CHAPTER XXVI. RAMPIKE'S WINTER QUARTERS.
"Hallo, there! Hallo!" cried Steve as soon as his eyes fell upon the man and his rocker; but Steve's voice was so pitiably weak and small in a country where mud-banks are built like mountains, that it did not even wake an echo.
"Come along, Steve; it's no good shouting for half an hour yet. Look out for the prickly pears!" said Ned, and so saying he plunged into a little ravine, whose beggarly barrenness cried aloud to winter to come and hide it from the face of the sun.
"It's all very well to tell a man to look out for them," answered Steve in the peevish voice of sickness, "but there is nothing else to step on. It's all thorns and sharp stones in this confounded country."
"Never mind, stick to it, old chap."
"Just what I am doing, worse luck to it," muttered Steve, trying to tear himself away from a patch of little cacti upon which he had inadvertently sat down.
Ned turned and saw Steve's plight, and the white woe-begone face of his comrade only heightened the comedy of the position. So that there, at the last gasp, sick and worn-out, these two failures, with their stomachs empty and their soles full of thorns, stood and laughed until the tears rolled down their cheeks.
From the next step in the bench which led to the river Ned joined his deep bass to Steve's, and together they shouted their loudest to attract the man's attention. In vain. Whoever he was the man worked on, bending over his rocker, with the gold fever at his heart and the boom of the great river in his ears.
"It's no good, we must go right down to him," said Ned; and five minutes later he and Steve stood together upon the bar on which the man was at work. But so intent was he upon his rocking, or so silent was the approach of his visitors' bare and bleeding feet over the great boulders, that it was not until Ned's shadow fell upon him that the gold-worker was aware of a stranger's presence.
Then quick as thought he sprang to his feet, snatching up a Winchester as he did so, and covering his men with it before he had time to look into their faces.
"Stand off!" he roared, "or by 'Mity I'll let light through you!" and for the moment it seemed a mere toss-up whether he would shoot or not. But the men he spoke to were as reckless of life as he was. Hardship had taught them that a human life is not such a wonderfully big stake as the fat townsmen seem to think.
"You're in a tearing hurry to shoot, ain't you?" asked Steve coolly. "How would it be if we were to talk first? Don't you know us, Rampike?"
At the first sound of Steve's voice the miner had dropped his rifle into the hollow of his arm, and now he came forward, and holding out a huge hairy paw, yellow with river mud, said simply, "Shake."
It was not a very effusive greeting, but men don't "gush" much in the upper country, and yet that glimpse of a friendly face, and grip of a friendly hand, acted as a wonderful restorative upon the tired natures of both Steve and Ned. The sky itself seemed to get clearer and the mountain air less chill now that they had run against a "pal" once more.
"Wal, sonny, did you strike Pete's Creek?" was old Rampike's first question after they had all three "shaken some."
"We did so," answered Steve.
"Any 'pay' up there?"
"I should smile," replied the Yankee, using the slang of his country, and throwing down the belt of dust which he had clung to through all his wanderings.
"Why, this is free gold!"
"You bet it is; and there is enough for everyone we know and to spare," added Steve, "where that came from."
For a minute or two Rampike only turned the gold over and over in his hands and said nothing. At last he asked:
"Did you git Cruickshank?"
"No, never saw him," answered Ned.
"Praise the Lord you ain't got everything. I ain't sure as I wouldn't ruther look at him through the back-sights of this here, than find a crik like yourn;" and the old man passed his hand caressingly along the barrel of his "44.70."
"But, say, you look mighty hard set. Have you any grub along with you?"
"Not an ounce of flour, and this is the last of our meat;" and so saying Ned pulled out of his pocket the ration which he had kept for Chance.
"It's pretty lucky that I'm well heeled in the way of provisions, ain't it, else we'd all starve. Wal, come along up to the 'dug-out;'" and so saying he picked up his coat and rifle and led up to the bluff, until all three stood before the door of his winter residence.
Next to the homes of the pre-historic cavemen, and a few rude stone-heaps in which the Caucasian Ossetes live, the "dug-outs" along the Frazer river are the most miserable abodes ever fashioned for themselves by men. And yet these holes in the hill, with doors and roofs aflush with the hillside, are better adapted to resist the intense cold of a British Columbian winter than either frame-shack or log-hut.
"Come right in, lads," said Rampike, putting his foot against the planks which served him for a door, and thus rudely clearing the way for his visitors into a little dark interior with walls and floor of Frazer river mud.
A rough table, a solitary chair, and a kind of bench furnished the hovel somewhat more luxuriously than might have been expected, but unless you took a deep interest in geology the walls and general surroundings in Rampike's reception-room were distinctly crude and unpleasant.
If, however, you cared for geology, you could study specimens of the Frazer river system through the wide chinks between the boards which walled the room without even leaving your chair. Indeed, there was more "bed rock," as Rampike called it, than boarding in the composition of his walls.
But neither geology nor furniture attracted any attention from Steve or Ned. When they entered the cabin their eyes lit upon two things only, and it was a good hour before they took any real interest in anything else. The two centres of attraction were a frying-pan and a billy, round which all three men knelt and served, making themselves into cooks, stokers, or bellows, until the billy sang on the hearth and the bacon hissed in the pan.
Then for a while there was silence, and this story does not begin again until someone struck a match upon the seat of his pants. I believe it was Rampike, because, having had more experience than Steve, he could bolt his food faster. I know that it was not Ned, for he could never finish his meal until about the end of Steve's first pipe. Steve said it was because the Englishman eat so much. Ned said that in England men eat their food, in America they "swallered down their grub." "Swallerin' down your grub," he said, "was a faster but less satisfactory process than eating your food." But as I wish to remain upon friendly terms with both disputants, I cannot enter into this matter.
"Do you reckon to go in again this fall?" asked Rampike, without any prelude but a puff of tobacco smoke.
"To the creek?" said Ned, reaching across his neighbour for the billy. "Yes, we must go in, and that soon."
"What's your hurry? Steve here cain't travel, and you're pretty nigh played out though you are hard; and as for the gold, that'll stay right there till spring."
"You forget that there were three of us at Antler. Phon is up at the creek now."
"Phon! What, that Chinee! Is he up at the crik?"
"If he is alive he is," answered Ned. "He may have starved for all I know."
"Starved! not he; but you'll never see that heathen agen. He'd live on dirt or nothin' at all, any Chinee can do that; but you bet your life he ain't up there now. He's just skipped out to Victoria by some other road with all the dust he can pack along. That's what Phon has done."
"You don't know him, Jim, and you aren't fair to him. No westerner ever is fair to a Chinaman. Phon will stay by the creek. My only fear is that we sha'n't be able to find the creek."
"Not find the crik, you say! Why, Ned Corbett, you ain't no bloomin' tenderfoot in the woods, are you? You ain't likely to forgit your way to the bank when the whole business belongs to you?"
"Perhaps not, but I've been blind for a week;" and then answering the inquiry in Rampike's eyes, Ned lighted his pipe and told the whole story of his own and Steve Chance's wanderings, from the time when they struck Pete's Creek until their return to the Frazer.
Now and again Rampike broke in upon the thread of the narrative with some pertinent question, or a comment as forcible as a kick from a mule, but he managed to keep his pipe going pretty steadily until Ned came to Steve's feat in "blazing." Then the old man's wrath broke out, and his pipe even dropped from his mouth. For a moment he looked at Steve in speechless indignation, and then he expressed himself thus:
"Strike me pink," he said, "ef a real down-easter ain't a bigger born fool in the woods than any bloomin' Britisher I ever heerd tell on. That's so."
After this there was a pause, during which Steve snored peacefully, and old Rampike, having made an exhaustive examination of the bowl of his pipe, proceeded to refill it with chips from his plug of T. & B.
At length Ned began again:
"You've been looking for the creek yourself, haven't you?"
"No. I stayed right here, making wages on that bar there."
"I wonder who made those camps then which we found along the divide. I can't think that those were Indian camps;" and Ned told his companion of the camps which he and Steve had stumbled upon during their search for Pete's Creek, as well as of that glove found by the bear tracks.
"Bear tracks!" growled Rampike, "not they. A softy who would blaze the wrong side of a tree wouldn't know bear tracks from the tracks of a gal's shoe with a French heel to it. Cruickshank's tracks, that's what they was, and ef you don't see more of 'em before you get your gold out of Pete's Crik you may call me the biggest liar in Cariboo!"
"You don't mean to say that you think Cruickshank would dare to dog us?"
"Dog you! That man would dog the devil for gold."
This was a new idea to Ned. If there was any truth in it, then all Phon's stories of faces seen in the pool, of eyes which watched the gold, of figures which rustled ever so lightly over the dry sal-lal on the canyon's edge, when all save Phon and the night owls slept, all these stories might be something more than the imaginings of a crazed Chinaman's brain.
For a while Ned sat silently smoking and looking thoughtfully into the embers. Then he rose, and knocking the ashes out of his pipe said:
"I am going to look for Phon to-morrow if Steve seems well enough to be left here. Shall you come?"
"Yes, I reckon I may as well. You cain't hev all the sport, sonny. I'm ruther partial to gunning myself."