CHAPTER XXIX.
PHON'S RETURN.
The day after Ned Corbett's sheep-hunt was too cold even to go and bringin the carcase. A wind had risen, not much of a wind it is true, butjust enough to drive the cold right through a man like blades of sharpsteel, so that Ned and Steve and Rampike remained in the dug-out,smoking and trying to keep warm, or from time to time going to the doorto watch the great river gradually yielding to the power of the frost.
The white scum of the day before had grown into blocks and hummocks ofice, and these came down grinding and roaring through the mist. In onemore night the great Frazer would be fettered for the winter.
In the mist which hung over the freezing waters, everything assumedunnatural proportions. Rocks loomed out like mountains, bushes likeforest trees, and a sneaking fox looked larger than a grizzly bear.
It was a weird scene, and it held Corbett and his companions fascinateduntil the bitterness of the cold drove them back for a few moments totheir fire.
In this way they spent their day until nearly three o'clock, when thelight began to fail, and Corbett, who was at the door, cried to Rampike,who was inside the hut:
"Great Scott, Jim, come here! What is that?"
"That" to which Corbett's pointing finger called attention was a strangeupright mass of ice, which came riding towards them upon a little floe,a floe which later on was caught and whirled round and round in abackwater of the river just below the cabin.
"A tree, ain't it, Steve?" said Jim, appealing to Chance, who hadfollowed him out. "A tree, I reckon, Ned, as has got wedged in somehowamong the drift."
"Yes, I guess it's a tree," Steve assented. "But what with the mist andthe way the thing dances around, it's mighty hard to tell what it is."
"Well, I'm getting as full of fancies as a woman," said Ned, "but Icould have sworn when I saw it first, that that thing was a man."
"A man? By heaven, it _is_ a man!" yelled Jim. "Look, look!" and withwhite, scared face he stared at the thing as it came circling roundagain in the endless, meaningless dance of the drift through the mist.
"If it's a man, it is no good standing here," said Corbett quickly."Bear a hand to drag him ashore." And snatching a rope from the insideof the hut, he sprang down the steep bank to the shore, though the facesof his followers showed plainly enough that, terrible as dead men alwaysare to the living, there was something about this river-waif which madehim a horror greater even than the dead who die on land.
By some strange chance the body (for it was a body) had got jammedbetween two pieces of drift in such a manner that it stood upright,waist-high above the flood, bowing and curtseying with every movement ofthe water, but so coated with ice that, but for its general outline anda rag of clothing which still fluttered from it, none could have guessedits nature.
For a moment Corbett feared that it would break out of the backwater,and be whirled down the stream before he could get his rope over it; butno, the stream had not done with its plaything yet. The winter would bea long one, and what matter if this wayfarer by the Frazer tarried evena day and a night in the backwater? The rocks had stayed there forhundreds of years. There was no hurry about such things. Round and roundin the same order came the hummocks, a bit of a wrecked canoe on one, onthe next only the wreck of a man. Round and round whirled the long loopof Corbett's lariat, until the silent rider came bowing past him withinhis reach. Then the rope flew out, and the long loop poised and settledsilently about the rider's neck. Quick as thought Ned was jerked uponhis knees, and for a moment it seemed as if the angry river would suckhim in and add him to the number of its ghastly dancers. But Ned wasyoung and strong and loved life, so that he stayed himself against agreat boulder and called aloud for help.
"Hold on to the rope!" he yelled to his comrade. "The thing fights likea salmon!"
Do you know what it is to feel the electric thrill which travels alldown your spine when you stick in a good fish? do you know how his everystruggle vibrates along your own nerves, until your heart almost stopswith excitement? If you do, you may be able to picture what those threemen felt as the frozen corpse plunged and struggled on the rope, nowsucked down by the under-tow, now springing beneath the buffets of thedrifting ice. Ned shuddered and felt sick as he braced himself againstits unholy strength; but the Shropshire breed is like the bull-dog's,once fast in anything it will never let go whilst life lasts; so that inspite of the river, and the fear which chilled his marrow, Ned persisteduntil he drew his ghastly capture hand over hand to shore.
There is something very horrible in the helpless way in which the headof a drowned man rolls about when you lay him down once more upon dryland, but even that is not so ghastly as were the actions of the warpedand rigid mummy which Corbett and his friends carried to their cabin.
From the waist up the body was stiff and straight, but below the waistthe legs had been frozen into such strange curves and angles, that whenthey laid it down upon the floor the corpse went rolling and bumpingover and over, and then lay rocking to and fro as if it would never bestill. Every gust of wind set it in motion again, and the horror of thething grew to such an extent that Ned at last rose, saying:
"I can't stand this, boys; the thing seems to be laughing at us. Let'sfix it in a chair so as to keep it still until morning."
"And what are you going to do with it, then?" asked Chance.
"Bury it, I suppose, Steve. Oughtn't we to?"
"Wal, I don't want to dictate to no man, but ef you're goin' to make apractice of bringing corpses to this shanty, I quit," remarked Jim, whohad been strongly opposed to robbing the Frazer of its prey from thefirst.
"Don't cut up rough, old chap. If your body was going down in thatseething hell of waters, you'd be glad if anyone would drag you ashoreand give you decent burial. Let it bide until to-morrow, Jim, and I'llbury it myself."
"Very well. That's a go. Now just lend a hand to cinch him on to thischair for the night, so as he won't be crawlin' around in the dark;" andold Jim with Ned's assistance fastened the body into a chair which stoodby the rough deal board which served them for a table, and there leftit.
Why is it that, to even the boldest men, the dead are so very terrible?Is it their inhuman calm, their silence, or the mystery to which theyalone hold the key, that awes and chills the hottest human heart?Whatever the cause of it, the nameless terror exists, and neither strongNed Corbett, nor scoffing Chance, nor hard old Jim were proof againstit. With that _thing_ sitting in their one seat waiting for the morningto come that it might be buried, all three men crept away into thefurthest corner of their tiny shack, and, trembling at every log whichcreaked and sputtered on the hearth, covered their heads with theirblankets and prayed for daylight to come.
But the hours of the night are longer than those of the day. Thelesson-books say that the twenty-four hours are all of the same length,just sixty minutes of sixty seconds in each, but the lesson-books lie.Who that has lain awake from midnight till dawn will believe that thesix hours before sunrise are no longer than the six which succeedsunset? Of course they are longer, but the hours of that one night inthe hillside above the fast-freezing Frazer were the longest since Godmade the world.
Down below the listeners could hear the grinding and roaring of thefrozen river, and the shriek of the rising night wind as it tore throughthe deep canyons. Now and again a loud report echoed in the stillness asan ice-crack spread from side to side of some frozen mountain lake, andall night long there were inarticulate murmurs and groanings of waterprisoned beneath ice, and the long howling of starved wolves amongst thesnow.
The Indians believe that their dead hunters assume the forms of wolves,and if so, the whole of the dead Chilcotins were out hunting, addingtheir hideous voices to those other voices of the night, which had inthem nothing that was familiar, nothing that was in sympathy with man orman's daily life. It seemed to the sleepless listeners that their ownsouls had lost their way and strayed into some waste place, where it wasalways winter and always night, and then a
s they strained their ears sothat they could hear the beat of each others' hearts, a terrible thinghappened.
It was only a chair which creaked, but the creaking of it seemed todeaden every other sound, and nature herself held her breath to listen.There it was again! Creak, creak, creak, and a scraping sound upon themud floor. Unless the ears of three men had gone crazy with fright, thatgrisly visitor of theirs was pushing its chair along the floor as if itwould rise up and be gone. All through the night the noises went on: thechair creaked, the feet of the dead moved upon the floor, and once inthe dim light of early dawn, one who dared to look for a moment, fanciedthat he saw a long lean hand move slowly across the table.
Yet even fear yields at last to sleep, and before the full dawn camethere were four sleepers in that hut,--three who should wake and one whoshould sleep on for ever, and all four comrades, who for a little whilehad pursued that will-o'-the-wisp, Wealth, together.
For the dead man was Phon!
The ice shroud which had hidden him before had melted in the night, andthe strength of the frost had gone out of his poor dead limbs, and inthe searching white light of the day he lay huddled up on the chair, hishead fallen forward upon the table, and his body a limp mass of fadedblue rags.
Even before Ned raised his head they all knew him, and when Ned pointedsilently to a little dark spot at the nape of the dead man's neck, noone expressed any surprise.
There had been just such another mark at the nape of dead RobertRoberts' neck.
"Two!" groaned Rampike. "My God, two of 'em, and we ain't beginning toget level with him yet!"
Before they saw the corpse upon the previous evening the men had beensitting, according to their wont, round their rough table smoking andporing over Chance's old map of British Columbia.
That map was the nearest approach to a book in their possession, andthey often studied it and made yarns about it; but the night of Phon'sarrival all three had bent over it with more than their ordinaryinterest, because Ned had told them of his fancy that he had recognizeda certain valley from the main ridge. It was just in front of this mapthat the corpse had been placed, when Rampike had cinched it into itschair for the night.
"I guess we had better clear 'em all away," said the old man after apause, and with a comprehensive wave of his hand he indicated the corpseand the map, the cups and the half-smoked pipes which still littered thetable.
Ned and Steve came to their comrade's assistance, and the three made asif they would lift Phon from his seat, but at the very first touch allshrank back, while Chance cried out:
"Look at its hand! Look, look, it is writing!"
Like men in a nightmare the three stood, unable to move or to speak,whilst that long lean hand which lay upon the map moved slowly along.Like the finger of a clock, or a shadow upon a dial, it crept alongslowly, slowly, and ever as it went they heard the grating of one longuntrimmed nail against the canvas.
It seemed to the onlookers that the hand took hours to travel acrossthree inches of the map, and then the limp body gave a lurch and slidwith a soft heavy thud to the ground.
The slight movement caused by Jim's first touch had disturbed thebalance of the body, out of which all the rigid strength of the frosthad now gone, so that the slackened muscles left to themselves shrank upand collapsed. This was what really happened, but to Rampike and therest it seemed that the dead wrote.
"That's jest what he's come for. Thet's the way to Pete's Crik as he'sbin a showin' you, and thet's where you'll find the man as shot him andold Rob. Bear a hand, we can carry him out now. I guess there ain't nocall for him here any longer." And so saying Rampike took hold of thecorpse, and with Ned's assistance bore it out and laid it down upon thesnow.
Upon the map upon which Phon's dead hand had rested there was a fine wetline drawn by his nail--a line which led from the very spot where thedug-out stood upon the bank of the Frazer, to a point upon the rightbank of the Chilcotin, a good deal to the north of the spot at whichCorbett believed that the gold-camp lay.
Steve Chance took a pencil, and whilst the others bore out the body hemarked the line carefully, that it might not dry up and vanish away.Even as he did so, a wild cry which he knew well came from the benchabove the cabin. It began in a low key, and rose higher and higher untilit was like the wail of a banshee, then it died away sullenly, and Steveheard Rampike's voice outside the cabin calling to him:
"Come along and lend a hand, Steve. If we don't bury him pretty soonthose blasted wolves will get him."
Steve hurried out, and together the three tried hard to make some sortof a grave for Phon in the hillside. They might as well have tried todig into adamant.
"It ain't no good," growled Rampike at length; "and if you jest bury himin the snow the wolves'll get him. Not as it matters much."
"We'd better put him back in the Frazer than leave him here," said Ned.
"That's so. He cain't stay in the cabin now as he's thawed out, but Iain't sure as we can get him back agen into the river."
Jim was right.
The earth which the Chinaman had robbed of its hidden treasure refusedto receive him; the friends he had lived amongst would have none of him,now that death's seal was upon him; and even the river, which had spewedhim up upon its banks, had now closed its portals against him, so thatit was only after half an hour's hard labour that Chance and Corbettwere able to hew out a hole in the solid ice, through which to send backits dead to the Frazer.
For one moment Ned Corbett stood with his hat in his hand, looking up tothe sky, wondering whither the spark of life had gone and commending itto its Creator, and then he pushed the body head first through the hole.The ice round the spot where the three men stood was clear and stillfairly thin, so that they saw, or thought that they saw, a face pressedagainst it for a moment, staring with wild eyes towards the world of theliving, and then the stream caught it and it shot down and was gone.
The man had dreamed all his life of the golden secrets which lay in thebed of the mighty Frazer. He had looked forward to the days when heshould carry the golden spoils of British Columbia to his own sunnyland; but fate had mastered him, and though his body might roll amongstthose golden sands, and his dead hands touch the heavy nuggets, it wouldprofit him nothing. The dead have no need of gold!
CHAPTER XXX.
CRUICKSHANK AT LAST!
After the burial of Phon there was no more rest for the men in the"dug-out." The Frazer was frozen hard, and offered a firm white way bywhich the three outcasts might return to some place where there werewarmth and light and the voices of their fellow-men. But none of thethree cared to profit by this way of escape. To them a mist seemedalways to hang over the river, and the voices of the dead came to themthrough it; and to Ned Corbett it seemed that day and night one mournfulold tune rang in his ears, and day and night Rampike polished his rifleand thought of the "pal" he had lost, and the murderer who had escapedhim.
"It ain't no manner of use, Ned," he said one day towards the end ofwinter, when the ice was already breaking up. "I know as I might jest aswell stay another month, and then go with you to look for this crik. ButI cain't do it. Somethin' keeps callin' to me to git, and I mean makin'a start to-morrow whether you and Steve come or stay."
They had been together all through the dreary winter, and had hoped togo out together in the spring, back to that summer land by the sea fromwhich they had all come. They were weary for awhile of the rush andstruggle for wealth, and were pining for the smell of the salt waves andthe drowsy lap of the sea upon the shore. They had talked over thesethings together when the noonday was dark with falling snow, and nowthat spring was at hand they little liked the idea of being parted.
"Hold hard, old man," said Corbett. "Let us see if we can't arrange togo together. Which way do you think of going?"
"Thar's only one way, the way as _he_ showed us," answered Rampike,nodding over his shoulder towards the river down which Phon had gone tohis rest.
For a few minutes Corbett made no answer, bu
t sat staring fixedly out ofthe little window at the Frazer.
"It's infernal foolishness," he said at last--"infernal foolishness, Iknow, and yet I feel as you do, Jim. I shall never rest until I havetried Phon's way. I'm getting as superstitious as a Siwash."
"Superstitious is a mighty long word, but it don't amount to much.There's a heap of things happens as you cain't account for."
"Perhaps," assented Ned, and then took up once more Steve's ragged mapof British Columbia, and studied for the hundredth time the coursetraced upon it by the dead man's nail.
"It runs south-south-east from here," he said.
"Yes, I know, and that'll be clar up that bluff and on to the divide,and then over a lot of gulches, I reckon, until we strike the Chilcotin.It'll be a pretty rough trail, you bet."
"Well, rough or smooth, Jim, if Steve doesn't mind waiting here for us,I'll come with you and start as soon as you please. What do you say,Steve?"
Now Steve Chance, as the reader knows, was by nature a decent obligingfellow, and, moreover, Steve had had all the rough travel that he caredabout for years to come, so he answered readily enough.
"If you'll pass me your word that you'll be back inside of three weeks,I'll stay. But you don't expect to see Cruickshank, I hope?"
"I know as we shall see him," said Rampike quietly. "Summat tells me as_his_ time's up."
The very next day Rampike and Corbett started up the bluffs above thedug-out. Down below them the ice in the Frazer was already beginning to"run," but the snow on the mountain-sides lay hard and unmelted still,so that travelling without snowshoes was fatiguing in the last degree.From the top of the ridge the two men got a good view of the countrythrough which they had to travel. The mountains, as far as they couldsee, followed the course of the Frazer until its junction with theChilcotin, where they bent into a kind of elbow; in fact the two riversand their attendant mountains formed two sides of a triangle, betweenwhich lay gulches and ravines innumerable, and the base of this trianglewas the course laid out for them by Phon.
"Looks as if that Chinee corpse had bin laughin' at us after all,"muttered Rampike. "A man would want wings to cross that country."
"Never mind, let's try it, Jim," said Corbett; and together the two menpressed on, floundering sometimes up to their armpits in the deep snow,and sometimes finding an easy way where the country at first sightappeared impassable.
On the third day of their journey, towards evening, they entered anarrow snow-choked canyon, which seemed to lead through the second mainridge of mountains to the Chilcotin.
As they entered this canyon Ned Corbett paused and looked searchingly upand down it, as if looking for some sign to distinguish it from itsfellows.
But he found none. Like a hundred others which they had seen, thisgully was deep and narrow and full of snow. The pines which grew on itssides seemed only just able to keep their heads above the white flood.Somewhere far down below, no doubt, there was a creek, which sang andflashed in the summer sunlight; but it was buried now out of sight bythe snow and gagged by the frost.
"Do you think you know this here place, Ned?" asked Rampike, who hadbeen watching his comrade's face.
"I _feel_ as if I did, and yet I can't see anything, Jim, that I couldswear to."
"Is that so? Well, it's no matter, because we must stick to this canyonanyway. It leads out on to the Chilcotin," replied the old man, and sosaying he led on.
After a while he paused.
"Say, Ned, is that a sheep-trail across there on the other side?"
Ned looked hard in the direction indicated, shading his eyes with hishand to get a better view.
"It looks more like a bear's trail," he replied, "only the bears are allholed up still."
"It's pretty well used, whatever it is, and I guess we should find it asight better travelling there than it is here. Shall we try it?"
As it happened the snow was exceptionally deep where the two men stood,so that they sank up to their knees at every step. A beaten trail of anykind would therefore save them an infinite amount of labour.
"Yes, let's," said Ned, with the brusqueness of a man who needs all hisbreath for other uses.
To get to the trail Corbett and Rampike had to cross the canyon, and inplaces this was almost impossible, both men sinking from time to timealmost out of sight in the snow.
Twice Rampike voted that they should give up the attempt, and twiceCorbett persuaded him to go on.
At last, sweating and trembling with exertion, they got clear of theworst of the snow and stood upon the edge of the trail.
For a moment no one noticed anything. They were both too tired to usetheir eyes even. Then a sudden gleam of triumph flashed into Rampike'sface, and he swore savagely between his teeth, as he was wont to do whenanything moved him deeply. Bending over the trail he scrutinized itcarefully, fingering the soiled snow, and making an impression with hisown foot that he might compare it with the tracks before him.
When he raised his face to Corbett's he had regained all his oldcoolness, but there was a cold glitter in his eyes which spoke ofrepressed excitement.
"What is it, Jim?" asked Corbett.
"What is it? Don't you see? It's the trail of the bar we've bin' huntin'this long while, that's what it is. I suppose we'd better toss for theshot."
The trail was the trail of a man. The moment Corbett looked carefully atit he saw that; and yet, cold-blooded as it seemed to him afterwards, henever hesitated for a moment, but when Rampike produced a coin and sentit spinning into the air, cried "Heads!" with all the eagerness of a boytossing for first innings in a cricket match.
"Tails it is! That thar is a lucky coin to me," said Rampike; "that'swhy I always pack it around." And so saying he replaced an old Englishshilling in his pocket and began examining the lock of his Winchester,whilst Ned looked anxiously up and down the valley as if he expectedevery moment to see their foe come into sight.
"Oh, no fear of his comin' just yet awhile," said Jim, noticing hiscomrade's glances. "He went up the canyon about an hour ago, and I don'treckon as he'll be along this way agen before morning. I wonder whathe's up to, anyway?"
To men like Rampike and Corbett the testimony of the trail upon whichthey stood put some facts beyond all dispute. That some man who woremoccasins used it at least twice a day, and had so used it for a monthpast, they knew as certainly as they knew anything. That he had passedalong the trail within the hour they also knew, and that he wasCruickshank they guessed with a confidence which left no room for doubt.
"I guess, Ned, as this here must be Pete's Crik as we've got into."
"That is what I've been thinking for some time," replied Ned.
"Then that's his trail to the diggings from the river. But what does hewant at the river so often? That licks me."
As Ned had no explanation to offer, the two stood silent for a moment,until the old man's eyes fell upon the tracks which he and Ned had madeacross the canyon.
"If we don't hide those we shall scare our game," he muttered. "Lend ahand, Ned, to cover some of them up."
"I guess that'll do," he admitted, after half an hour's hard work."Looks as if a bar had come across until he smelled them tracks of hisand then turned back agen. Cruickshank 'll never notice, anyway, so wemay as well foller this trail to the river. Step careful into histracks, Ned. I'd like to see what he has been at on the river."
These were the last words spoken by either Corbett or Rampike for quitehalf an hour, during which they followed one another in Indian file,stepping carefully into the same footprints, so that to anyone but askilled tracker, it would appear at first sight that only one man hadused the trail.
At the end of half an hour they paused. The roaring of a great river wasin their ears, and the grinding of a drift ice.
"That's the Chilcotin," whispered Corbett.
"The Frazer, more like," replied Rampike. "Yes, I thought as much," headded a moment later as he came round a corner of the bluff round whichthe trail ran. "We've struck the jun
ction of them two rivers. This creekruns in pretty nigh the mouth of the Chilcotin."
Almost whilst he was yet speaking, Corbett caught the speaker by thebelt and dragged him down in the snow at his side.
In spite of the suddenness and roughness of such treatment the old manuttered no protest. The question he wanted to ask was in his eyes as heturned his head cautiously and looked into his comrade's face, but withhis lips he made no sound.
Putting his lips to Jim's ear, Ned whispered: "There's a canoe justbelow us on the beach, lie still whilst I take a look at it;" and thenhe crawled away upon his belly until he could peer from behind a boulderon the sky-line, at the valley below.
In that valley, between steep banks and piles of great ice-wornboulders, the last two hundred yards of the Chilcotin river rushed by tojoin the Frazer, and amongst these boulders, at the very edge of theopen water, lay a rough Indian canoe.
At the side of the canoe the trail stopped.
"So that's the carcase as we have to watch," said Rampike's voice inNed's ear. "There's no need to keep down, lad, he ain't here. Let's goalong the trail and take a look." And so saying Rampike rose and walkeddown to the canoe.
The sight which there met his eyes and Ned's struck both men dumb for awhile with wonder.
What they saw was the work of one man, in one winter, without propertools, without sufficient food, and with the awful odds against him ofplace and weather.
"The devil fights hard for his own," muttered Ned; and indeed it seemedas if one man, unaided by supernatural powers, could not haveaccomplished what this man had done.
Corbett forgot that the greed of gold is almost a supernatural power.Out of the trunk of a tree, felled by his own hands, the man who dweltin this snow-choked canyon had made himself a canoe, his one tool theblade of his axe. The canoe so built was neither beautiful nor strong,but it was just strong enough for a fearless man to risk his life in,and beautiful enough, when it had its cargo on board, to tempt nine menout of ten to risk their souls to obtain it.
For the cargo of that canoe was the world's desire--the omnipotent,all-purchasing gold! In a hundred small sacks this cargo was storedaway, each sack made either of deer-skin or the clothes of the man whomade them. He had risked his life and sacrificed the blood of others toget the yellow dust, and now he gave the very clothes from off his back,in spite of the bitter winter cold, to make sacks to save it in. As Nedlooked and counted the sacks, and thought of old Roberts and Phon, ofthe money wasted and the toil unrewarded, he sighed. For the first timehe regretted that he had lost the toss.
"Wal, come on, Ned," said Rampike, breaking in upon this train ofthought suddenly, "I'm goin' to watch right here. It's mighty lucky aswe came when we did. That fellow means to skip as soon as ever the riverclears."
Ned said nothing, but in silence followed his companion to a lair behinda great block of gray stone, from which they could look down upon thetrail opposite to them.
"I guess it's safest here, though if the ice breaks up a bit more wesha'n't be able to get back if we want to," said Rampike; for in orderto reach a position which commanded Cruickshank's trail, Rampike had ledthe way across the river, stepping warily across the ice, which wasalready split up into great pieces, which ground against each other andmoved slowly with the stream.
"It's not more than a hundred yards, I reckon, and I'll back her toshoot good that far, even by moonlight," were the last words whichRampike muttered as he drew a bead upon an imaginary figure on the trailacross the river, and after this silence came and wrapped the two menround.
All through the gloaming and the night, even until the dawn, there wasonly a great gray stone which stood upon one side of the Chilcotin andlooked down upon the trail on the other side.
There was no movement anywhere save the movement of the ice in the riverand of the moon as she rose and sank again in the clear night sky, norwas there any sound save the grinding of the ice as it broke intosmaller and yet smaller pieces, and was borne along to join the hurtlingmass which was hurrying down the Frazer.
At first the shadows crept out into the valley, and one who was watchingthem gripped his rifle hard, and his breath came thick and fast. Againthe moon rose and the shadows fled, and all was white and motionless anddumb. After this it grew darker again; the moon had gone and a chillwind made the watchers shiver, and one of them drew a white thread outof the material of his coat, and doubled it and tied it round the muzzleof his rifle, so that it made a great knot where the sight was,serviceable instead of a sight in the half darkness. The wind was cold,and the watchers' clothes were rigid with frost, but Rampike's fingersscarcely trembled as he tied that knot, and his face was firm and coldas ice.
At last there was a sound far away up the canyon. "Crunch crunch, crunchcrunch," it sounded with a regularity unlike any sound in nature. It wasno rolling of the rocks, no creaking of the frozen pines, not even thetread of any beast of prey. It was the step of a man, and colonel or nocolonel, the man whose tread echoed in that wintry dawn, brought withhim to his doom some traces of that early training which had come to himfrom the drill-sergeant. In the streets of a great city a hundred menmay pass and no one hears their tread, or knows that he hears it, andyet in spite of the roaring of the rivers and the grinding of the ice,this one man's tread, even in the snow, seemed like the tread of anarmy, and the sound of it grew and grew until Corbett knew that theheavens heard it, and that its vibrations were echoed in hell.
At the last they saw him, this man richer than all other men, this manyellow with gold and crimson with other men's blood, and what they sawwas a wan, ragged figure, worn to a mere skeleton, its shoulders bent,plodding heavily along with the last load of yellow dust, stolen fromPete's Creek, hanging heavily in its hands.
For a moment Corbett doubted if this could really be that same stalwart,smooth-tongued knave who had jockeyed him out of his dollars for threeuseless claims, but a sharp metallic "clink" upon the rock beside himcalled him back to himself and reminded him that Rampike had no doubtseven if he had.
Inch by inch Ned saw the long barrel of the Winchester pushed out overthe rock, until it rested firmly, its deadly muzzle dark in the dimlight of dawn.
Slowly Rampike lowered his head until his cheek lay against the coldmetal and his eye trained the weapon upon the man who for gold had nothesitated to kill two of his fellows.
One more beat of his heart and he too would feel the kiss of the coldlead and go whither those others had gone.
"My God, I can't do it!--Cruickshank!" cried Corbett, and as he criedout he sprang to his feet and threw up Rampike's rifle.
"Cruickshank!" the cry startled the silence, so that all nature seemedto shudder at the sound, and "Cruickshank!" "Cruickshank!" the rocksrepeated until the sound died away amongst the snows at the head of thecanyon.
At the first sound of that cry he whose name it was stopped, and as heturned to look across the river the white light of dawn came down andstruck him across the face, so that those who looked could see the linesgraven on it by fear and hunger and remorse, and then his hands wentwildly up towards heaven and he fell.
The path which he had trodden so often crossed at this place a sheerslope of hardened snow, in which he had cut footsteps for himself,narrow indeed, but sufficient for the safety of a careful man. Until nowhe had never slipped or dreamed of slipping, and yet now with that cryin his ear, with the last load of gold in his hand, with the riveralmost clear enough for flight, he slipped and fell. Those who lookedsaw only a face full of mad fear, they heard only the clang of the metalwash-pan, which he wore as miners wear it, at his belt, and then, quickas the first ray of the dawn shoots across the mountain-side,Cruickshank shot down that ice-slope, and with a dull heavy plunge, sankin the ice-choked river.
For minutes, which seemed hours, the two men who lay behind the rockneither spoke nor moved, only they stared with wide eyes at the emptytrail where he had stood, and the jostling hummocks of ice in the riveramongst which he sank.
"Wal,
" said Rampike at last, "that's all, and I guess we take the pot."And he turned to where the canoe full of gold, the price of three men'slives, lay alone in the gray light of dawn.
Even as he spoke the canoe moved. Some will say that the ice on which itrested had been sucked away by the rising river, and that so, it sliddown naturally and was borne along with all the other river waifs,--deadpines and dead men's bodies.
But Rampike, who saw the thing, says that hands like the hands of thedead laid hold upon it and drew it away.
Then they watched it drift out amongst the ice into the Frazer, andthere for a while the great river played with it, and moaned and laughedover it by turns, and then it sank, and the gold that was in it, and thesin which that gold begot, are a portion of the load which the old riveris so glad to lay down as she rushes into the salt sea beyond thesand-heads at New Westminster.
_L'envoi._
My story is told, and the days which I wrote of have passed away, butsomething is still left to remind old-timers of the rush of '62. Pete'sCreek is still yielding a fair return for work done upon it by acompany, whose chairman is our old friend, Steve Chance, but suchpockets as that found under Phon's boulder have never been found again.
As for Ned Corbett, he is a rancher now on those yellow Chilcotinuplands, and the gold which pleases him best is that left by the sunupon his miles and miles of sweet mountain grass. If others have moregold, Ned has all that gold can purchase by the Frazer or elsewhere,work which he loves, and such health, spirits, and moderate wealth asshould satisfy an honest man.
+---------------------------------------------------+|Transcriber's note: || ||Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. || |+---------------------------------------------------+
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