"When I come out through the cañon gate." He hoped his laugh was reassuring.
CHAPTER XXIII
WHEN MORNING CAME
The rope proved long enough but there was no overhang. And the ledge was a path down the face of the cliff, but so fragmentary that many times the hold of his fingers forced into crevices alone made it passable. At the very start, an apparently solid piece broke off under his weight and almost cast him into the depths. After that lesson, which came so near to being his last, he sidled along the wall so that his toes might set as near the face of it as possible.
Fifty feet from the bottom of the gulch the ledge ended. He was forced to stake all on a hazardous leap into the top of the nearest fir tree. While the upper branches gave under his hundred and eighty pounds and countless needles pricked him, his fall was broken and eventually stayed by the stouter limbs below.
In the gathering dusk he gained the burial ground of which O'Malley had spoken. Familiar as he was with the native customs of the Northland, he felt thankful, when this settlement of the dead loomed up in the gloom, that he had been prepared for the spectral effect. Built on stilts above each grave were huts of bizarre woodwork. In each, he knew, were housed the particular personal treasures of some departed brave, but nothing of intrinsic worth.
Seymour was not superstitious and, much as he might have preferred other habitation for the night, he did not hesitate to borrow a lodging here. Selecting the most commodious of the "hatches," he climbed under its roof. Although this particular 8x10 boot-box boasted both a spire and a dome it was open on one side, presumably for the purpose of exhibiting a black bottle, an alarm clock from which the works had been removed, and other heirlooms of some Siwash gone to happier hunting grounds. It offered a measure of protection, however, against the chill that came with darkness. As he had no blanket and dared not light a fire, this "spook roost," as he thought of it, was more than welcome.
A short distance up the creek from his refuge and on the opposite bank lay an Indian camp of four or five families, to judge by the number of supper fires. He watched the natives through their meal, the while munching a tasteless emergency ration that was guaranteed to be rich in calories.
The Indian camp proved unusually quiet. He had heard Eskimo hunting parties make far more of a powwow around their night fires of blubber. There was no ribald song or laughter, no fighting, which were to be expected if the despoilers were supplying the natives with liquor, as Moira had told the sergeant.
The yelping of many hungry dogs warned him of the folly of trying to scout the camp under cover of darkness. He decided to stay where he was and to begin his explorations in the morning when work was under way. Gradually, with the fires, the noise of the camp died out, as if the sleeping mats were superattractive to the natives after a hard day's work on the placers.