Granger's face went white and his lips trembled; his finger closed upon the trigger, then with an effort he controlled himself. "I think I've heard enough from you on that point," he said; "suppose we drop this discussion and get the canoe ready?"
He turned upon his heel and walked into the hut, followed more slowly by Spurling.
This was by no means their first falling out in the past four months; from the night that they left Murder Point things had been going from bad to worse. Given two men who set out into the forest together, bound by the strongest ties of friendship, who travel in one another's footsteps and sleep side by side for days and nights at a stretch, without seeing any other face but one another's and their own reflected visage, with nothing to break the silence but their own voices, and the cries of the wilderness, which have become irritatingly monotonous because of their sameness and frequent reiteration, and it is a thing to be marvelled at if they do not come back enemies. But when they set out each with his own hidden secret, each with his own private suspicion of his companion, with a gnawing enmity between them which has been changed into a show of friendship only by force of circumstance, when the object of their journey is a possession over which they have quarrelled before and parted company, concerning which they are already secretly jealous, then the final relationship of those two men can be forecast without any fear of error.
Before they had reached the Forbidden River they had ceased to converse. By the time that they had landed at the hut, their nerves were jangled. Before they had been working there many days they had thought their way over all their old grievances, and, like petulant children, were on the lookout for any new cause of offence. The cause had come when Spurling, tired with rocking the cradle, his face and hands swollen by the sun and mosquito-bitten, had said, "I don't see why we should take all this trouble. I'm going to quit work."
Granger was attending to the flume which they had constructed. "You're going to do no such thing," he had said.
"Yes, I am; you're not my master and I shan't ask your permission. There's as much gold as we shall require in those two sacks which the Man with the Dead Soul washed out. If you've got such a scrupulous conscience, you can dig out your share; but I'm not going to help you."
"So you've turned thief now, in addition to your other profession," was the retort which Granger had thrown back.
Out of such small foolishnesses had arisen quarrel after quarrel, so that it had become only necessary for Spurling to make a statement for Granger to contradict him, or for Granger to express a desire for Spurling to thwart its accomplishment. Day by day they would toil together, digging out the muck, emptying it into the sluice-boxes or testing it in the pan, without exchanging a word; then some trifling difficulty would arise, for which, perhaps, neither of them was responsible, and they would seize the opportunity to goad one another on to murder with the evil of what they said. On one point only were they agreed—the gathering of the most wealth in the shortest time; for wealth meant to them escape and the preserving of their lives. To this end they feverishly laboured both day and night, reserving no special hours for sleep and rest. Yet, even in their escape, as has been seen, they did not necessarily include one another; so far as Spurling was concerned, when once the gold had been acquired, it was "each man for himself." There was no loyalty between them; they were kept together only by a common avarice, and by fear of the wideness of the Northland.
Yet there were times when Granger would waken to a sense of something that was better. By the end of August they had washed out all the dust and nuggets that they could possibly carry, and it was then that he had recognised that greed, regardless of consequence, had become the master-passion of both their lives. The words which the Dead Soul had spoken to him would come back, "I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir"—and he would look at Spurling and, bending down above the water, he would regard himself. Going over to Spurling he would say, laying his hand upon his shoulder, "Druce, in spite of the harsh things which we have spoken, we must still be friends, and seek out El Dorado together."
After such a reconciliation they would talk together of their plans and the various ways in which they would amend their lives; but gradually they came to know that, while they lived, their hatred never could be dead, and, defiant of whatsoever resolutions they might make, would surely reassert itself. It was the spirit of the North which spoke through them, and not they themselves—the spirit of silence, striving to utter itself, and of enmity to all the world.