THE IRRESISTIBLE BAIT.
The band of gold grabbers, whose prisoner Miss Maclan had become, had met the snowstorm supinely. They had, besides, obeyed their prudent leader by remaining buried in its protective mantle until the day was broken. The ravine crest had quickly been banked up, so that shielded them; and the marshland, offering no poor resistance to the tempest, had turned no gusts back. They had suffered the least of any exposed in that time of anguish. The danger over, they set to cleaning the camp with coarse jokes, and thronged to breakfast at a bugle call, after having worked on a cup of coffee alone with the wolfish appetite of sojourners in that high latitude. They were well provisioned, none of the wormy "crackers," rank pork, and burnt horse bean coffee of commerce, but good flour bread, deer and bear meat, and honest salt pork. Captain Kidd would have lost half the troop in this onerous wintry expedition with an inferior table.
For the leaders a marquee had been erected, raised of the canvas that sheltered them nightly, in which a folding table stood on picket pins for legs, so that the guests could squat around. Well loaded with hearty fare and various liquors, it was the article of furniture most prominent.
The captain and his lieutenants were received by a youth of eighteen, who took their rifles with the address of an experienced servant, and a Negro.
As soon as he arrived Kidd bade the latter withdraw.
"¡Vamos! 'moosey!" he cried, "For your big ears are not wanted. The Drudge will do the waiting. Tell the señora to breakfast with her new toy! I have a business conference to make with my partners. Mind, none of your sneaking curiosity, or I'll sell you to the Blackfeet for a slave. They are swarming out there!"
The Negro dived under a flap of canvas with a terrified face, as much afraid of his threat as of his master, thus evading a tin plate that was wantonly skimmed after him, and might have cut his head.
"Sit to it, gentlemen," said Kidd, rubbing his hands, "and don't let the good things get cold."
They had not waited for this apology for grace to begin the meal like so many carnivora. For about a quarter of an hour no one uttered a word except "Pass the mustard," "Don't let that bottle go to sleep thar!" and so on, whilst "Drudge" was kept on the trot.
He was only about eighteen, we repeat; but he appeared older from being tall, large in the joints, muscular, and especially from the resolution on his manly countenance; he was sallow, and his restless eyes dark. He seemed a prey to incurable melancholy. Though he was too crafty to let his true sentiments be exposed, it was clear that he served these ruffians with inward repugnance, not to say hatred. Two of them in particular filled him with disgust, and they always spoke in a scornful and threatening tone; they even struck him and kicked him, as if they considered him their thrall. These were "Quarry Dick" and "Lottery Paul," Kidd's next men, of whom Mr. Filditch has made an unflattering mention. Their more intimate acquaintance is about to be given.
The chief was the first to break the silence with a remark that summed up the prevailing sentiment, no doubt, as all growled or grinned approvingly.
"The storm was no feather," he said, "but it has blown over nicely. Old Nick has taken first-rate care of his chicks."
"I don't think anything less would have pulled us through so far," said his right hand neighbour sarcastically.
"And so he ought. We work mighty hard for him, you bet!" said his opposite, emphatically.
"To say nothing of what we are going to do pretty soon 'on,'" concluded the one facing the captain, upon which all four laughed.
"Yes, it's blown over, and our old friends in Texas are catching it about this time. I hope it will wash the slate of some of my unpaid scores in barrooms I could tell you of! But care killed a cat; I'll have none of that in my tumbler. There's only one thing kept me awake last night, and that was not the thought of the storm."
"What, my friend Corky Joe?" inquired the captain, who seemed to feel peculiar affection for this lieutenant.
This singular, or even comic title, that of the wolverine, otherwise carcajieu of the Canadian trappers, the wickedest wild beast of Northwest American fauna, seemed no misnomer for a daredevil, spirited, malicious, alert, quick to whip out a knife or draw a pistol to back his impudent and defiant speech. The finest shot with either hand was he, the best horseman and the most tireless and reliable sentinel of the band.
"I only would like to know who cut off our friends in the narrow ways."
"Oh, as for that, the girl whom we brought in alone knows; but I am sure they knew we were 'no good settlers,' to have laid our representatives low. I am reserving the questioning of that girl till our more important 'talk' is over. Light your pipes, gentlemen, if you are done polishing your eyeteeth, and let us hold the council."
"There's one thing sure," observed the Frenchman, "the more I look on this forsaken country, through smoke or with a clear eye, whither the Cap. has brought us, the more firmly I wish I had it well behind me. It's enough to make a man wish he was a grizzly; nothing else can thrive here."
"Come, come, Frenchy," remonstrated the leader, "we are no more delighted than you. It is not here I mean to lay out Kiddville! But there is no other way to the port whereto I steer."
"Port! More like alkali water; there's not an ounce of anything worth a man's stooping to pick up over all the tracks we've crossed. The fact is, the hangers round Varina have 'stuffed' you with yarns of the wonderland which gets farther away the nearer you come to it! Gammon about the valley covered with surface gold! I know what gold bearing earth is, having been in Californy in the good old years!" with a smack of the lips. "This volcanic tract is burnt out. Any metal has long since melted and run away miles below. Either you have swallowed the old trapper's drunken mouthings for gospel, or you have let Corky Joe here get you in a coil! The bigger lies he tells, the more you like him, I believe! I wouldn't copper his layout one sou! You hear me!"
"You keep my name out of it!" cried the individual alluded to, with an unfriendly tone.
"I'll kick you out of it if you lead us astray! I am not to be bluffed off by you, ugly face! This is a free country, ain't it? And my opinion is that you fawn on the chief to have the longest pull at his bottle of select brandy!"
Scarcely were the words spoken before the Wolverine reached across the low board with a gleaming bowie knife. Luckily, the Frenchman knew the man he had taunted, and threw himself back, which gave Kidd time to shove himself between.
"Put up your knives," he roared. "What do you friends want to waste a stab and a cut for when we are literally surrounded by the enemy? It's only when we have eaten the last round of horseflesh that we should carve one another, and we have not come to that corner yet. Come, come, don't rile me with your snarling!"
"All right, old man, that's past now," returned the Parisian, "only we'll come to a settlement before we come to the settlement, or I am much mistaken—"
"Still at it, confound you!" cried the captain, laying his hand on his revolver butt.
"Oh, no, that's only a leetle friendly caution. Here's his health! All I have to say is that if you had listened to Dick and me, who wanted to 'clean up' the new mines at Deadman, Wyoming, instead of this uncombed savage, the carcajieu, who bolsters you up in your obstinate fit to keep on going ahead, we should not be where snowstorms rage. Why, you knew us down south, but the Wolverine was no acquaintance of yours a month before you gathered the gang; my pile on that for a fact!"
"That's so, Paul," returned the leader, dreamily.
"Why not even have gone through the Mormon country? We all know they are 'temperance folk'; but, bless you! It's next door to a teetotal town that one drinks the best tarantula juice."
"That's true!" said Dick.
"I daresay," replied the chief bandit, "that I have gone a trifle out of my way, but you ought to know that I was bound to leave no 'pointer' on my path as to my true aim. Things were getting too hot for us on the border—we are well out of sheriffs' and vigilance committees' curiosity. I do not like there being so many folks afoot just where I believed we should find a desert, but perhaps last night's blizzard has scattered them like so many loose pebbles. What do you think of our scrape?" he demanded of Corky Joe.
"About as bad as they make 'em," was the unhesitating answer.
"What's your opinion, Dick?"
The English ex-convict shook his head sulkily.
"It's a beast of a country," he grumbled. "There's more snow falls in an hour here than would fill St. James' Park for a week! It will be almost a treat to be a roast at a redskin's torture fire."
"I concur," added Lottery Paul, laughing. "All right, Quarryman, we are two of a pair, and I'll stick to you when you say we must claw out of this trap."
"What's the use of this bullying bounce?" cried the captain, "We are all in the same box, aren't we?"
"I don't know so much about that. Paul and me are new to this wild tramping business, and never came to such passes as these deuced mountain passes before. The Californian Sierra is molehills to it!"
"In short," took up the Frenchman, "we believe your gold mine is a fraud. Your course so far tends to take us over the Rockies, where many a better man has left his bones, and though a solid chunk of gold as big as a house awaits me yonder, I have my reasons not to go over to the Pacific coast."
"Same here," subjoined the English felon, scowling.
"What I go on to say is, every step forward means harder fare—the tracts you assured us were desolate are growing Injins, your gold mine does not show up, and so, give us a couple of hundred dollars apiece for having escorted you so far, and we'll march off on our own hooks."
"That's my say, too," coincided Dick, delighted with the Parisian's eloquence.
"I have heard you out," proceeded the captain, smoothing his brow with an effort. "Now, hearken to me. You are green to these parts—very well. From my youth up I have heard stories of a Wonderland on whose threshold we now are. The Indians regard it with awe, and only peer into it from afar; but trapper and hunter have penetrated it by design or hazard, and all their tales cannot be campfire lies. Moreover, they have brought palpable evidences to the border. At Santa Fe I gambled with a trapper, whose jacket was bright with diamond buttons, stones that he found in a marvellous garden where the berries were turned to petrifaction as they grew; the chokecherries were rubies, the blueberries turquoises, the pigeon berries garnets, the Indian pears flawless crystal. He had collected a pouchful in half an hour, for which a Jew at St. Peter's gave him eight hundred dollars as they were turned over to him in the rough."
"Did you ever meet 'Oregon Ol,'[1] in your rustling about? He's a Nor'wester who has traversed this region more than most; he never wants for gold, and he hardly takes a trap out with him, and often brings back the powder he started with. And Marcellin's Choctaw Boy, and Hopeful Ed., and Simmins the Knifer, all familiar with the Yellowstone River to its uppermost forks. They have lined their pockets without handling the spade, on surface flakes alone. And Jim Ridge, the father of the Old Birds of the Sierras—with his copper face companion the Cherokee!" he went on, with a deep and sudden frown and a baleful glance, "Look at their equipments, at the way they buy the cream of everything, and take two or three trains a year up into the highlands. What is all that for? Provisioning themselves for staking out all the best spots in an auriferous region—the motherland of the gold and silver of which mere washings go down thither by driblets! Those mountaineers are leagued with the Yager, and they have found an enormously rich hole in the Yellowstone Basin. There's enough to make each of us twenty times, ay, fifty times a millionaire, and those dozen hunters selfishly stand us off! Go your way, if you are bent on it, without any dollars from me. I will persevere, though I am left alone, in striving to wrest this secret from that crew. I tell you, boys, I have had enough of a hard life with the prospect of walking off a mule's back till a rope round my neck brings me to a short stop. I want, with the worst kind of want, to go see Europe with a big draft on the Bank of England, and have some of these Eye-talian princelings black my boots before I die in 'em."
Then, seeing that he had kindled his hearers with cupidity, he concluded:
"Who loves gold galore, comes along with Mr. Pirate King!"
"I catch on," cried Joe, as if inspirited.
"They do say, though, that the Yellowstone Valley is haunted—spirits of Injin devils guard the incalculable treasures, spit hot poison at the invader, smother him in scalding mud, shower rocks upon him from tall bluffs—so if you are afraid of what hasn't daunted Old Jim and his band, why, leave me and Joe to have the first chop 'rise' on you when we meet in Nevada City, me and Joe regularly bulging out with whisky, good hotel grub, and gold and diamonds, and you scraping the gutter for the dimes swept out of the stores! Look here! If in ten days we are not knee deep in golden sands, in a vale where eternal summer reigns, then lead me out and shoot me!"
There was a pause: the Frenchman's eyes blazed like fanned coals, the Englishman panted noisily and ground his teeth with a bulldog's anticipatory glee.
"We are on a sure soft thing now," pursued the captain, clinching the nail which he had driven home. "I don't know how it is, but I am confident our vein of bad luck has fined out to a hair, and that fortune is going to do a smile."
"All right," said Dick, after a glance at the Frenchman, who nodded, "we'll tail on for ten days."
"Then another drink round. Joe, pick me out four or five fellows who can use snowshoes without laying themselves up with the mal du racquet (snowshoe lameness), and let them scout about to see if the Indian sign crops up over the new snows."
The lieutenant having left the tent, the captain pulled out a map on sheepskin, and explained in detail where he surmised the treasure of the trappers to be, and where he also hoped to surprise Jim Ridge in his mountain recess. His enthusiastic promises and the effect of the liquors restored the recalcitrant pair to good-humoured allegiance.
In two hours' time, one of the scouts returned, pleading that his snowshoes were unable to help him over a snow coated ciénaga, or bad swampy stretch, where he would have sunk and been smothered. But, in the captain's ear, he whispered a communication which set that worthy to reflection. At the end of it, he directed Lottery Paul to take the rackets and go off investigating in a certain direction, ordered Joe to keep good guard over the camp, and took Dick with him on an exploration of his own.
Installed without any hostile spies at his elbow as provisional commander, Corkey Joe smiled to himself, and muttering: "Nothing could have been better; hang them all three!" he proceeded towards the rocks, where Drudge was standing on guard over a mysterious doorway.
[1] See The Treasure of Pearls in this series.