"GOLD—GOLD IN FLAKES, AND LUMPS, AND NUGGETS."
The wet pebbles amongst which the gold lay were twice as beautiful, and as Ned wiped the perspiration from his brow he thought that a quart of gold would be but a small price to pay for a quart of honest Bass. But Phon had no such fancies. With a wild cry, like the cry of a famished beast, the Chinaman threw himself into the hollow he had cleared, clawing and scratching at the gold with his long, lean hands until his nails were all broken and his flesh torn and bleeding.
Nor was Chance far behind Phon in the scramble. Together the two delved and scratched and picked about the bed-rock, amassing little piles and stacks of nuggets from the size of a pea to the size of a hen's egg, and so busy were they and so intent upon their labour that neither of them noticed Corbett, who after Phon's first wild cry had turned away in disgust, and now sat solemnly smoking on a log by the camp-fire.
Taking his pipe from his mouth, he blew away a long wreath of fragrant smoke, and as he watched it dissolve in space his thoughts fashioned themselves into these strange words:
"Confound your gold anyway! I don't want any more of it in my share of life's good things."
After the removal of Phon's boulder there was no more talk of washing with pan or rocker, no more thought of digging or mining. Even Chance and Phon were content with the quantity of gold which lay ready to their hands at Pete's Creek. The only trouble was that at Pete's Creek the yellow stuff was absolutely worthless, and that between Pete's Creek, where the gold lay, and those cities of men in which gold is of more value than anything else upon earth, were several hundred miles of wild country, where a man might be lost in the forest, or drowned in the river, or starved on the mountain, just like a beggarly coyoté, and that although he was richer than a Rothschild.
Steve had heard of men in Cariboo who had paid others ten dollars a day to carry their gold-dust for them, and he would gladly have done as much himself; but, unluckily, the only men within reach of him were as rich as he was, and wanted help just as badly. So Steve joined Corbett and Phon, and the three men sat together looking down upon as much wealth as would buy the life-long labour, aye, the very bodies and souls, of a hundred ordinary men, and yet they were conscious that it was about even betting that they would all three die beggars—die starving for want of a loaf of bread, though each man carried round his waist the price of a score of royal banquets!
Steve was the first to break the silence. Pointing away over the rolling forest lands, towards the bed of the Frazer river, he said:
"It looks pretty simple, Ned, and I guess we could get there and back in a week."
"Do you? You would be a good woodsman if you got to the river in a week, and a better one if you ever found your way back here at all."
"How's that? You don't mean to say that you think it possible that we shall lose the creek again now that we have found it?"
"We ought not to, Steve, but that is a bad country to get through and an easy one to get lost in;" and Corbett's eyes dwelt mistrustingly upon the dark, dense woods, the deep gullies, the impervious stretches of brûlé, and the choking growth of young pines which lay between the knoll upon which they sat and the distant benches of the Frazer river.
"Well what had we better do, Ned? If we don't take care we shall get caught in a cold snap before we know where we are."
"We had better leave here to-morrow morning, I think, Steve, carrying all the gold we can with us, and make straight for the Frazer. There we may meet some miners going out for the winter, and if they have not struck it rich themselves they may be willing to pack the stuff out for us. If not, we must look for old Rampike and wait for the spring."
"What! and put up with nearly another year of this dog's life with all that lying there?"
"I'm afraid so, Steve. You can't order a special train from here to New York though you are a millionaire."
For a little while Steve Chance sat moodily biting at the stem of his unlit pipe, and then he asked Corbett—
"Are you going to join Rampike for his fall hunt, Ned?"
"Certainly. Why not?"
"Oh, I don't know, only I thought that you might have changed your mind;" and Chance's eyes wandered round to the pile of gold nuggets over which Phon kept guard.
"That can make no difference, Steve. I don't want what Cruickshank stole from me. I want to settle with him for my countryman's life."
"Much good that will do poor old Roberts. But as you please. We are all mad upon one subject or another. Do you still think that Cruickshank is somewhere hereabouts?"
"I don't think that he is on this side of the river or we should have come across his tracks before now, but I fancy he is somewhere in this Chilcotin country."
"You don't think that that glove could have been his?"
"You said that there were no men's tracks anywhere near it, so I suppose not."
"That's so; but I've seen some of your tracks since, Ned, which looked awfully like those bear tracks. I'm hanged if I know whether they were bear tracks after all!"
"It is a pity you were so positive about them at first then. But it is too late now in any case. If the tracks were made by Cruickshank he is far enough from here by now."
Again the conversation ceased for a time, the only sound being the rattle of Pete's Creek in the dark gorge below.
"It is a pity the goats have all cleared out. Don't you think you could find one, Ned, before we start?" asked Chance at length.
"No, I'm certain that I could not. We must be content with trout (if Phon can catch any), and the flour which I saved when we struck the creek."
"Ah, I had forgotten that. Is there much of it?"
"About half a pound apiece per diem for a week."
"Short commons for a hungry man, especially as the berries are nearly all gone."
"It will be hungry work for us until we reach the Frazer, but there is a little goat's meat left and the fish."
"Say, Phon, you think you catch plenty fish by to-morrow?"
"S'pose you come 'long an' help I catch 'em," replied Phon.
"All right, I'll come. How much gold you pack along with you, Phon?" Steve added as the three went down to the creek to fish.
"Me halo pack any," was Phon's unexpected reply.
"Halo pack any! Why, don't you want any gold?"
"Yes, me want him, but me not pack any. Me not go to-mollow. Me stop here!"
"Stop here! What, alone! How about the devils?"
Poor Phon glanced nervously over his shoulder. The shadows were growing deeper and deeper amongst the pine stems, and the trees were creaking and groaning with a little wind which generally rose about sundown.
"S'pose you want find men carry gold to Victollia, one man go catch 'em. One man plenty. S'pose two man stop here, that heap good. No one steal 'um gold then," and the speaker pointed to the bags of dust.
"Nonsense, Phon. Who do you suppose would take the gold?"
"Debil take him; debil take him, sure. Debil watch him all the time. S'pose all go, debil take him quick."
"Well, I'm afraid your friend the devil will take the stuff to-morrow morning, for to-morrow morning we all leave this place. You had better pack as much dust as you can carry if you are afraid to leave it."
"No. Me halo pack any. S'pose all go, me stop 'lone."
It was a resolute reply in spite of the man's frightened face, and the tone of it arrested Ned's attention.
"Have you ever really seen anyone about the camp?" he asked.
"No, me halo see him, me halo see him. Only me know him there. All the time he go lound an' lound and look at the gold and come closer. Me halo see him, me feel him looking all the time. Stop here, Misser Ned, stop here."
"The gold has made you crazy, Phon," said Ned, somewhat contemptuously, disregarding the piteous appeal in the man's tone and gesture. "However, if you like to stay, it will do no harm. You can catch plenty of fish, and we shall be back in a fortnight or so." And then turning to Steve, Ned added, in a lower tone: "He'll change his mind when he sees us start, and if he doesn't we cannot drag him through that country against his will."
That night the three discoverers of Pete's Creek worked as hard to collect a store of little trout as they had ever worked to gather gold, and at dawn two of the three stood ready to start on their march to the Frazer. In spite of all Ned's persuasions Phon remained firm in his resolution to stay with his treasure. For him the woods were devil-haunted; articulate voices whispered in every wind; faces of fear were reflected from every starlit pool; and yet, in spite of all the terrors which walk at night, Phon refused to leave his gold. In him greed was stronger even than fear.
"He will be raving mad before we get back," muttered Ned, as he gazed at the frail blue figure crouching over the camp-fire; "but what can we do? We can't 'pack' the fellow along with us."
"No, we cain't do that," replied Steve. "Poor beggar! I wouldn't be in his shoes for all the gold in the creek."
And as he stared in a brown study at the charred stumps and rough white woodwork in that gloomy canyon, at the broken rock and the dead fires, Chance began unconsciously to hum the air of "The Old Pack-mule."
"Confound you, Steve," cried Corbett angrily, "stop that! Isn't it bad enough to hear the winds crooning that air all night, and the waters of the creek keeping time to it? Shut up, for heaven's sake, and come along!" and without waiting for an answer Ned turned his back upon the gold camp and plunged boldly into the woods between it and the Frazer.
It had been arranged that Corbett should go ahead with the rifle, and that Chance should follow him with an axe. "Any fool can blaze a tree, but it takes a quick man to roll over a buck on the jump," had been Steve's verdict, and he had allotted to himself the humbler office.
From the moment they left camp until nightfall, it seemed to Steve that he and his companion did nothing but step over or crawl under logs of various sizes and different degrees of slipperiness. To follow the sinuous course of a mountain stream through a pine-forest may look easy enough from a distance, but in reality to do so at all closely is almost impossible.
As for Pete's Creek, it ran through a deep and narrow canyon, the walls of which were precipitous rocks, along which no man could climb. The bed of the creek for the most part was choked with great boulders, amongst which the water broke and foamed, rendering wading impossible; and along the edges of the canyon up at the top the pines grew so thick, or the dead-falls were so dense, that it was all Ned could do to keep within hearing of the creek.
The constant forking of the stream made careful blazing very necessary, and this took time, and the course of the stream was so tortuous that they had frequently to walk four miles to gain one in the direction in which they wanted to go, so that when at last they reached a bare knoll, from which they could look out over the forest, it seemed to Ned and Steve that the Frazer valley was no nearer, and the crawling folds of the great Chilcotin mountains no more distant than they had been at dawn.
But the folds of the mountains were already full of inky gloom, and it was evident that a stormy night was close at hand, so that whether they had made many miles or few upon their way, it was imperatively necessary to camp at once. Almost before the fire had been lighted night fell, a night of intense darkness and severe cold, a cold which seemed to be driven into the tired travellers by a shrill little wind, which got up and grew and grew until the great pines began to topple down by the dozen. From time to time one or other of the sleepers would wake with a shiver and collect fresh fuel for the dying fire, or rearrange the log which he had laid at his back to keep the wind off; but in spite of every effort the night was a weary and a sleepless one both for Ned and Steve, and in the morning, winter, the miner's deadliest foe, had come.
For a month or more yet there might not be any serious snowfall, but the first flakes of snow were melting upon Corbett's clothes when he got up for the last time that night and found that the dawn had come. Far away upon the distant crest of the black mountains at his back, Ned saw the delicate lace-work of the first snow-storm of the year like a mantilla upon the head of some stately Spanish beauty.
"By Jove, Steve, we have no time to lose," said Ned. "Look at that!" and he pointed to the mountains. "If this is going to be an early winter, Phon is a lost man."
"Lead on, Ned," replied Steve, "I'll follow you as long as my legs will let me, but if you can find any way of avoiding those dead-falls to-day, do so. Nature never meant me for a squirrel or a Blondin."
"The only other way if you don't like balancing along these logs is down there over these boulders, and the water there is thigh-deep in places, and cold as ice;" and Corbett pointed to the bed of the creek a hundred feet below.
"Let's try it for a change, Ned, it cain't be worse than this," panted Steve, who at the moment was crawling on his hands and knees through a mesh-work of burnt roots and rampikes.
"All right, come along," said Ned, and using their hands more than their feet, the two men crept down the rock wall of the canyon until they reached the bed of the creek.
Here things went fairly well with them at first. The water was icy cold, but their limbs were so bruised and feverish that the cold water was pleasant to them; and though the boulders over which they had to climb were slippery and hard to fall against, they were not more slippery and very little harder than the logs above. After two or three miles of wading, however, Steve's limbs began to get too numbed with cold to carry him any further, and a return to dry land became necessary. Looking up for some feasible way out of the trap into which they had fallen, Ned at last caught sight of what appeared to be fairly open country along the edge of the canyon, and of a way up the rock wall which, though difficult, was not impossible.
"Here we are, Steve," he cried as soon as he saw the opening. "Here's an open place and a fairly easy way to it. Come along, let's get out of this freezing creek;" and so saying he went at the rock wall and began to scramble up like a cat.
Steve was either too tired or too deliberate to follow his friend at once, and in this instance it was well for him that he was so, for a second glance showed him a far easier way to the upper edge of the canyon than the direct route taken by Ned.
Clambering slowly up by the easier way of the two, Steve was surprised not to find Ned waiting for him when he at length gained the top of the rocks, and still more surprised when, after waiting for some minutes, he heard a faint voice below him calling him by name.
"Steve! Steve!" cried the voice.
"What is it, and where are you, Ned?" answered Chance.
"Here, underneath you. Look sharp and lend me a hand, I can't hold on much longer!"
By Ned's tones his need was urgent, and yet Chance could not get a glimpse of him anywhere. Dropping on to his knees and crawling to the edge, Steve leaned over until half his body was beyond the edge of the cliff. Then he saw his friend, but even then he did not comprehend his peril. The rock wall at the point at which Ned had tried to scale it ended in a kind of coping, which now projected over his head; but as if to make amends for this, a stout little juniper bush offered the climber a convenient hand-rail by which to swing himself up on to the top. And yet with the juniper within reach of him, there hung Ned Corbett yelling for help.
"Why don't you get hold of the bush, Ned, and haul yourself up? I cain't reach you from here," cried Steve.
"Daren't do it!" came the short answer. "There's a hornet's nest on it!" and as Ned spoke Steve caught sight of a great pear-shaped structure of dry mud which hung from the bush over the creek.
"Well, get down and come round my way."
"Can't do it. I can't get back," answered Ned, who, like many another climber, had managed to draw himself up by his hands to a spot from which descent was impossible.
At that moment, whilst Steve was devising some kind of extempore ladder or rope, there was a rattle of falling stones, and a cry: "Look out, Steve, catch hold of me if you can!" and as the frail hold of his hands and feet gave way, Ned made a desperate spring and clutched wildly at the very bough from which that innocent-looking globe of gray mud hung. The next moment, at the very first oscillation of their home, out rushed a host of furious-winged warriors straight for Corbett's face. Luckily for him Steve had clutched him by the wrist, and though the sudden attack of the hornets upon his eyes made Ned himself let go his hold, his friend managed to maintain his until, amid a perfect storm of angry wings and yellow bodies, the two lay together upon the top of the cliff. If Steve had let go at that moment when the hornets rushed out to war, Ned Corbett must have fallen back upon the rocks at the bottom of the canyon, and there would have been an end to all his troubles. As it was he lay upon the top of the cliffs, and realized that the worst of his troubles were but beginning.
"Are you much stung, Steve?" he asked.
"You bet I am, Ned. Look! that would hardly go into an eight-and-a-half lavender kid now," and Steve held out his right hand, which was already much swollen.
But Ned did not take any notice of it. Instead he pressed his hands against his eyes and writhed with pain, and when Steve laid his hand on him he only muttered: "My God! my God! Steve, how will you and Phon ever find your way out? I am stone blind!"
Perhaps no two men were ever in more desperate plight than were Steve Chance and Ned Corbett as they lay upon the edge of Pete's Creek canyon in the Chilcotin country on that 2d of October, 1862.
For a week at least they had been living upon very meagre rations, made up principally of brook trout and berries; for a day and a half they had been stumbling hurriedly through one of the densest mountain forests in British Columbia; and now, when Chance's strength was exhausted and the grub half gone, Ned the guide and hunter was utterly bereft of sight.
For ten long minutes the two sat silent, then Ned lifted his head in a helpless dazed way, and Steve saw that both his eyes were completely closed by the hornets' stings.
"Chance, old chap, this is bad luck, but it will all rub off when it's dry. There are only two things now for you to choose between, either you must go on alone and bring help for Phon and myself from the Frazer, or go back and bring Phon out with you. You and he could catch a fresh supply of trout up at the pool, enough at any rate to keep body and soul together."
"And what is to become of you, Ned?"
"Oh, I shall get all right. I must get on as best I can in the dark for a day or two, and then if you can spare me the rifle, I shall be able to forage for myself. If you can spare the rifle I can do with half my share of the grub."
Steve Chance laughed. It was not the time which most men would have chosen for laughing, but still Steve Chance laughed a quiet dry laugh. The Yankee didn't like hard times, and didn't pretend to, but he had got into a corner, and had not the least idea of trying to back out of it.
"Say, Ned, is that what you'd expect an 'old countryman' to do? I guess not. And if it comes to that, men don't go back on a pal in the new country any more than they do in the old. If you stay here, I stay with you. If we get out of this cursed country we get out together, and if we starve we starve together. Let's quit talking nonsense;" and Chance, whose spirit was about two sizes too big for his body, got up and busied himself about making a fire and a rough bed for his sick comrade, as if he himself had just come out for a pic-nic.
Now you may rail at Fortune, and the jade will only laugh at you: you may pray to her, and she will turn a deaf ear to your prayers: you may try to bribe her, and she will swallow your bribes and give you nothing in return: but if you harden your heart and defy her, in nine cases out of ten she will turn and caress you.
Thus it was in Steve's case.
He was as it were fighting upon his knees, half dead but cheery still, and the woman-heart of Fortune turned towards him, and from the time when he set himself to help his blind comrade things began to mend. In the first place, when he tried the creek for trout, he found no difficulty in catching quite a respectable string of fish in a little over an hour, although for the last two days he and Ned had almost given up fishing as useless outside Phon's pool. Then on the way back from his fishing he met a stout old porcupine waddling off to winter quarters. Stout as he was, the porcupine managed to move along at quite a lively pace until he reached a pine, up which he went as nimbly as a monkey; but Steve was ready to do a good deal of climbing to earn a dinner, and did it (and the porcupine, too, "in the eye").
Thanks to these unhoped-for supplies of fish and fresh meat the two companions were able to camp and rest for a couple of days, during which the inflammation in Ned's eyes abated considerably, although he still remained totally blind, in spite of the rough-and-ready poultices of chewed rose-leaves constantly prepared for him by Steve.
"Do you feel strong enough to walk, Ned, if I lead you?" asked Steve after breakfast, on the third morning in the hornet's-nest camp.
"Yes, I'm strong enough, but you can't lead a blind man through this country."
"Cain't I? I've been looking round a bit, and it's pretty clear ahead of us. I've caught a good lot of trout now, and if you will carry the rifle and the axe, Ned, I'll try if I cain't find a way out for both of us."
"And how about blazing the trail?"
"Oh, I reckon we must let that slide. We can go by the creek when we want to get in again. My blazing don't amount to much so far, anyway."
"Why not?"
"Well, it's no good raising Cain now, old man, because the thing is done. I said 'any fool could blaze a trail,' and I was wrong; seems as if I'm a fool who cain't blaze one. Anyway, I blazed all those trees for the first two days as they came to me, not as they passed me, and I reckon my blazes won't show much from this side of the trees."
A moment's reflection will make the whole significance of Steve's admission plain even to those who have never seen a blazed tree. In making a new trail through a thickly-timbered country it is customary to blaze or chip with the axe a number of trees along the trail, so that anyone following you has only to look ahead of him and he will see a succession of chipped trees clearly defining the path.
If the trail is to be a permanent one, the man blazing it chips both sides of the marked tree, so that a man coming from either end of the trail can see the blazes. If, however, you only want to enable a friend or pack-train to follow you, you save time and blaze the trees as you come up to them, on the side facing you as you advance. This of course affords no guidance to you if you want to return along your own trail, and this was exactly what Steve had done. But bad as his mistake was, it was too late to set it right, and realizing this Ned made light of it, hoping against hope that whenever his eyes should be opened again he would be able to recognize the country through which they had passed, and so find his way back to Phon.
But in his heart Ned never expected to see Phon or the Golden Creek again. As he trudged along in the darkness, holding on to the end of Steve's stick, he could hear the refrain of that old song following him; and though his eyes were shut he could see again both those camps in the woods, the one in which he had found Roberts dead, and the one in which, as he now believed, he had left Phon his servant to die.
As a rule Ned's mind was far too busy with the things around him to indulge in dreams and forebodings, but now that his eyes were shut his head was full of gloomy fancies and prophesies of evil.
"I can't hear the creek any longer, Steve," he said at length, as he and his guide paused for breath.
"No, and I'm afraid, old fellow, that you won't hear it again. I've lost it somehow or other, trying to get round those dead-falls."
"Are you sure that you can't hit it off again?"
"Sure! You bet I'm sure. What do you suppose that we have been going round and round for the last half hour for? I've tried all I know to strike it again."
"That's bad, but it can't be helped; steer by the sun now and the wind. The Frazer is down below us, to our left front."
For an hour leader and led blundered on in silence. Following Ned's advice Steve took his bearings carefully, and then tried to steer his course by the sun and the way the wind blew upon his cheek. But in an hour he was, to use an Americanism, "hopelessly turned round." You cannot go straight if you want to in the woods unless you have a gang of men with you to cut a road through live timber and dead-fall alike; you must diverge here to escape a canyon, there to avoid a labyrinth of young pines, and even if you try to cut across a dead-fall you will be obliged to achieve your object by tacking from point to point, just as the fallen trees happen to lie. When he took his bearings, Steve was confident that nothing could make him mistake his general direction: a quarter of an hour later, when he had sunk out of sight of the sun, in a perfect ocean of young pines, he began to doubt whether his course lay to his right or to his left. The sun was hidden from him, no wind at all touched his cheek, and in that hollow amongst the pines he could not tell even which way the land sloped. He felt like a drowning man over whom the waves were closing, and in his helplessness he became more and more confused, until at last he was hardly certain whether the sun rose in the east or in the west.
To the man who sits quietly at home and reads this it may seem incredible that a level-headed man, and no mean woodsman as woodsmen go, should ever entirely lose his head and distrust his memory of the common things which he has known all his life. And yet in real life this happens. Men will get so confused as to doubt whether the needle of their compass points to the north or from the north, and so muddled as to their landmarks as to be driven to the conclusion that "something has gone wrong" with the compass, making it no longer reliable.
As for Steve he had lost confidence in everything, and was wandering at random amongst woods which seemed endless—woods which shut out all life and stifled all hope, which laid hold of him and his comrade with cruel half-human hands, stopping and tripping their tired feet and tearing flesh as well as clothes to ribands.
"Are we getting near the bench country yet, Steve?" asked Ned at length. "We don't seem to me to be going very straight."
"How can you tell, Ned? Are you beginning to see a little?"
"Devil a bit, but it feels as if we were scrambling along side-hills instead of going steadily downhill all the time, though I daresay it is only my fancy. I'm not used to going about with my eyes shut."
"And I am," said Steve bitterly. "That is just what I've been doing all my life, and now we shall both have to pay for it. We may as well sit down and die here, Ned. I cain't keep this farce up any longer. I'm clean turned round and have been all day;" and with a great weary sigh Steve Chance sank down upon a log and buried his head in his hands. He was utterly broken down, physically and mentally, by the difficulties of forest travel.
Even to the hunter these British Columbian forests are full of difficulties, but to a man like Steve they are more full of dangers than the angriest ocean. For an hour or two hours, or for half a day, a patient man may creep and crawl through brush and choking dead-fall, putting every obstacle aside with gentle temperate hand, and hoping for light and an open country; but even the most patient temper yields at last to the persistent buffets of every mean little bough, and the most enduring strength breaks down when dusk comes and finds the forest tangle growing thicker at every step.
To Steve Chance every twig which lashed him across the eyes, every log against which he struck his shins, had become a sentient personal enemy, whose silence and apathy only made his attacks the harder to bear, until before the multitude of his enemies and the darkness of the trackless woods, the young Yankee's strength and courage failed him, and he sat down ready if need be to die, but too thoroughly exhausted to make another effort for life. Had there been a ray of hope to cheer him he would have kept on, but a day's wandering in the dark labyrinths of a mountain forest, where the winds have built up barriers of fallen pines, and where the young trees rise in dark green billows above the bodies of their unburied predecessors, is enough to kill hope in the most buoyant heart.
"Don't throw up the sponge, Steve," said a voice at his elbow. "We'll reach the Frazer yet."
The speaker was blind, and though he had never opened his mouth to complain all through that weary day, be sure that the led man had borne many a shrewd buffet which his leader had escaped. If the forest was dark to Steve, it was darker to blind Ned Corbett, but he at any rate was unbeaten still.
"I think that I shall be able to see a little to-morrow, Steve," he went on; "and I believe that I can put your head straight now."
"I don't see how even you can do that, Ned," replied Chance despondently.
"Don't you? Well, let's try. Are there any deer tracks near us?"
"Yes, here's an old one leading right past the log we are sitting on."
"That's good. Now follow that downhill, and if you lose sight of it look for another and follow that downhill too. The stags may go a long way round, but it is long odds that they will go at last to water, and all water in this country leads to the Frazer."
Ned's reasoning seemed so sound to Steve that for a time it inspired him with fresh energy, and although at nightfall he had not yet reached the promised stream, he rose again next day with some faint hope to renew the search.
But the stags of Chilcotin were neither blind nor lame nor tired, so that a journey which occupied more than a day at the pace at which tired men travel, was but an afternoon's ramble for them. For the men, their followers, the end was very near. At mid-day upon the fourth day of Corbett's blindness, he and Steve were slowly picking their way through logs and over boulders which seemed to everlastingly repeat themselves, when Ned felt a jerk at the stick by which Steve led him, and the dry sal-lal bushes crushed and the stick hung limply in his hand. There was no one holding on to the other end of it!
"What, Steve, down again?" he cried. "Hold up, old man!" But there was no answer.
"Steve," he cried again, "are you hurt?" but not even a rustling bush replied. Whatever was the matter, Steve Chance lay very still.
"Great heavens, he can't be dead!" muttered the poor fellow; and the horror of the thought made the cold perspiration break out upon his brow.
"Steve! Steve!" he cried, and falling upon his knees he groped among the bushes until his hand rested upon his comrade's quiet face. There was no blood upon either brow or cheek (Ned's questioning hand could tell that much), so no stone had struck him in his fall, and as he pressed his hand against Steve's chest a faint fluttering told Ned that life was not yet extinct. But if not extinct it was at a very low ebb, and when he had raised his comrade's head and made a rough pillow for it of logs, Ned Corbett sat down in the silence and in the darkness to wait alone for death.
He could do no more for Steve. If he wanted water he could not get it, indeed if he dared to move a yard or two away it was ten to one but that he would never find his way back again. There was food enough in his pack for one more slender meal, and probably the food in poor Chance's pack would never be wanted by him, but when that was gone, unless God gave him back his sight, strong man though he was, Ned Corbett could only sit there day by day in the darkness and starve to death. He wondered whether a death by starvation was painful, whether in such straits as his it would be unmanly to kiss the cold muzzle of his good Winchester and then go straight to his Maker and ask Him what he had done amiss that all these troubles should have come upon him.
But Ned Corbett put the thoughts away from him. Suicide was after all only a way of sneaking out of danger and away from pain—it was a form of "funking;" and though ill luck might dog him, and bully him, and eventually kill him, Ned ground his teeth and swore that it should not make him "funk."
But it did seem hard to think of Steve's sanguine hopes as they sat in their tent by Victoria's summer sea, to think of the weary pack-trail to Williams Creek, the worthless claims, old Roberts' stony face gazing piteously to heaven, the gold in piles at Pete's Creek, and all the rest of it; and then to think that their share in the play must end here, drowned in a forest of pines, lost in the dark and forgotten, whilst that thief would return to the light and live out his days amongst his fellow-men in wealth and honour.
Just at this point the bushes at Ned's feet stirred, and a faint voice murmured:
"Ned—are you there, Ned?"
In a moment Cruickshank was forgotten, and the whole pageant of the unsuccessful past vanished. Steve lived, that was enough for Ned.
"Yes, old man, of course I am. What is it?"
"Where am I, Ned, and what has happened?"
"You've tumbled down and stunned yourself, I think, Steve; but lie still a little and you'll come round all right."
"I don't think that's it, old man. I'm not in any pain, but I think (don't get riled at me)—I think I am going to send in my chips!"
"Nonsense, Steve. Don't make a blessed school-girl of yourself." Corbett spoke roughly to rouse his comrade to fresh effort, but his own voice was very husky in spite of himself.
"It's no good, Ned, you cain't get another kick out of me; and it doesn't much matter, anyway. Do you remember that Indian superstition about the owls hooting when a chief is going to die?"
"One of poor Rob's yarns, wasn't it?"
"Yes, one of Rob's. There! do you hear the owls now? There must be a dozen of them at least."
"What rubbish, Steve; and anyway you aren't a chief, and the owls only hoot for a chief's death."
Chance did not answer, but instead, from somewhere high up in the mountain forest, came a deep hollow "Wh[=o][=o], wh[=o][=o]!" answered almost immediately from the pines just below where the white men lay.
Again and again the cries reverberated through the forest, and Chance shuddered as he heard the hollow prophecy of death, whilst Corbett, who had started to his feet, stood straining every muscle and every sense to catch each note of that weird hooting.
Suddenly a smile spread over his swollen features as he said: "Do you hear that, Steve?" and at the same moment a sharp "thud, thud" seemed to come through the forest and stop suddenly at the very edge of the clearing in which Ned stood, and Steve turning feebly on his elbow saw a beautiful black and gray face, out of which stared two great eyes, and above it were ears, long twitching ears, which seemed to drink in every forest whisper. For a moment Steve saw this, and noted how the shadow of the fluttering leaves played over the deer's hide, and then there came a sudden flash of white, and in a few great bounds the apparition vanished, clearing six-foot logs as if they had been sheep hurdles.
"A mule deer, wasn't it?" asked Ned, who in spite of his blindness seemed to have understood all that was happening.
"Yes, a mule deer, and a rare big one too. Of course I was too slow and too weak to get the rifle;" and with a groan Steve sank back upon his side and shut his eyes again.
"No matter, Steve, the owls will get him, and we shall have our share. Did you hear that?"
As Ned spoke a rifle-shot woke the mountain echoes, followed by another and another, each shot lower down the mountain than the one preceding it.
"Great Scott, how infamously they shoot!" muttered Ned. "The first fellow wounded him and he isn't down yet. Ah, there—at last!" he added, as a fourth shot was followed by an owl's cry, differing somewhat from those which had preceded the advent of the deer.
"What do you mean, Ned?" asked Chance, who had been sitting up watching and listening open-mouthed to his comrade's soliloquy.
"Mean? Why, Indians, of course. 'Wh[=o][=o], wh[=o][=o]' means 'where are you?' and 'hè, hè' means 'I've killed, come and help me pack him home;'" and Ned put his hands to his mouth, and drawing a deep breath sent the deep sepulchral call-note of the owl echoing through the forest.
"It's life or death, Steve," he remarked; "if the Indians aren't friendly it's death, but it will be a better death anyway than starving here in the dark."
As the echoes of Ned's hoot died away amongst the pines, both he and Steve became conscious that they were no longer alone. Someone else had entered the clearing, and a pair of human eyes were intently fixed upon them. This both the white men knew, not by sight or hearing, but by that other sense for which we have no better name than instinct. They had not heard a rustle among the leaves, nor had Steve seen so much as a shadow upon the grass, and yet both men turned simultaneously towards the same point, and Ned, in spite of his blindness, said "Clahowyah" as confidently as if he held his visitor by the hand.
"Clahowyah" (How do?), repeated a deep guttural voice from the shadow of the pines, and as he spoke a broad-shouldered wiry redskin stepped softly over the logs to meet the whites. If he always moved as silently as he moved then, it was no wonder that the listening deer so often found themselves looking down the barrel of Anahem's Hudson Bay musket before their great ears had given them any warning of their danger.
"Thank God, we are saved," whispered Ned, as the chief's words reached him. "He has traded with whites, or he wouldn't speak Chinook. Lead me up to him."
But Anahem saw the outstretched hand as soon as Chance, and stepping quickly forward took it.
"Mika halo nanitch?" (You don't see?), he asked.
"Halo!" replied Ned, and he pointed to his swollen eyelids.
"Mika comtax—by and by skookum nanitch" (I understand, by and by you'll see all right), replied the chief, and then turning he repeated the owl's call twice, and almost immediately a low answer came to him from the woods above.
Luckily for Steve and Ned, the chief of the Chilcotins had met many white men when in his early days he had hunted on the Stikeen river, and all those whom he had met had been servants of a company which has always kept good faith with its Indian neighbours and employés. The honesty and fair dealing of the Hudson Bay Company saved the two white men's lives from Anahem and his tribesmen, as it has saved many a hundred lives both of redskins and whites since the day when the two races first met. Anahem knew that a fresh class of whites had lately come into his country—whites who cared nothing for skins and trading, but who spent all their time digging and making mud-pies by the river banks. He knew it because he had heard of them, had seen their strange canoes upon the Frazer, bottom upwards sometimes; and once he had found one of their tin cups, with something scratched upon it, hanging to a pine-tree, underneath which lay a little pile of bones which the coyotés had cleaned.
Probably these men, he thought, were gold-diggers, and lost as that other one had been lost, whose bones he had seen; but at any rate they were both very weak, and one was blind, so for the sake of that great Company which was honest, Anahem determined to help these men, who, within half an hour of their first meeting with the chief, lay warm and at rest within the glow of his camp-fire.
Then it seemed to Steve that their troubles fell away from them like the forest shadows before the firelight, and it seemed already years ago since he and Ned had sat down in the bushes to die. Anahem's tribe was out for its fall hunt, and Ned and Steve had luckily wandered within the arms of the great drag-net of men, which was still sweeping the hillsides for game. As they lay by the camp-fire Ned and his companion could hear the hunters calling to each other; but the net was broken now, and the cries were the cries of the owl who has killed, not of the owl who still seeks his quarry.
Here and there high up amongst the woods Steve could see a little column of smoke, marking the spot where some belated hunter had made up his mind to pass the night. The fire would serve to cook his food and keep him warm; and if any friend chose to come and help him home with his game, the smoke would guide him. But most of the hunters brought back their game to camp that night, dragging it along the trails, or packing it on their backs, so that before Steve slept he had seen fifteen carcases brought in as the result of this one hunt.
He had often wondered in old days, how men who neither ploughed nor sowed nor kept cattle could manage to live through the long winter months: now he wondered no longer. The Chilcotins had been in camp for a week, and there were only six men amongst them who had muskets, and yet there were four great stacks of raw hides in their camp already—stacks as high as a man's head, and on every bough within a hundred yards of the fires were hanging strips and chunks of deers' meat.
The camp reminded Steve of the appearance of a hawthorn bush, in which a butcher-bird has built its nest,—the whole place was red with raw meat, and there were piles of soft gray down and hair, three and four feet high. These were the scrapings of a hundred hides, roughly cleaned by the Indian women during the week.
In such a camp as Anahem's hunger is an easy thing to cure, and that and blindness were Ned's chief complaints; and even the blindness yielded in a day or two to a certain dressing prepared for Ned by the squaws. But Steve Chance did not recover as easily as Corbett did. The prostration from which he suffered was too severe to be cured by a long night's rest and a couple of square meals. At night he lay and tossed in broken slumbers, and dreams came to him which wearied him more than if he had never slept. He saw, so he said, the gold-camp every night of his life, and Phon the only human being in it; and all the while Phon stood in a flood of gold dust, which rose higher and higher, until it swelled and broke over him and ran on a yellow heavy flood like the flood of the Frazer.
Day after day Ned waited and hoped against hope, until the Chilcotins were ready to strike their camp and go home for the winter. He had already done his utmost to persuade Anahem to search for Phon, but the chief took very little notice of him. Either he thought that Ned like Steve was rambling in his mind, or he did not understand him (for Anahem spoke very little Chinook, and Ned spoke less), or, and that is probable too, he did not think it mattered much what became of a Chinaman; and as to the gold, if it really was there, it would probably wait until the white men could go and look for it themselves. If Ned would have gone with him, Anahem would have gone perhaps to look for the creek; but Ned could not leave Chance whilst he was ill, and Steve would not get well, so that ended the matter.
There seemed only one course open to Ned, and he prepared to take it. Anahem had told him as they talked one night over the camp-fire that he had seen the smoke of a white man's fire coming from a dug-out on the banks of the Frazer.
"How long ago was that?" asked Ned.
"On my way up here, about the time of the young moon," answered Anahem.
"Then that may be Rampike," muttered Ned; and the next day he got Anahem to show him the direction in which the dug-out lay.
"Could I get there in two days?" he asked.
"A skukum (strong) Indian could. The sick white man can be there on the third day at nightfall."
This was enough for Ned. Next morning he bought some meat and dried salmon from his Indian friends, and guided by Anahem and followed by Chance he left the camp. If Chance's strength would hold out until they could reach the dug-out, he could nurse him there at his leisure, and by and by, when Steve was stronger, Ned and Rampike could go out together to look for Phon and Cruickshank. It was not impossible after all that they should find Phon still alive, though fish and roots and the inner bark of trees would be all that he could get to live upon. But would Chance's strength hold out? That was the trouble. He was terribly worn and weak, and his eyes shone feverishly, and he neither slept well nor eat well in spite of the fresh keen air. As he followed Anahem up a steep bluff Steve panted and his knees were unsteady, and when the chief stopped at last upon a bald ridge overlooking the pine-woods, he lay back upon his light load saying, "It's as well you've stopped, chief, at last. Another hundred yards, and I should have bucked my pack off."
Anahem looked surprised that even a sick man should complain of such a trifling hill. An old squaw would have carried two sacks (a hundred pounds) of flour up it without a murmur, and Steve's pack did not weigh half that.
"Your bones," he said, smiling rather contemptuously, "white bone, our bones wild bone," and then turning to Corbett he pointed out to him where the deep-bellied Frazer roared along in the valley below the pine-woods, and to one spot upon its banks, where, so he said, was the white man's dug-out.
"You see," he said, "where the sun will set."
"Nawitka" (Certainly), answered Ned.
"Now, look on the Frazer's banks under there where the sun will set, and you will see one patch all the same, like blood."
"Yes, I see it."
"Now, look to that side of it," and he waved his hand to the left, "and you will see one great mud-mountain like this;" and with his stick he drew in the sandy soil at his feet a picture of a great cathedral organ, with pipes reaching from the river to the sky.
Ned was startled by the strange likeness which the chief's picture bore to a thing which the chief could never have seen, but he held his peace and looked for the mud-mountain.
"Yes, chief," he said. "I see a great mountain of mud, but I cannot see the shape of it from here."
"Not see the shape of him! Ah, my friend not see well yet," said Anahem pityingly; and though Ned knew very well that his sight was as good as it had ever been, he said nothing.
He didn't want Anahem to think that wild sight like wild bone was better than the civilized samples of the same.
"Well, you see the mountain. By and by you come closer and see his shape. Under that mountain, in the bank on this side the river, stop one white man. You keep along this trail," and Anahem pointed to the track upon which they stood, "along the ridge, and by and by it will go downhill, and on the night of the third day you will see the white man. Good-bye," and before they knew that he was going the old chief turned, and like the shifting shadow of a cloud which the winds blow across the hillside, he moved away and was gone. There was no sound as he went—no twig snapped, no overall scraped against the bushes. In silence he had come, and in silence he had gone. For a moment the two with "parted lips and straining eyes stood gazing where he sank," for indeed it seemed to them as if the sea of the woods had opened and swallowed up their friend. Then Chance spoke:
"A creepy old gentleman, Ned; rather like one of Phon's devils."
"A deuced good devil to us, anyway. If we ever find Phon and the gold we shall owe our good luck to him, as we owe him our lives."
"Yes, I wish he had stopped. I should like to have given him a 'potlatch.'"
"Just as well that you didn't offer him anything. He might have liked this rifle, but I really doubt whether he knows enough about gold-dust to make him value that."
"That's what, Ned. But come on and let us get through this beastly forest to those open benches below;" and Chance made as if he would burst his way through the barriers of serried pines which intervened between him and the Frazer valley.
"What, again, Steve?" cried Ned. "Isn't one lesson enough for you? If you tried that you would be lost again in ten minutes. No more short cuts for me. I mean to stick to the trail, and you must follow me;" and so saying Corbett took up his bundle and went ahead at a quiet steady pace which, in five or six hours, brought Steve to the land of his desire, where what trees there were were great bull-pines standing far apart, and giving men lots of room for their feet below and wide glimpses of heaven above their heads.
As soon as they reached the open country Chance's spirits improved, and his strength came back with his spirits, but for all that he was still so weak that the progress which Ned and he made was very slow, and their provisions were again at a perilously low ebb when they came in sight of that strange freak of nature, opposite to which dwelt (so they hoped) their old friend Rampike. The bluff was exactly as Anahem had drawn it: an organ cast in some Titanic mould, the pipes of it two hundred feet from base to summit, and stained with all manner of vivid metallic colours. At its foot was the gray Frazer, and the dull sky of early winter hung low about its head; but the organ was dumb from all eternity, unless those were its voices which ignorant men attributed to the winds and the fretting foaming river.
For awhile the two wanderers stood staring in wonder at this strange landmark, and then Steve's weary face lit up with a smile and a mist came over his eyes.
"Ned, as I hope for heaven, there's smoke!" and he stretched out his arm and pointed to where a thin blue column curled up against the sky.
Ned saw the smoke as clearly as Steve, but in spite of Steve's entreaties he absolutely refused to press on towards it.
"No, old fellow, we will camp here for a couple of hours, and you must eat and sleep. That smoke is a long way from here yet, and we may miss it to-night after all when we get low down amongst those sand-hills."
From where they stood the column of smoke looked within a stone's-throw, but Corbett knew well how the clear atmosphere of British Columbia can deceive eyes unused to measure distance amongst her mountains. So in spite of Steve's protestations the two men camped, and though he did not know it, Steve ate Ned's lunch, and Ned carried Steve's away in his pocket in case they should not be able to reach the river by nightfall. That slender ration in Ned's pocket was the very last food which the two men possessed, and Ned was already reproaching himself for his rashness in starting so poorly provided.
"What if after all Rampike should not be at the dug-out, or, if there, should be himself short of grub?"
Luckily for Steve and Ned it seemed as if fortune had almost spent her malice upon them, for that evening as they reached the edge of the last bench above the Frazer, they saw that they had steered a true course. Right below them, issuing from a little black funnel in the mud-bank itself, rose the column of smoke, and in the bed of the river, upon a sand-bar, they could see a man working a cradle.
"Hallo, there! Hallo!" cried Steve as soon as his eyes fell upon the man and his rocker; but Steve's voice was so pitiably weak and small in a country where mud-banks are built like mountains, that it did not even wake an echo.
"Come along, Steve; it's no good shouting for half an hour yet. Look out for the prickly pears!" said Ned, and so saying he plunged into a little ravine, whose beggarly barrenness cried aloud to winter to come and hide it from the face of the sun.
"It's all very well to tell a man to look out for them," answered Steve in the peevish voice of sickness, "but there is nothing else to step on. It's all thorns and sharp stones in this confounded country."
"Never mind, stick to it, old chap."
"Just what I am doing, worse luck to it," muttered Steve, trying to tear himself away from a patch of little cacti upon which he had inadvertently sat down.
Ned turned and saw Steve's plight, and the white woe-begone face of his comrade only heightened the comedy of the position. So that there, at the last gasp, sick and worn-out, these two failures, with their stomachs empty and their soles full of thorns, stood and laughed until the tears rolled down their cheeks.
From the next step in the bench which led to the river Ned joined his deep bass to Steve's, and together they shouted their loudest to attract the man's attention. In vain. Whoever he was the man worked on, bending over his rocker, with the gold fever at his heart and the boom of the great river in his ears.
"It's no good, we must go right down to him," said Ned; and five minutes later he and Steve stood together upon the bar on which the man was at work. But so intent was he upon his rocking, or so silent was the approach of his visitors' bare and bleeding feet over the great boulders, that it was not until Ned's shadow fell upon him that the gold-worker was aware of a stranger's presence.
Then quick as thought he sprang to his feet, snatching up a Winchester as he did so, and covering his men with it before he had time to look into their faces.
"Stand off!" he roared, "or by 'Mity I'll let light through you!" and for the moment it seemed a mere toss-up whether he would shoot or not. But the men he spoke to were as reckless of life as he was. Hardship had taught them that a human life is not such a wonderfully big stake as the fat townsmen seem to think.
"You're in a tearing hurry to shoot, ain't you?" asked Steve coolly. "How would it be if we were to talk first? Don't you know us, Rampike?"
At the first sound of Steve's voice the miner had dropped his rifle into the hollow of his arm, and now he came forward, and holding out a huge hairy paw, yellow with river mud, said simply, "Shake."
It was not a very effusive greeting, but men don't "gush" much in the upper country, and yet that glimpse of a friendly face, and grip of a friendly hand, acted as a wonderful restorative upon the tired natures of both Steve and Ned. The sky itself seemed to get clearer and the mountain air less chill now that they had run against a "pal" once more.
"Wal, sonny, did you strike Pete's Creek?" was old Rampike's first question after they had all three "shaken some."
"We did so," answered Steve.
"Any 'pay' up there?"
"I should smile," replied the Yankee, using the slang of his country, and throwing down the belt of dust which he had clung to through all his wanderings.
"Why, this is free gold!"
"You bet it is; and there is enough for everyone we know and to spare," added Steve, "where that came from."
For a minute or two Rampike only turned the gold over and over in his hands and said nothing. At last he asked:
"Did you git Cruickshank?"
"No, never saw him," answered Ned.
"Praise the Lord you ain't got everything. I ain't sure as I wouldn't ruther look at him through the back-sights of this here, than find a crik like yourn;" and the old man passed his hand caressingly along the barrel of his "44.70."
"But, say, you look mighty hard set. Have you any grub along with you?"
"Not an ounce of flour, and this is the last of our meat;" and so saying Ned pulled out of his pocket the ration which he had kept for Chance.
"It's pretty lucky that I'm well heeled in the way of provisions, ain't it, else we'd all starve. Wal, come along up to the 'dug-out;'" and so saying he picked up his coat and rifle and led up to the bluff, until all three stood before the door of his winter residence.
Next to the homes of the pre-historic cavemen, and a few rude stone-heaps in which the Caucasian Ossetes live, the "dug-outs" along the Frazer river are the most miserable abodes ever fashioned for themselves by men. And yet these holes in the hill, with doors and roofs aflush with the hillside, are better adapted to resist the intense cold of a British Columbian winter than either frame-shack or log-hut.
"Come right in, lads," said Rampike, putting his foot against the planks which served him for a door, and thus rudely clearing the way for his visitors into a little dark interior with walls and floor of Frazer river mud.
A rough table, a solitary chair, and a kind of bench furnished the hovel somewhat more luxuriously than might have been expected, but unless you took a deep interest in geology the walls and general surroundings in Rampike's reception-room were distinctly crude and unpleasant.
If, however, you cared for geology, you could study specimens of the Frazer river system through the wide chinks between the boards which walled the room without even leaving your chair. Indeed, there was more "bed rock," as Rampike called it, than boarding in the composition of his walls.
But neither geology nor furniture attracted any attention from Steve or Ned. When they entered the cabin their eyes lit upon two things only, and it was a good hour before they took any real interest in anything else. The two centres of attraction were a frying-pan and a billy, round which all three men knelt and served, making themselves into cooks, stokers, or bellows, until the billy sang on the hearth and the bacon hissed in the pan.
Then for a while there was silence, and this story does not begin again until someone struck a match upon the seat of his pants. I believe it was Rampike, because, having had more experience than Steve, he could bolt his food faster. I know that it was not Ned, for he could never finish his meal until about the end of Steve's first pipe. Steve said it was because the Englishman eat so much. Ned said that in England men eat their food, in America they "swallered down their grub." "Swallerin' down your grub," he said, "was a faster but less satisfactory process than eating your food." But as I wish to remain upon friendly terms with both disputants, I cannot enter into this matter.
"Do you reckon to go in again this fall?" asked Rampike, without any prelude but a puff of tobacco smoke.
"To the creek?" said Ned, reaching across his neighbour for the billy. "Yes, we must go in, and that soon."
"What's your hurry? Steve here cain't travel, and you're pretty nigh played out though you are hard; and as for the gold, that'll stay right there till spring."
"You forget that there were three of us at Antler. Phon is up at the creek now."
"Phon! What, that Chinee! Is he up at the crik?"
"If he is alive he is," answered Ned. "He may have starved for all I know."
"Starved! not he; but you'll never see that heathen agen. He'd live on dirt or nothin' at all, any Chinee can do that; but you bet your life he ain't up there now. He's just skipped out to Victoria by some other road with all the dust he can pack along. That's what Phon has done."
"You don't know him, Jim, and you aren't fair to him. No westerner ever is fair to a Chinaman. Phon will stay by the creek. My only fear is that we sha'n't be able to find the creek."
"Not find the crik, you say! Why, Ned Corbett, you ain't no bloomin' tenderfoot in the woods, are you? You ain't likely to forgit your way to the bank when the whole business belongs to you?"
"Perhaps not, but I've been blind for a week;" and then answering the inquiry in Rampike's eyes, Ned lighted his pipe and told the whole story of his own and Steve Chance's wanderings, from the time when they struck Pete's Creek until their return to the Frazer.
Now and again Rampike broke in upon the thread of the narrative with some pertinent question, or a comment as forcible as a kick from a mule, but he managed to keep his pipe going pretty steadily until Ned came to Steve's feat in "blazing." Then the old man's wrath broke out, and his pipe even dropped from his mouth. For a moment he looked at Steve in speechless indignation, and then he expressed himself thus:
"Strike me pink," he said, "ef a real down-easter ain't a bigger born fool in the woods than any bloomin' Britisher I ever heerd tell on. That's so."
After this there was a pause, during which Steve snored peacefully, and old Rampike, having made an exhaustive examination of the bowl of his pipe, proceeded to refill it with chips from his plug of T. & B.
At length Ned began again:
"You've been looking for the creek yourself, haven't you?"
"No. I stayed right here, making wages on that bar there."
"I wonder who made those camps then which we found along the divide. I can't think that those were Indian camps;" and Ned told his companion of the camps which he and Steve had stumbled upon during their search for Pete's Creek, as well as of that glove found by the bear tracks.
"Bear tracks!" growled Rampike, "not they. A softy who would blaze the wrong side of a tree wouldn't know bear tracks from the tracks of a gal's shoe with a French heel to it. Cruickshank's tracks, that's what they was, and ef you don't see more of 'em before you get your gold out of Pete's Crik you may call me the biggest liar in Cariboo!"
"You don't mean to say that you think Cruickshank would dare to dog us?"
"Dog you! That man would dog the devil for gold."
This was a new idea to Ned. If there was any truth in it, then all Phon's stories of faces seen in the pool, of eyes which watched the gold, of figures which rustled ever so lightly over the dry sal-lal on the canyon's edge, when all save Phon and the night owls slept, all these stories might be something more than the imaginings of a crazed Chinaman's brain.
For a while Ned sat silently smoking and looking thoughtfully into the embers. Then he rose, and knocking the ashes out of his pipe said:
"I am going to look for Phon to-morrow if Steve seems well enough to be left here. Shall you come?"
"Yes, I reckon I may as well. You cain't hev all the sport, sonny. I'm ruther partial to gunning myself."