For ten days or a fortnight after the conversation recorded in the last chapter, Rampike and Ned Corbett wandered about the country trying to "locate" Pete's Creek.
They started, as they had arranged to, upon the very next morning, leaving Steve Chance with ample provisions, to sleep and eat and rest himself after the hard times which he had been through, or if he wanted a little exercise and amusement there was the bar down below the dug-out upon which he could earn very fair wages by using Rampike's rocker.
From the dug-out to the mouth of the Chilcotin was no great distance, and Ned felt certain that anyone who knew his way to it could reach the camp in which he had left Phon in one day from the river's mouth. Unfortunately neither he nor Rampike knew their way to it, and still more unfortunately they went the wrong way to work to find it. At the end of a fortnight they both saw their mistakes, but it was too late to remedy them. Instead of taking up his own tracks at once and trying to follow them back through the woods to the creek, Ned had taken Rampike up the course of the Chilcotin, in the hope that he would be able to identify Pete's Creek amongst the hundred and one creeks and streams which emptied themselves into the main river from its right bank.
In this he failed signally, and when the search was over it was somewhat late to take up the back tracks, which were already faint and partly obliterated. However, there was nothing else to be done, so Rampike and Corbett started again, following the tracks step by step until they came at last to the Chilcotins' camp. Here they found dead fires and dry bones, and piles upon piles of soft gray fur, and over all these signs of slaughter more than one track of the inquisitive deer whose kinsmen had been so ruthlessly butchered all round. Where the principal camp-fire had stood, was a message written to whomsoever it might concern, a message written with twelve unpeeled sticks, each about six inches long, driven into the ground one behind the other, in Indian file, their tops or heads all bent one way, towards the south.
There were two other sticks, but these were peeled and white, and their heads bowed towards the Frazer.
Old Rampike touched the sticks with the toe of his moccasin.
"Pretty good writin', I call that," said he; "beats school-teachers' English to my mind. 'Twelve Injuns gone south, two whites gone down to the Frazer,' that's what that fellow says, and the piles of fur will tell you why they were all here, and a squint at them bones will give you a pretty fair notion when they went away."
So far, no doubt, the records were plain enough. Unfortunately it had not occurred to the Indian historians to point out from which direction those two whites had come to them, and a short distance outside the limits of the Chilcotin camp all trace of them ceased, for winter had come upon the Chilcotin uplands. The higher Ned went the colder the weather grew, until at last he felt that he had fairly entered the domain of the ice king. On the bald hills the yellow grass was hidden, and on the long pastures the little clumps of pines were powdered and plumed with snow.
All colour had gone from the landscape. There were no more red flushes of Indian pinks amongst the sun-dried grass, no more gleamings of sunlight upon lakes of sapphire blue. All was white, white, dead white, or a still more lifeless gray where the wind had swept the lakelets and left the rough ice bare.
In the glare of the winter sun, ice crystals floated instead of the mites which used to dance in the summer sunshine, and on those gray blots, which had been lakes where ducks called and shook their dripping wings, stood now the mud-huts of the musk-rats, and beside them at the edge of the ice stood their owners, rigid, silent, and watchful, as everything seemed to be in this silent winter-world. As far as the eye could see, in heaven or on the earth, there was nothing which lived or moved except those musk-rats, and you could not tell that they lived until the ice crunched under your feet. Then they vanished. There was no sound. You did not see them go, only when you looked again the little rigid figures were there no longer. Even old Rampike almost shivered as the biting wind caught him when he topped the ridge, and he drew his coat together and buttoned it as he turned to Ned.
"It's real winter up here, sonny, and I reckon it will be mighty lonesome for that heathen of yours by the crik, unless he and Cruickshank hev jined and gone into partnership. I'm beginning to think as he has got starved after all."
Ned made no reply. It was horribly lonesome; but if Phon and Cruickshank had met, Ned didn't think that the Chinaman would care whether the sun warmed or the winter wind froze him, whether he lay alone or in the midst of his fellow-men. Ned had a hideously vivid recollection of another snow scene, and of a certain little black bullet hole in the nape of a man's neck.
Well, after all, he reflected, death by gunshot might be preferable to a slow death by starvation and cold, and day by day it became more abundantly clear that neither Rampike nor Ned would find their way to Phon that winter.
The snow had changed the whole surface of the country so thoroughly that even had Ned passed through every inch of it with his eyes open he would never have recognized it again. There were hollows where before there had been hills, hills where there had been hollows. The drifting snow had made a false surface to the land and covered every landmark; and, moreover, the two searchers began to feel that it would not do to remain in the uplands any longer, unless they too would be cut off and buried away from their fellow-men by the tons upon tons of soft feathery stuff which the skies threatened to pour down upon them every day.
"It's no good talking, Ned, we're beat and we've got to give in. If your heathen hasn't skipped out some other way he's a corpse, that's just what he is, and we've no call to risk our skins collecting corpses," said Rampike as he sat in the dug-out, to which the two had returned after nearly three weeks' search for Phon. "The Almighty seems to have a down on you, my lad, someways, and if one may say so without harm, He seems to be standin' in with Cruickshank, but you bet He'll straighten it out by and by. Up to now Cruickshank has won every trick, and you're jest about broke; but no matter, we'll stay right with him all the while, and we'll get four kings or a straight flush and bust the beggar sky-high at the finish: see if we don't. What we've got to do now is jest to hole up like the bars. Winter's coming right away."
It was a long speech for Rampike, but the occasion was a serious one, and the old man felt that it would require all the influence which he could bring to bear to make Ned Corbett accept his defeat, and take some thought for his own safety.
"What makes you think that winter is so close?" Ned asked.
"Wal, there's a many reasons. The weather has been hardenin' up slowly all the while, and yesterday I saw the tracks of a little bunch of ewes along the top of that bench above us. The big-horns are comin' down, and when they come down you may look out for real winter. You bet."
After this there was silence for a time. Steve and Ned were thinking of the long account unsettled between themselves and Cruickshank, and a little too of the weary months during which they must lie dormant, as Rampike said, "like bears in a hole."
At last there was a clatter on the floor. Jim's pipe had fallen from his mouth, and the old man was snoring peacefully in that beauty sleep with which he generally preluded his night's rest.
As he lay there with his coat under his head and his patched flannel shirt turned up to his elbows, showing a hard sinewy forearm, Jim Rampike was a type of that strong wild manhood which flooded the West from '48 to '62, spending its force in a search for gold in spite of nature and in the face of any odds, and yet utterly careless of the gold when won.
Let those who will preach upon the sordid motives which drew all that muscle and pluck to the West; others will remember how freely the miners squandered that for which they risked so much.
There were no misers amongst the miners of the West; the fortunes they made were mere counters in a game which they played, not for the stakes but for the sake of the game itself—for its very dangers and hardships; and, thanks chiefly to one strong man, who still lives in the country which owes him so much, their game was played in British Columbia with less loss of life and less lawlessness than in any other mining centre in America.
To Jim mining or prospecting was what big game hunting is to richer men. He had prospected alone for months in the Rockies, he had won big stakes in California in the great "rushes," and he had starved and toiled, loafed and squandered in turn, until his hair was as gray as a badger's coat and his lean frame strong and wiry as a wolf's. When he made a pile he set himself diligently to "paint the nearest town red." Drinks for every man and jewellery for every woman he met as long as the dust lasted was his motto; and if the dust which he had taken months to gather would not melt quick enough by fairer means, he would smash costly mirrors, fill champagne glasses only to sweep rows of them down with his cane until the champagne or the dust was all gone, or else he would put every cent upon the turn of a card in the hands of a man whom he knew did not play fair.
In a month at most Jim's spree was over. For that month he had been the most noticeable fool in a town of noisy roisterers; at the end of it he was "dead-broke" again and happy. Then without an idea of the eccentricity either of his own or the gambler's conduct, he would betake himself to that worthy and borrow from him enough gold to begin life again; and to the gambler's credit be it said, that he never refused to grant such a loan, never looked for interest upon it, nor troubled himself much about the return of the capital. Freely if dishonestly he came by his gains, freely at any rate he gave; and many a man owes a good turn to the very men whose delicate sense of touch drew more gold into their pockets than was ever won by any single miner's pick.
They are, after all, only symbols for which we all of us spend our lives, and if the yellow dust led the old man to live the life he loved, and which suited him, what did it matter? As Ned watched the red firelight flicker about the strong square jaw, and redden like blood on the great forearm, he felt that there was at any rate one man in Cariboo in whom he could unhesitatingly trust.
Before turning over to sleep Ned softly opened the door of the hut and looked out. The night was clear and bright, so clear that the hills opposite seemed to have come closer to the hut than they had been by day. Overhead stars and moon seemed to throb with a strange vitality, and burn with a cold fire all unlike the faint and far presentment of stars in an English sky. Nor was the boom of the river, which was as the accompaniment to every song of nature's changing moods, the only sound upon the night air. There was a voice somewhere amongst the stars—a loud clear "Honk, honk!" a cry of unseen armies passing overhead, and Ned as he listened recognized in the cry of the geese another of nature's prophecies of winter.
But the cry of the geese and the boom of the river only emphasized the solitude which reigned around. Nature was alone on the Frazer that night, except for one great shadowy figure which Ned suddenly became aware of, moving upon the sand-bar upon which he had first seen Rampike. For a while Corbett thought that the moon was playing strange freaks with him, and so thinking he covered his eyes and changed his position. But no, it was no fancy. From side to side with a slow swinging motion the great dark bulk lurched silently along. If its tread had been as heavy as that of a battalion, Ned would not have heard it at that distance through the roar of the river, but that never occurred to him. The form gave him the idea of noiseless motion, and besides, at the second glimpse, he knew the beast that he was watching. The Lord of the Frazer walked in his own domain.
A moment before the mystery of the night had Ned Corbett in its clutches, but the sight of the grizzly banished dreams at once, and the moon a minute later looked down upon another actor in the night's drama, one who hid his shining rifle barrels beneath his ragged coat, and tried hard but in vain to still the loud beatings of his heart; for the sight of so noble a foe stirred the blood of the Shropshireman as fiercely as the sight of the gold had stirred Phon's sluggish blood. But the hunter toils in vain quite as often as his brother the gold-seeker, and when Ned Corbett reached the river bed the bear had gone—gone so silently and so speedily that but for those huge tracks in one of which both Ned's feet found room, Corbett would have vowed that what he had seen was but another shadow of that haunted river bed.
"This here's the last day's huntin' as you'll get for quite a while, and don't you forget it."
The speaker was Rampike, and he spoke with the emphasis of conviction. Ned Corbett, who stood beside him at the door of the dug-out, seemed inclined to argue with him, but Rampike did not wait to hear what he had to say.
"You think," said the old man, "as it ain't partickler cold jest because the air is dry and there's plenty of sunshine. Wait until you get out of the sunshine and you'll know more about it. Why, look there at the old river—she don't close up for nothing."
Ned looked in the direction indicated by Rampike's outstretched hand, and noticed for the first time that on the yellow flood of the Frazer a strange white scum had risen, which seemed to gather as it drifted by so as to almost impede the river's progress in places. This was the beginning of the ice.
"There'll be a bridge to-morrow, I shouldn't wonder, as you mout drive cattle over. If you want any more huntin' you'd better get it to-day. We could do with another sheep or two." And so saying the old man went back into the cabin.
The air of British Columbia is so dry and the sunlight so bright, that until the shadows begin to fall or the wind begins to blow, it never occurs to anybody that the thermometer may have fallen to "ten below." To Ned Corbett, as he shouldered his rifle and climbed the first hill, it seemed that the weather was about what you would expect in England in October, but he changed his mind after he had been for five minutes in a narrow gully with a northern aspect into which no sunlight came. There indeed he began to wonder why, in spite of his toil, he earned no healthy glow such as exercise should bring, and even when he emerged upon the top of the bench he was almost afraid to open his mouth lest the bitter cold should creep down his throat and freeze his vitals.
But there was that upon the glittering snow-covered table-land which diverted his attention from the cold. At first he thought that the herds of some distant rancher had wandered to the Frazer, and were now feeding before him in little mobs and bunches of from ten to twenty head. There were so many beasts in sight, and in the wonderfully clear atmosphere they looked so large, their dark coats contrasting with the snow upon which they stood, that it never occurred to Ned that they were sheep.
A second glance, however, revealed the truth, just as a second thought reminded him that there was no rancher then in British Columbia from whom these herds could have wandered.
Here and there Ned could see the yellowish-white sterns of a band feeding from him, or the splendid sweep of a noble pair of horns against the clear sky. These were no domestic cattle, bred to be butchered, but a great army of big-horns driven from their mountain haunts by the advance of winter. For a while Ned lay and looked at them as they scraped away the snow to get at the sweet sun-dried grasses beneath, and then he began to consider how best he might win some trophy from them with which to adorn the hall of that long, low house of his father's which looked from Shropshire across the hills to Wales.
There were giants amongst them, Ned could see that, and his fingers itched to pull the trigger at more than one great ram; but the chiefs of the herd, nine in number, lay like nine gray images of stone in the middle of a level, park-like expanse, round which the smaller beasts fed and kept guard. For a long time Corbett lay and looked at the silent nine, with their heads turned in different directions, as if each had undertaken to watch one particular quarter for a coming foe. At last one of the nine rose slowly, and stood looking intently towards Corbett. At the moment he himself had risen somewhat upon his hands and knees to get a fairer view of the coveted horns, and possibly at a thousand yards the ram had seen enough of Ned's cap above the sky-line to make him suspicious. Had a gray-faced old ewe seen as much she would have given the alarm, but the ram was bolder or more careless.
For ten minutes Corbett had to remain as he was, his head rigid, and the spines of a prickly pear running into the palms of his hands. At the end of that time the ram lowered his head, turned round, and lay down again. It was only an odd-looking boulder, he thought, after all; but had he looked ten minutes later the ram would have missed that boulder upon the sky-line, for Ned Corbett was going at his best pace downhill to a point from which he thought that he could creep to within two hundred yards of his prey.
Ned was going at his best pace, because the sun stood so high in the heavens, that under ordinary circumstances the sheep would have already been on the move for the timber.
As it was there could not be much time to spare in spite of the temptations of the new-found pasture, and as Ned's snow-clogged moccasins kept letting him down upon the hillside, he just lay where he fell, and, in his own words, "let himself rip" until he reached the bottom. There he pulled up with a jerk, a somewhat bruised and breathless person, but utterly reckless of such small matters as bruises if he could only get up to his point of vantage in time.
Alas for the hopes of mortals! When Ned Corbett had reached the top of the opposite bank his breath was coming thick and short, and great drops of perspiration were splashing on to the snow from his brow, but there was not one single sheep in sight where half an hour before he had seen five hundred. The white table-land was empty. Ned could have seen a sparrow on it if there had been one to see, but there was no living thing there, only across and across it were the tracks of many feet, and in one place where the rams had been, long plunging tracks, and then, as it were, a road along which the herd had trotted steadily away to the timbered gulches above. That stalker's curse, the wind, had brought some hint of Ned's presence to the watchful beasts, and they had not waited for anything more.
"Confound the wind!" Ned muttered, "I'll be shot if I can understand how it happened;" and plucking a few hairs from his yellow head he let them go, and watched them as they drifted straight back into his face.
"The wind is all right now," he growled. "Well, I've not done with them yet;" and having made quite sure that the nine chiefs had gone up a certain gully, he began to make another detour in order to get above them.
Up and up he went, the snow getting deeper as he climbed higher, and the trees growing wider apart. Now and again he had to force his way through a thick place of young pines, where, as his shoulders brushed against them, the boughs discharged whole avalanches of soft, heavy snow upon his head, half blinding him for the moment. Once he saw the sunlight gleam upon what looked like a spear-head low down on the other side of a pine-hole, but as he looked a big brown ear flickered forward beside the spear-head, and next moment a great stag had risen, and for half a second stood looking at the intruder. But Ned let the stag go. He did not want stags just then, and, besides, in the green timber on the ridge where he stood there were lots of them, and all large ones. The little fellows lived lower down, it seemed.
So he pushed on, until all at once the frost got hold of him. In a moment his heart seemed to stop beating, his knee remained bent in the very act of climbing over a log, his hands stuck to his sides, and his eyes stared as if he had seen a ghost. Right below him, not sixteen paces away, stood the statue of the thing he sought. It could not be a live beast; it was too still. Only for a second Ned dared to look before he sank into the snow behind a juniper bush, but in that second he saw that what he looked on was the statue of an old, old ewe, big almost as a six-year old ram, and gray with age, her villainously-inquisitive head turned (luckily for Ned) downhill. For a few seconds the ewe stood searching the depths of the gully below, and then, without so much as a glance uphill, tossed her head in the air and walked silently forward past Corbett's hiding-place. One after another, all at the same sober pace and all as silent as shadows, ten or a dozen old ewes went by in the footsteps of the first.
Then there was a little noise—you would not have heard it anywhere else, but in the silence of the snow it was quite loud—and forty or fifty ewes and lambs went by, all, even the lambs, looking inquiringly down into the gully below, but none of them wasting so much as a glance upon the ground above them. After the lambs had gone by there was a pause, a break in the stream, and Corbett's heart began to throb louder than it had any right to. So far he had not even drawn a bead upon the sheep. Sixty beasts at least had gone by him one after another within sixteen paces, and he had let them go. He knew well from experience that the last comers would be the rams, and last of all would come the master of the flock. There was a kind of knoll just below him, and the first sight he got of each new-comer was upon this. One after another the sheep appeared, like figures upon a pedestal, at this spot, stood awhile, gazed, and then passed on. At last a ram stood there, his great horns standing out very wide from his head. "Not of much account," thought the hunter. "He's a four-year old; maybe fourteen inches round the butt—not more anyway," and he let him go.
Twice after that Ned raised his rifle and refrained. The biggest had not come yet. At last he could stand it no longer. How could he tell that the beauty before him was not the master ram? and if so, in another second he would be gone. The rifle rang through the mountains, a dozen blue grouse rattled out of the pines and swung downhill on wide, motionless wings, the ram toppled right over and went bumping down the gully out of sight. There was a wild rush of hurrying feet and the thud, thud of beasts that leapt from rock to rock, and then all was still. Rushing forward in the direction taken by the herd, Corbett found himself stopped by a ravine—a deep-cut, uncompromising cleft in the rock, bare stone on either side, and a sheer fall between of some hundreds of feet, and from side to side not less than twenty-five to thirty feet across. Ned stopped dead. This was beyond any man's power, even with a fair run and a good take-off, and yet every lamb in that band had jumped it—jumped it clear!
As he stood marvelling at the great leap before him, a stone rattled down from the other side of the ravine, and raising his eyes Corbett saw what many a man has sought season after season in vain, a ram, big and square-built as a mountain pony, with great horns curling close against his head in a perfect curve, horns which measured at the very least, eighteen good inches round the butt.
Ned had only a second to look at him in, and even before he could pull the trigger the ram had turned; but for all that Ned heard the loud smack of his bullet, and he knew that it was not the rock against which it had struck.
"Got him right on the shoulder-blade," he muttered, as he started full of hope to circumnavigate the head of the ravine. It was a long way round, but Ned got over the ground quickly, and soon found his wounded beast hobbling slowly away upon three legs. For two solid hours Ned followed his ram, who, in spite of his wound, could go just fast enough to keep his pursuer out of range.
Meanwhile the sun was sinking fast, and in spite of himself Ned had to admit that he must give up the chase. Even for an eighteen-inch head he dared not risk a night out on these mountains with the thermometer at ten degrees below zero. "Just one more ridge," he muttered to himself, "and then I'll give him up;" and so muttering he climbed painfully through the deep snow to the top of yet one more of those little ridges, over so many of which he had climbed that day. As his head came over the sky-line, Ned's heart dropped into his boots, and he felt the sickness of despair. The ram had vanished. He could see for half a mile in front of him, but there was no ram. Could it be that after all that weary tramp, and in spite of all those great splashes of blood, his prey had gathered fresh strength, and making a final effort had got clean away from him? For a moment Ned thought that it must be so, but the next his eye lighted upon what looked like a great gray boulder, a boulder though which had no snow upon it, and which moved ever so little. Then as he rushed forward the gray thing staggered to its knees, lurched heavily forward, and lay still again. A few seconds later Ned Corbett's hands clutched the solid crown of one who had been a king amongst the high places of the earth.
But there was no time for rest, much less for exultation. The crimson of the setting sun was already beginning to flush along the forest floors, and Ned, as he looked over the country below him, felt his heart grow sick at the thought that if he returned as he came he could not reach the hut before dark.
Was there no other way—no short cut? Ned rather thought that there was, and determined to try it. Instead of going up and down every gully on the face of the range, he would make for the edge of the divide and follow it round until he reached a point opposite to his camp, then he would descend, taking his chance of finding an easy way down. But before starting on his homeward journey, Ned hacked off the head of his victim and bound it (a heavy load) upon his own shoulders. If he had to stop out all night and risk death by frost-bite, he might as well take with him a souvenir of his hardships should he be lucky enough to survive them. As for the meat, Rampike and Steve could help him bring that in, later on. If the coyotés let it alone it would keep well enough; and Ned thought that a rag, which he had drawn through his rifle barrels and fastened to the carcase, would keep off the coyotés.
Having made his preparations he started, and toiled steadily until he reached the ridge, where the walking became infinitely easier. Ned had not much time to look about him, but for all that his eyes were not shut, and he could not help noticing one valley some distance away in the opposite direction to his camp. It seemed to him that he had seen that valley before, but it was far off, and the light was failing.
It was night when Ned reached the dug-out; there was a harsh grinding sound down in the river bed, and his clothes, which had been wet with perspiration, were frozen stiff and cold. But as he gazed at his ram's head, Ned Corbett was content.
The day after Ned Corbett's sheep-hunt was too cold even to go and bring in the carcase. A wind had risen, not much of a wind it is true, but just enough to drive the cold right through a man like blades of sharp steel, so that Ned and Steve and Rampike remained in the dug-out, smoking and trying to keep warm, or from time to time going to the door to watch the great river gradually yielding to the power of the frost.
The white scum of the day before had grown into blocks and hummocks of ice, and these came down grinding and roaring through the mist. In one more night the great Frazer would be fettered for the winter.
In the mist which hung over the freezing waters, everything assumed unnatural proportions. Rocks loomed out like mountains, bushes like forest trees, and a sneaking fox looked larger than a grizzly bear.
It was a weird scene, and it held Corbett and his companions fascinated until the bitterness of the cold drove them back for a few moments to their fire.
In this way they spent their day until nearly three o'clock, when the light began to fail, and Corbett, who was at the door, cried to Rampike, who was inside the hut:
"Great Scott, Jim, come here! What is that?"
"That" to which Corbett's pointing finger called attention was a strange upright mass of ice, which came riding towards them upon a little floe, a floe which later on was caught and whirled round and round in a backwater of the river just below the cabin.
"A tree, ain't it, Steve?" said Jim, appealing to Chance, who had followed him out. "A tree, I reckon, Ned, as has got wedged in somehow among the drift."
"Yes, I guess it's a tree," Steve assented. "But what with the mist and the way the thing dances around, it's mighty hard to tell what it is."
"Well, I'm getting as full of fancies as a woman," said Ned, "but I could have sworn when I saw it first, that that thing was a man."
"A man? By heaven, it is a man!" yelled Jim. "Look, look!" and with white, scared face he stared at the thing as it came circling round again in the endless, meaningless dance of the drift through the mist.
"If it's a man, it is no good standing here," said Corbett quickly. "Bear a hand to drag him ashore." And snatching a rope from the inside of the hut, he sprang down the steep bank to the shore, though the faces of his followers showed plainly enough that, terrible as dead men always are to the living, there was something about this river-waif which made him a horror greater even than the dead who die on land.
By some strange chance the body (for it was a body) had got jammed between two pieces of drift in such a manner that it stood upright, waist-high above the flood, bowing and curtseying with every movement of the water, but so coated with ice that, but for its general outline and a rag of clothing which still fluttered from it, none could have guessed its nature.
For a moment Corbett feared that it would break out of the backwater, and be whirled down the stream before he could get his rope over it; but no, the stream had not done with its plaything yet. The winter would be a long one, and what matter if this wayfarer by the Frazer tarried even a day and a night in the backwater? The rocks had stayed there for hundreds of years. There was no hurry about such things. Round and round in the same order came the hummocks, a bit of a wrecked canoe on one, on the next only the wreck of a man. Round and round whirled the long loop of Corbett's lariat, until the silent rider came bowing past him within his reach. Then the rope flew out, and the long loop poised and settled silently about the rider's neck. Quick as thought Ned was jerked upon his knees, and for a moment it seemed as if the angry river would suck him in and add him to the number of its ghastly dancers. But Ned was young and strong and loved life, so that he stayed himself against a great boulder and called aloud for help.
"Hold on to the rope!" he yelled to his comrade. "The thing fights like a salmon!"
Do you know what it is to feel the electric thrill which travels all down your spine when you stick in a good fish? do you know how his every struggle vibrates along your own nerves, until your heart almost stops with excitement? If you do, you may be able to picture what those three men felt as the frozen corpse plunged and struggled on the rope, now sucked down by the under-tow, now springing beneath the buffets of the drifting ice. Ned shuddered and felt sick as he braced himself against its unholy strength; but the Shropshire breed is like the bull-dog's, once fast in anything it will never let go whilst life lasts; so that in spite of the river, and the fear which chilled his marrow, Ned persisted until he drew his ghastly capture hand over hand to shore.
There is something very horrible in the helpless way in which the head of a drowned man rolls about when you lay him down once more upon dry land, but even that is not so ghastly as were the actions of the warped and rigid mummy which Corbett and his friends carried to their cabin.
From the waist up the body was stiff and straight, but below the waist the legs had been frozen into such strange curves and angles, that when they laid it down upon the floor the corpse went rolling and bumping over and over, and then lay rocking to and fro as if it would never be still. Every gust of wind set it in motion again, and the horror of the thing grew to such an extent that Ned at last rose, saying:
"I can't stand this, boys; the thing seems to be laughing at us. Let's fix it in a chair so as to keep it still until morning."
"And what are you going to do with it, then?" asked Chance.
"Bury it, I suppose, Steve. Oughtn't we to?"
"Wal, I don't want to dictate to no man, but ef you're goin' to make a practice of bringing corpses to this shanty, I quit," remarked Jim, who had been strongly opposed to robbing the Frazer of its prey from the first.
"Don't cut up rough, old chap. If your body was going down in that seething hell of waters, you'd be glad if anyone would drag you ashore and give you decent burial. Let it bide until to-morrow, Jim, and I'll bury it myself."
"Very well. That's a go. Now just lend a hand to cinch him on to this chair for the night, so as he won't be crawlin' around in the dark;" and old Jim with Ned's assistance fastened the body into a chair which stood by the rough deal board which served them for a table, and there left it.
Why is it that, to even the boldest men, the dead are so very terrible? Is it their inhuman calm, their silence, or the mystery to which they alone hold the key, that awes and chills the hottest human heart? Whatever the cause of it, the nameless terror exists, and neither strong Ned Corbett, nor scoffing Chance, nor hard old Jim were proof against it. With that thing sitting in their one seat waiting for the morning to come that it might be buried, all three men crept away into the furthest corner of their tiny shack, and, trembling at every log which creaked and sputtered on the hearth, covered their heads with their blankets and prayed for daylight to come.
But the hours of the night are longer than those of the day. The lesson-books say that the twenty-four hours are all of the same length, just sixty minutes of sixty seconds in each, but the lesson-books lie. Who that has lain awake from midnight till dawn will believe that the six hours before sunrise are no longer than the six which succeed sunset? Of course they are longer, but the hours of that one night in the hillside above the fast-freezing Frazer were the longest since God made the world.
Down below the listeners could hear the grinding and roaring of the frozen river, and the shriek of the rising night wind as it tore through the deep canyons. Now and again a loud report echoed in the stillness as an ice-crack spread from side to side of some frozen mountain lake, and all night long there were inarticulate murmurs and groanings of water prisoned beneath ice, and the long howling of starved wolves amongst the snow.
The Indians believe that their dead hunters assume the forms of wolves, and if so, the whole of the dead Chilcotins were out hunting, adding their hideous voices to those other voices of the night, which had in them nothing that was familiar, nothing that was in sympathy with man or man's daily life. It seemed to the sleepless listeners that their own souls had lost their way and strayed into some waste place, where it was always winter and always night, and then as they strained their ears so that they could hear the beat of each others' hearts, a terrible thing happened.
It was only a chair which creaked, but the creaking of it seemed to deaden every other sound, and nature herself held her breath to listen. There it was again! Creak, creak, creak, and a scraping sound upon the mud floor. Unless the ears of three men had gone crazy with fright, that grisly visitor of theirs was pushing its chair along the floor as if it would rise up and be gone. All through the night the noises went on: the chair creaked, the feet of the dead moved upon the floor, and once in the dim light of early dawn, one who dared to look for a moment, fancied that he saw a long lean hand move slowly across the table.
Yet even fear yields at last to sleep, and before the full dawn came there were four sleepers in that hut,—three who should wake and one who should sleep on for ever, and all four comrades, who for a little while had pursued that will-o'-the-wisp, Wealth, together.
For the dead man was Phon!
The ice shroud which had hidden him before had melted in the night, and the strength of the frost had gone out of his poor dead limbs, and in the searching white light of the day he lay huddled up on the chair, his head fallen forward upon the table, and his body a limp mass of faded blue rags.
Even before Ned raised his head they all knew him, and when Ned pointed silently to a little dark spot at the nape of the dead man's neck, no one expressed any surprise.
There had been just such another mark at the nape of dead Robert Roberts' neck.
"Two!" groaned Rampike. "My God, two of 'em, and we ain't beginning to get level with him yet!"
Before they saw the corpse upon the previous evening the men had been sitting, according to their wont, round their rough table smoking and poring over Chance's old map of British Columbia.
That map was the nearest approach to a book in their possession, and they often studied it and made yarns about it; but the night of Phon's arrival all three had bent over it with more than their ordinary interest, because Ned had told them of his fancy that he had recognized a certain valley from the main ridge. It was just in front of this map that the corpse had been placed, when Rampike had cinched it into its chair for the night.
"I guess we had better clear 'em all away," said the old man after a pause, and with a comprehensive wave of his hand he indicated the corpse and the map, the cups and the half-smoked pipes which still littered the table.
Ned and Steve came to their comrade's assistance, and the three made as if they would lift Phon from his seat, but at the very first touch all shrank back, while Chance cried out:
"Look at its hand! Look, look, it is writing!"
Like men in a nightmare the three stood, unable to move or to speak, whilst that long lean hand which lay upon the map moved slowly along. Like the finger of a clock, or a shadow upon a dial, it crept along slowly, slowly, and ever as it went they heard the grating of one long untrimmed nail against the canvas.
It seemed to the onlookers that the hand took hours to travel across three inches of the map, and then the limp body gave a lurch and slid with a soft heavy thud to the ground.
The slight movement caused by Jim's first touch had disturbed the balance of the body, out of which all the rigid strength of the frost had now gone, so that the slackened muscles left to themselves shrank up and collapsed. This was what really happened, but to Rampike and the rest it seemed that the dead wrote.
"That's jest what he's come for. Thet's the way to Pete's Crik as he's bin a showin' you, and thet's where you'll find the man as shot him and old Rob. Bear a hand, we can carry him out now. I guess there ain't no call for him here any longer." And so saying Rampike took hold of the corpse, and with Ned's assistance bore it out and laid it down upon the snow.
Upon the map upon which Phon's dead hand had rested there was a fine wet line drawn by his nail—a line which led from the very spot where the dug-out stood upon the bank of the Frazer, to a point upon the right bank of the Chilcotin, a good deal to the north of the spot at which Corbett believed that the gold-camp lay.
Steve Chance took a pencil, and whilst the others bore out the body he marked the line carefully, that it might not dry up and vanish away. Even as he did so, a wild cry which he knew well came from the bench above the cabin. It began in a low key, and rose higher and higher until it was like the wail of a banshee, then it died away sullenly, and Steve heard Rampike's voice outside the cabin calling to him:
"Come along and lend a hand, Steve. If we don't bury him pretty soon those blasted wolves will get him."
Steve hurried out, and together the three tried hard to make some sort of a grave for Phon in the hillside. They might as well have tried to dig into adamant.
"It ain't no good," growled Rampike at length; "and if you jest bury him in the snow the wolves'll get him. Not as it matters much."
"We'd better put him back in the Frazer than leave him here," said Ned.
"That's so. He cain't stay in the cabin now as he's thawed out, but I ain't sure as we can get him back agen into the river."
Jim was right.
The earth which the Chinaman had robbed of its hidden treasure refused to receive him; the friends he had lived amongst would have none of him, now that death's seal was upon him; and even the river, which had spewed him up upon its banks, had now closed its portals against him, so that it was only after half an hour's hard labour that Chance and Corbett were able to hew out a hole in the solid ice, through which to send back its dead to the Frazer.
For one moment Ned Corbett stood with his hat in his hand, looking up to the sky, wondering whither the spark of life had gone and commending it to its Creator, and then he pushed the body head first through the hole. The ice round the spot where the three men stood was clear and still fairly thin, so that they saw, or thought that they saw, a face pressed against it for a moment, staring with wild eyes towards the world of the living, and then the stream caught it and it shot down and was gone.
The man had dreamed all his life of the golden secrets which lay in the bed of the mighty Frazer. He had looked forward to the days when he should carry the golden spoils of British Columbia to his own sunny land; but fate had mastered him, and though his body might roll amongst those golden sands, and his dead hands touch the heavy nuggets, it would profit him nothing. The dead have no need of gold!
After the burial of Phon there was no more rest for the men in the "dug-out." The Frazer was frozen hard, and offered a firm white way by which the three outcasts might return to some place where there were warmth and light and the voices of their fellow-men. But none of the three cared to profit by this way of escape. To them a mist seemed always to hang over the river, and the voices of the dead came to them through it; and to Ned Corbett it seemed that day and night one mournful old tune rang in his ears, and day and night Rampike polished his rifle and thought of the "pal" he had lost, and the murderer who had escaped him.
"It ain't no manner of use, Ned," he said one day towards the end of winter, when the ice was already breaking up. "I know as I might jest as well stay another month, and then go with you to look for this crik. But I cain't do it. Somethin' keeps callin' to me to git, and I mean makin' a start to-morrow whether you and Steve come or stay."
They had been together all through the dreary winter, and had hoped to go out together in the spring, back to that summer land by the sea from which they had all come. They were weary for awhile of the rush and struggle for wealth, and were pining for the smell of the salt waves and the drowsy lap of the sea upon the shore. They had talked over these things together when the noonday was dark with falling snow, and now that spring was at hand they little liked the idea of being parted.
"Hold hard, old man," said Corbett. "Let us see if we can't arrange to go together. Which way do you think of going?"
"Thar's only one way, the way as he showed us," answered Rampike, nodding over his shoulder towards the river down which Phon had gone to his rest.
For a few minutes Corbett made no answer, but sat staring fixedly out of the little window at the Frazer.
"It's infernal foolishness," he said at last—"infernal foolishness, I know, and yet I feel as you do, Jim. I shall never rest until I have tried Phon's way. I'm getting as superstitious as a Siwash."
"Superstitious is a mighty long word, but it don't amount to much. There's a heap of things happens as you cain't account for."
"Perhaps," assented Ned, and then took up once more Steve's ragged map of British Columbia, and studied for the hundredth time the course traced upon it by the dead man's nail.
"It runs south-south-east from here," he said.
"Yes, I know, and that'll be clar up that bluff and on to the divide, and then over a lot of gulches, I reckon, until we strike the Chilcotin. It'll be a pretty rough trail, you bet."
"Well, rough or smooth, Jim, if Steve doesn't mind waiting here for us, I'll come with you and start as soon as you please. What do you say, Steve?"
Now Steve Chance, as the reader knows, was by nature a decent obliging fellow, and, moreover, Steve had had all the rough travel that he cared about for years to come, so he answered readily enough.
"If you'll pass me your word that you'll be back inside of three weeks, I'll stay. But you don't expect to see Cruickshank, I hope?"
"I know as we shall see him," said Rampike quietly. "Summat tells me as his time's up."
The very next day Rampike and Corbett started up the bluffs above the dug-out. Down below them the ice in the Frazer was already beginning to "run," but the snow on the mountain-sides lay hard and unmelted still, so that travelling without snowshoes was fatiguing in the last degree. From the top of the ridge the two men got a good view of the country through which they had to travel. The mountains, as far as they could see, followed the course of the Frazer until its junction with the Chilcotin, where they bent into a kind of elbow; in fact the two rivers and their attendant mountains formed two sides of a triangle, between which lay gulches and ravines innumerable, and the base of this triangle was the course laid out for them by Phon.
"Looks as if that Chinee corpse had bin laughin' at us after all," muttered Rampike. "A man would want wings to cross that country."
"Never mind, let's try it, Jim," said Corbett; and together the two men pressed on, floundering sometimes up to their armpits in the deep snow, and sometimes finding an easy way where the country at first sight appeared impassable.
On the third day of their journey, towards evening, they entered a narrow snow-choked canyon, which seemed to lead through the second main ridge of mountains to the Chilcotin.
As they entered this canyon Ned Corbett paused and looked searchingly up and down it, as if looking for some sign to distinguish it from its fellows.
But he found none. Like a hundred others which they had seen, this gully was deep and narrow and full of snow. The pines which grew on its sides seemed only just able to keep their heads above the white flood. Somewhere far down below, no doubt, there was a creek, which sang and flashed in the summer sunlight; but it was buried now out of sight by the snow and gagged by the frost.
"Do you think you know this here place, Ned?" asked Rampike, who had been watching his comrade's face.
"I feel as if I did, and yet I can't see anything, Jim, that I could swear to."
"Is that so? Well, it's no matter, because we must stick to this canyon anyway. It leads out on to the Chilcotin," replied the old man, and so saying he led on.
After a while he paused.
"Say, Ned, is that a sheep-trail across there on the other side?"
Ned looked hard in the direction indicated, shading his eyes with his hand to get a better view.
"It looks more like a bear's trail," he replied, "only the bears are all holed up still."
"It's pretty well used, whatever it is, and I guess we should find it a sight better travelling there than it is here. Shall we try it?"
As it happened the snow was exceptionally deep where the two men stood, so that they sank up to their knees at every step. A beaten trail of any kind would therefore save them an infinite amount of labour.
"Yes, let's," said Ned, with the brusqueness of a man who needs all his breath for other uses.
To get to the trail Corbett and Rampike had to cross the canyon, and in places this was almost impossible, both men sinking from time to time almost out of sight in the snow.
Twice Rampike voted that they should give up the attempt, and twice Corbett persuaded him to go on.
At last, sweating and trembling with exertion, they got clear of the worst of the snow and stood upon the edge of the trail.
For a moment no one noticed anything. They were both too tired to use their eyes even. Then a sudden gleam of triumph flashed into Rampike's face, and he swore savagely between his teeth, as he was wont to do when anything moved him deeply. Bending over the trail he scrutinized it carefully, fingering the soiled snow, and making an impression with his own foot that he might compare it with the tracks before him.
When he raised his face to Corbett's he had regained all his old coolness, but there was a cold glitter in his eyes which spoke of repressed excitement.
"What is it, Jim?" asked Corbett.
"What is it? Don't you see? It's the trail of the bar we've bin' huntin' this long while, that's what it is. I suppose we'd better toss for the shot."
The trail was the trail of a man. The moment Corbett looked carefully at it he saw that; and yet, cold-blooded as it seemed to him afterwards, he never hesitated for a moment, but when Rampike produced a coin and sent it spinning into the air, cried "Heads!" with all the eagerness of a boy tossing for first innings in a cricket match.
"Tails it is! That thar is a lucky coin to me," said Rampike; "that's why I always pack it around." And so saying he replaced an old English shilling in his pocket and began examining the lock of his Winchester, whilst Ned looked anxiously up and down the valley as if he expected every moment to see their foe come into sight.
"Oh, no fear of his comin' just yet awhile," said Jim, noticing his comrade's glances. "He went up the canyon about an hour ago, and I don't reckon as he'll be along this way agen before morning. I wonder what he's up to, anyway?"
To men like Rampike and Corbett the testimony of the trail upon which they stood put some facts beyond all dispute. That some man who wore moccasins used it at least twice a day, and had so used it for a month past, they knew as certainly as they knew anything. That he had passed along the trail within the hour they also knew, and that he was Cruickshank they guessed with a confidence which left no room for doubt.
"I guess, Ned, as this here must be Pete's Crik as we've got into."
"That is what I've been thinking for some time," replied Ned.
"Then that's his trail to the diggings from the river. But what does he want at the river so often? That licks me."
As Ned had no explanation to offer, the two stood silent for a moment, until the old man's eyes fell upon the tracks which he and Ned had made across the canyon.
"If we don't hide those we shall scare our game," he muttered. "Lend a hand, Ned, to cover some of them up."
"I guess that'll do," he admitted, after half an hour's hard work. "Looks as if a bar had come across until he smelled them tracks of his and then turned back agen. Cruickshank 'll never notice, anyway, so we may as well foller this trail to the river. Step careful into his tracks, Ned. I'd like to see what he has been at on the river."
These were the last words spoken by either Corbett or Rampike for quite half an hour, during which they followed one another in Indian file, stepping carefully into the same footprints, so that to anyone but a skilled tracker, it would appear at first sight that only one man had used the trail.
At the end of half an hour they paused. The roaring of a great river was in their ears, and the grinding of a drift ice.
"That's the Chilcotin," whispered Corbett.
"The Frazer, more like," replied Rampike. "Yes, I thought as much," he added a moment later as he came round a corner of the bluff round which the trail ran. "We've struck the junction of them two rivers. This creek runs in pretty nigh the mouth of the Chilcotin."
Almost whilst he was yet speaking, Corbett caught the speaker by the belt and dragged him down in the snow at his side.
In spite of the suddenness and roughness of such treatment the old man uttered no protest. The question he wanted to ask was in his eyes as he turned his head cautiously and looked into his comrade's face, but with his lips he made no sound.
Putting his lips to Jim's ear, Ned whispered: "There's a canoe just below us on the beach, lie still whilst I take a look at it;" and then he crawled away upon his belly until he could peer from behind a boulder on the sky-line, at the valley below.
In that valley, between steep banks and piles of great ice-worn boulders, the last two hundred yards of the Chilcotin river rushed by to join the Frazer, and amongst these boulders, at the very edge of the open water, lay a rough Indian canoe.
At the side of the canoe the trail stopped.
"So that's the carcase as we have to watch," said Rampike's voice in Ned's ear. "There's no need to keep down, lad, he ain't here. Let's go along the trail and take a look." And so saying Rampike rose and walked down to the canoe.
The sight which there met his eyes and Ned's struck both men dumb for a while with wonder.
What they saw was the work of one man, in one winter, without proper tools, without sufficient food, and with the awful odds against him of place and weather.
"The devil fights hard for his own," muttered Ned; and indeed it seemed as if one man, unaided by supernatural powers, could not have accomplished what this man had done.
Corbett forgot that the greed of gold is almost a supernatural power. Out of the trunk of a tree, felled by his own hands, the man who dwelt in this snow-choked canyon had made himself a canoe, his one tool the blade of his axe. The canoe so built was neither beautiful nor strong, but it was just strong enough for a fearless man to risk his life in, and beautiful enough, when it had its cargo on board, to tempt nine men out of ten to risk their souls to obtain it.
For the cargo of that canoe was the world's desire—the omnipotent, all-purchasing gold! In a hundred small sacks this cargo was stored away, each sack made either of deer-skin or the clothes of the man who made them. He had risked his life and sacrificed the blood of others to get the yellow dust, and now he gave the very clothes from off his back, in spite of the bitter winter cold, to make sacks to save it in. As Ned looked and counted the sacks, and thought of old Roberts and Phon, of the money wasted and the toil unrewarded, he sighed. For the first time he regretted that he had lost the toss.
"Wal, come on, Ned," said Rampike, breaking in upon this train of thought suddenly, "I'm goin' to watch right here. It's mighty lucky as we came when we did. That fellow means to skip as soon as ever the river clears."
Ned said nothing, but in silence followed his companion to a lair behind a great block of gray stone, from which they could look down upon the trail opposite to them.
"I guess it's safest here, though if the ice breaks up a bit more we sha'n't be able to get back if we want to," said Rampike; for in order to reach a position which commanded Cruickshank's trail, Rampike had led the way across the river, stepping warily across the ice, which was already split up into great pieces, which ground against each other and moved slowly with the stream.
"It's not more than a hundred yards, I reckon, and I'll back her to shoot good that far, even by moonlight," were the last words which Rampike muttered as he drew a bead upon an imaginary figure on the trail across the river, and after this silence came and wrapped the two men round.
All through the gloaming and the night, even until the dawn, there was only a great gray stone which stood upon one side of the Chilcotin and looked down upon the trail on the other side.
There was no movement anywhere save the movement of the ice in the river and of the moon as she rose and sank again in the clear night sky, nor was there any sound save the grinding of the ice as it broke into smaller and yet smaller pieces, and was borne along to join the hurtling mass which was hurrying down the Frazer.
At first the shadows crept out into the valley, and one who was watching them gripped his rifle hard, and his breath came thick and fast. Again the moon rose and the shadows fled, and all was white and motionless and dumb. After this it grew darker again; the moon had gone and a chill wind made the watchers shiver, and one of them drew a white thread out of the material of his coat, and doubled it and tied it round the muzzle of his rifle, so that it made a great knot where the sight was, serviceable instead of a sight in the half darkness. The wind was cold, and the watchers' clothes were rigid with frost, but Rampike's fingers scarcely trembled as he tied that knot, and his face was firm and cold as ice.
At last there was a sound far away up the canyon. "Crunch crunch, crunch crunch," it sounded with a regularity unlike any sound in nature. It was no rolling of the rocks, no creaking of the frozen pines, not even the tread of any beast of prey. It was the step of a man, and colonel or no colonel, the man whose tread echoed in that wintry dawn, brought with him to his doom some traces of that early training which had come to him from the drill-sergeant. In the streets of a great city a hundred men may pass and no one hears their tread, or knows that he hears it, and yet in spite of the roaring of the rivers and the grinding of the ice, this one man's tread, even in the snow, seemed like the tread of an army, and the sound of it grew and grew until Corbett knew that the heavens heard it, and that its vibrations were echoed in hell.
At the last they saw him, this man richer than all other men, this man yellow with gold and crimson with other men's blood, and what they saw was a wan, ragged figure, worn to a mere skeleton, its shoulders bent, plodding heavily along with the last load of yellow dust, stolen from Pete's Creek, hanging heavily in its hands.
For a moment Corbett doubted if this could really be that same stalwart, smooth-tongued knave who had jockeyed him out of his dollars for three useless claims, but a sharp metallic "clink" upon the rock beside him called him back to himself and reminded him that Rampike had no doubts even if he had.
Inch by inch Ned saw the long barrel of the Winchester pushed out over the rock, until it rested firmly, its deadly muzzle dark in the dim light of dawn.
Slowly Rampike lowered his head until his cheek lay against the cold metal and his eye trained the weapon upon the man who for gold had not hesitated to kill two of his fellows.
One more beat of his heart and he too would feel the kiss of the cold lead and go whither those others had gone.
"My God, I can't do it!—Cruickshank!" cried Corbett, and as he cried out he sprang to his feet and threw up Rampike's rifle.
"Cruickshank!" the cry startled the silence, so that all nature seemed to shudder at the sound, and "Cruickshank!" "Cruickshank!" the rocks repeated until the sound died away amongst the snows at the head of the canyon.
At the first sound of that cry he whose name it was stopped, and as he turned to look across the river the white light of dawn came down and struck him across the face, so that those who looked could see the lines graven on it by fear and hunger and remorse, and then his hands went wildly up towards heaven and he fell.
The path which he had trodden so often crossed at this place a sheer slope of hardened snow, in which he had cut footsteps for himself, narrow indeed, but sufficient for the safety of a careful man. Until now he had never slipped or dreamed of slipping, and yet now with that cry in his ear, with the last load of gold in his hand, with the river almost clear enough for flight, he slipped and fell. Those who looked saw only a face full of mad fear, they heard only the clang of the metal wash-pan, which he wore as miners wear it, at his belt, and then, quick as the first ray of the dawn shoots across the mountain-side, Cruickshank shot down that ice-slope, and with a dull heavy plunge, sank in the ice-choked river.
For minutes, which seemed hours, the two men who lay behind the rock neither spoke nor moved, only they stared with wide eyes at the empty trail where he had stood, and the jostling hummocks of ice in the river amongst which he sank.
"Wal," said Rampike at last, "that's all, and I guess we take the pot." And he turned to where the canoe full of gold, the price of three men's lives, lay alone in the gray light of dawn.
Even as he spoke the canoe moved. Some will say that the ice on which it rested had been sucked away by the rising river, and that so, it slid down naturally and was borne along with all the other river waifs,—dead pines and dead men's bodies.
But Rampike, who saw the thing, says that hands like the hands of the dead laid hold upon it and drew it away.
Then they watched it drift out amongst the ice into the Frazer, and there for a while the great river played with it, and moaned and laughed over it by turns, and then it sank, and the gold that was in it, and the sin which that gold begot, are a portion of the load which the old river is so glad to lay down as she rushes into the salt sea beyond the sand-heads at New Westminster.
L'envoi.
My story is told, and the days which I wrote of have passed away, but something is still left to remind old-timers of the rush of '62. Pete's Creek is still yielding a fair return for work done upon it by a company, whose chairman is our old friend, Steve Chance, but such pockets as that found under Phon's boulder have never been found again.
As for Ned Corbett, he is a rancher now on those yellow Chilcotin uplands, and the gold which pleases him best is that left by the sun upon his miles and miles of sweet mountain grass. If others have more gold, Ned has all that gold can purchase by the Frazer or elsewhere, work which he loves, and such health, spirits, and moderate wealth as should satisfy an honest man.