D’Arcy realized that he had struck a good proposition. They built the rough hut and commenced their awful task. Day by day the dump of excavated pay dirt grew larger. They tested it at times to find the yield of gold ever-increasing. At nights they sat and talked of the future. Shanks and Lonagon were for running a big hotel in San Francisco. That seemed to be their highest ideal, and nothing could shift them from it.
The fact that each of them would in all probability possess little short of a million dollars made no difference whatever. They were set on a drinking-place—where one could get drink any hour of the night without having to knock folks up, or even to get out of bed for it! 215
D’Arcy was planning for a life of absolute luxury. He had been poor from birth—the worst poverty of all, coupled as it was with social prominence. He glowed with pleasure as he looked forward to a time when moneylenders and dunning creditors would be conspicuously absent.
It was Shanks who brought the trouble upon them. Shanks had hit upon a Thlinklet encampment a mile or two down the creek. There were about a dozen mop-headed, beady-eyed men, and some two dozen women—two apiece—and children. Shanks in his wanderings after adventure had met a more than usually attractive Thlinklet girl. She had not been averse to his approaches and it ended in a pretty little love-scene, upon which the husband was indiscreet enough to intrude. Having some hard things to say to Shanks, who unfortunately for the devoted husband, knew a lot of the Thlinklet dialect, and who resented aspersions upon his character from an “Injun Polygamist,” the latter promptly shot him.
The girl screamed with terror, and the Thlinklet community ran as one man to the scene of 216 the tragedy. Shanks, reading swift annihilation in their eyes, promptly “beat it” for the hut.
They were now in the midst of their trouble. All the Indians had turned out armed to the teeth. Not unskilled in the art of war, they had garbed themselves in white furs, presenting an almost impossible target for the men inside the hut. A spokesman had come forward demanding the body of Shanks, and was told to go to blazes. They now crept along the deep ravine spread out over the snowy whiteness.
“I wish you’d kep’ your courtin’ till we got to ’Frisco,” growled Lonagon.
“I didn’t even kiss the gal!” retorted Shanks. “I was jest telling her——”
There was a report from outside, and a rifle-bullet whizzed within a few inches of his head.
“Gee, they’ve got guns!” exclaimed Lonagon. “That’s darn unfortunate!”