CHAPTER XXX. CRUICKSHANK AT LAST!
After the burial of Phon there was no more rest for the men in the "dug-out." The Frazer was frozen hard, and offered a firm white way by which the three outcasts might return to some place where there were warmth and light and the voices of their fellow-men. But none of the three cared to profit by this way of escape. To them a mist seemed always to hang over the river, and the voices of the dead came to them through it; and to Ned Corbett it seemed that day and night one mournful old tune rang in his ears, and day and night Rampike polished his rifle and thought of the "pal" he had lost, and the murderer who had escaped him.
"It ain't no manner of use, Ned," he said one day towards the end of winter, when the ice was already breaking up. "I know as I might jest as well stay another month, and then go with you to look for this crik. But I cain't do it. Somethin' keeps callin' to me to git, and I mean makin' a start to-morrow whether you and Steve come or stay."
They had been together all through the dreary winter, and had hoped to go out together in the spring, back to that summer land by the sea from which they had all come. They were weary for awhile of the rush and struggle for wealth, and were pining for the smell of the salt waves and the drowsy lap of the sea upon the shore. They had talked over these things together when the noonday was dark with falling snow, and now that spring was at hand they little liked the idea of being parted.
"Hold hard, old man," said Corbett. "Let us see if we can't arrange to go together. Which way do you think of going?"
"Thar's only one way, the way as he showed us," answered Rampike, nodding over his shoulder towards the river down which Phon had gone to his rest.
For a few minutes Corbett made no answer, but sat staring fixedly out of the little window at the Frazer.
"It's infernal foolishness," he said at last—"infernal foolishness, I know, and yet I feel as you do, Jim. I shall never rest until I have tried Phon's way. I'm getting as superstitious as a Siwash."
"Superstitious is a mighty long word, but it don't amount to much. There's a heap of things happens as you cain't account for."
"Perhaps," assented Ned, and then took up once more Steve's ragged map of British Columbia, and studied for the hundredth time the course traced upon it by the dead man's nail.
"It runs south-south-east from here," he said.
"Yes, I know, and that'll be clar up that bluff and on to the divide, and then over a lot of gulches, I reckon, until we strike the Chilcotin. It'll be a pretty rough trail, you bet."
"Well, rough or smooth, Jim, if Steve doesn't mind waiting here for us, I'll come with you and start as soon as you please. What do you say, Steve?"
Now Steve Chance, as the reader knows, was by nature a decent obliging fellow, and, moreover, Steve had had all the rough travel that he cared about for years to come, so he answered readily enough.
"If you'll pass me your word that you'll be back inside of three weeks, I'll stay. But you don't expect to see Cruickshank, I hope?"
"I know as we shall see him," said Rampike quietly. "Summat tells me as his time's up."
The very next day Rampike and Corbett started up the bluffs above the dug-out. Down below them the ice in the Frazer was already beginning to "run," but the snow on the mountain-sides lay hard and unmelted still, so that travelling without snowshoes was fatiguing in the last degree. From the top of the ridge the two men got a good view of the country through which they had to travel. The mountains, as far as they could see, followed the course of the Frazer until its junction with the Chilcotin, where they bent into a kind of elbow; in fact the two rivers and their attendant mountains formed two sides of a triangle, between which lay gulches and ravines innumerable, and the base of this triangle was the course laid out for them by Phon.
"Looks as if that Chinee corpse had bin laughin' at us after all," muttered Rampike. "A man would want wings to cross that country."
"Never mind, let's try it, Jim," said Corbett; and together the two men pressed on, floundering sometimes up to their armpits in the deep snow, and sometimes finding an easy way where the country at first sight appeared impassable.
On the third day of their journey, towards evening, they entered a narrow snow-choked canyon, which seemed to lead through the second main ridge of mountains to the Chilcotin.
As they entered this canyon Ned Corbett paused and looked searchingly up and down it, as if looking for some sign to distinguish it from its fellows.
But he found none. Like a hundred others which they had seen, this gully was deep and narrow and full of snow. The pines which grew on its sides seemed only just able to keep their heads above the white flood. Somewhere far down below, no doubt, there was a creek, which sang and flashed in the summer sunlight; but it was buried now out of sight by the snow and gagged by the frost.
"Do you think you know this here place, Ned?" asked Rampike, who had been watching his comrade's face.
"I feel as if I did, and yet I can't see anything, Jim, that I could swear to."
"Is that so? Well, it's no matter, because we must stick to this canyon anyway. It leads out on to the Chilcotin," replied the old man, and so saying he led on.
After a while he paused.
"Say, Ned, is that a sheep-trail across there on the other side?"
Ned looked hard in the direction indicated, shading his eyes with his hand to get a better view.
"It looks more like a bear's trail," he replied, "only the bears are all holed up still."
"It's pretty well used, whatever it is, and I guess we should find it a sight better travelling there than it is here. Shall we try it?"
As it happened the snow was exceptionally deep where the two men stood, so that they sank up to their knees at every step. A beaten trail of any kind would therefore save them an infinite amount of labour.
"Yes, let's," said Ned, with the brusqueness of a man who needs all his breath for other uses.
To get to the trail Corbett and Rampike had to cross the canyon, and in places this was almost impossible, both men sinking from time to time almost out of sight in the snow.
Twice Rampike voted that they should give up the attempt, and twice Corbett persuaded him to go on.
At last, sweating and trembling with exertion, they got clear of the worst of the snow and stood upon the edge of the trail.
For a moment no one noticed anything. They were both too tired to use their eyes even. Then a sudden gleam of triumph flashed into Rampike's face, and he swore savagely between his teeth, as he was wont to do when anything moved him deeply. Bending over the trail he scrutinized it carefully, fingering the soiled snow, and making an impression with his own foot that he might compare it with the tracks before him.
When he raised his face to Corbett's he had regained all his old coolness, but there was a cold glitter in his eyes which spoke of repressed excitement.
"What is it, Jim?" asked Corbett.
"What is it? Don't you see? It's the trail of the bar we've bin' huntin' this long while, that's what it is. I suppose we'd better toss for the shot."
The trail was the trail of a man. The moment Corbett looked carefully at it he saw that; and yet, cold-blooded as it seemed to him afterwards, he never hesitated for a moment, but when Rampike produced a coin and sent it spinning into the air, cried "Heads!" with all the eagerness of a boy tossing for first innings in a cricket match.
"Tails it is! That thar is a lucky coin to me," said Rampike; "that's why I always pack it around." And so saying he replaced an old English shilling in his pocket and began examining the lock of his Winchester, whilst Ned looked anxiously up and down the valley as if he expected every moment to see their foe come into sight.
"Oh, no fear of his comin' just yet awhile," said Jim, noticing his comrade's glances. "He went up the canyon about an hour ago, and I don't reckon as he'll be along this way agen before morning. I wonder what he's up to, anyway?"
To men like Rampike and Corbett the testimony of the trail upon which they stood put some facts beyond all dispute. That some man who wore moccasins used it at least twice a day, and had so used it for a month past, they knew as certainly as they knew anything. That he had passed along the trail within the hour they also knew, and that he was Cruickshank they guessed with a confidence which left no room for doubt.
"I guess, Ned, as this here must be Pete's Crik as we've got into."
"That is what I've been thinking for some time," replied Ned.
"Then that's his trail to the diggings from the river. But what does he want at the river so often? That licks me."
As Ned had no explanation to offer, the two stood silent for a moment, until the old man's eyes fell upon the tracks which he and Ned had made across the canyon.
"If we don't hide those we shall scare our game," he muttered. "Lend a hand, Ned, to cover some of them up."
"I guess that'll do," he admitted, after half an hour's hard work. "Looks as if a bar had come across until he smelled them tracks of his and then turned back agen. Cruickshank 'll never notice, anyway, so we may as well foller this trail to the river. Step careful into his tracks, Ned. I'd like to see what he has been at on the river."
These were the last words spoken by either Corbett or Rampike for quite half an hour, during which they followed one another in Indian file, stepping carefully into the same footprints, so that to anyone but a skilled tracker, it would appear at first sight that only one man had used the trail.
At the end of half an hour they paused. The roaring of a great river was in their ears, and the grinding of a drift ice.
"That's the Chilcotin," whispered Corbett.
"The Frazer, more like," replied Rampike. "Yes, I thought as much," he added a moment later as he came round a corner of the bluff round which the trail ran. "We've struck the junction of them two rivers. This creek runs in pretty nigh the mouth of the Chilcotin."
Almost whilst he was yet speaking, Corbett caught the speaker by the belt and dragged him down in the snow at his side.
In spite of the suddenness and roughness of such treatment the old man uttered no protest. The question he wanted to ask was in his eyes as he turned his head cautiously and looked into his comrade's face, but with his lips he made no sound.
Putting his lips to Jim's ear, Ned whispered: "There's a canoe just below us on the beach, lie still whilst I take a look at it;" and then he crawled away upon his belly until he could peer from behind a boulder on the sky-line, at the valley below.
In that valley, between steep banks and piles of great ice-worn boulders, the last two hundred yards of the Chilcotin river rushed by to join the Frazer, and amongst these boulders, at the very edge of the open water, lay a rough Indian canoe.
At the side of the canoe the trail stopped.
"So that's the carcase as we have to watch," said Rampike's voice in Ned's ear. "There's no need to keep down, lad, he ain't here. Let's go along the trail and take a look." And so saying Rampike rose and walked down to the canoe.
The sight which there met his eyes and Ned's struck both men dumb for a while with wonder.
What they saw was the work of one man, in one winter, without proper tools, without sufficient food, and with the awful odds against him of place and weather.
"The devil fights hard for his own," muttered Ned; and indeed it seemed as if one man, unaided by supernatural powers, could not have accomplished what this man had done.
Corbett forgot that the greed of gold is almost a supernatural power. Out of the trunk of a tree, felled by his own hands, the man who dwelt in this snow-choked canyon had made himself a canoe, his one tool the blade of his axe. The canoe so built was neither beautiful nor strong, but it was just strong enough for a fearless man to risk his life in, and beautiful enough, when it had its cargo on board, to tempt nine men out of ten to risk their souls to obtain it.
For the cargo of that canoe was the world's desire—the omnipotent, all-purchasing gold! In a hundred small sacks this cargo was stored away, each sack made either of deer-skin or the clothes of the man who made them. He had risked his life and sacrificed the blood of others to get the yellow dust, and now he gave the very clothes from off his back, in spite of the bitter winter cold, to make sacks to save it in. As Ned looked and counted the sacks, and thought of old Roberts and Phon, of the money wasted and the toil unrewarded, he sighed. For the first time he regretted that he had lost the toss.
"Wal, come on, Ned," said Rampike, breaking in upon this train of thought suddenly, "I'm goin' to watch right here. It's mighty lucky as we came when we did. That fellow means to skip as soon as ever the river clears."
Ned said nothing, but in silence followed his companion to a lair behind a great block of gray stone, from which they could look down upon the trail opposite to them.
"I guess it's safest here, though if the ice breaks up a bit more we sha'n't be able to get back if we want to," said Rampike; for in order to reach a position which commanded Cruickshank's trail, Rampike had led the way across the river, stepping warily across the ice, which was already split up into great pieces, which ground against each other and moved slowly with the stream.
"It's not more than a hundred yards, I reckon, and I'll back her to shoot good that far, even by moonlight," were the last words which Rampike muttered as he drew a bead upon an imaginary figure on the trail across the river, and after this silence came and wrapped the two men round.
All through the gloaming and the night, even until the dawn, there was only a great gray stone which stood upon one side of the Chilcotin and looked down upon the trail on the other side.
There was no movement anywhere save the movement of the ice in the river and of the moon as she rose and sank again in the clear night sky, nor was there any sound save the grinding of the ice as it broke into smaller and yet smaller pieces, and was borne along to join the hurtling mass which was hurrying down the Frazer.
At first the shadows crept out into the valley, and one who was watching them gripped his rifle hard, and his breath came thick and fast. Again the moon rose and the shadows fled, and all was white and motionless and dumb. After this it grew darker again; the moon had gone and a chill wind made the watchers shiver, and one of them drew a white thread out of the material of his coat, and doubled it and tied it round the muzzle of his rifle, so that it made a great knot where the sight was, serviceable instead of a sight in the half darkness. The wind was cold, and the watchers' clothes were rigid with frost, but Rampike's fingers scarcely trembled as he tied that knot, and his face was firm and cold as ice.
At last there was a sound far away up the canyon. "Crunch crunch, crunch crunch," it sounded with a regularity unlike any sound in nature. It was no rolling of the rocks, no creaking of the frozen pines, not even the tread of any beast of prey. It was the step of a man, and colonel or no colonel, the man whose tread echoed in that wintry dawn, brought with him to his doom some traces of that early training which had come to him from the drill-sergeant. In the streets of a great city a hundred men may pass and no one hears their tread, or knows that he hears it, and yet in spite of the roaring of the rivers and the grinding of the ice, this one man's tread, even in the snow, seemed like the tread of an army, and the sound of it grew and grew until Corbett knew that the heavens heard it, and that its vibrations were echoed in hell.
At the last they saw him, this man richer than all other men, this man yellow with gold and crimson with other men's blood, and what they saw was a wan, ragged figure, worn to a mere skeleton, its shoulders bent, plodding heavily along with the last load of yellow dust, stolen from Pete's Creek, hanging heavily in its hands.
For a moment Corbett doubted if this could really be that same stalwart, smooth-tongued knave who had jockeyed him out of his dollars for three useless claims, but a sharp metallic "clink" upon the rock beside him called him back to himself and reminded him that Rampike had no doubts even if he had.
Inch by inch Ned saw the long barrel of the Winchester pushed out over the rock, until it rested firmly, its deadly muzzle dark in the dim light of dawn.
Slowly Rampike lowered his head until his cheek lay against the cold metal and his eye trained the weapon upon the man who for gold had not hesitated to kill two of his fellows.
One more beat of his heart and he too would feel the kiss of the cold lead and go whither those others had gone.
"My God, I can't do it!—Cruickshank!" cried Corbett, and as he cried out he sprang to his feet and threw up Rampike's rifle.
"Cruickshank!" the cry startled the silence, so that all nature seemed to shudder at the sound, and "Cruickshank!" "Cruickshank!" the rocks repeated until the sound died away amongst the snows at the head of the canyon.
At the first sound of that cry he whose name it was stopped, and as he turned to look across the river the white light of dawn came down and struck him across the face, so that those who looked could see the lines graven on it by fear and hunger and remorse, and then his hands went wildly up towards heaven and he fell.
The path which he had trodden so often crossed at this place a sheer slope of hardened snow, in which he had cut footsteps for himself, narrow indeed, but sufficient for the safety of a careful man. Until now he had never slipped or dreamed of slipping, and yet now with that cry in his ear, with the last load of gold in his hand, with the river almost clear enough for flight, he slipped and fell. Those who looked saw only a face full of mad fear, they heard only the clang of the metal wash-pan, which he wore as miners wear it, at his belt, and then, quick as the first ray of the dawn shoots across the mountain-side, Cruickshank shot down that ice-slope, and with a dull heavy plunge, sank in the ice-choked river.
For minutes, which seemed hours, the two men who lay behind the rock neither spoke nor moved, only they stared with wide eyes at the empty trail where he had stood, and the jostling hummocks of ice in the river amongst which he sank.
"Wal," said Rampike at last, "that's all, and I guess we take the pot." And he turned to where the canoe full of gold, the price of three men's lives, lay alone in the gray light of dawn.
Even as he spoke the canoe moved. Some will say that the ice on which it rested had been sucked away by the rising river, and that so, it slid down naturally and was borne along with all the other river waifs,—dead pines and dead men's bodies.
But Rampike, who saw the thing, says that hands like the hands of the dead laid hold upon it and drew it away.
Then they watched it drift out amongst the ice into the Frazer, and there for a while the great river played with it, and moaned and laughed over it by turns, and then it sank, and the gold that was in it, and the sin which that gold begot, are a portion of the load which the old river is so glad to lay down as she rushes into the salt sea beyond the sand-heads at New Westminster.
L'envoi.
My story is told, and the days which I wrote of have passed away, but something is still left to remind old-timers of the rush of '62. Pete's Creek is still yielding a fair return for work done upon it by a company, whose chairman is our old friend, Steve Chance, but such pockets as that found under Phon's boulder have never been found again.
As for Ned Corbett, he is a rancher now on those yellow Chilcotin uplands, and the gold which pleases him best is that left by the sun upon his miles and miles of sweet mountain grass. If others have more gold, Ned has all that gold can purchase by the Frazer or elsewhere, work which he loves, and such health, spirits, and moderate wealth as should satisfy an honest man.
Transcriber's Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.