another fire, and repeat the process, until we had burnt our way down to bed-rock. We would then build our fires against the bank of the hole, and drift sideways, moving perhaps one foot of pay-dirt each day. The dirt thus brought out we would dump in piles, to be left until spring, when water could be obtained to wash out the pay. I mention this to show how we passed the winter in Bonanza. Everywhere these fires were burning, and all day the smoke hung or drifted very slowly, in thick sheets like vast overhanging masses of wool.

My claim had not proved so rich as the one I had vacated, and yet it was impressed upon me that I had done very well. I had taken out altogether some eight thousand dollars, the bulk of which had been stolen by Redpath, and the greater part of what remained would be swallowed up in buying supplies during the winter. None of the men from the Carillon had done any good, and Jim Morrison was a loafer about the city. Jake Peterssen, with many another, made a very substantial grub stake. MacCaskill was the one lucky man, who had struck a “world-beater,” but his wealth benefited only the saloon proprietors upon Front Street.

It was a day in November, when, after buying some tea and sugar at the store of the Bonanza Trading and Supply Association, during the short period of the glimmer, I became attracted by a notice suspended over the big stove. A knot of men were discussing the same loudly and angrily. I could read anything by that time, so I went up; and this is what I read:—

The days crept on to the end of the month, and the thefts went on, too, while the public anger became hotter, and excitement fired the entire city. There are crimes worse than murder in the eyes of miners: such crimes as tampering with another man’s claim in the close season, taking a neighbour’s lawful water; but above all, opening and rifling an associate’s cache, the special act of guilt for which pardon can never be given. When any man is sentenced of robbing a cache, let that man be condemned!

One miner assured me that in the course of a long life spent about the gold-mines of the world, only two cases of this extreme guilt had ever come within his knowledge. The miner trusts his associates implicitly. Before going away, he will store his supplies, his tools, and his tent inside a cave, or in some hole, set his name upon the outside and his mind at rest, because he knows that no miner will touch his cache or its contents, however hard put to it he may be for supplies. The rascal who would rob a church will not touch a cache.

There were three quaint old men of Hanafin City, all as like each other as it was possible for men to be, named respectively Rod, Abe, and Pal, close friends, but not related. These men had come in during the beginning of August with a quantity of supplies, and had gone out about the middle of September, before the coming of the ice, after they had stored their possessions in a cache upon the partnership claim, which was 1,000 feet in length, and rectangular in form, going up the hill from the Akshelah. They were fine old gentlemen, very popular, true miners, who understood the science of their profession thoroughly. They went out to escape the night, with the idea of returning to work their claim in the spring.

Upon the 27th of November, at twenty minutes past six by the clock in the Record Office, a patrol rode into Hanafin, horse and rider white with frost, and a few minutes later a report passed feverishly about the city that the cache of the three old men had been tampered with. The deep-toned threatenings of the infuriated citizens had hardly broken out when Moccasin Bill appeared upon Front Street, his grizzled beard heavy with ice, and his preternaturally grave face sterner even than usual. He stood upon the street, in front of the principal drinking and gambling saloon, and called in his high nasal tones:

“Boys all! I’ve jest come right from old men’s cache. I’ve ben burnin’ on me new claim alongside.”

The miners came about him in the weird night under the aurora. The snow wore a greenish hue, and the frost crystals danced in the firelike atmosphere as so many electric sparks. I could see the lumps of ice upon Bill’s beard knocking together when his head moved. A shout went up from the saloon, and the men came forth like hornets out of their nest, smoking, swearing, shouting, among them MacCaskill, his big face scarlet, his tongue noisy, his hands full of money, because the interruption had drawn him from the furious excitement of the faro table. The crowd surged up and around Moccasin Bill.

“Boys all! old men’s cache has ben pulled inter pieces. Everything’s ben took. This city uv our Queen has ben disgraced—”

I could see his lips still moving, but what more he said was lost in the mad shoutings of all Hanafin. These men were terrible. Their faces were like those one half sees passing in a bad dream. Their cigars had dropped, and I could see the red points blinking upon the green snow. The electric light of the sky flashed and hissed over their heads and all their insanity. At last Moccasin Bill was heard again.

“I’ve ben around. Them things were took to-day. There’s tracks en the snow—”

There he was stopped. A yelling went up on every side, and the men ran together, apparently in confusion, but all with an object—to prepare themselves for a journey. A thousand men made for the silent canyon, a thousand men poured through what once had been Mosquito Hole, and that thousand men swept over the snow and the hidden treasures of Bonanza. So the hunt began. The pursuers were men, and their quarry men. They were more terrible than dogs, these hunters, because men can call off the dogs of chase. But who can call off men?

“Say!” A hand pulled my arm, and a frightened voice exclaimed: “The Commissioner’s away!”

It was Dave, late of the Carillon.

“Don’t ye see?” he went on fearfully. “The boys are so mad there’ll be no holdin’ of ’em. The Commissioner’s gone around the country, an’ won’t be back before the week-end. The boys’ll jest take the law inter their own hands.”

“What will they do if they catch the thieves?” I could hardly speak with fear, because I was sure I could name one of the marauders.

“They’ll flog ’em sure. They’ll hang ’em. They’re so ter’ble mad, p’r’aps they’ll put ’em on the wood-pile.”

I shuddered dreadfully. The frost choked my breath when I tried to protest against the horror of burning fellow-men.

“The police will stop it,” I managed to say.

“The police’ll make the boys give ’em over to the law, if so be they’re strong enough. But there’s only fifty of ’em in Hanafin, now the Commissioner’s gone wi’ his crowd.”

A quiet settled over the city, perhaps because it felt a tragedy impending, perhaps because the noisiest fifth part of its inhabitants were hunting in the night over Bonanza. I did not sleep during the hours which are considered night in the other world. Sometimes I looked out fearfully along silent Front Street, which spread away under the pale green glow, the lights from the saloons flashing on the near side, and upon the far side, from the Variety Theatre, came fitfully a burst of harsh music or a yell of drunken applause. One or two huge huskies moved slowly about the snow like hungry bears.

The hours of business returned, but the hunters were not among us. The glimmer of hopeless daylight reached us, and the miners went out into Bonanza to watch and wait for the hounds, but there was no burning done. There were no signs of the thousand who had gone forth to hunt, beyond their innumerable tracks in the snow.

“They’ll be ter’ble cold an’ hungry,” said some.

Then an old man, who knew all the moods of the arctic winter, put up his hand at noon, and pointed north.

“There’s wind a-comin’ there,” he said. “If they ain’t back afore night, we won’t see half of ’em no more.”

I saw the scar of misty cloud he indicated rising out of the northern snows, a long thin patch, the colour of indigo, and as it ascended all our dim, sad light went out.

Only a few citizens knew that a posse of police had set forth during the night, so soon as the hunters had gone out, and no one could know which direction they had taken, because it is the habit of these men to ride back upon their tracks, and jump their horses to some patch of ground which the wind has swept clean of snow, and so ride away and baffle pursuit. The few who knew guessed that they had gone to bring the Commissioner. They would have to ride against time, and the act of God.

The Hanafin Herald, our daily paper, did not appear, not for the lack of news that day, but because the men who prepared it were out upon the chase.

By two o’clock daylight was done; at three, no news; about four, the aurora came up like dark-blue smoke, and the atmosphere was entirely without motion; five, the silence was still unbroken, the air so still that it would never have supported a feather; at ten minutes past, the snow-dust along Front Street began to whirl in small eddies. It was a fantastic sight, and the man who was weather-wise chewed his cigar-end fiercely.

“It’s a-goin’ to be an old-time night,” he said simply.

Six o’clock, and the murmur of many voices filled the city. The hunters were returning from Bonanza. The atmosphere was filled with a stream of liquid ice, and the noise of feet tramping upon snow. The dark-blue aurora was growing purple, and a dreadful darkness settled down, like something tangible and creeping.

Out of the closeness of that gloom the procession entered Hanafin City. First came a sweeping van of misty ghosts, whirling along side by side, formed by columns of ice-cold snow-dust, whipped up into the atmosphere by some northern current sent as a forerunner of the great wind; then those who had gone forth to watch and wait; after these, the hunters and the hunted.