“The way young Dick pegged out game, of course. The three of them had been showing round a couple of nuggets, and talking big about the bucketfuls of the same stuff that might be picked up for the asking on a little stream that emptied into the Babine Lake, and, of course, they pretty soon got a crowd together to go with them, every man armed, for the Tacla Indians are an awkward lot to deal with. So they started, and were three days out from Skeena when trouble began, for a rumour went round that the nuggets hadn’t been found on the Babine at all, but had been stolen from a man what had brought them down from Juneau, and taken too much liquor on board at Skeena to be able to look after his own property. The crowd was a pretty rough one, and they pretty soon made the three stand out.”
“What is that?” asked Nell, faintly.
Ike gave another rumbling laugh. “It about amounts to standing up to be shot at. The old men hadn’t got much fight left in them, but young Dick wasn’t made like that, and they say he fought like ten men rolled in one, and knocked the crowd over in so many places all at once, that at last they just bowled him over in self-defence, as you may say.”
“Do you mean he was shot?” asked Nell, in a horrified whisper.
“That is what it amounts to, I suppose, though I never heard anyone give it a name. In fact, it might prove extremely awkward for some of that crowd, if it could be proved which of them had let off their revolvers on that occasion. Law is law in Canada, you know; and the police are about as smart as they make ’em, but they haven’t got eyes in the back of their heads, and they can’t be in fifty different places at once, so accidents do occur once in a while,” said Ike, with a big sigh; after which he finished his soup, and decided to have another pint to take away with him.
“Were they all killed?” asked Nell, whose very teeth were chattering.
Ike shook his head. “There was no particulars come through regarding the old’uns. But the worst of it was that the story about gold on the Babine was true, as the crowd found when they got there, only the Indians was there too, and had their eyes skinned. So that of the thirty or forty what went, only five came back to Skeena.”
Nell covered her face with her hands, and sobbed from sheer horror, and sympathy with the poor victim of such a tragic fate. She had no especial pity for the crowd so nearly wiped out by Tacla Indians, for their end had in it a sort of retributive justice which appealed to her ideas of fitness.
“There now, don’t you take on about a fellow being wiped out as was born to be hanged, and only missed his destiny by a fluke, as you may say.”
There was considerable consternation in Ike’s tone, and he gazed at her with so much concern that she must have laughed at his lugubrious expression had her mood not been so far removed from merriment just then.