CHAPTER XII.
A SHEER SWINDLE.
It is hard to sever the idea of a journey's end from ideas of rest andcomfort. A is the starting-point, B the goal, and no matter how distant,no matter how wild the region in which B lies, the mind of the travellerfrom A to B is sure to picture B as a centre of creature comforts and ahaven of luxurious rest.
Thus it was then that Steve and Corbett hurried through the lengtheningshadows, eager for the city that was to come, their eyes strained tocatch a glow of colour, and their ears alert for the first hum whichshould tell of the presence of their fellow-men.
After the gloom of the northern forests, the silence of the pack-trail,and the monotony of forced marches, they were ready to welcome any lighthowever garish, any revelry however mad it might be. Life and light andnoise were what both hankered after as a relief from the silence andsolitude of the last few days, and it is this natural craving for changein the minds of men who have been too much alone, which accounts forhalf the wild revels of the frontier towns.
As a matter of history, the first impression made by Williams Creek uponthe sensitive mind of the artist Chance was one of disappointment.Perhaps it was that the heavy shadows of the mountains drowned allcolour, or that the day was nearly over and the dance-house not yetopen; whatever the cause Williams Creek struck Chance with a chill. Itwas a miserable, mean-looking little place for so much gold to comefrom. In his visions of the mines Steve had dwelt too much upon theglitter of the metal, and too little on the dirt and bare rock fromwhich the gold has to be extracted; extracted, too, by hard labour,about the hardest labour probably which the bodies of men were ever madeto undergo.
As his eyes gradually took in the details of the scene, Steve Chanceremembered Cruickshank's glowing word-pictures of the mines, and his owngaudy map of them, and remembering these things a great fear fell uponhim. Steve had accomplished a pilgrimage over a road upon which strongermen had died, and brave men turned back, and now the shrine of hisgolden god lay at his feet, and this is what it looked like.
In the shadow of a spur of wooded mountains, lay a narrow strip of landwhich might by comparison be called flat. It was lower than the baldmountains which were at its back, so the melted snows of last winter hadtrickled into it, until the whole place was a damp, miserable bog,through the centre of which the waters had worn themselves a bed, andmade a creek.
There were many such bogs and many such creeks about the foothills ofthe bald mountains, but these were for the most part hidden by anabundant growth of pine, or adorned by a wealth of long grass and theglory of yellow lily and blue larkspur. But this bog was less fortunatethan its fellows. Gold had been found in the creek which ran through it,so that instead of the spring flowers and the pines, there were barepatches of yellow mud, stumps rough and untrained where trees had stood,tunnels in the hillside, great wooden gutters mounted high in the air tocarry off the stream from its bed and pour it into all manner ofunexpected places, piles of boulders and rubbish, so new and unadornedby weed or flower that you knew instinctively that nature had had nohand in their arrangement.
And everywhere amongst this brutal digging and hewing there were new loghuts, frame shanties, wet untidy tents, and shelters made of odds andends, shelters so mean that an African Bushman would have turned up hisnose at them. Instead of the telegraph and telephone wires that runoverhead in ordinary cities, there were in the mining camp innumerableflumes, long wooden boxes or gutters, to carry water from point topoint. These gutters were everywhere. They ran over the tops of thehouses, they came winding down for miles along precipitous side-hills,and they ran recklessly across the main street; for traffic there wasnone in those days, or at any rate none which could not step over, orwould not pass round the miners' ditch. In 1862 rights of way weredisregarded up in Cariboo, but an inch of water if it could be used forgold-washing was a matter of much moment.
"I say, Ned, this looks more like a Chinese camp than a white man's,doesn't it?" remarked Steve with a shudder.
"What did you expect, Steve,--a second San Francisco?"
"Not that; but this place looks so dead and seems so still."
"Silence, they say, is the criterion of pace," quoted Ned; "but I canhear the noise of the rockers and the rattle of the gravel in thesluices. It looks to me as if men were at work here in grimearnest.--Good-day. How goes it, sir?"
The last part of Corbett's speech was addressed to a man of whom he justcaught sight at that moment, standing in a deep cutting by the side ofthe trail, and busily employed in shovelling gravel into a sluice-box athis side.
"Day," grunted the miner, not pausing to lift his head to look at theman who addressed him until he had finished his task.
"Are things booming here still?" asked Chance.
"Booming, you bet! Why, have you just come up from the river?" and theman straightened his back with an effort and jerked his head in thegeneral direction of the Frazer.
"That's what," replied Steve, dropping naturally into the brief idiomsof the place.
"Seen anything of the bacon train?" asked the miner after a pause,during which he had again ministered to the wants of his sluice-box.
"The bacon train! What's that?"
"Brown's bacon train from Oregon. Guess you haven't, or you'd know aboutit. Bacon is played out in Williams Creek, and we are all going itstraight on flour."
The thought of "going it straight on flour" was evidently too much forSteve's new friend, for he actually groaned aloud, and dug his shovelinto the wall of his trench with as much energy as if he had beendriving it into the ribs of the truant Bacon Brown.
"That will suit us royally," ejaculated Ned. "We shall have a smalltrain here in a day or two, and there's a good deal of bacon amongst ourstores."
"You've got a train acomin'! By thunder! I thought I knowed your voices.Ain't you them two Britishers as were along of Cruickshank?"
"Strike me pink if it isn't Rampike!" cried Steve, and the next minutethe old gentleman who had helped Steve in his little game of pokerclimbed out of the mud-pie he was making, and shook hands, even with theChinaman.
"But where's Roberts, and where's Cruickshank?" he asked.
Corbett told him.
"Wal, as you've left Roberts with him I suppose it's all right. Did youmeet any boys going back from these parts?"
"Only two, going back for grub," replied Ned.
"I guess they told you how short we were up here, and they are worse offat Antler."
"No, they said very little to us. They had a bit of a yarn withCruickshank though. He was leading out and met them first. He didn't sayanything about the want of grub to us."
"That's a queer go. Why, it would almost have paid you to go to Antlerinstead of coming here. You would get two dollars a pound for bacon upthere."
"Ah! but you see we were bound to be here for the 1st of June, becauseof those claims we bought."
"Is that so? Bob did say summat about those claims. Do you know wherethey are?"
"Here's our map," replied Corbett, producing the authorized map of Dewdand Cruickshank, upon which the three claims had been duly marked. "IsDewd in the camp?" he added.
"I don't know; but come along, there goes Cameron's triangle. Let us goand get some 'hash,' and we can find out about Dewd and the claims." Andso saying Rampike laid aside his shovel, put on his coat, and led theway down to a big tent in the middle of the mining camp.
Here were gathered almost half the population of Williams Creek fortheir evening meal, the other half having finished theirs and departedto work upon the night-shift; for most of the claims were worked nightand day, their owners and the hired men dividing the twenty-four hoursamongst them.
Here, as on board the steamer, Rampike was evidently a man of someaccount; one able to secure a place for himself and his chums in spiteof the rush made upon the food by the hungry mob in its shirt sleeves.
At first all three men were too busy with their knives and forks tonotice anyone or hear what men were saying ab
out themselves, but in alittle while, when the edge of appetite was dulled, Ned caught the wordsrepeated over and over again--"Bacon Brown's men, I guess," and at lasthad to answer point blank to a direct question, that he had "never heardof Mr. Brown before."
"These fellows hain't seen Brown at all," added Rampike. "They'relooking for Dewd. Have you seen him anywhere around?"
At the mention of Dewd's name a broad grin passed over the faces ofthose who heard it, and one man looked up and remarked that a good manypeople had been inquiring kindly after Dewd lately. The speaker was acommon type amongst the miners, but in those early days his roughclothes and refined speech struck Ned as contrasting strangely.
Truth to tell, he had been educated at Eton and Oxford, had thrown up agood tutorship to come out here, and here he was happy as a king, thoughall his classical education was thrown away, and his blue pantaloonswere patched fore and aft with bits of sacking once used to containthose favourite brands of flour known respectively as "Self-rising" andthe "Golden Gate."
As he rose to his feet with the names of the brands printed in largeletters on either side of him, he looked something between a navvy and a"sandwich man."
"Dewd," he went on, "has been playing poker lately a little too well toplease the boys. Say, O'Halloran, do you know where Dewd is?"
"Faith and I don't. If I did, Sandy M'Donald would give me half hisclaim for the information. Hullo, have you got here already, sonny? Iwas before ye though." And Ned's red-headed friend of fightingproclivities held out his hand to him over the heads of his neighbours.
"What does Sandy want him for?" asked someone in the crowd.
"You'd betther ax Sandy. All I know is that he went gunning for himearly this morning, and if he wasn't so drunk that he can't walk he'd beafther him still."
"Who's drunk, Pat,--Dewd or Sandy?"
"Oh, don't be foolish! Whoever heard of Dewd touching a drop of goodliquor. That's the worst of that mane shunk; he gets you blind drunkfirst and robs you afther."
"What, have you been bitten too, O'Halloran?" asked the tutor; and whilethe laugh was still going at the wry face poor Corny O'Halloran pulled,Rampike and his three friends slipped quietly out of the room.
"I guess we may as well locate those claims of yourn right away,"remarked Rampike as soon as they were clear of Cameron's tent, "so asthere'll be no trouble about securing them to-morrow. Not as I think anyone is likely to jump 'em. Let me see your map."
Ned handed over the map before alluded to.
"Why, look ye here, these claims are right alongside the Nugget, therichest claim on the creek!" cried their friend, after studying the mapfor a few minutes.
"Quite so, that is what gives them their exceptional value," remarkedChance, quoting from memory Cruickshank's very words.
"Oh, that's what gives them their 'ceptional vally, is it, young man?"sneered Rampike. "Wal, I guess they ought to have a 'ceptional vally' tomake it worth while working them there;" and Rampike, who was nowstanding by the Nugget claim alongside the bed of the creek, pointedupwards to where the bluffs, two hundred feet high, hung precipitouslyover their heads.
It was no good arguing, no good swearing that the map must be wrong,that Cruickshank had marked the wrong lots, that there was a mistakesomewhere.
"Just one of the colonel's mistakes, that's what it is. Come and see thegold Commissioner, he'll straighten it out for you," retorted Rampike,hurrying the three off into the presence of a big handsome man, whosegenial ways and handsome face made "the judge" a great favourite withthe miners.
All he could do he did, and was ready to go far beyond the obligationsof his office in his desire to help Cruickshank's victims. It was a verycommon kind of fraud after all. The colonel had drawn a sufficientlyaccurate map of the Williams Creek valley; he had even given accuratelyevery name upon that map, and moreover the claims which he had sold toCorbett & Co. adjoined the Nugget claim, and had been regularly taken upand bonded by his partner and himself. Cruickshank's story indeed wastrue in every particular.
Gold was being taken out of the Nugget mine at the rate of several lbs.per diem; why should it not be taken out of the claims which itadjoined?
There was only one objection to Cruickshank's map,--he had not drawn itin relief. There was only one objection to Corbett's claim--the surfaceof it would have adjoined the surface of the Nugget claim had they bothbeen upon the same level, only,--only, you see, they were not. There wasa trifling difference of two hundred and fifty feet in the altitude ofthe Nugget claim and the bluff adjoining it, and Corbett's claim was onthe top of that bluff. Now a claim on the top of a bluff, where no rivercould ever have run to deposit gold, and whither no water could bebrought to wash for gold, was not considered worth two thousand dollarseven in Cariboo.