He crammed the stove with fuel until the hot pipe trembled to the draught, and soon set a bounteous meal before us—fresh venison and smoked salmon with new bread and dried berries—while he also prepared a broth for Ormond, who drank a little greedily, and then lapsed into slumber. I was for pushing on after a brief rest, but Hector thought differently.
“Neither man nor horse has been drowned while I kept this crossing,” he said, “and by the help o’ Providence no man will. Can ye no hear the river roaring to the boulders, and would ye have her wash ye out mangled out o’ human image into the bottomless pool? Maybe ye’ll no like the passage in the light o’ dawn, but ye cannot cross till then.”
He spoke with a tone of certainty, and knowing that only those who live by them can predict the eccentric rise and fall of these torrents I was glad to defer to his judgment. It was only for Ormond’s sake that we desired to press on at all, and Harry observed truthfully, “It wouldn’t do the poor fellow any good to drown him.”
It was late, but we still loitered about the stove, and when once the old man stood in the open doorway glancing toward the foaming rush of the river that I could see beyond him, as though to gauge its force by the roar which now filled the room, one of the party remarked: “Old Hector’s a curious critter, with a kink inside his brain, but there’s many a free miner owes a big debt to him. He knows each trick of the river; the Siwash say it talks to him, and when he says clear passage I guess you can cross. I’ve heard that the Roads and Trails Authorities allow him a few dollars subsidy, but he doesn’t stay here for that. He was mixed up in some ugly doings in the gold days, and reckons he’s squaring it by keeping the crossing. And I guess he comes pretty near doing it, too, for there’s a good 278 many lives to his credit, if that counts for anything, and I’m figuring it does.”
He ceased as our host returned and said, “She’s falling half-a-foot an hour, an’ for the sake of the sick man I’ll see ye over with the break of dawn. Got hurt on the gold trail—ye need not tell me. There’s no a sand bar or gully from Fraser till Oominica Hector did not travel thirty years ago. They came up in their thousands then, an’ only the wolf an’ eagle ken where the maist o’ them lie.”
“That’s true,” said the grizzled prospector. “I was in the last of it when Caribou was played out and we struck for the Peace country and Cassiar,” and Hector stared past him through the smoke wreaths with vacant eyes that seemed to look far back into bygone years.
“There was red gold to be had for the seeking then,” he said. “We won it lightly, an’ we spent it ill. Ay wine an’ cards, an’ riot’ when they brought the painted women in, until the innocent blood was spilt, and Hector came down from Quesnelle with the widow’s black curse upon him—but it was his partner shot Cassell in the back. The widow’s curse; and that’s maybe why Mary Macdonal’ lies long years her lone among the hills o’ Argyle.”
“Tell us how you cleaned out the Hydraulic Company, Hector,” said the prospector, and added aside to me, “I’m switching him off onto another track. He’s not cheerful on this one, and it’s hardly fair play to listen while he gives himself away.”
Then we heard true stories of the old mad days, tales of grim burlesque and sordid tragedy, which have never been written, and would not be credited if they were, though their faint echoes may still be heard between the Willow River and Ashcroft on the Thompson. Long afterward when Harry and I discussed that experience he said, 279 “Say little about Hector; one must know these mountains well to understand him. I never saw any one quite like him. He spoke like a Hebrew prophet, and we obeyed him as though he were an emperor.”
I slept in a splendid dry blanket under a bearskin which Hector spread over me, and a dim light was in the eastern sky when the old man roused me, saying, “If ye are stout at the paddle we’ll try the river noo.”