“When did you meet him again?”
“Several years afterward in San Francisco. He seemed to be prospering, and my luck had not been good. Through him, I entered the service of the Alaska Commercial Company. That, of course, was before the Klondyke rush, and the A.C.C. ruled the frozen North.”
“It was in Alaska that you were first fortunate, wasn’t it? You have never told me much about the mine you found.”
Osborne looked as if the recollection was unpleasant, but he saw that she was interested, and he generally indulged her. Though she believed in and was inclined to idealize him, Ruth was forced to admit that there was nothing in his appearance to suggest the miner. His light summer clothes were chosen with excellent taste, and there was a certain fastidiousness in his appearance and manners which was hardly in keeping with his adventurous past.
“Well,” he said, “it was an unlucky mine from the beginning—and I was not the first to find it. I had been some years in the company’s service when I was sent as agent to one of their factories. It was situated on a surf-beaten coast, with a lonely stretch of barrens and muskegs rolling away behind, and the climate was severe. There were no trees large enough to break the savage winds, and for six months the ground was covered deep with snow. A small bark came up once or twice a year, and my business was to trade with the Indians and the Russian half-breeds for furs. In winter we had only an hour or two’s daylight, but I got books from San Francisco, and read them by the red-hot stove while the blizzards shook the factory. Even in those days, it was suspected that there was gold in Alaska; but the A.C.C. did not encourage prospecting, and the roughness of the country made it almost impossible for a stranger to traverse. Still, a few prospectors somehow made their way into it, and probably died, for they were seldom seen after their first appearance. I can recollect two or three, hard-bitten men who stayed a day or two with us and then vanished into the wilds.
“It was late in the fall when one arrived with two Aleut Indians in a skin canoe. I never learned where he came from nor how he got so far, for there was no communication with the North except by the company’s vessels, but he told us he meant to locate a mine he had heard about and thought he could get back before winter set in. He went off with the Aleuts and a few provisions he bought, and that was the last we saw of him until the following summer. Then I made a journey inland to visit a tribe which had brought in no furs, and one night we made camp among a patch of willows. When we were gathering wood I saw that the larger bushes had been hacked down, and thought it had been done by a white man. The next morning we found an empty provision can of the kind we kept, and, later on, bits of charred sticks where a fire had been lighted. That led us to follow up the creek we had camped by; and presently we found the man who had made the fire.”
“Dead!” Ruth exclaimed.
“He had been dead for months. All that was left was a clean-picked skeleton bleached by the snow and a few rags of clothes. The significant thing was that the breast-bone was cut through: sharply cleft, as if by an ax.”
“How dreadful! You think the Indians killed the man?”
“It looked like it. There may have been a fight over the last of the provisions, which the Aleuts carried off, because I found very few cans and only one small empty flour-bag; but the tools indicated that it was the same man who had visited the factory. I had not even heard his name, and if he had any friends they never learned his fate; but he died rich.”