CHAPTER XXIX. PHON'S RETURN.
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!