CHAPTER XIV. WHAT THE WOLF FOUND.
About midnight Rampike returned to his hut, and as the moonlight streamed through the doorway across the floor, Corbett rose without a word and joined the old miner outside.
"You didn't need much waking, lad."
"No; and yet I slept like a top. But I felt you were coming, and now every nerve in my body is wide awake."
Rampike looked at his companion curiously.
"You're a strong man, Ned Corbett, but take care. I've known stronger men than you get the 'jim-jams' from overwork."
Ned laughed. He hardly thought that a man who had not tasted liquor for a month was likely to suffer much from the "jim-jams."
"That's all right," said Rampike testily. "You may laugh, but I've seen more of this kind of life than you'll ever see, and I tell you, you'd better stay where you are."
"What! and let Cruickshank go?"
"What are you going to do with Cruickshank when you catch him?"
"Bring him back to look at the mistake he made about my claims," answered Corbett grimly.
"And suppose Cruickshank don't feel like coming back? It's more than likely that he won't."
"Then it will be a painful necessity for Roberts and myself to pack him back."
"If you get him back the law can't touch him, and the boys won't lynch him just for swindling a tenderfoot."
"The law can't touch him?"
"Why, certainly not. If you were such a blessed fool as to buy claims without a frontage on the crik, that's your business. He didn't say as they weren't on the top of a mountain."
"But no mountain was shown on his map," argued Corbett.
"I guess he'd say as he couldn't draw maps well and the one Steve Chance copied was the best he knew how to make. He sold you what he said he'd sell you, and if you didn't ask any questions that's your fault."
This was a new view of the case to Corbett, and for a moment he felt staggered by it, but only for a moment. After all, it was not for the sake of the claims that he had made up his mind to pursue Cruickshank.
"Thanks, Rampike, for trying to make me stay here. I know what you mean, but I am not as nearly 'beat' as you think I am, and I wouldn't leave old Roberts alone with that scoundrel even if I was. Have you got the grub there?"
"Well, if that's your reason for going I've no more to say, except as I reckon Roberts is pretty good at taking care of himself. However, a pal's a pal, and if you mean to stay by him, I'll not hinder you. Here's the grub;" and so saying he helped Ned to fix a little bundle upon his shoulders, taking care that whatever weight there was should lie easily in the small of his back. "It's only dried venison," continued Rampike, "and I didn't put any bread in. Bread weighs too much and takes up too much room. You can go it on meat straight for a week, can't you?"
"I'll try to. Give Chance a helping hand if you can. He is a regular rustler if you can get him any work to do."
"Don't worry yourself about your pals. You are going to look for Dick Rampike's old partner, and you may bet your sweet life that he won't let your pals starve."
The two men, who had been walking slowly through the mining camp, had now reached the foot of the trail by which Ned had arrived at Williams Creek.
"Well, good-bye, Rampike," said Ned, stopping and holding out his hand. "It's no good your coming any farther. Don't let Steve follow me."
"Good-bye, lad; I'll see that Steve Chance don't follow you. He ain't built to go your pace," he added, looking after Ned, "if he wanted to, but there'll be me and some of the boys after you afore long, if there's going to be any trouble;" and with this consoling reflection in his mind, the old hard-fist returned to his cabin, pulled off his long gum boots, and lay down on the floor beside the still sleeping Chance and Phon.
Mr. Rampike had not as yet had time to furnish his country residence, and after all, in his eyes a bed was rather a useless luxury. 'What's the matter with a good deal floor?' he often used to ask; and as he never got a satisfactory answer, he never bothered to build himself a bunk.
Meanwhile Ned Corbett was standing for a moment on the top of a bluff above Williams Creek, whence he could still see the lights of the camp, and still hear faint strains of music from the dance-house and the monotonous "clink, clink" of the miner's pick. The next moment he turned his back upon it all; a rising bank shut out the last glimpse of the fires and the last faint hum of human life. The forest swallowed them up, and Ned was alone with the silence.
Never in all his life had he been in so strange a mood as he was that night.
It seemed to him that every nerve and muscle in his body, every faculty of his brain, had been tuned to concert pitch. All his old calmness had deserted him, and in place of it a very fire of impatience devoured him. Wherever the trail allowed of it he broke into a long swinging run, and yet, though the miles flew past him, he was not satisfied. On! on! a voice seemed to cry to him, and in spite of his speed the voice still urged him to further efforts. That was the worst of it. Instead of the silence the forest seemed full of voices,—not voices which spoke to his ear, but voices which cried to the soul that was within him. The shadows were full of these inarticulate cries, the night air throbbed with them, all nature was full of them, and of a secret which he alone seemed unable to grasp.
But it was no good standing still to listen, so he pressed on until he came to the bridge of pines where the day before Phon had clung, swinging between this world and the next. Here Corbett hesitated for the first time, standing at the top of that arch of pines, looking across the black gulf in which the unseen waters moaned horribly. If his foot slipped or his hands failed him for the tenth part of a second, he would drop from the moonlight into eternal darkness, leaving no trace behind by which men could tell that Ned Corbett had ever existed.
For a moment a cold horror seized him, he clung wildly to the boughs round him and looked backwards instead of forwards. But this fit only lasted for a moment, and then the bold English blood came back to his heart with a rush. "Good heavens!" he muttered, "am I turning Chinaman?" and as he muttered it he launched himself boldly across the gap, caught at the rope to steady himself, and having crossed the bridge set his face firmly once more for the bald mountains above him.
All through the night Corbett maintained that long swinging stride, climbing steadily up the steep hills and passing swiftly down the forest glades, tireless as a wolf and silent as a shadow.
When the dawn came he paused in his race, and sat down for a quarter of an hour to eat a frugal meal of dried meat. Had he been living the normal life of a civilized man in one of the cities of Europe, he would have needed much less food and eaten much more. All civilized human beings overeat themselves. Perhaps if the food at the Bristol or the Windsor was served as dry and as little seasoned as Rampike's venison, less would be eaten and more digested.
Breakfast over, Ned resumed his course. Even during his hurried meal he had been restless and anxious to get on. Fatigue seemed not to touch him, or a power over which mere human weariness could not prevail, possessed him.
As the air freshened and the stars paled, the tits and "whisky-jacks" began their morning complaints, their peevish voices convincing Ned that they had been up too long the night before. A little later the squirrels began to chatter and swear angrily at him as he passed, and a gray old coyoté slinking home to bed stood like a shadow watching him as he went, wondering, no doubt, who this early-rising hunter might be, with the swift silent feet, white set face, and stern blue eyes which looked so keen and yet saw nothing.
Then the sun rose, and at last, taking a hint from the tall red-deer, Ned threw himself down on the soft mosses, trusting in the sun to warm him in his slumbers, as it does all the rest of that great world which gets on very well without blankets.
Until the shadow had crept to the other side of the tree under which he lay, Ned Corbett slept without moving; then he rose again, ate a few mouthfuls of dried meat, took a modest draught of the white water which foamed and bubbled through the moss of the hillside, and again went on.
One day went and another came, and still Corbett held on his course, and on the third day he had his reward. At last on the trail in front of him he saw the tracks of horses, nine in number, all of them shod before and behind as his own had been, and the tracks of one man driving them.
That was singular. There were two men left with Ned Corbett's pack-train. Where had the other gone to? Backwards and forwards he went, bending low over the trail and scrutinizing every inch of it, but he could see no sign of that other man. Perhaps he had tired and had found room upon one of the least laden of the pack animals. It would be hard upon the beast and most uncomfortable for the rider, but it was possible.
Or perhaps the tracks of the man who "led out" had been quite obliterated by the feet of the beasts which followed him. That too was possible, and Ned remembered how he had noticed upon the trail that a horse's stride and a man's were almost exactly the same length, so that it might be that for a few hundred yards at any rate one of the animals had gone step for step over Cruikshanks or old Rob's tracks.
But this could not have lasted for long; either the man or the beast would have strayed a yard or two from the track once in the course of a mile; but Corbett had examined the tracks for more than a mile, and still the story of them was the same: "nine pack-horses driven by one man over the trail nearly a week ago;" that was the way the tracks read, and Ned could make nothing else out of them.
There was one thing, however, worth mentioning. Corbett had hit upon the tracks on the path by which he himself had come from the Balm-of-Gilead camp to Williams Creek, at a point as nearly as he could judge five miles on the Williams Creek side of that camp. So far then the pack-train had followed him, but at this point it had turned away almost at right angles to follow a well-beaten trail which Corbett and Steve had overlooked when they passed it a week earlier.
"That, I suppose, is where we went wrong, and this must be the proper pack-trail to Williams Creek," soliloquized Ned, and then for a moment he stood, doubting which way he should turn. Should he follow his pack-train, or should he go back until the tracks told him something of that other man, whose feet had left no record on the road?
The same instinct which had urged him on for the last three days, took hold upon him again and turned him almost against his will towards the old Balm-of-Gilead camp.
It was nearly dark when he reached it, and he would perhaps have passed it by, but that he stumbled over the half-burnt log which had been used as the side log for his own fire. Since Ned had camped there a little snow had fallen, a trifling local storm such as will take place in the mountains even in May, and this had sufficed to hide almost all trace of the camp in that rapidly waning light.
As well as he could, Corbett examined the camp, going carefully over every inch of it; but the only thing he could find was a cartridge belt, hung up on the branch of a pine,—a cartridge belt half full of ammunition for a revolver. This he at once recognized as belonging to Roberts.
"By Jove, that's careless," he muttered, "and unlike the old man. I should have thought at any rate that he would have found out his loss before he got very far away, and have come back for the belt."
In another quarter of an hour it was too dark to see his hand before his face, so making the best of a bad business Ned sat down at the foot of a big pine, and leaning his back against it tried to doze away the time until the moon should rise and enable him to proceed on his way. But though Corbett's muscles throbbed and his limbs trembled from over-exertion, no sleep would come to him. In spite of himself his brain kept on working, not in its ordinary methodical fashion, but as if it were red-hot with fever. Indeed poor Ned began to think that he was going mad. If he were not, what was this new fancy which possessed him?
For some reason beyond his own comprehension his brain would now do nothing but repeat over and over again the refrain of Roberts' favourite song. The tune of "the old pack-mule" had taken possession of him and would give him no peace. Without his will his fingers moved to the time of it; if he tried to think of something else his thoughts put themselves in words, and the words fell into the metre of it, and at last he became convinced that he could actually with his own bodily ears hear the refrain of it, sad and distant as he had last heard it before leaving that camp.
There it came again, wailing up out of the darkness, the very ghost of a song, and yet as distinct as if the singer's mouth had been at his ear—
"Riding, riding, riding on my old pack-mule."
When things had gone as far as this, Ned sprang to his feet with a start. There was no doubt about that weird note anyway; and though it was but the howl of a wolf which roused him from his doze, Ned shuddered as the long-drawn yell died away in the darkness, which was now slowly giving way to the light of the rising moon.
Brave man though he was, Ned Corbett felt a chill perspiration break out all over him, and his heart began to beat in choking throbs. The wolf's weird music had a meaning for him which he had never noticed in it before. He knew now why it was so sad. Had it not in it all the misery of homeless wandering, all the hopelessness of the Ishmael, whose hand is against every man as every man's hand is against him, all the bitterness of cold and hunger and darkness? Was his own lot to be like the wolf's?
"Great Scott, this won't do!" cried the lad, and snatching up his pack he blundered away upon the trail, prepared to face anything rather than his own fancies.
As he moved away down the trail Corbett thought that he caught a glimpse of the beast, whose hideous voice had dispelled his dreams and jarred so roughly upon his nerves.
Fear makes most men vicious, and Corbett was very human in all his moods, so that his first impulse on seeing the beast which had frightened him was to give it the contents of his revolver. Stooping down to see more clearly, he managed to get a faint and spectral outline of his serenader against the pale moonlight, and into the middle of this he fired. A wolf's body is not at any time too large a mark for a bullet, even if it be a rifle bullet; but a wolf's body is a very small mark indeed for a revolver bullet at night, and so Ned found it, and missed. To his intense surprise, however, the gray shadow was in no hurry to be gone. Though the report of the revolver seemed curiously loud in the absolute silence of a northern night, the wolf only cantered a few yards and then stood still again, and again sent his hideous cry wailing through the forest aisles.
"Curse you, you won't go, won't you?" hissed Ned, his nerve completely gone, and his heart full of unreasonable anger; and again he fired at the brute, and this time rushed in after his shot, determined if he could not kill him with a bullet to settle matters with the butt.
But the wolf vanished in the uncertain light as if he had really been a shadow, and his howl but the offspring of Corbett's fancy. For a few yards Ned followed in the direction in which the beast seemed to have gone, until his eyes fell upon a swelling in the snow, near to which the wolf had been when the first shot was fired.
What is that other sense which we all of us possess and for which there is no name,—that sense which is neither sight nor hearing, nor any of the other three common to our daily lives? Before Ned Corbett's eyes there lay a low swelling mound of snow, smooth white snow, still and cold in the pale moonlight. There were ten thousand other mounds just like it in the forest round him, and yet before this mound Corbett stood rooted to the ground, whilst his eyes dilated and he felt his hair rising with horror, and in the utter stillness heard his own heart thundering against his side.
Until that moment Ned Corbett had never looked upon the dead. He had heard and read of death, and knew that in his turn he too must die; but as it chanced, he had never yet seen that dumb blind thing which live men bury, saying this was a man. And yet it needed not the disappointed yell of that foul scavenger to tell him what lay beneath the snow.
Slowly he compelled himself to draw near, and stooping he completed with reverent hands what the claws of the hungry beast had already begun, and then the moon and the man, with wan white faces, looked down together upon all that remained of cheery old Rob. Corbett knew at last why there had been no peace for him in the forests that night. There was no mystery about his old comrade's death. The whole foul story of murder was written so large that the woods knew it, and were full of it. This was the story which the shuddering pines had whispered all along the trail, and at last Corbett had grasped their secret and knew what the voices kept saying.
Just where the curly hair came down upon his friend's sturdy neck, was a small dark hole; a trifling wound it looked to have killed so strong a man, and yet when the bullet struck him there, Roberts had fallen without knowing who had struck him.
Then for one moment, perhaps, the man who did this thing had stood glaring at what he had done, more afraid of the dead man at his feet than his victim had ever been of any man. The position of the body told the rest of the story. Though he could kill him, Cruickshank dared not leave those death-sharpened features staring up to heaven appealing for vengeance against the murderer, so he had seized the corpse by its wrists and dragged it away from the camp-fire, away to where the dark balsams threw their heaviest shadows, and there left it, its arms stretched out stiff and rigid for the snows to cover and hide until it should melt away into the earth whence it came.
And what was Corbett to do? Men do not weep for men—their grief lies too deep for that—and, moreover, there is nothing practical in tears.
And yet what was Corbett to do? He might hide the dead again for awhile, but in the end he would be meat for the wolf and the raven.
"Oh God!" he cried in the bitterness of his spirit, "is this nothing unto Thee? Dost Thou see what man has done?"
And even then, while the infinitely small pleaded from the depth of the forest to the Infinitely Mighty, a little wind came and shook the tops of the pines, and the dawn came.
Thereafter, as far as Corbett knew, time ceased. Only the pines went by and the trail slipped past under his feet, until, in spite of all his efforts, and although the trees seemed still to go past him, he himself stood still. Then there came a humming in the air and the thunder of a great river in his ears, and the earth began to rise and fall, and suddenly it was night!
* * * * * * * *
It was on a Monday morning that Ned Corbett started from Williams Creek to search for Cruickshank, and on Saturday old Bacon Brown from Oregon brought his train into Antler, and with it a tall, fair-haired man, whom he had found upon the trail some fifteen miles back he said—a man whom he guessed had had the "jim-jams" pretty bad, "and come mighty nigh to sending in his chips, you bet."