CHAPTER XXII
IN THE SPRINGTIME
So the day came when the outfit of John Kars "pulled out." There had been no change in his plans as the result of Alec Mowbray's murder. There could be no change in them, so long as hundreds of miles divided this man from the girl who had come to mean for him all that life contained. The old passion for the trail still stirred him. The Ishmaelite in him refused to change his nature. But since his manhood had responded to natural claims, since the twin gray stars had risen upon his horizon, a magnetic power held him to a definite course which he had neither power nor inclination to deny.
The days before the departure had been busy indeed. They had been rendered doubly busy by the affairs surrounding Alec Mowbray's death. But all these things had been dealt with, with an energy that left a course of perfect smoothness behind as well as ahead.
Everything, humanly possible, would be done to hunt down the instigator and perpetrator of the crime, and a small fortune was placed at the disposal of Kars' trusted attorneys for that purpose. For the rest he would be personally responsible. In Bill Brudenell he had a willing and sagacious lieutenant. In Abe Dodds, and in the hard-living expert prospector, Joe Saunders, he had a staff for his enterprise on Bell River beyond words in capacity and loyalty.
But the "outfit." It was called "outfit," as were all such expeditions. It resembled an army in miniature, white and colored. But more than all else it resembled a caravan, and an extensive one. The preparations had occupied the whole of the long winter, and had been wrapped in profound secrecy. The two men who had carried them out, under Bill Brudenell's watchful eye, had labored under no delusions. They were preparing for a great adventure in the hunt for gold, but they were also preparing for war on no mean scale. Their enthusiasm rejoiced in both of these prospects, and they worked with an efficiency that left nothing to be desired.
The dispositions at departure were Kars' secret. Nor were they known until the last moment. The warlike side of the expedition was dispatched in secret by an alternative and more difficult trail than the main communication with Fort Mowbray. It carried the bulk of equipment. But its way would be shorter, and it would miss Fort Mowbray altogether, and take up its quarters at the headwaters of Snake River, to await the coming of the leaders. Abe and Saunders would conduct this expedition, while Kars and Bill traveled via Fort Mowbray, with Peigan Charley, and an outfit of packs and packmen such as it was their habit to journey with.
The start of the expedition was without herald or trumpet. It left its camp in the damp of a gray spring morning, when, under cover of a gradually lightening dawn, it struck through a narrow valley, where feet and hoofs sank deep into a mire of liquid mud.
To the west the hills rose amidst clouds of saturating mist. To the east the rolling country mounted slowly till it reached the foot of vast glacial crests, almost at the limit of human vision. The purpling distance to the west suggested fastnesses remote enough from the northern man, yet in those deep canyons, those wide valleys, along creek-bank and river bed, the busy prospector was ruthlessly prosecuting his quest for the elusive "color," and the mining engineer was probing for Nature's most deeply hidden secrets.
This was the Eldorado John Kars had known since his boyhood's days, when the fierce fight against starvation had been bitter indeed. Few of the secrets of those western hills were unknown to him. But now that his pouch was full, and the pangs of hunger were only a remote memory, and these hills claimed him only that he was lord of properties within their heart which yielded him fortune almost automatically, his eyes were turned to the north, and to the hidden world eastwards.