AN INGENIOUS INTRODUCTION.
More uneasy about the Indians, whom Captain Kidd knew to be embittered when repulsed at an almost victory, and about the trappers whom he rightly conjectured to have interfered to save the Canadians from annihilation, he moved leisurely to the rendezvous with the convict in order to examine the ground. But nothing was visible to accentuate his fears, and, spying the fantastic block of lava stone in question, he hastened to congratulate Dick on the splendid lie by which the gold seekers were given the credit of saving the Bois Brulés. As he expected, the Englishman, not having his own cause to move slowly, was already at the tryst. At all events, a figure in all points resembling his was before the stone, clearly outlined against it, though he was puzzled to account for a second object, human in form, but of an abnormal flesh colour, like a "raw" corpse, pendant a foot or two from the ground as if hung to a jutting point of the natural obelisk.
"Fool that I am!" suddenly ejaculated Captain Kidd, who had stopped with a chill to the heart, "It's the strange light before nightfall that is giving me a scare! Why, it's nothing but a young bear that he has killed and flayed!—Bear's steak for supper! Ha, ha!"
Indeed, with their peculiar long paws, nothing more resembles a man, excepting cousin monkey, than uncle bear, slim with wintering.
On a nearer approach, any doubt about Dick's identity with the form calmly leaning on the rifle was impossible. Nevertheless, the silence and the immobility of the bandit appalled the other, and the hanging figure, drumming with its heels on the upright stone as the spinning and unspinning of its cord of support oscillated it, increased in ghastliness and its likeness to homo rather than ursa.
Pausing again anew, he let himself be attracted to understand the puzzle, and, as Dick made no movement, far less a reply to his now frenzied appeal, he darted madly to the butte where the lava stone rose like a monument. There the explanation was ample.
Some merciless hand had slain the Englishman, beheaded him, and flared him, with the skin of the neck only left intact, and after suspending the body like an artist's écorché along the pillar, stuffed the human hide out with snow so that not a wrinkle showed. The cold had frozen this effigy into the semblance of a marble statue. Whilst the captain gazed horrified, some scratches on the obelisk near the suspended corpse caught his eyes. He read with redoubled apprehension:
"—, known as 'the Sydney Duck,' 'Sydney Dick,' and 'the Convict,' escaped from Australian prisons, murderer of Californian miners, of Don Gregorio Peralta, and of his daughter, Mrs. Filditch, tried, found guilty, and executed by Us,"
"THE MEN OF THE MOUNTAIN."
"Hands off! This is the buzzard's bait, do you hear?"
Then the drawing of a rifle and crossed knives, and the fur trademarks of Jim Ridge, Cherokee Bill, and the name "S. G. Filditch," firmly graven.
At the end of reading this weird death sentence, which was a warning too, Captain Kidd uttered a terrible execration, and clutching his rifle and knife, as if he expected the wild justiceers to spring out upon him from around the monolith, darted frenziedly from the unhallowed eminence.
But he had no pursuers, and reflection came to him after half an hour's mad floundering in the snow, that he would be safer among his men than solitary. Besides, Lottery Paul had probably returned, and might, in the chiefs absence, preach that doctrine of retreat to the gin palaces of the frontier which was, on the face of it, superior to the present outlook. His iron hand could alone contain the bandits if any could.
"Besides," murmured he, "what would 'Dave Steelder' say if he knew me to turn such a skulk? After all, what a riddance that rough brute is! As for me, I have had some very close calls, but fortune has carried me through."
The grey sky was darkening, distant objects were already blending into compact masses. Luckily, though not a proven trail finder, Kidd had woodcraft in plenty, and soon hit on the proper homeward direction. On spying an indubitable mark, he uttered a sigh of gratification, and hurried to make up for lost time. He judged that within the hour he would be in camp, when he came upon some fresh and bold prints in the snow crust, hardening as the night brought coolness. No one could doubt that they were made by a grizzly bear, not the black or the brown, but the genuine "Uncle Ephraim" himself. This set the fugitive a-thinking. A braver man than he does not foresee a meeting with Old Eph. without pardonable misgiving.
The grizzly or the grisly—according to whether you name him after his coat or the horror he inspires, is, far more than the lion, the king of beasts, for he is perfect in courage, in strength, steadiness under gunfire, and a noble good humour towards his folk. He is, perhaps, the only animal that dances in sheer love of amusement, and his gambols at a "bears' party" are the drollest sight a hunter ever knows. It is true few have looked on and lived to tell. The Rocky Mountains are the home of the veritable grizzly, and the frequency of his apparition among the mines of the Sierra Nevada won the title of the Grizzly Bear State for California.
Captain Kidd recovered from the recent shock that had unhinged him before a danger that required coolness to temper bravery. He shook his head like a Newfoundland coming out of the water, and growled.
"This lumbering fool has smelt the camp, and has put himself exactly in my way back. I wish he had given those Canadians a visit where there are plenty of dead bodies."
He carefully examined his rifle, slipped in a second bullet in a greased wad, and resumed his march, but with extreme caution. The difficulty was not to stumble on his foe, who, with razor sharp claws six or seven inches long, would make a man look as if he had gone through a "system of saws" in a mill.
He had proceeded some five hundred yards, so as to nearly get out of the tangle wood of deciduous trees, distorted and stunted by the cold winds, when a prolonged cavernous grumbling, arising not far from him, sent an icy shiver all through him. He stopped short, bent forward, and took a wary look. Before attaining a clearing, there was a narrow canyon to cross, profoundly cleft between two perpendicular sides, two yards deep and twenty paces long. About a third of the way up this channel, leisurely sprawling on the snow, in which he was partly embedded on account of his great weight, a grizzly was licking his fore paws and smoothing pine burrs out of his harsh coat. Suddenly, the animal winked its little savage eyes, pricked its snub ears up, and, without glancing round or caring to listen, set to sniffing. Its subtle scenting faculty had been aroused by some unwonted and consequently disquieting emanation. Nevertheless, a fact delighting the captain, it was not he to whom the bear was paying any heed.
"Good luck to the stir in the air that saves me!" he thought. "The creature never imagines that a man is treading on his tail. 'Tis a splendid fur coat; but I am not hunting grizzly just at present, thank you! I don't care for any on my toast!"
Hence, he was taking a backward step and looking about him to try to manage a circuit to avoid the encounter, when he heard what seemed an echo, only a little more so, of the bear's growl. It came from behind him, and was so angrily intoned that he was most surprised to see a second grizzly, no doubt the mate of the first, slouching along towards him, its head lowered in his track.
To be the shuttlecock between two ursine battledores is one of those experiences of which few victims narrate the incidents.
The second antagonist was certain to arrive at him by its unerring scent, and, moreover, was the nearer as well as the larger beast. To shoot and run for his life was all the course which his fright counselled, so he lifted his gun, levelled it steadily at the grizzly's eye, partly veiled by its shaggy fore hair, and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately, whether the piece had been tampered with, or the snow had eaten away the barrel, the charge hung fire, and the peculiar and frightfully loud detonation betokened that the barrel had burst. Without being wounded, the captain pitched forward head foremost into the snow, from not meeting the recoil which he had nerved himself to resist.
Both bears howled together, rattled their claws and gnashed their teeth, and, with a loud snarling, bounded towards the hapless captain. Mechanically, he drew his knife, but, on scrambling to his feet, experienced a fear so inexpressibly appalling that he forgot his determination to resist to the inevitable death, and leaped away in a mad scamper.
Accustomed to riding, he was not a good pedestrian; his winter garments were unsuitable, and he was no longer blessed with youth. Besides, to get over such ragged ground, and among tough, thorny, scrubby conifera, was impossible for one in blind haste. He could tell by their breathing that the two bears were nearing him, bound for bound. He had lost his knife, and his revolver having been torn out of his belt by a briar too, he was absolutely at the mercy—an unknown element—of his pursuers. He dared not turn his head; in hunters' phraseology, he felt them ruffle his hair with their breath; and, in truth, Old Ephraim and his spouse were not a dozen steps off. His own hair stood up, spite of a cold perspiration, for he felt that he was irremediably lost. In two or three minutes, say five at most, he would become that not unique subject of a well-worn Western epitaph—granting that he was left in buriable tatters—Unknown man gobbled up by grizzly.
He was stopped by the inability to make a further move; both bears reared up, and the least towered a head and shoulders above him. He was, by the force of education, striving to recall a prayer, when a human hand unexpectedly clutched him by the collar and dashed him down, crying in a voice most energetic:
"Lay down, you fool, and give a man a chance to shoot, will you not?"
As the captain again was buried in the snow, two rapid reports of a gun extinguished in their reverberations the growls of the grizzlies. Then arose a couple of painful lamentations from their hoarse throats, and, as Kidd lifted his head, he beheld with stupefied eyes a man disdainfully pursuing the bears and keeping them "on their run" with panic by pelting them with snowballs and splinters of ice till they disappeared over a mound and into some crevice, where the chaser deemed it good sense not to follow further.
"What is this all?" the gold grabber demanded, sitting up, still half dazed and wholly incredulous, and speaking Spanish, as one in dire straits always uses the mother tongue.
"Talk English," responded the other, returning rapidly and recharging his double-barrelled gun, according to hunters' rules, never to carry unloaded firearms in a dangerous country. "And don't talk to me of the courage of the grizzly any more. Are you alive? I mean, are you not wounded?"
"I am not sure how I am," returned the chief of the gold seekers, standing with difficulty, and staring at his rescuer.
It was Ranald Dearborn, clad as a regular hunter; but his face was not burnt and weather beaten yet, like a veteran's, and he had an elegant and almost dandified air, which his recent conduct belied.
He laughed as the captain brushed himself down, and "tried" all his joints, doubtingly.
"Where are the bears?" inquired Kidd, anxiously.
"I drove them into a crack that probably leads to their lair. They shed my shot and my bullet off like rain from a roof; but we may be more lucky in another attack. Shall we have a turn at them?"
"Thank you very much, but I have had all I want of such diversion. Why, when they reared, it was like looking up the side of a church! I am sure their teeth were as long as a hunting knife. Who and what are you, stranger?"
"A hunter—an Englishman wintering in Canada and hereabouts—came out to this New World to see some sport."
"Alone!" cried Kidd, in the tone of one addressing a madman. "Stop, though, I have heard—though I never believed it—that solitary hunters of your nationality do come here with the notion that buffalo are merely wild bullocks, the puma a large edition of the domestic cat, and grizzly himself, a rough badger puffed into balloon size by pinyon fruit. I say, friend," he went on, nervously glancing about, "kindly lend me your arm as far as my encampment. I am in force here, and promise you good entertainment. Not a man of my band but will welcome the preserver of their leader. I owe my life to you doubly; you must not go away till I shall have acquitted myself of the debt."
"Nonsense! It's all in the day's sport. You would do as much for me, if it had been the other way about."
"I doubt it—I draw the line at grizzly. But you know that such a service obliges the doer as much as the receiver. Come along."
"I tell you, I am used to camp down anywhere I feel sleepy. I have no fear of rheumatism," returned the young man, gaily.
"I beg you to accompany me to my camp, for I am quite lame, and spend at least a night there."
"Do you insist upon that?" inquired Dearborn, with a singular expression.
"Certainly; we must drink to our better acquaintance;" dragging him feverishly along.
"Have your own way."
"You Englishmen are all as rich as you are eccentric, but no man can be too rich. I may be able to relieve myself of some of my obligation yet."
"Not a word of that! As for accompanying you to your camp, please to observe that you entreated me to do so."
"I'd force you if I could."
"This is a queer world, and in this wilderness passions rule unconstrained. Friends overnight shoot at one another at sight at noon of the morrow! If we ever fall out, mind, you must not blame me, since I wanted to be left alone, as I came."
"What trash! You are joking in that dry way which we Spanish well understand. You have saved my life."
"It looks so, does it not? Still, I should feel more certain on that point, and rate myself more of a hero if we had those bearskins—one apiece!"
"I'll send twenty men to track them to the death, and you shall have both. But come on."
Leaning upon the stranger's arm in an affectionate manner, Captain Kidd pressed on as nimbly as his shattered nerves and really crippled state permitted. Not one look behind did he give, and yet, had he been able to see the other side of the rising ground, over which Ranald had driven the terrified bruins, he would have been given food for reflection.
In fact, sitting on their tails, without their heads, which they held in their paws, the bears were laughing with supplementary inner mouths belonging to quite human countenances. These bore a strong resemblance to those of Cherokee Bill and Jim Ridge. They, of few men, had the necessary knowledge of grizzly's fife and demeanour to play the part which had completely deceived Captain Kidd, and would have succeeded with a more skilled hunter. Presently the two disrobed themselves, flung away the osier rods which had swelled out the skins, packed the latter up, and winked drolly at one another.
"I say, Bill, mind you see the editor of the Rocky Mountain Squelcher," observed the old trapper, humorously, "and insert the item that Mr. R. Dearborn was introduced to Captain Kidd by Mr. and Mrs. G. Bear!"