The girl shook her head and her eyes were full of a smiling, almost motherly tenderness for the strong man of many years who was tasting the bitterness of real defeat. She had known him from the day he first set foot at Fort Cupar with that sort of family intimacy which is part of the life of the great solitudes. She had been a child then. Now she was a grown woman with a mind that was simply serious despite her ready laugh, and a heart full of deep, womanly sympathy. All life and hope still lay before her. This man had gone far beyond the meridian of both. He was rapidly approaching those declining years with a great failure to his credit, and she realised the tragedy of it.
“No,” he said. “I guess I can’t bluff you, Kid. You’re kind of nimble.” His eyes were still on the approaching outfit. “I wonder,” he went on. “That wise old talk you reckon I’m full of. Do you fancy me passing it to you before I quit, instead of to that bunch of Cheechakos?”
The girl nodded with a twinkling smile.
“Sure,” she said. “I’d feel jealous you handing it to the others.”
Ben Needham laughed in that short, dry fashion which was his limit of hilarious expression.
“Well, you best pull your freight out of here before that bunch of Cheechakos come alongside. Ther’s a whole heap o’ things you know, but a sight bigger heap of the things you don’t know. The junk that comes up out of Placer is mostly junk, mean, human junk. The men of the gold trail ain’t like the metal they’re chasing, except in the colour of their livers. One of the things I haven’t figgered you’re wise to is you’re a gal of nigh twenty, and you’ve a face that smiles like spring sunshine, and the sort of eyes that makes a man feel like shooting up the other feller. Do you get me? Beat it, my dear. You’ve a Mum, an’ you’ve got a dandy bunch of brothers an’ sisters. You’ve got a home way out there on the Caribou River that ain’t ever known a thing but what a good woman can make it. Wal, keep things that way. But you won’t do it if the muck of the gold trail hits your tracks.”
The girl’s smile had passed as she watched the old man expectorate into the clear waters at his feet. She remained completely silent while, in an utterly changed tone, he hurled violent expletives at his workers. She looked on while he passed down to where the lashings were being made fast on the last canoe whose load had just been completed. When he came back her thoughtful mood had passed, and her smile was supreme once more.
“I’d wanted to see you start out, Ben,” she said gently. “You know it’s hard not to be able to speed a real friend, when—when— But there, it’s no use. The kids are needin’ me, so’s Mum, and Usak and the deer. You’re so slow getting away I just can’t stop.” Her gaze wandered again to the approaching outfit, and it was a little regretful, and something wistful. “Are all the men of the gold trail tough? I mean are they just all bad?”
The grey head denied her. The man’s cynical smile twinkled in his eyes.
“The men ain’t no better, an’ no worse than most of us,” he said slily. “That is till they get the yellow fever of it all. When that gets around they’re mighty sick folk till the fever passes. Guess your memory don’t carry you back to the days when you weren’t more than knee-high to a grasshopper. If it did maybe you’d be wise to the thing that’s got a mighty big place in your dandy life. It’s gold. The yarns I’m told say it was gold that robbed you of a father. It was gold that left you helpless, feed for the coyotes that didn’t find you. It was gold,” he went on, pointing across the river, “that left them burnt out sticks, which one time was your rightful home. Gold, I guess, has played a mighty tough part in your life, Kid, and maybe it ain’t goin’ to let up. That’s the way of things. I’d say you ain’t done with gold yet. You see, ther’s the story of that ‘strike’ your father made, an’—lost. No,” he added thoughtfully. “It’s goin’ to come back on you. An’ that’s why I say beat it. Don’t wait around for those folks comin’ up the river. They got the fever bad, I guess, or they wouldn’t be makin’ a country that’s cursed by the Euralian fur poachers. Yes. Beat it, Kid. Light out. They’re comin’ right in.”