It was with a sigh of sincere relief that Corbett and Steve and Phon portioned out the pack among them, and said adieu to their dead cayuse. Whilst he lived they felt that they could not leave behind them an animal for which they had paid a hundred dollars, but now that he was dead they were free from such scruples, and proceeded upon their journey at a considerably increased rate of speed.
Flower-time was past in Cariboo, and the whole forest was full of fruit. Upon every stony knoll, where the sun's rays were reflected from white boulders or charred black stumps, there grew innumerable dwarf raspberry canes, bearing more fruit than leaves. By the side of the trail the broad-leaved salmon-berry held up its fruit of crimson velvet, just high enough for a man to pluck it without stooping, and every bush which Steve and Ned passed was loaded either with the purple of the huckle-berry or the clear coral red of the bitter soap-berry. Best of all berries to Ned's mind was that of a little creeper, the fruit of which resembled a small huckle-berry, and reminded the thirsty palate of the combined flavours of a pine-apple and a Ribston pippin.
Altogether, what with the fool-hens and the grouse (which were too careful of their young to care properly for themselves) and the berries, it was evident to Ned that no man need starve in the forests of Cariboo in early autumn; but there were broad tracks through the long grass and traces amongst the ruined bushes of another danger to man's life every bit as real and as terrible as the danger of starvation. The fruit season is also the bear season, and the long sharp claw-marks in front of the track told Corbett that the bears were not all black which used the trail at night and rustled in the dense bush by day. Though they never had the luck to meet one, Ned and Steve had their eyes skinned and their rifles loaded for grizzly every day until they issued from the forest on to the bare lands above the Frazer.
As they could not get a canoe at Soda Creek they had to tramp down stream to Chimney Creek, where a few Chinamen were washing for gold. These men, in return for some trifling gift of stores, took the party across the river, and so worked upon the mind of their fellow-countryman with stories of the great "finds" up stream of which they had heard that his eyes began to glisten with the same feverish light which had filled them at Lillooet.
The Frazer had a peculiar fascination for Phon, and no wonder, for there is something about this river unlike all other rivers—something which it owes neither to its size nor its beauty. The Frazer looks like a river of hell, if hell has rivers. From where Ned Corbett stood, high up above the right bank, he could get glimpses of the river's course for some miles. Everywhere the scene was the same, a yellow turbid flood, surging savagely along through a deep gully between precipitous mud bluffs, whose sides stained here and there with metallic colours—vivid crimson and bright yellow, made them look as if they had been poured hot and hissing from nature's cauldron, and that so recently that they had not yet lost the colours of their molten state. The rolling years are kind to most things, beautifying them with the soft tints of age or veiling them with gracious foliage, but the banks of the Frazer still look raw and crude; the gentler things of earth will have nothing to do with the accursed river, in which millions of struggling salmon rot and die, while beside its waters little will grow except the bitter sage bush and the prickly pear.
When Corbett and Chance reached Chimney Creek the fall run of salmon was at its height, and added, if possible, to the weird ugliness of the river. From mid-stream to either bank every inch of its surface was broken by the dorsal fins or broad tails of the travelling fish, while in the back waters, and under shelter of projecting rocks, they lay in such thousands that you could see the black wriggling mass from a point several hundred yards away. From the shingle down below you could if you chose kill salmon with stones, or catch them with your hands, but you could not walk without stepping on their putrefying bodies, which while they still lived and swam took the vivid crimson or sickly yellow of the Frazer's banks. They looked (these lean leprous fish) as if they had swallowed the yellow poison of the river, and it was burning their bodies alive.
And yet like the men their betters they still struggled up and up, reckless of all the dangers, though out of every hundred which went up the Frazer not three would ever find their way back again to the strong wholesome silvery sea. The glutted eagles watched for them, the bears preyed upon them, Indians speared them; they were too weak almost to swim; their bodies were rotting whilst they still lived, and yet they swam on, though their strength was spent and they rolled feebly in a flood through which, only a few months earlier, they would have shot straight and strong as arrows fresh loosed from the bow. Gold and desolation and death, and a river that roared and rattled as if playing with dead men's bones; a brittle land, where the banks fell in and the ruined pines lay, still living, but with their heads down and their roots turned up to the burning sky; a land without flowers, jaundiced with gold and dry with desire for the fairer things of earth—this is what Corbett saw, and seeing, he turned away with a shudder.
"My God!" he said, "gold should grow there; nothing else will; even the fish rot in that hell broth!"
"You aren't polite to Father Frazer, Ned. So I will propitiate him;" and the Yankee turned to the yellow river, and holding high a silver dollar he cried, "See here, old river, Steve Chance of N'York is dead broke except for this, and this he gives to you. Take his all as an offering. The future he trusts to you."
And so saying Steve sent his last coin spinning out into the gully, where for a moment it glittered and then sunk and was lost, swallowed up in the waves of the great river, which holds in her bed more wealth than has ever been won from nature by the greed and energy of man.