CHAPTER VIII. THEIR FIRST "COLOURS."
"Lillooet at last!"
Steve Chance was the speaker, and as his eyes rested upon the Frazer, just visible from the first bluff which overlooks the Lillooet, his spirits rose so that he almost shouted aloud for joy. There beneath him, only a short mile away, lay most of the things which he longed for: rest after labour, good food, and pleasant drinks. Steve's cravings may not have been the cravings of an ideal artist's nature, but let those who would cavil at them tramp for a week over stone-slides and through alkaline dust, and then decide if these are not the natural longings of an ordinary man.
To tell the whole truth, Steve had amused himself and his comrade Roberts for more than a mile by discussing what they would order to eat and drink when once they reached comparative civilization again. Even the hardest of men tire in time of bacon and beans and tea.
A "John Collins," a seductive fluid, taken in a long glass and sipped through a straw, was perhaps what Steve hankered after most; but there were many other things which he longed for besides that most delectable of drinks, such for instance as a "full bath," a beefsteak, and clean sheets to follow.
Alas, poor Steve! There was the Frazer to wash in if he liked, and no doubt he could have obtained something which called itself a steak at the saloon, but a "John Collins" and clean sheets he was not likely to obtain west of Chicago.
Indeed, to this day long glasses and "drinketty drinks" are rare in the wild west; "drunketty drinks" out of short thick vulgar little tumblers being the order of the day. And apart from all this, Lillooet, though larger in 1862 than it is to-day, was even then but a poor little town, a town consisting only of one long straggling street, which looked as if it had lost its way on a great mud-bluff by the river. Benches of yellow mud and gray-green sage-brush rose above and around the "city," tier above tier, until they lost themselves in the mountains which gathered round, and deep down at the foot of the bluffs the Frazer roared along.
Since Chance had last seen the Frazer at Westminster its character had considerably changed. There it was a dull heavy flood, at least half a mile in breadth from bank to bank; here it was an angry torrent, roaring between steep overhanging banks, nowhere two hundred yards apart. There the river ran by flat lands, and fields which men might farm; here the impending mountains hung threateningly above it. The most daring steamboat which had ever plied upon the Frazer had not come nearer to Lillooet than Lytton, and that was full forty miles down stream.
In one thing only the Frazer was unchanged. At Lillooet, as at Westminster, it was a sordid yellow river, with no sparkle in it, no blue backwaters, no shallows through which the pebbles shone like jewels through liquid sunshine. And yet, artist though he was in a poor tradesman-like fashion, Steve gazed on the Frazer with a rapture which no other stream had ever awakened in him. At the portage between Seton and Anderson lakes he had passed a stream such as an angler dreams of in his dusty chambers on a summer afternoon, but he had hardly wasted a second glance upon it. Only trout lay there, great purple-spotted fellows, who would make the line vibrate like a harp string, and thrash the water into foam, ere they allowed themselves to be basketed; but in the Frazer, though the fish were only torpid, half-putrid salmon, that would not even take a fly, there was gold, and gold filled Steve's brain and eyes and heart just then to the exclusion of every other created thing. All he wanted was gold, gold; and his spirits rose higher and higher as he noted the flumes which ran along the river banks, and saw the little groups of blue-shirted Chinamen who squatted by their rockers, or shovelled the gravel into their ditches.
So keen, indeed, was Steve to be at work amongst his beloved "dirt," that tired though he was, he persuaded Ned to come with him and wash a shovelful of it, whilst dinner was being prepared.
Right at the back of the town a little company of white men had dug deep into the gravel of the beach, set their flumes, and turned on a somewhat scanty supply of water, and here Steve obtained his first "colours."
A tall old man who ran the mine lent him a shovel, and showed him where to fill it with likely-looking dirt; taught him how to dip the edge of his shovel in the bucket, and slowly swill the water thus obtained round and round, so as to wash away the big stones and the gravel which he did not want.
The operation looks easier than it is, and at first Steve washed his shovel cleaner than he meant to, in a very short time. By and by, however, he learnt the trick, and was rewarded by seeing a patch of fine gravel left in the hollow of the shovel, with here and there a tiny ruby amongst it, and here and there an agate. The next washing took away everything except a sediment of fine black sand,—sand which will fly to a magnet, and is the constant associate and sure indication of gold.
Steve was going to give this another wash when old Pete stopped him. "Steady, my lad, don't wash it all away; there it is, don't you see it!" and sure enough there it was, up by the point of the shovel, seven, eight—a dozen small red specks, things that you almost needed a microscope to see, not half as beautiful as the little rubies or the pure white agates; but this was gold, and when the old miner, taking back his shovel, dipped it carelessly into the water of his flume, Chance felt for a moment a pang of indignation at seeing his first "colours" treated with such scant ceremony, although the twelve specks together were not, in all probability, worth a cent.
But the sight of the gold put new life into Chance and filled Phon's veins with fever. One night at Lillooet, Steve said, was rest enough for him; and most of that night he and Phon spent either down by the river or in the saloon, watching the Chinese over their rockers, or listening to the latest accounts from Cariboo. Men could earn good wages placer mining at Lillooet in '62, even as they can now, but all who could afford it were pushing on up stream to golden Cariboo. What was five dollars a day, or ten, or even twenty for the matter of that, when other men were digging out fortunes daily on Williams Creek and Antler Cunningham's, and the Cottonwood?
And in this matter Cruickshank humoured Steve's feverish impatience to get on. Here, as at Douglas, the gallant colonel showed a strange reluctance to mingle with his fellows, or at least with such of them as had passed a season in the upper country, and even went so far as to camp out a mile away from the town, to give the pack animals a better chance of getting good feed, and to secure them, so he said, against all temptations to stray up stream with somebody else. Horseflesh was dear at Lillooet in '62; and the colonel said that morals were lax, though why they should have been worse than at Westminster, Ned could not understand.
However, it suited him to go on, so he raised no objection to Cruickshank's plans, more especially as the rest did not seem beneficial to his honest old chum, Roberts, who had been the centre of a hard-drinking, hard-swearing lot of mining men, ever since he arrived at Lillooet. Whenever Ned came near, these men sunk their voices to a whisper, and once when Cruickshank came in sight, the scowl upon their brows grew so dark, and their mutterings so ominous, that the colonel took the hint and vanished immediately. When Ned saw him next he was at their trysting-place, a mile and a half from the saloon, and very impatient to be off,—so impatient, indeed, that he absolutely refused to wait for Roberts, who, he "guessed," was drunk.
"Those old-timers are all the same when they get amongst pals, and as for Roberts, we are deuced well rid of him, he is no use anyway," said the colonel.
This might very well be Cruickshank's opinion. It was not Ned's, and Ned had a way of thinking and acting for himself, so without any waste of words he bade his comrades "drive ahead," whilst he turned back in search of Roberts.
By some accident this worthy had not heard of the intended start, and was, as Ned expected, as innocent of any intention to desert as he was of drunkenness.
When Ned found him he was sitting in the barroom with a lot of his pals, and the conversation round him had grown loud and angry; indeed, as Ned entered, a rough, weather-beaten fellow in his shirt sleeves was shouting at the top of his voice, "What the deuce is the good of all this jaw? Lynch the bilk, that's what I say, and save trouble."
But Ned's appearance put a stop to the proceedings, though an angry growl broke out when he was overheard to say that Cruickshank and Steve had started half an hour ago, and that he himself had come back to look for old Roberts.
"Don't you go, Bob," urged one of his comrades; "them young Britishers are bound to stay by their packs, but you've no call to."
"Not you. You'll stay right here, if you ain't a born fool," urged another.
But Bob was not to be coaxed or bantered out of his determination to stay by his brother Salopian.
"No, lads," he retorted, "I ain't a born fool, and I ain't the sort to go back on a pal. If Corbett goes I'm going, though I don't pretend to be over-keen on the job."
"Wal, if you will go, go and be hanged to you; only, Bob, keep your eye skinned, and, I say, shoot fust next time, shoot fust; now don't you forget it!" with which mysterious injunction Bob's big friend reeled up from the table (he was half-drunk already), shook hands, "liquored" once more, and left. He said he had some business to attend to down town; and as it was nearly noon, and he had done nothing but smoke and drink short drinks since breakfast-time, he was probably right in thinking that it was time to attend to it.
Whilst this gentleman rolled away down the street with a fine free stride, requiring a good deal of sea-room, Ned and his friend had to put their best feet foremost (as the saying is) to make up for lost time. When you are walking fast over rough ground you have not much breath left for conversation, and this, perhaps, and the roar of the sullen river, accounts for the fact that the two men strode along in silence, neither of them alluding to the conversation just overheard in the saloon, although the minds of both were running upon that subject, and Ned noticed that the pistol which Roberts pulled out and examined as they went along was a recent purchase.
"Hullo, you've got a new gun, Rob," he remarked. Everything with which men shoot is called a gun in British Columbia.
"Yes, it's one I bought at Lillooet. I hadn't got a good one with me."
"Well, I don't suppose you'll want it, now you have got it," replied Corbett.
"Well, I don't know. I might want it to shoot grouse with by the side of the trail."
And the old fellow laid such an emphasis upon his last words and chuckled so grimly, that Ned half suspected that he had wetted his whistle once too often after all.