CHAPTER XI.
"JUMP OR I'LL SHOOT."
Three days after they left the Balm-of-Gilead camp, Ned Corbett and histwo friends stood upon a ridge of the bald mountains looking down uponthe promised land.
"So this is Eldorado, is it?"
Ned Corbett himself was the speaker, though probably those who had knownhim at home or in Victoria would have hardly recognized him. All thethree gold-seekers had altered much in the last month, and standing inthe bright sunlight of early morning the changes wrought by hard workand scanty food were very apparent.
Bronzed, and tired, and ragged, with a stubble of half-grown beards upontheir chins, with patches of sacking or deer-skin upon their trousers,and worn-out moccasins on their feet, none of the three showed signs ofthat golden future which was to come. Beggars they might be, but surelyCroesus never looked like this!
"We shall make it to-day, Ned," remarked Chance, taking off his cap tolet the cool mountain breeze fan his brow.
"We may, if we can drag him along, but he is very nearly dead beat;" andthe direction in which Ned glanced showed his companion that he wasspeaking of a limp bundle of blue rags, which had collapsed in a heap atthe first sign of a halt.
"Why not leave Phon to follow us?" asked Steve in a low tone. Low thoughthe tone was, the bundle of blue rags moved, and a worn, shrivelledface looked piteously up into Ned's.
"No, no, Steve," replied Corbett. "All right, Phon, I'll not leave youbehind, even if I have to pack you on my own shoulders."
Thus reassured, the Chinaman collapsed once more. There was not a musclein his body which felt capable of further endurance, and yet, with thegold so near, and his mind full of superstitious horrors, he would havecrawled the rest of the journey upon his hands and knees rather thanhave stayed behind.
"Thank goodness, there it is at last!" cried Corbett a minute later,shading his eyes with his hand. "That smoke I expect rises fromsomewhere near our claims;" and the speaker pointed to a faint column ofblue which was just distinguishable from the surrounding atmosphere.
"I believe you are right, Ned. Come, Phon, one more effort!" and Stevehelped the Chinaman on to his legs, though he himself was very nearlyworn out.
Ned took up the slender pack which Phon had carried until then, andadded it to the other two packs already upon his broad shoulders. Afterall the three packs weighed very little, for Ned's companions had thrownaway everything except their blankets, and Steve would have even thrownhis blanket away had not Ned taken charge of it. Ned knew fromexperience that so long as he sleeps fairly soft and warm at night aman's strength will endure many days, but once you rob him of his rest,the strongest man will collapse in a few hours.
As for their food, that was not hard to carry. Each man had a cruststill left in his pocket, and more than enough tobacco. Along the trailthere were plenty of streams full of good water, and if bread and waterand tobacco did not satisfy them, they would have to remain unsatisfied.It had been a hard race against time, and the last lap still remained tobe run; but that smoke was the goal, and with the goal in sight evenPhon shuffled along a little faster, though he was so tired that,whenever he stumbled he fell from sheer weakness.
The bald mountains so often alluded to in Cariboo story are ranges ofhigh upland, rising above the forest level, and entirely destitute oftimber at the top.
Here in late summer the sunnier slopes are slippery with a luxuriantgrowth of long lush grasses and weeds, and ablaze with the vivid crimsonof the Indian pink. In early spring (and May is early spring in Cariboo)there is still snow along the ridges, and even down below, though thegrasses are brilliantly green, the time of flowers has hardly yet come.
Here and there as the three hurried down they came across big bouldersof quartz gleaming in the sun. These were as welcome to Steve as thelast milestone on his road home to a weary pedestrian. Where the quartzwas, there would the gold be also, argued Steve, and the thought rousedhim for a moment out of the mechanical gait into which he had fallen.But he soon dropped into it again. A hill had risen and shut the columnof smoke out of his sight, and the trail was leading down again to thetimber.
Away far to the east a huge dome of snow gleamed whitely against thesky-line. That was the outpost of the Rockies. But Steve had no eyeseven for the Rockies. All he saw was a sea of endless brown hillsrolling and creeping away fold upon fold in the distance, all so likeone to another from their bald ridges to the blue lakes at their feet,that his head began to spin, and he almost thought that he must beasleep, and this some nightmare country in which he wandered along aroad that had no end.
Luckily Ned roused him from this dreamy fit from time to time, or itmight well have happened that Steve's journey would have ended on thisside of Williams Creek in a rapid slide from the narrow trail to thebottom of one of the little ravines along which it ran.
Both men were apparently thinking of the same subject. So that thoughtheir sentences were short and elliptical, they had no difficulty inunderstanding each other's meaning. Men don't waste words on such amarch as theirs.
"Another three hours ought to do it," Ned would mutter, shifting hispack so as to give the rope a chance of galling him in a fresh place.
"If we get there by midnight, I reckon it would do."
"Yes, if we could find the claims."
"Ah, there is that about it! Have you got the map?"
"Yes. I've got that all right. Oh, we shall do it in good time;" and Nedlooked up at his only clock, the great red sun, which was now nearlyoverhead.
The next moment Corbett's face fell. The path led round a bluff, beyondwhich he expected to see the trail go winding gradually down to a littlegroup of tents and huts gathered about Williams Creek. Instead of thathe found himself face to face with one of those exasperating gulcheswhich so often bar the weary hunter's road home in the Frazer country.The swelling uplands rolled on, it was true, sinking gradually to thelevel of Williams Creek, and he could see the trail running from him tohis goal in fairly gentle sweeps, all except about half a mile of it,and that half-mile lay right in front of him, and was invisible.
It had sunk, so it seemed to Ned, into the very bowels of the earth, andanother hundred yards brought him to the edge of the gulch and showedhim that this was the simple truth. As so often happens in this countrywhich ice has formed (smoothing it here and cutting great furrowsthrough it elsewhere), the downs ended without warning in a precipitouscliff leading into a dark narrow ravine, along the bottom of which thegold-seekers could just hear the murmur of a mountain stream.
It was useless to look up and down the ravine. There was no way over andno way round. It was a regular trap. A threadlike trail, but well worn,showed the only way by which the gulch could be crossed, and as Nedlooked at it he came to the conclusion that if there was another suchgulch between him and Williams Creek it would probably cost him all hewas worth, for no one in his party could hope to cross two such gulchesbefore nightfall.
"It's no good looking at it, come along, Steve!" he cried, and graspingat any little bush within reach to steady his steps, Ned began thedescent.
Who ever first made that trail was in a hurry to get to Williams Creek.The recklessness of the gold miner, determined to get to his gold, andcareless of life and limb in pursuit of it, was apparent in every yardof that descent, which, despising all circuitous methods, plungedheadlong into the depths below.
Twice on the way down Steve only owed his life to the stout mountainweeds to which his fingers clung when his feet forsook him, and once itwas only Ned's strong hand which prevented Phon from following a greatflat stone which his stumbling feet had sent tobogganing into the darkgulf below.
For two or three minutes Ned had to hold on to Phon by the scruff of theneck before he was quite certain that he was to be trusted to walk aloneagain. Even Steve kept staring into that "dark-profound" into which thestone had vanished in a way which Corbett did not relish. Though he hadnever felt it himself, he knew all about that strange fascination whichseems to tempt
some men, brave men too, to throw themselves out of arailway-carriage, off a pier-head, or down a precipice, and thereforeNed was not sorry to be at the bottom of that precipitous trail withoutthe loss of either Steve or Phon.
"Say, Ned, how does that strike you? It's a 'way-up' bridge, isn't it,old man?" and the speaker pointed to a piece of civil engineeringcharacteristic of Cariboo.
Two tall pines had grown upon opposite edges of the narrow ravine inwhich the gulch ended. From side to side this ravine was rather toobroad for a single pine to span, and far down below, somewhere in thedarkness of it, a stream roared and foamed along. The rocks were dampwith mist and spray, but the steep walls of the narrow place let in nolight by which the prisoned river could be seen. In order to cross thisplace, men had loosened the roots of the two pines with pick and shovel,until the trees sinking slowly towards each other had met over themid-stream. Then those who had loosened the roots did their best to makethem fast again, weighting them with rocks, and tethering them withropes. When they had done this they had lashed the tops of the treestogether, lopped off a few boughs, run a hand-rope over all, and calledthe structure a bridge.
Over this bridge Ned and his comrades had now to pass, and as he lookedat the white face and quaking legs of Phon, and then up at the eveningsky, Ned turned to Steve and whispered in his ear: "Pull yourselftogether, Steve. This is a pretty bad place, but we have got to get overat once or not at all. That fellow will faint or go off his head beforelong."
Luckily for Ned, Steve Chance had plenty of what the Yankees call"sand."
"I'm ready, go ahead," he muttered, keeping his eyes as much as possibleaverted from the abyss towards which they were clambering.
"I'll go first," said Corbett, when they had reached the roots of thenearest pine; "then Phon, and you last, Steve." Then bending over hisfriend he whispered, "Threaten to throw him in if he funks."
Of course the bridge in front of Corbett was not the ordinary way toWilliams Creek. Pack-trains had come to Williams Creek even in thoseearly days, and clever as pack-ponies are, they have not yet developed atalent for tree climbing. So there was undoubtedly some other way toWilliams Creek. This was only a short cut, a route taken by pedestrianswho were in a hurry, and surely no pedestrians were ever in a muchgreater hurry than Steve and Ned and Phon.
Consider! Their all was on the other side of that ravine; all theirinvested wealth and all their hopes as well; all the reward for weeks ofweary travel, as well as rest, and shelter, and food. They had much togain in crossing that ravine, and the slowly sinking sun warned themthat they had no time to look for a better way round. They must takethat short cut or none. And yet when Ned got closer to the rough bridgehe liked it less than ever. Where the trees should have met and joinedtogether a terrible thing had happened. Ned could see it now quiteplainly from where he stood. A wind, he supposed, must have come howlingup the gulch in one of the dark days of winter, a wind so strong thatwhen the narrow gully had pent it in, it had gone rushing along,smashing everything that it met in its furious course, and amongst otherthings it had struck just the top of the arch of the bridge.
The result was that just at the highest point there was a gap, not a biggap, indeed it was so small that some of the ropes still held andstretched from tree to tree, but still a gap, six feet wide with nobridge across it, and black, unfathomable darkness down below. NedCorbett was one of those men who only see the actual danger which has tobe faced, the thing which has to be done--that which is, and not thatwhich may be. For instance, Ned saw that he had to jump from one stoutbough to another, that he would have to cling to something with hishands on the other side, and that it would not do to make a false step,or to clutch at a rotten bough.
That was all he saw. So he leapt with confidence (he had taken twentyworse leaps in an afternoon in the gymnasium at home for the fun of thething), and of course he alighted in safety, clambered down the otherpine-tree trunk, and landed safe and sound on the farther shore. He hadnever stayed to think of the awful things which would have happened ifhe had slipped; of that poor body of his which might have gone whirlinground and round through the darkness, until it plunged into the watersout of sight of the sun and his fellow-men.
But all men are not made after this fashion. When Ned turned towardsthe bridge he had just passed his face turned white, and his hands,which had until then been so firm trembled. What he saw was this. Phonhad been driven ahead of Steve, as Corbett and Steve had arranged. Aslong as the big broad trunk of the pine was beneath him, with plenty ofstrong boughs all round him to cling to, Phon had listened to Steve andobeyed him. Now it was different. Phon had come to the end of the pine,to the place from which Corbett had leaped, and nothing which Stevecould say would move him another inch. Chinamen are not trained inathletics as white men are, and to Phon that six-foot jump appeared tobe a simply impossible feat. Steve might threaten what he liked, butjump Phon would not. The mere sight of the horrible darkness below madehis head reel, and his fingers cling to the rough pine like the fingersof a drowning man to a plank.
And now Ned noticed a worse thing even than this Phon had been driven tothe very end of the tree by Steve, and Steve himself was close behindhim. The result was that the weight of two men had to be borne at onceby the thin end of what, after all, was but a small pine, and oneextended almost like a fishing-rod across the ravine. So the tree beganto bow with the weight, and then to lift itself again until it wasswinging and tossing, swaying more and more after every recoil, so thatat each swing Ned expected to see one or both of his friends tossed offinto the gulf below. There must come an end to such a scene as thissooner or later, and Ned could see but one chance of saving his friend.
"Chance," he shouted, "hold tight! I am going to shoot that cursedChinaman!"
The miserable wretch heard and understood the words, and saw theWinchester, the same which had sent the runaway cayuse spinning down thestone-slide, come slowly up to Corbett's shoulder.
"Jump or I'll shoot! It's your last chance!" and Phon heard the clank ofthe pump as his master forced up a cartridge into the barrel of hisrifle.
It was now death anyway. Phon realized that, and even at that moment hismemory showed him plainly a picture of that pinto mare, whose bruisedand battered body, with a great ghastly hole between the eyes, he hadseen by the edge of Seton Lake. That last thought decided him, and witha scream of fear he sprang out, and managed to cling, more by sheer luckthan in any other way, to the pine on the Williams Creek side of theravine. When Ned grounded arms and reached out to help Phon across thelast few feet of the bridge he was wet through with perspiration, andyet he was as cool as a new-made grave.
"Ned," said Steve five minutes later, "I would give all the gold inCariboo if I had it, rather than cross that place again!"--and he meantit.
For a few minutes Steve's gold fever had abated, and in the terror ofdeath even the Chinaman had forgotten the yellow metal. And yet theirjourney was now over, and within half an hour's walk of them lay theclaims they had bought, the wonderful spot of earth out of which theywere to dig their heart's desire, the key to all pleasures and themaster of nine men out of every ten--gold!
Ned laughed to himself. Was a steady head and the agility of a verysecond-rate gymnast worth more than all the gold in Cariboo?
"WITH A SCREAM OF FEAR THE CHINAMAN SPRANG OUT."]