CHAPTER XXII. GOLD BY THE GALLON!
After the finding of Pete's Creek there was no more talk of returning to the Frazer. In Corbett's camp the reign of gold had begun, so that no man spoke of anything or thought of anything but the yellow metal. Gold was a god to all the three of them, and Phon and Chance and Corbett alike bowed their backs and worshipped, grovelling on their knees and toiling with pick and pan and rocker all the day long. Only Corbett rebelled at all against the tyranny of the strange god, and he rebelled in thought only. Each day, in his heart, he swore should be the last which he would waste down by the creek, and yet every fresh dawn found him at his place with the others. Luckily for the gold-seekers, Pete's Creek was rich in other things besides mere gold. Trout abounded in the water, and huckle-berries grew thick some little distance down stream; and in addition to these good things Corbett soon discovered that the trails which ran thread-like over the face of the cliffs above Pete's Creek owed their existence to the feet of generations upon generations of white goats—staid stolid brutes, with humps upon their backs, little black horns upon their heads, wide frills to their hairy pantaloons, and beards worn as seafaring men used to wear them, all round their chins and cheeks.
These were the aborigines of Pete's Creek, and were if anything more confiding and more easily killed than the trout. Every morning at early dawn the gold-seekers saw the goats clambering slowly back to the lairs, in which they hid during the daytime, and just after dark the rattling stones told them that their neighbours were on their way down again to the lowlands. Whenever Ned wanted one for the pot, the stalk was a very simple thing, the goat standing looking at the approaching gunner with stony indifference, until a bullet rolled him over. Food was plentiful enough about the creek, and Ned was able to lay aside what little flour remained, keeping it until the time came when winter should make a move to some lower camping ground an absolute necessity.
So then the three had nothing to do but to gather up the gold-dust, and add pile to pile and bag to bag of the precious metal.
All worked with energy, but no one with such tireless patience, such feverish vigour, as the little Chinaman. Compared to him Chance was a sluggard, and even Corbett's strength was no match for the ceaseless activity of this withered, yellow little mortal, whose bones stared through his skin, and whose eyes seemed to be burning away their sockets.
The stars as they faded in the morning sky saw Phon come down to work; the sun at mid-day beat upon his head but could not drive him away from his rocker; and night found him discontented because the hours in which man can labour are so few and so short. As long as Phon could see the "colours" in his pan he stuck to his work, and when he could see no longer he carried his treasure to camp and kept it within reach of him, and if possible under the protection of Ned and Ned's rifle.
Even in the night season this slave of gold took no rest. In Victoria in old days the devils used to come to him, and tell him all manner of things—when to gamble and when not to gamble, for instance; now they haunted him, and filled him with fears lest someone else should snatch his treasure from him.
In spite of the absolute stillness which reigned round the creek, Phon believed that he was watched day and night, nor could Corbett's rough rebukes or Chance's chaff shake him in this belief. Twice he woke up, screaming that someone was taking away the gold, and once he swore positively that he had seen a face looking at him as he washed the rich dirt—a face which peered at him from the bushes, and disappeared without a sound before he could identify it. There were no tracks, so of course Phon was dreaming; but perhaps, even if there had been anyone watching from the place at which Phon saw the face, he would not have left a very distinct track, as the rock just there was as hard and unimpressionable as adamant.
Corbett, as he watched his servant muttering to himself and glancing nervously over his shoulder at every wind which stirred in the bush, felt convinced that the gold had turned his brain. And yet in some things Phon was sane enough. It happened that there was, in a sudden bend of the stream, a great boulder, which broke the course of the water, and sent it boiling and gurgling in two small streams about the boulder's base. From the very first this boulder fascinated Phon. For centuries it had stood in the same place, until green things had grown upon it, and gray lichens had spread over it.
It was a favourite resting-place for the white-breasted dipper on his way up stream; the fish used to lie in the shelter of it, where their struggle against the water need not be so severe, or to wait for the food which was washed off its piers and buttresses: and sometimes even the deer would come and stand knee-deep in the stream, to rub the velvet off their horns against its angles.
But Phon the Chinaman had guessed a secret which the old rock had kept for centuries—a secret which neither the birds nor the fish nor the deer, nor even those wise white-bearded patriarchs, the goats, had ever heard a whisper of.
That rock was set in gold, and Phon knew it.
Year by year the pebbles and the gravel and disintegrated rock were washed lower and lower down the bed of the stream, and all the while the gold kept sinking and staying, whilst the gravel and sand went on. But even gold must move, however slowly, in the bed of a rapid stream, and at last golden sand and flakes and nuggets all came to the bend where Phon's rock stood. Here the gold stopped. Gravel might rest for a while, and then rattle on again; pebbles and boulders might be torn away from their anchorage under the lee of the rock by the eager waters, but gold never. Once there Phon knew it would stay, clinging to the bottom, and even working under the rock itself. Knowing this Phon looked at the rock, and greed and discontent tortured him beyond endurance. He had already amassed far more gold than he could possibly spend upon the paltry pleasures he cared for; but he loved the yellow metal for itself, not for the things it can purchase, and this being so, he proceeded to match his cunning against the strength of the rock.
First he gathered great piles of quick burning wood from the banks and piled them upon his victim as if he would offer a sacrifice to mammon, and this he set fire to, bringing fresh supplies of wood as his fire burnt low. After a while the rock beneath the fire grew to a white heat, and then by means of a wooden trough which he had made, Phon turned a stream of cold water from the creek upon the place where the fire had been, and these things he continued to do for many days, until at last the giant yielded to the pigmy, and the great boulder, which for centuries had withstood the force of the stream in flood-time and the grinding ice in winter, began to break up and melt away before the cunning of a wizened, yellow-skinned imp from China.
About this time, and before the rock was finally split up and removed, Phon suggested that it would be better to try to divert the stream from its bed at some point just above the rock, so that they might be able to get at the gold when the boulder had been removed. To do this flumes had to be made, and axes were in request to hew them out. At the first mention of axes Steve became uneasy. There had been two axe-heads in the outfit originally, and he had been intrusted with one of them, and had lost it.
"I know I had it in the last camp," he asserted.
"Then you had better go back for it; the last camp is only about five hours' tramp from here. Or if you think that you can't find your way to it, I will go," remarked Corbett.
"I can find my way all right," replied Chance in an injured tone, nettled at the implied slur upon his woodcraft; "but do you think it is worth while going back for it?"
"Certainly. You could no doubt make a hundred dollars here in the time it will take you to get that axe, but a hundred dollars would not buy us an axe-head at Pete's Creek."
This argument being unanswerable, Steve took the back track, and after being away from camp all day, returned about sundown with the missing axe and an old buckskin glove.
"So you found the axe, I see?" was Corbett's greeting when the two met.
"Yes, I found it; I knew to a dot where I left it. But it was deuced careless to leave it anyway, wasn't it? By the way, you did not leave anything behind you in that camp, did you?"
"No, not I. I always go round camp before leaving to look for things. I only wonder that I did not see your axe."
"Oh, you wouldn't do that, I left it sticking in a cotton-wood tree a quarter of a mile from camp. But didn't you leave your 'mitts' behind?"
"No, my dear chap. I tell you I don't leave things behind. Here are my mitts;" and the speaker drew from his pocket a pair of buckskin gloves much frayed and worn.
"Then who in thunder is the owner of this?" exclaimed Chance, holding up a single glove very similar in make to those which Corbett wore.
"Your own glove, I expect, Steve, isn't it? I haven't seen you wearing any lately, and one wants them pretty badly amongst these rocks. You thought that you had caught me tripping, did you, my boy?" and Ned laughed heartily at his companion's crest-fallen appearance.
"No, Ned, this isn't mine," replied Steve seriously. "See here, it would hold both my hands."
"That is odd. Where did you find it, Steve?" and taking the glove in his hands Ned examined it carefully.
"You can't tell how long it has been out," he muttered, "the chipamuks or some other little beasts have gnawed the fingers; but the only wonder is that they haven't destroyed it altogether. Where did you say you found it?"
"About a quarter of a mile from camp. A bear has been round the camp since we were there, and I was following his trail for a bit to see what I could make of it when I came across this."
"Was it a grizzly's or a black bear's track which you followed?"
"I couldn't make out. The ground was hard, and I'm not much good at tracking. I could hardly be sure that it was a bear's track at all."
"It wasn't a man's track by any chance?"
"Confound it, Ned, I am not such an infernal fool as you seem to think. Yesterday you suggested that I couldn't find my way to the old camp, and now you ask me whether I know a bear's track from a man's."
"Don't lose your temper about it, old fellow. A man's track is very like a bear's, especially if the man wears moccasins and the ground is at all hard. Of course if you are certain that what you saw were bears' tracks there's an end of it. After all, this glove may have been where you found it since last summer. It might have been Pete's perhaps."
And so the matter dropped and the glove was forgotten, for there were many things to occupy the attention of Ned and Steve in those days; and as for Phon, he never even heard of the glove, being busy at the time upon some engineering work in connection with that great boulder of his at the bend in the stream.
For several days the Chinaman had ceased to wash or dig, all his time being devoted to preparations for the removal of the boulder, and at last, one morning, when the gully was full of the pent smoke of his fires, he was ready for the last act in his great work, and came to Corbett and Chance for help. On the top of the rock were the ashes of Phon's fires, and at its feet, where once the waters ran, was dry ground, while from summit to base the rock itself was split into a hundred pieces, so small as to offer no serious difficulties to the united efforts of the three men who wanted to remove them. For centuries the rock had stood upon a kind of shelf, from which the three men, using a pine-pole as a lever, pitched one great fragment after another until the whole of the rock's bed lay bare.
Then for a moment they paused, while the smoke drifted about them, and the corded veins stood out strangely upon their pale faces. Surely they were dreaming, or their eyes were tricked by the smoke! Phon had guessed that the boulder had caught and held some portion of the gold which had come down the mountain stream in the course of the last few centuries, but the sight upon which he gazed now was such as even he had only dreamed of when the opium had possession of him body and soul.
The bed of the boulder was a bed of gold—gold in flakes and lumps and nuggets; gold in such quantities that as Steve and Ned looked at it a doubt stole into their minds. Surely, they thought, it cannot be for this common, ugly stuff, of which there is so much, that men toil and strive, live and die, and are damned!
"GOLD—GOLD IN FLAKES, AND LUMPS, AND NUGGETS."
The wet pebbles amongst which the gold lay were twice as beautiful, and as Ned wiped the perspiration from his brow he thought that a quart of gold would be but a small price to pay for a quart of honest Bass. But Phon had no such fancies. With a wild cry, like the cry of a famished beast, the Chinaman threw himself into the hollow he had cleared, clawing and scratching at the gold with his long, lean hands until his nails were all broken and his flesh torn and bleeding.
Nor was Chance far behind Phon in the scramble. Together the two delved and scratched and picked about the bed-rock, amassing little piles and stacks of nuggets from the size of a pea to the size of a hen's egg, and so busy were they and so intent upon their labour that neither of them noticed Corbett, who after Phon's first wild cry had turned away in disgust, and now sat solemnly smoking on a log by the camp-fire.
Taking his pipe from his mouth, he blew away a long wreath of fragrant smoke, and as he watched it dissolve in space his thoughts fashioned themselves into these strange words:
"Confound your gold anyway! I don't want any more of it in my share of life's good things."