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Gold, Gold, in Cariboo! A Story of Adventure in British Columbia

by Clive Phillipps-Wolley · English · Gutenberg #45870 · 469,035 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Gold, Gold, in Cariboo! A Story of Adventure in British Columbia

Author: Clive Phillipps-Wolley

Illustrator: Godfrey C. Hindley


        
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                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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"GOLD, GOLD, IN CARIBOO!"


[Illustration: CORBETT SEIZES HIS ONE CHANCE FOR LIFE.]


GOLD, GOLD, IN CARIBOO!

A Story of Adventure in British Columbia

by

CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY

Author of "Snap" "A Sportsman's Eden" &c.

Illustrated by Godfrey C. Hindley

New Edition







Blackie and Son Limited
London Glasgow and Dublin
1903




CONTENTS.

CHAP.                                       Page
     I. THE GOLD FEVER,                        9

    II. A "GILT-EDGED" SPECULATION,           23

   III. A LITTLE GAME OF POKER,               33

    IV. THE MOTHER OF GOLD,                   41

     V. "IS THE COLONEL 'STRAIGHT?'"          52

    VI. THE WET CAMP,                         64

   VII. FACING DEATH ON THE STONE-SLIDE,      73

  VIII. THEIR FIRST "COLOURS,"                82

    IX. UNDER THE BALM-OF-GILEAD TREE,        89

     X. THE SHADOWS BEGIN TO FALL,            97

    XI. "JUMP OR I'LL SHOOT,"                107

   XII. A SHEER SWINDLE,                     117

  XIII. THE BULLET'S MESSAGE,                125

   XIV. WHAT THE WOLF FOUND,                 132

    XV. IN THE DANCE-HOUSE,                  144

   XVI. THE PRICE OF BLOOD,                  153

  XVII. CHANCE'S GOLD-FEVER RETURNS,         162

 XVIII. ON THE COLONEL'S TRAIL AGAIN,        170

   XIX. "GOOD-BYE, LILLA,"                   177

    XX. THE ACCURSED RIVER,                  184

   XXI. PETE'S CREEK,                        192

  XXII. GOLD BY THE GALLON!                  203

 XXIII. THE HORNET'S NEST,                   211

  XXIV. DROWNING IN THE FOREST,              222

   XXV. IN THE CAMP OF THE CHILCOTINS,       234

  XXVI. RAMPIKE'S WINTER QUARTERS,           243

 XXVII. THE SEARCH FOR PHON,                 250

XXVIII. THE KING OF THE BIG-HORNS,           258

  XXIX. PHON'S RETURN,                       266

   XXX. CRUICKSHANK AT LAST!                 276




ILLUSTRATIONS

                                                       Page
CORBETT SEIZES HIS ONE CHANCE FOR LIFE       _Frontis._  80

"WITH A SCREAM OF FEAR THE CHINAMAN SPRANG OUT"         116

LILLA ACCOSTS THE COLONEL IN THE DANCE-HOUSE            146

"GOLD--GOLD IN FLAKES, AND LUMPS, AND NUGGETS"          210




CHAPTER I.

THE GOLD FEVER.


In the April of 1862, Victoria, British Columbia, was slowly recovering
from what her inhabitants described as a serious "set back."

From the position of a small Hudson Bay station she had suddenly risen
in '58 to the importance of a city of 17,000 inhabitants, from which
high estate she had fallen again with such rapidity, that in 1861 there
were only 5000 left in her to mourn the golden days of the "Frazer River
humbug."

In '48 the gold fever broke out in California, and for ten years, in the
words of an eye-witness, 50,000 adventurers of every hue, language, and
clime were drifting up and down the slopes of the Great Sierra, in
search of gold, ready to rush this way or that at the first rumour of a
fresh find.

In '58 California's neighbour, British Columbia, took the fever. The cry
of "Gold, gold!" was raised upon the Frazer, and the wharves of San
Francisco groaned beneath the burden of those who sought to take ship
for this fresh Eldorado.

In a year most of these pilgrims had returned from the new shrine,
poorer by one year of their short lives, beaten back by the grim canyons
of the Frazer river, or cheated of their reward by those late floods,
which kept the golden sands hidden from their view. In '58 and '59 the
miner cursed Victoria as a city of hopes unfulfilled, and left her to
dream on undisturbed of the greater days to come.

She looked as if, on this April day of '62, her dreams were of the
fairest. The air, saturated with spring sunshine, was almost too soft
and sweet to be wholesome for man. There was a languor in it which
dulled the appetite for work; merely to live was happiness enough;
effort seemed folly, and if a man could have been found with energy
enough to pray, he would have prayed only that no change might come to
him, that the gleam of the blue waters of the straits and the diamond
brightness of the distant snow-peaks might remain his for ever, balanced
by the soft green of the island pine-woods: that the hollow drumming of
the mating grouse and the song of the meadow lark, and the hum of waking
nature might continue to caress his ear, while only the scent of the
fresh-sawn lumber suggested to him that labour was the lot of man.

And yet, in spite of this seeming dreaminess in nature, the old earth
was busy fashioning new things out of the old, and the hearts of men all
along the Pacific slope were waking and thrilling in answer to the new
message of Mammon--"Gold! gold by the ton, to be had for the gathering
in Cariboo!" The reports which had come down from Quesnel, of the
fortunes made in '61 upon such creeks as Antler and Williams, had
restored heart to the Victorians, and even to those Californian miners
who still sojourned in their midst, so that quite half the people in the
town, old residents as well as new-comers, were only waiting for the
snows to melt, ere they rushed away to the mining district beyond the
Bald Mountains.

But the snows tarry long in the high places of British Columbia, and the
days went on in spite of the men and their desire, and bread had to be
earned even in such an Elysium as Vancouver Island, with all the gold
which a man could want, as folks said, within a few weeks' march of
them; so that hands and brains were busy, in spite of the temptations of
Hope and the spring sunshine. Moreover, there were dull dogs even then
in Victoria, who believed more in the virtue of steady toil than in
gold-mining up at Cariboo.

Thus it happened, then, that a big, yellow-headed axeman, and a ray of
evening sunlight, looking in together through an open doorway upon Wharf
Street, found a man within in his shirt sleeves, still busily engaged
upon his daily task.

"Hullo, Corbett, how goes it? Come right in and take a smoke."

The voice, a cheery one with a genuine welcome in it, came from the
inside of the house, and in answer the axeman heaved his great shoulder
up from the door-post and loafed in.

In every movement of this man there was a suggestion of healthy
weariness, that most luxurious and delightful sensation which comes over
him who has used his muscles throughout the day in some one of those
outdoor forms of labour which earn an appetite, even if they do not gain
a fortune.

As he stood in the little room looking quizzically at his friend's
work, Ned Corbett, in his old blue shirt and overalls, with the axe
lying across one bare brown forearm, might have served an artist as a
model for Labour; but the artist into whose studio he had come had no
need for such models. There was no money in painting such subjects, and
Steve Chance painted for dollars, and for dollars only. Round the room
at the height of a man's shoulder was stretched a long, long strip of
muslin (not canvas, canvas would cost six bits a picture), and this
strip had been sized and washed over with colour. When Corbett entered,
Chance had just slapped on the last patch of this preliminary coat of
paint, so that now there was nothing more to be done until the morrow.

"Well, Steve, how many works of art have you knocked off to-day?" asked
Corbett.

"Works of art be hanged!" replied his friend. "I've covered about twenty
feet of muslin, and that at five dollars a picture isn't a bad day's
work. What have you done?"

"Let me see, I've cut down a tree or two and earned an appetite,
and--oh, yes, a couple of dollars to satisfy the same. Isn't that
enough?"

"All depends upon the way you look at things. I call it fooling your
time away."

"And I call this work of yours a waste of talent worse, fifty times
worse, than my waste of time. Look at that thing, for instance;" and Ned
pointed to a large canvas, bright with all the colours of the rainbow.

"That! Well, you needn't look as if the thing might bite, Ned. That is
the new map of Ophir, a land brimming 'ophir'--forgive the joke--with
coarse gold, and, what is more important, bonded by those immaculate
knights of the curbstone, Messrs. Dewd and Cruickshank."

"An advertisement, is it? Well, it is ugly enough even for that. How
much lower do you mean to drag your hapless art, you vandal? 'Auctioning
pictures,' as you call it, is bad enough, but this is simple
sign-painting!"

"Well, and why not, if sign-painting pays? You take my advice, Ned; get
the 'sugar' first, the fame will come at its leisure. Sign-painting is
honest anyway, and more remunerative than felling trees, you bet."

"That may be," replied the younger man, balancing his axe in his strong
hands, "and more intellectual, I suppose; but, by George, there's a
pleasure in every ringing blow with the axe, and the scent of the fresh
pine-wood is sweeter than the smell of your oil-paints."

"Pot-paints, Ned, two bits a pot. We don't run to tube-paints in this
outfit."

"Well, pot-paints if you like; but even so you are not making a fortune.
We can't always sell those panoramas of yours, you know, even at a
dollar a foot."

"That's _your_ fault, Ned; you've no eye for the latent merits of my
pictures, and therefore make a shocking mess of the auctioneer's
department. However, I am not wedded to my art. If lumbering and
painting don't pay, what do you say to real estate?" and as he spoke,
Chance put his "fixins" together and proceeded to lock up the studio for
the night.

"Real estate! Why, fifty per cent of the inhabitants of the Queen City
are real estate agents professionally, and most of the others are
amateurs. Be a little original, outside your art anyway, old fellow. I
don't want anything to do with real estate, except in acre blocks
beyond the city limits, and a jolly long way beyond at that!"

"Is that so?" asked a mellow voice from behind the last speaker. "Then,
my dear sir, Messrs. Dewd and Cruickshank can fix you right away. What
do you say to a little farm on the gorge, fairly swarming with game, and
admirably suited for either stock raising or grain growing?"

"Viticulture, market-gardening, or a gentleman's park! Better go the
whole hog at once, Cruickshank," laughed Chance, turning round to greet
the new-comer, a dark, stout man with an unlit cigar stuck in the corner
of his mouth.

"You must have your joke, Mr. Chance; but the farm is really a gem for
all that, and with the certainty of a large advance in price this
summer, a man could not do better than buy."

"What, is the farm better than a claim in Ophir?" laughed Chance.

"Ah, well, that is another matter!" said Cruickshank. "The farm is a
gilt-edged investment. There is, of course, just a suspicion of
speculation in all gold-mining operations, though I can't see where the
risk is in such claims as those you mention. By the way, have you
finished the map?"

"Yes, here it is," replied the artist, producing a roll from under his
arm, and partly opening it to show it to his questioner. "I call it
rather a neat thing in sign-boards, don't you? I know I've used up all
my brightest colours upon it."

"Yes, it will do; and though I don't suppose Williams Creek is quite
that colour," laughed Cruickshank, "I am happy to say that our reports
are not over-coloured, even if our map is. Do you know the Duke of
Kent, Mr. Corbett?"

"No. Who is the Duke of Kent? I'd no idea that we had any aristocrats
out here."

"Oh, the duke's is only a fancy title; most titles are that way in the
far west."

"My sentiments exactly, Colonel Cruickshank," replied Corbett; and
anyone inclined to quarrel with him might have thought that Corbett
dwelt just a thought too long upon the "colonel."

But Cruickshank was not inclined to quarrel with a man who stood six
feet two, and girthed probably forty inches round the chest, and who was
reported, moreover, to be master of quite a snug little sum in good
English gold.

"The Duke of Kent has a claim alongside those which we bonded last fall,
and he tells me that he has already refused a hundred thousand dollars
for a half share in it."

"A hundred thousand dollars for a half share! Great Cæsar's ghost, why,
you could buy half Victoria for the money!" cried Chance.

"Well, not quite, but a good deal of it, and yet I've no doubt but that
we have quite as rich claims amongst those we offer for sale. How can it
be otherwise? They lie side by side on the same stream."

"Have you seen any of these claims yourself, colonel?" asked Corbett.

"Every one of them, my good sir. My clients are for the most part my own
countrymen, and you may bet that I won't let them be done by any beastly
Yank."

"Civil to you, Steve," laughed Corbett.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Chance, but there are Americans _and_ Americans;
and you can understand that a man who has spent the best years of his
life wearing the Queen's uniform feels hotly about some of the frauds
practised upon tender-feet by Californian bilks."

"Why, certainly; don't apologize. I suppose there are a few honest men
and a good many rogues in every nation. Did you say you had seen the
claims yourself? I thought you were in Victoria in the fall."

"No; Dewd and I were up together. I came down and he stayed there. There
is big money in them. Change your minds, gentlemen, and give up art for
gold-mining."

"No, thanks; I think not," replied Corbett.

"No! Well, you know best. Good-day to you. You won't take a drink, will
you?"

"No, I won't spoil my appetite even for a cock-tail."

"So long, then!" and with a flourish of his gold-headed cane, which was
meant to represent a military salute, the somewhat florid warrior dived
through a swing-door, over which was written in letters of gold, "The
Fashion Bar."

"Say, Corbett," remarked Chance as Cruickshank disappeared, "don't you
make yourself so deuced disagreeable to my best customers. Cruickshank's
orders keep our firm in bread and cheese, and I can see you want to kick
the fellow all the time he is in your company."

"All right, old chap; but I didn't say anything rude, did I? If he would
only drop the 'British army' and 'we English' I wouldn't even want to be
rude. What the deuce does he care whether he gets his dollars from a
Britisher or a Yank?"

"Not much, you bet! But here we are. Hullo, Phon, have you got the
muck-a-muck ready?"

"You bet you! Soup all ready. Muck-a-muck heap good to-day you see;"
and laughing and chattering Phon dived into the tent, and rattled about
the tin plates and clucked as if he were calling chickens to be fed.

Phon was a character in his way, and a good one at that; a little wizen,
yellow body, with an especially long pig-tail coiled up on his head like
a turban; eyes and tongue which were in perpetual motion, and a great
affection for the two white men, who treated him with the familiarity of
old friendship.

"What are you in such a deuce of a hurry for to-night, Phon?" asked
Corbett a little later, when the Chinaman rushed in to take away the
remains of dinner.

"S'pose I tell you, you no let me go?" replied the fellow, half
interrogatively.

"Go! of course I'll let you go. I couldn't help myself, I suppose. Where
are you going to--the hee-hee house?"

"No, no. Hee-hee house no good. No makee money there. Pay all the time.
Me go gamble."

"Gamble, you idiot! What, and lose all your pay for a month?"

"'Halo' (_anglice_ not) lose. Debbil come to me last night; debbil say,
'Phon, you go gamble, you win one hundred dollars.' I go win, you see."

"Please yourself. You'll see as much of that hundred dollars as you did
of the devil. Who's that calling?"

Phon went out of the tent for a moment and then returned, and holding up
the tent flap for someone to enter, said:

"Colonel Cruickshank want to see you. Me go now?"

"All right! go to blazes, only don't expect us to pay you any more wages
if you lose. Come in, colonel."

"Won't you come out instead, Mr. Corbett? It's better lying on the
grass outside than in to-night."

"Guess he is right, Ned. Come along, you lazy old beggar!" cried Chance.
And the three men in another minute were all lying prone on a blanket by
the embers of a camp-fire, smoking their pipes and chatting lazily.

Corbett's tent--a marvel of London make, convertible into anything from
a Turkish bath to a suit of clothes, and having every merit except the
essential one of portability--stood upon the very edge of the
encampment, commanding a view of the sea and the Olympic Range on the
farther shore.

The encampment itself was a kind of annexe of the town of Victoria,
standing where James Bay suburb now stands, although what is to-day
covered with villas and threatened by an extension of the electric
tramway was in '62 a place of willows and wild rosebushes.

Here lived part of the floating population of Victoria, miners _en
route_ to Cariboo, remittance-men sent away from home to go to the dogs
out of sight of their affectionate relatives, and a good many other
noisy good-fellows who liked to live in their shirt sleeves in the open
air.

Corbett and Chance were the aristocrats of this quarter, thanks to the
magnificence of their abode and the general "tonyness" of their outfit.
In their own hearts they knew that they were victims to their
outfitter--that they were living where they were instead of in a house
merely out of regard for their tent, and for those mysterious camp
appliances which all fitted into one another like Chinese puzzles.

That was where the shoe pinched. In a moment of pride they had pitched
their tent (according to written instructions) and unpacked their
"kitchen outfits," and _they had never been able to repack them_.

It was all very well to advertise the things as packing compactly into a
case two feet by one foot six inches, but it required an expert to pack
them; and so, unless they were minded to abandon their "fixings," they
had to stay by them. Therefore they stayed, and said they preferred the
open air, even when it rained, as it sometimes does even on Vancouver
Island.

Later on they learnt better, and were consoled for their losses by the
sight of the hundred and one "indispensable requisites of a camp life"
cast away by weary pilgrims all along the Frazer river road. It is a
pity that the gentlemen who sell camp outfits cannot be compelled to
pass one year in prospecting before they enter upon their trade.

But an April evening by the Straits of Fuca, with a freshly-lit pipe
between your teeth, will put you in charity even with a London
outfitter. The warm air was full of the scent of the sea and the sweet
smoke of the camp-fires, while the chorus of the bull-frogs sounded like
nature's protest against the advent of man.

As the darkness grew the forest seemed to close in round the intruding
houses, and for a while even the estate agent was silent, oppressed by
the majesty of night and nature.

It was Corbett who broke the silence at last.

"Do you know that long, blue valley, Steve--you can hardly see it
now,--the one that goes winding away back into the mountains from the
gate of the Angels?"

Steve nodded. He was too lazy to answer.

"That valley is my worst tempter. I know I ought to settle here and
work: keep a store and grow up with the country; but I can't do it. That
valley haunts me with longings to follow it through the blue mists to--"

"To the place where the gold comes from--eh, Ned? To the place where it
lies in lumps still, not worn into dust by its long journey down stream
from the heart of its parent mountain. Old Sobersides, you have been
reading your _Colonist_ too much lately."

Ned smiled, and knocking the ashes out of his pipe, began to refill it.

"How much of all these yarns about gold up at Antler and Williams Creek
do you believe, colonel?" he asked, turning to Cruickshank. "Do you
really think anyone ever took out fifty ounces in a day with a rocker?"

"I know it, my good sir. I have seen it. When Antler was found in 1860
the bed-rock was paved with gold, and you could not wash a shovelful of
dirt that had not from five to fifty dollars' worth of dust in it."

"Oh, there's gold up in Cariboo, Ned, but it wants finding. You've only
got to go into the saloons to know that there is plenty of dust for the
lucky ones. Fellows pay with pinches of dust for liquors whose names
they did not know a year ago."

"_Paid_, you mean, Chance," corrected Cruickshank. "They are all pretty
near stone-broke by now. But are you longing to go and bail up gold in
your silk hat, Mr. Corbett?"

"I am longing to be doing something new, colonel. I've taken the
prevalent fever, I think, and want to make one in this scrimmage. I
can't sit still and see band after band of hard-fists going north any
longer. Town life may be more profitable, perhaps, but I want to be
with the men."

"Bully for you, Ned! English solidity of intellect for ever! Why, you
villain, you're as bad a gambler as Yankee Chance."

"Worse, I expect, Mr. Chance," remarked Cruickshank, eyeing the two
young men critically. "You would play to win, he would play for the mere
fun of playing."

"Which would give me the advantage," retorted Corbett; "because in that
case I should stop when I was tired of the game."

"Never mind the argument," broke in Chance; "gambler or no gambler, if
you go I go. I'm sick of that picture of the pines and the waterfall,
anyway."

"So is Victoria. 'Bloomin' red clothes'-props and a mill-race,' one chap
called the last copy I tried to sell," muttered Corbett.

"Well, why not buy a couple of those claims of mine?" suggested
Cruickshank. "I always like to do a fellow-countryman a good turn, and
it would really be a genuine pleasure to me to put you two into a good
thing."

"How many have you left, Colonel Cruickshank?" He could not help it for
the life of him, but the moment Cruickshank became more than ordinarily
affectionate and open-hearted Corbett put on the colonel, and, as it
were, came on guard. He was angry with himself directly afterwards for
doing so, but he could no more help it than a man can help pulling
himself together when he hears the warning of the rattlesnake.

"Only three, Mr. Corbett; and I doubt whether I can hold those till
to-morrow morning. I am to meet a man in town at nine about them."

"What do you want for the three?"

"As a mere matter of curiosity?" put in Chance.

"Well, let me see. They are '100-foot' claims, right alongside the
places where the big hauls were made last year; but they are the last,
and as you are an Englishman and a friend--"

"Oh, please be good enough to treat this as a purely business matter,"
ejaculated Corbett, blushing up to the temples, whilst anyone looking at
Cruickshank might for the moment have thought that his speech had had
exactly the effect he intended it to have.

"Well, say two thousand dollars apiece; that is cheap and fair."

"Two thousand dollars apiece! What a chap you are to chaff,
Cruickshank!" cried Chance, breaking in. "Do you take us for
millionaires?"

"In embryo if you buy my shares, certainly, my dear sir."

"Perhaps. But look here, say a thousand dollars apiece, half cash, and
half when we make our pile."

"Can't do it; but I'll knock off a hundred dollars from each claim, as
we are friends."

"The market value is two thousand dollars, you say, Colonel Cruickshank
(my dear Chance, do leave this to me), and you have yourself inspected
these claims?"

"Certainly."

"And they are good workable claims, adjoining those you spoke of?"

"Undoubtedly, that gives them their principal value."

"Very well then, I'll buy the three. Here is a hundred dollars to bind
our bargain. We'll settle the rest to-morrow. Now, let me give you a
drink."

"Thank you. Are the claims to stand in your name?"

"In Chance's, Phon's, and mine. How will that do, Steve?"

"Settle it your own way; if you have gone crazy I suppose I must humour
you. But there is a good deal owing to our firm from yours, colonel,
isn't there?"

"Of course. That can be set off against a part of the sum due as payment
for the claims. Good-night, Mr. Corbett. Thank you for the confidence
you show in me. Treat a gentleman like a gentleman, and an honest man
like an honest man, say I."

"And a thief or a business man like a thief or a business man," muttered
Chance, as Cruickshank walked away. "Oh, Ned, Ned! What a lot nature
wasted on your muscles which she had much better have put into your
head!"




CHAPTER II.

A "GILT-EDGED" SPECULATION.


"Ned, were you drunk last night, or am I dreaming?" asked Chance next
morning, as the two sat over their breakfast, while the canoes of the
early Indian fishers stole out along the edges of the great kelp beds.

It was a lovely scene upon which Corbett's tent looked out, but Chance
at the moment had no eyes for the blue water, or the glories of the snow
range beyond, all he could think of was "three claims at two thousand
dollars apiece."

"Neither, that I am aware of, Steve. You eat as if you had all your
faculties about you, and I've no head ache."

"Then you did not buy three claims from Cruickshank at two thousand
dollars apiece?"

"Yes, I did; and why not?"

"Where is the money to come from?"

"I'll see to that," replied Corbett. "I am quite aware that six thousand
dollars is twelve hundred pounds; but if you don't want to take a share
in my speculation, I propose to invest that much of my capital in the
venture, and even if I lose it all I shall still have something left,
besides my muscles, thank God. You two, Phon and yourself, can work for
me on wages if you like, or we'll make some other arrangement to keep
the party together."

For a minute or two Chance said nothing, and then he began laughing
quietly to himself.

"Say, Ned, you took scarlatina pretty bad when you were a kiddy, didn't
you?"

"I don't remember, old chap. Why do you ask?"

"And whooping-cough, and measles, and chicken-pox, and now its gold
fever, and my stars isn't it a virulent attack?" and Chance broke out
laughing afresh.

"I don't see," began Corbett, growing rather red in the face.

"Oh, no; you don't see what all this has to do with me," interrupted
Chance, "and it's infernal impertinence on my part to criticise your
actions, and if I wasn't so small you would very likely punch my head. I
know all that. But, you see, we two are partners, and I am not going to
dissolve partnership because I think you are taking bigger risks than
you ought to. If you put up three thousand dollars I will put up as
much, and part of it can come out of the money owing to the firm."

"But why do this if you think the risk too big?" asked Corbett.

"Why ask questions, Ned? I feel like taking the risk; I am a Yankee,
and therefore a natural gambler. You of course are not, are you? And
then it's spring-time, and from twenty-three to the other end of
threescore years and ten is a long, long time; and even if we 'bust,'
there'll be lots of time to build again. So we will go halves, the third
claim to be held in Phon's name, and Phon to work on wages."

"Let us have old Phon in. Phon! Phon!" shouted Corbett.

The Chinaman, who was cleaning the tin plates by a creek hard by, came
slowly towards them.

"Well, Phon, did you lose all your dollars last night?" asked his
master.

"Me tell you debbil say me win--debbil know, you bet," replied Phon
coolly.

"And did you win?"

"Me win a hundred dollars--look!" and the little man held out a roll of
dirty notes, amounting to something more than the sum named.

"You were in luck, Phon. 'Spose I were you, I no go gamble any more,"
remarked Corbett, dropping into that pigeon English, which people seem
to think best adapted to the comprehension of the Chinaman.

"Oh yes, you go gamble too. Debbils bodder me very bad last night. They
say you go gamble, Chance he go gamble, Phon he go gamble too. All go
gamble togedder. And then debbil he show me gold, gold,--so much gold me
no able to carry it. Where you goin' now?"

"I guess your friends, the devils, might have told you that too,"
remarked Chance. "Don't you know?"

"No, me no savey. You tell me."

"Corbett and myself are going up to Cariboo mining, and if you like you
can come as cook, or you can come and work on wages in our claims. How
would you like that?"

"Me come, all-lite me come; only you give me one little share in the
claims--you let me put in one hundred dollars I win last night."

"Better keep what you've got and not gamble any more," replied Corbett
kindly.

"Halo! Halo keep him. 'Spose you not sell me share I go gamble again
to-night."

"Better let him have his way, Ned. Let the whole crowd go in together,
'sink or swim.'"

"Very well, Phon, then you will come."

"You bet you, Misser Corbett. Who you 'spose cook for you 'spose I no
come?" And having proposed this final conundrum, Phon retired again to
his kitchen.

"Rum, the way in which he seemed to know all about our movements, Ned,"
remarked Chance, when the Chinaman had done.

"Oh, he overheard what we said last night, or at breakfast this
morning," replied Corbett.

"He wasn't here last night, and he was down by the stream whilst we were
at breakfast."

"All right, old man, perhaps his 'debbil' told him. It doesn't much
matter anyway. Did you see this piece in the _Colonist_?"

"About us? No. Read it out."

"'We understand that Colonel Cruickshank, the Napoleon of Victorian
finance, the mammoth hustler of the Pacific coast, has determined to
conduct those gentlemen who have bought his bonded claims to the
fortunes which await them. This additional proof of the colonel's belief
in the property which he offers for sale should ensure a keen
competition for the one claim still left upon his hands, which we
understand will be raffled for this afternoon at 4 p.m. at Smith's
saloon. Tickets, ten dollars each. We are informed that amongst the
purchasers of claims in the Cruickshank reserve are an English gentleman
largely interested in the lumber business, and an American artist
rapidly rising into public notice.'"

"What cheer, my lumber king!" laughed Chance as Corbett laid down the
paper. "These journalists are wonderful fellows, but I suspect most of
that paragraph was inspired and paid for by the 'mammoth hustler.' By
the way, if it is true that he means to personally conduct a party to
Williams Creek, it does really look as if he had some belief in the
claims."

"Yes, IF he means to; but I expect that is simply to draw people to his
raffle this afternoon."

"Probably; but if he were to go up to Williams Creek we might as well go
up with him. You see, he has travelled along the trail before."

"Well, I'll see about that, and make any arrangements I can for getting
up to Cariboo, if you will try to get our accounts settled up, Steve.
I'm no good at figures, as you know."

"That's what!" replied Chance laconically; and the two young men got
upon their legs and prepared to start on their day's business.

It will be as well here to enter upon a short explanation of the law as
it then stood in British Columbia with regard to the bonding of claims.
Experience had shown that in the upper country, early winters and late
springs, with their natural accompaniment of deep snows, made mining
impossible for about half the year. In consequence of this a law had
been passed enabling miners to "bond" claims taken up late in the fall
until the next spring. Upon claims so bonded it was not necessary to do
any work until the 1st of June of the ensuing year, so that from
November to June the claims lay safe under the wing of the law; but
should their owners neglect to put in an appearance or fail to commence
work upon the 1st of June, they forfeited all right to the claims, which
could then be "jumped" or seized upon by the first comer.

It was under this law that Corbett and Chance had bought, so that it was
imperatively necessary that they should reach their claims by the 1st of
June; and although there was still ample time in which to make the
journey, there was no time to waste. The Cariboo migration had already
begun, and every day saw fresh bands of hard-fists leave Victoria for
the mines. Already the gamblers had gone, the whisky trains and other
pack trains had started, and the drain upon the stock of full-grown
manhood in Victoria was easily noticeable. It was no vain boast which
the miners made that the men of Cariboo were the pick of the men of
their day. Physically, at any rate, it would have been hard indeed to
find a body of men tougher in fibre and more recklessly indifferent to
hardships than the pioneers who pushed their way through the Frazer
valley to the gold-fields beyond. In that crowd there was no room for
the stripling or the old man. The race for gold upon the Frazer was one
in which only strong men of full age could live even for the first lap.

And this was the crowd which Corbett and Chance sought to join. To some
men the mere idea of a railway journey, entered upon without due
consideration and ample forethought, is fraught with terrors. Luckily
neither Corbett nor Chance were men of this sort. Chance was a Yankee to
the tips of his fingers, and had therefore no idea of distance or fear
of travel. The world was _nearly_ big enough for him, and he cared just
as little about "crossing the herring-pond" as he did about embarking on
a ride in a 'bus. As for Corbett, nature had made him a nomad--one of
those strangely restless beings, who, having a lovely home, and knowing
it to be lovely, still long for constant change, and circle the world
with tireless feet, only to bring home the report that "after all
England is the only place fit for a fellow to live in." The odd part of
it all is, that that being their conviction, most of these wanderers
contrive to live out of England for three parts of their lives.

It was no wonder, then, that when Corbett and Chance met again at dusk
everything had been, as Chance said, "fixed right away."

"It's a true bill about Cruickshank, old man," Corbett said. "And if you
can get the bills paid and our kit packed he wants us to start with him
on the _Umatilla_ for Westminster the day after to-morrow."

"I don't know about getting the bills paid," replied Chance. "A good
many fellows who owe us money appear to have gone before to Cariboo, but
I reckon we must look upon that as the opening of an account to our
credit in the new country."

"Not much of an account to draw upon; but I suppose it can't be helped.
I believe, though, that to do the thing properly we ought both to get
stone-broke before starting," remarked Corbett.

"That will come later. Hullo, Cruickshank! what is in the wind now?"
cried Steve, turning to the new-comer.

"Gold, gold, nothing but gold, Chance. But I say, gentlemen, are those
your packs?" asked the colonel, pointing to two small mountains of
luggage which nearly filled the interior of the tent.

"Yes. That is Chance's pack, and this is mine. There will be a sort of
joint-stock pack made up to-morrow of the kitchen stuff and the tent.
And I think that will be all."

"And you think that will be all, Mr. Corbett?" repeated Cruickshank.
"You are a strong man; can you lift that pack?" and he pointed to the
biggest of the two.

"Oh yes, easily; carry it a mile if necessary," replied Corbett,
swinging the great bundle up on to his shoulders.

"You _are_ a stout fellow," admitted Cruickshank admiringly; "but hasn't
it occurred to you that you may have to carry all you want for a good
many miles? And even if you can do that, who is to carry the joint-stock
pack? Not Phon, surely?"

"Well, but won't there be any pack ponies?" asked Corbett.

"For hire on the road, do you mean? Certainly not."

"All right, then," replied Corbett, after a minute or two spent in
solemnly and somewhat sadly contemplating all the neatly-packed camp
equipage. "I can do with two blankets and a tin pannikin if it comes to
that. Can't you, Steve?"

"A tin pannikin and blanket goes," answered Chance. "To blazes with all
English outfits anyway!"

"Well, I don't know about that," put in Cruickshank, who seemed hardly
as well pleased at his comrade's readiness to forswear comfort as might
have been expected. "I thought that you fellows might like to take a few
comforts along with you, so I had mentally arranged a way in which we
might combine pleasure with profit."

"Pleasure with profit by all means, my boy. Unfold your scheme, colonel;
we are with you," cried Chance.

"Well, stores are terribly high up in Cariboo. Whisky is about the only
thing these packers think of packing up to the mines, and if you fellows
had the coin I could easily buy a little train of cayuses down at
Westminster pretty cheap, and load them up with stuff which would pay
you cent per cent, and between us the management of a little train like
that would be a mere nothing."

"How about packing? You cain't throw a diamond hitch by instinct,"
remarked Chance, who knew a little from hearsay of the life of the road.

"Oh, I can throw the hitch, and so I guess can your heathen, and we'll
deuced soon teach both of you to take the on-side if you are wanted to."

"How much would such a train cost?"

"The ponies ought not to cost more than fifty dollars apiece; as to the
stores, of course it depends upon what you choose to take. The ponies
will carry about two hundred pounds apiece, if they are good ones."

"What do you say to it, Steve?" asked Ned.

"Seems a good business," replied Chance, "and we may as well put our
last dollars into a pack-train as leave them in the bank or chuck them
into the Frazer. A pack-train goes."

And so it was settled that the two friends should invest the balance of
their funds in a pack-train and stores for Cariboo. The venture looked a
promising one, with no possibility of failure or loss, and even if
things went wrong the boys would only be stone-broke; and who cares
whether he is stone-broke or not at twenty-three, in a new country with
no one dependent upon him?

It was only eighteen months before that Edward Corbett had left home, a
home in which it was part of the duty of about five different human
beings to see that Master Edward wanted for nothing. At about the same
time one of the finest houses in New York would have been disturbed to
its very foundations if it were suspected that Mr. Steve Chance wanted
for any of the luxuries of the nineteenth century, and yet here were
Steve Chance and Ned Corbett, their last dollar invested in a doubtful
venture, their razors abandoned, their toilet necessaries reduced to one
cake of soap and a towel between two (Cruickshank condemned the habit of
washing altogether upon the road), and their whole stock of household
goods reduced to two light packs, to be carried mile after mile upon
their own strong shoulders. There was daily labour ahead of them such as
a criminal would hardly have earned for punishment at home, there was a
certainty before them of bad food, restless nights, thirst, hunger, and
utter discomfort, and yet this life was of their own choosing, and a
smile hovered round the lips of each of them as the pipes dropped out of
their mouths and they turned over to sleep.

As for "gold," the prize which both of them appeared to be making all
these sacrifices for, neither of the boys, oddly enough, had thought of
it that night. With Phon it was different, but then he was a celestial.
He played for the stakes. Both the whites played, though in different
ways, for the fun of the game.




CHAPTER III.

A LITTLE GAME OF POKER.


"Well, Ned, how do our fellow-passengers strike you? This is a pretty
hard crowd, isn't it?" asked Chance, as his eyes wandered over the mob
of men of every nationality, who were jostling one another on board the
steamer _Umatilla_, ten minutes after she had left Victoria for New
Westminster.

"Yes, they look pretty tough, most of them," assented Corbett; "but a
three-weeks' beard, a patch in the seat of your pants, and a coat of
sun-tan, will bring you down to the same level, Steve. Civilized man
reverts naturally to barbarism as soon as he escapes from the tailor and
the hair-dresser."

"That's what, sonny! And I believe the only difference between a white
man and a siwash, is that one has had more sun and less soap than the
other."

"Oh, hang it, no! I draw the line there," cried Corbett. "But look,
there go the gamblers already;" and Ned pointed to a little group which
had gathered together aft, the leading spirit amongst them appearing to
be a dark, overdressed person, who was inviting everybody at the top of
his voice to "Chip in and take a drink."

"They don't mean to lose much time, do they?" remarked Chance. "And, by
the way, do you see that the 'mammoth hustler,' our own colonel, is
among them?"

"And seems to know every rascal in the gang," muttered Corbett.

"Come and look on, Ned, and don't growl. You don't expect a real-estate
agent to be a saint, do you?" remonstrated Chance.

"Not I. I don't care a cent for cards. You go if you like. I'll just
loaf and look at the scenery."

"As you please. I don't take much stock in scenery unless I have painted
it myself, and even that sours on me sometimes;" and with this frank and
quaintly expressed confession, Steve Chance turned and pushed his way
through the crowd to a place behind Cruickshank, who welcomed him
effusively, and introduced him to his friends.

Ned saw the artist gulp down what looked like a doctor's prescription,
and light up a huge black cigar, and then turning his back upon the
noisy expectorating crowd, he leant upon the bulwarks and forgot all
about it.

Before his eyes stretched a vast field of blue water; blue water without
a ripple upon it, save such as the steamer made, or the diving "cultus"
duck, which the boat almost ran down, before the bird woke and saw its
danger. Here and there on this blue field were groups of islands, wooded
to the water's edge, and inhabited only by the breeding ducks and a few
deer. As yet no one owned these islands, and, except for an occasional
fishing Indian, no one had ever set foot on most of them. Everything
spoke of rest and dreamful ease. What birds there were, were silent and
asleep, rocked only in their slumbers by the swell from the passing
boat, or else following in her wake on gliding wings which scarcely
seemed to stir. There was no wind to fret the sea, or stir an idle sail.
Nature was asleep in the spring sunlight, her calm contrasting strangely
with the noise, and passion, and unrest on board the tiny boat which was
puffing and churning its way through the still waters of the straits.

As for Ned, his ears were as deaf to the oaths and noise behind him as
his eyes were blind to the calm beauty beneath them. His eyes were wide
open, but his mind was not looking through them. As a matter of fact Ned
Corbett, the real Ned Corbett, was just then day-dreaming somewhere on
the banks of the Severn.

"Can you spare me a light, sir?"

This was the first sound that broke in upon his dreams, and Ned felt
instinctively in his waistcoat pocket, and handed the intruder the
matches which he found there.

"Thank you. I was fairly clemmed for a smoke."

"_Clemmed_" for a smoke! It was odd, but the dialect was the dialect of
Ned's dream still, and as he looked at the speaker, a broad burly
fellow, who evidently had made up his mind to have a chat, a pouch of
tobacco was thrust out to him with the words: "Won't you take a fill
yourself. It's pretty good baccy, and it ought to be. I had it sent to
me all the way from the Wyle Cop."

"The Wyle Cop!" ejaculated Ned. "I thought there was only one Wyle Cop.
Where do you come from, then?"

The stranger's face broadened into an honest grin.

"What part do I come from? Surely you ought to guess. Dunno yo' know a
Shropshire mon, when yo' sees un?" he added, dropping into his native
dialect, and holding out to Corbett a hand too broad to get a good grip
of, and as hard as gun-metal.

Ned took the proffered hand eagerly. The sound of the home dialect
stirred every chord in his heart.

"How did you know I was Shropshire?" he asked, laughing.

"How did I know? Well, I heard your friend call you Corbett, and that
and your yellow head and blue eyes were enough for me. But say," he
continued, resuming the Yankee twang which he had acquired in many a
western mining camp, "if that young man over there is any account to
you, you'd better go and see after him. They'll skin him clean in
another half hour unless he owns the Bank of England."

Corbett's eyes involuntarily followed those of his newly-found friend,
and he started as they rested upon Steve Chance, who now sat nervously
chewing at the end of an unlit cigar in the middle of the poker players.

"Your friend ain't a bad player, but he ain't old enough for that
crowd," remarked Roberts; and so saying he pushed a way for himself and
his brother Salopian through the crowd to the back of Chance's chair.

Except for the addition of Chance, and another youngish man who appeared
to be at least half-drunk, the party of poker players was the same which
sat down to play when the _Umatilla_ left the Victoria wharf.

Cruickshank faced Chance, and the same noisy dark fellow, who had been
anxious to assuage everyone's thirst in the morning, appeared to be
still ready to stand drinks and cigars. But the little crowd was quieter
than it had been in the morning. The players had settled down to
business.

"How deuced like Cruickshank that fellow is!" whispered Corbett to
Roberts.

"Which?" answered his friend. "There are two Cruickshanks playing--Dan
and Bub."

"But is the colonel any relation to the other?"

"I do not know which you call the colonel: never heard him called by
that name before; but that's Bub" (pointing to the ringleader of the
party), "and that's Dan" (pointing to the colonel). "Some say they are
brothers, some say they are cousins. Anyway, I know _one_ is a
scoundrel."

"The deuce you do. Which of them?" But his inquiries were cut short and
his attention diverted by the action of a new-comer, who just then
pushed past him with a curt, "'Scuse _me_, sir."

"Let him through," whispered Roberts. "I tipped him the wink, and if you
let him alone he'll fix them."

Ned was mystified, but did as he was bid. Indeed it was too late to
attempt to do otherwise, for the last-joined in that little crowd, a
withered gray man, whose features looked as if they had been hardened by
a hundred years of rough usage, had quietly forced his way to the front
until he had reached a seat at Steve Chance's elbow. It was noticeable
that though the crowd was by no means tolerant of others who tried to
usurp a front place amongst them, it gave way by common consent to the
new-comer, who was moreover specially honoured with a nod and a smile
from each of the Cruickshanks.

Steve only seemed inclined to resent the old man's familiarity, and for
any effect it had he might as well have hidden his resentment.

"Pretty new to this coast, ain't you, sir?" remarked Mr. Rampike, after
he had watched the game in silence for some minutes.

"Yes, I've only been out from the East a year," replied Steve shortly,
as he examined his hand.

"Bin losing quite a bit, haven't you?" persisted his tormentor. Steve
growled out that he _had_ lost "some," and turned his back on old
Rampike with an emphatic rudeness which would have silenced most men.

"'Scuse me, sir, one moment," remarked Rampike utterly unabashed, and
half rising to inspect Steve's hand over his shoulder.

A glance seemed to satisfy him.

"Who cut those cards?" he sung out.

"Dan Cruickshank," answered a voice from the crowd.

"Who dole those cards?" he persisted.

"Bub Cruickshank," replied the voice.

"Then, young man, you pass;" and without stirring a muscle of his face
he coolly took from the astounded Steve four queens, and threw them upon
the table.

For a moment Steve sat open-mouthed, utterly astounded by his adviser's
impudence, and when he tried to rise and give vent to his feelings,
Corbett's heavy hand was on his shoulder and kept him down.

Meanwhile an angry growl rose from the gamblers, but it was drowned at
once in the laugh of the crowd, as without a sign of feeling of any
kind, or a single comment, old Rampike slowly pulled from a pocket under
his coat-tails an old, strangely-fashioned six-shooter, which he began
to overhaul in the casual distrait manner of one who takes a mild
interest in some weapon of a remote antiquity.

One by one, as the old hard-fist played with his ugly toy, those who
objected to his intervention found that they had business elsewhere, so
that when at last he let down the hammer, and replaced his "gun" under
his coat-tails, Steve and the two Shropshiremen alone remained near him.
Glancing round for a moment, the old man came as near smiling as a man
could with features such as his, and then recovering himself he turned
to Steve and remarked:

"This ain't no concern of mine, mister, but my pardner there, Roberts, I
guess he takes some stock in you and he called me, so you'll 'scuse my
interfering, but ef you should happen to play agen with California
bilks, you mout sometimes go your pile on a poor hand, but pass four
aces, quicker nor lightning, if Bub Cruickshank deals 'em," with which
piece of advice the old man retired again into his shell, becoming, as
far as one could judge, an absolutely silent machine for the chewing of
tobacco.

Chance, now that he had had time to pull himself together, would gladly
have had a talk with his ally; but old Rampike would have none of him,
and Corbett, in obedience to a sign from Roberts, put his arm through
his friend's and carried him off to another part of the ship.

"Let the old man alone," remarked Roberts, "talking isn't in his line.
That is my share of the business. I sing and he fiddles."

"All right, as you please; but I say, Mr. Roberts," said Chance, "what
in thunder did your partner mean by making me throw down four queens?"

"Mean! why, that Bub Cruickshank had four kings or better. You don't
suppose that those chaps are here for their health, do you?"

"Here for their health?"

"Well, you don't suppose that they have come all the way to British
Columbia to play poker on the square?"

"Then who are the Cruickshanks?" demanded Chance.

"That is more than I know. Bub Cruickshank is just about as low-down a
gambler as there is on the coast; not a chap who pays up and stands
drinks when he is bust, like the count and that lot."

"And is the colonel his brother?"

"Some say he is, some say he isn't. But I never knew him regularly on
the gambling racket before, though he won a pile of money up at Williams
Creek last fall.

"Then you have been in Cariboo," Corbett remarked.

"In Cariboo? Rather! I was there when Williams Creek was found, and for
all that had to sing my way out with a splinter in my hand, and not a
nickel in my pocket."

"How do you mean 'sing your way out?'"

"I mean just what I say. My hand went back on me and swelled, so that I
couldn't work, and I just had to sing for my grub as I went along. Old
Rampike had a fiddle and used to play, and I used to make up the songs
and sing 'em. Perhaps you've heard the 'Old pack mule.' It's a great
favourite at the mines:


     "Ted staked and lost the usual way,
       But his loss he took quite cool;
     He was near the mines, and he'd start next day
       Riding on his old pack mule."


"Riding, riding, riding on his old pack mule," sang Chance.

"Oh, you know it, do you? Seems to me it suits your case pretty well.
Well, _I_ made that;" and so saying the poet protruded his portly bosom
three inches further into space, with the air of one who had done well
by his fellow-men and knew it.

"Are you coming up to Cariboo this spring?" asked Corbett.

"No, we haven't dust enough to pay our way so far, more's the pity."

"Why not come with us? I'll find the dollars if you'll lend a hand with
our pack-train," suggested Corbett.

"Well, I don't know, perhaps I might do worse; and as to that, if you
are taking a pack-train along I daresay I could pretty nearly earn my
grub packing. But I must talk it over with Rampike."

"All right, do you fix it your own way," put in Chance; "but mind, if
you feel at all like coming, there need be no difficulty about the
dollars either for you or your partner. I am pretty heavily in your debt
anyway."

"Not a bit of it. Those bilks owe us something perhaps, and if they get
a chance they won't forget to pay their score. But I guess they'll
hardly care to tackle Rampike, or me either for the matter of that;" and
whistling merrily his favourite tune, "Riding, riding, riding on the old
pack mule," the Cariboo poet went below for refreshment.




CHAPTER IV.

"THE MOTHER OF GOLD."


From Victoria to the mouth of the Frazer river is about seventy miles,
and thence to New Westminster is at least another sixteen. As the
steamers which used to ply between the two young cities in '62 were by
no means ocean racers, none of the passengers on board the S.S.
_Umatilla_ were in the least degree disappointed, although the shadows
of evening were beginning to fall before they passed the Sandheads, and
ran into the yellow waters of the Frazer.

Very few of those on board had eyes for scenery. A rich-looking bar or
a wavy riband of quartz high up on a mountain-side would have attracted
more attention from that crowd than all the beauties of the Yosemite,
and even had they been as keen about scenery as Cook's tourists, there
was but little food for their raptures in the delta they were entering.
The end of a river, like the end of a life, is apt to be ugly and dull,
and the Frazer exhibits no exception to this rule. Child as she is of
the winter's snows and the summer's sun, she loses all the purity of the
one and the gleam of the other long before she attains her middle
course, and at her mouth this "mother of gold" is but a tired, dull, old
river, sordid and rich with golden sands, glad, so it seems, to slip by
her monotonous mud-banks and lose herself and her yellow dross in the
purifying waters of the salt sea.

As Corbett gazed upon the wide expanse of dun-coloured flood, he saw no
sign even of that savage strength of which he had heard so much, except
one. Far out, and looking small in the great waste of waters, was a
stranded tree--a great pine, uprooted and now stranded on a sunken bank,
its roots upturned, its boughs twisted off, and its very bark torn from
its side by the fury of the riffles and whirlpools of the upper canyons.
To Corbett there was something infinitely sad in this lonely wreck,
though it was but the wreck of a forest tree. Had he known the great
sullen river better he would have known that she brought down many
sadder wrecks in those early days--human wrecks, whose wounds were not
all of her making, though the river got the evil credit of them.

As it was, the first sight of the Frazer depressed him, and his
depression was not dispelled by the sight of New Westminster. The idea
of a new city hewed by man out of the virgin forest is noble enough, and
whilst the sun is shining and the axes are ringing, the life and energy
of the workers makes some compensation for the ugliness of their work.
But it is otherwise when the sun is low and labour has ceased. Then
"Stump-town" seems a more appropriate title than New Westminster, and a
new-comer may be forgiven for shuddering at the ugliness of the new
frame-houses, at the charred stumps still left standing in the main
streets, at the little desolate forest swamps still left undrained
within a stone's-throw of the Grand Hotel, and at all the baldness and
beggarliness of the new town's surroundings. To Ned Corbett it looked as
if Nature had been murdered, and civilization had not had time to throw
a decent pall over her victim's body. Certainly in 1862 New Westminster
might be, as its citizens alleged, an infant prodigy, but it was not a
picturesque city.

However, as the S.S. _Umatilla_ ran alongside her wharf, a voice roused
Corbett from his musings, and turning he found Cruickshank beside him.

"What do you think about camping to-night, Corbett?" asked the colonel.
"It will be rather dark for pitching our tent, won't it?"

Now, since the poker-playing incident Corbett had not spoken to
Cruickshank. Indeed he had not seen him, and he had hardly made up his
mind how to treat him when they met. That Cruickshank had a good many
objectionable acquaintances was clear, but on the other hand there was
nothing definite which could be alleged against him. Moreover, for the
next month Ned and the estate-agent were bound to be a good deal
together, and taking this into consideration, Ned decided on the spur
of the moment to let all that had gone before pass without comment.
Cruickshank had evidently calculated upon Corbett taking this course,
for though there had been a shade of indecision in his manner when he
came up, he spoke quietly, and as one who had no explanations to make or
apologies to offer.

"Yes, it is too dark to make a comfortable camp to-night," assented
Corbett. "What does Chance want to do?"

"Oh, I vote for an hotel," cried Steve, coming up at the moment. "Let us
be happy whilst we may, we'll be down to bed-rock soon enough."

"All right, 'the hotel goes,' as you would say, Steve;" and together the
young men followed the crowd which streamed across the gangway to the
wharf.

There the arrival of the S.S. _Umatilla_ was evidently looked upon as
the event of the day, and a great crowd of idlers stood waiting for the
disembarkation of her passengers; and yet one man only seemed to be
there on business, the rest were merely loafing, and would as soon have
thought of lending a hand to carry a big portmanteau to the hotel as
they would have thought of touching their hats.

This one worker in the crowd was an old man in his shirt sleeves, who
caught Ned by the arm, as he had caught each of his predecessors, as
soon as his foot touched the wharf, and in a tone of fatherly command
bade him "Go up to the Mansion House. Best hotel in the city. It's the
miners' house," he added. "Three square meals a day every time, and
don't you forget it."

Ned laughed. The last recommendation was certainly worthy of
consideration, and as no one else seemed anxious for his patronage he
turned to Cruickshank with, "Is it to be the Mansion House?"

"Oh yes," replied the latter, "all the hard-fists stay with Mike."

"How long do you mean to stay here anyway?" asked Chance.

"Four or five days,--perhaps a week," replied Cruickshank. "There is a
boat for Douglas to-night, but we could not buy the horses and the
stores so as to be ready in less than a couple of days."

"That is so. We shall have to stay a week then?" asked Steve.

"Unless you like to intrust me with the purchase of your train. I could
hire a man to help me and come on by the next boat if you want
particularly to catch this one--"

The eyes of Corbett and Chance met, and unluckily Cruickshank saw the
glance, and interpreted it as correctly as if the words had been spoken.

Corbett noticed the flush on the man's face and the ugly glitter in his
eye, and hastened to soothe him.

"Oh no, colonel, it is deuced good of you," he said; "but we would
rather wait and all go together. We are looking to you to show us a good
deal besides the mere road in the next six weeks. But what are we to do
with our packs now?"

"We can't leave them here, can we?" asked Chance, pointing to where
their goods lay in a heap on the wharf.

"I don't see why not," growled Cruickshank; and then added
significantly, "Murder or manslaughter are no great crimes in the eyes
of some folk around here, but miners are a bit above petty larceny;" and
so saying he turned on his heel and left Chance and Corbett to shift
for themselves.

"Better take care what you say to that fellow," remarked Corbett,
looking after the retreating figure; "although I like him better in that
mood than in his oily one."

"Oh, I think he is all right; at any rate you won't want my help to
crush him, Ned, if he means to cut up rough."

"Not if he fights fair, Steve; but I don't trust the brute--I never
did."

"Just because he plays cards and calls himself a colonel? Why, everyone
is a colonel out here. But to blazes with Cruickshank anyway. Come and
get some grub."

And so saying Steve Chance entered the principal hotel of New
Westminster, down the plank walls of which the tears of oozing resin
still ran, while the smell of the pine-forest pervaded the whole house.

The "newness" of these young cities of the West is perhaps beyond the
imagination of dwellers in the old settled countries of Europe. It is
hard for men from the East to realize that the hotel, which welcomes
them to all the comforts and luxuries of the nineteenth century, was
standing timber a month before, that the walls covered with paper in
some pretty French design, and hung with mirrors and gilt-framed
engravings, were the homes of the jay and the squirrel, and that the
former tenants have hardly had time yet to settle in a new abode.

And yet so it is: we do our scene-shifting pretty rapidly out West, and
though there may not be time to perfect anything, the general effect is
wonderful in the extreme.

The Westminster hotel was a gem of its class, and even Ned and Steve,
who had become fairly used to Western ways, were a little aghast at the
contrast between the magnificence of some of the new furniture and the
simplicity of the sleeping accommodation, as illustrated by the rows of
miners' blankets neatly laid out along the floor. Luckily Cruickshank
had cautioned them to take their bedding with them, or they might have
been obliged to pass a cheerless night in one of the highly-gilded
arm-chairs, which looked as comfortless as they were gaudy.

The old tout upon the wharf, who owned what he advertised, had not
misrepresented his house. As he had said, the meals were square enough
even for the hungry miners who swarmed around his board, and though it
was dull to lie upon their oars and wait, Steve and Ned might have found
worst places to wait in than the Mansion House. For at Westminster a
delay arose, as delays will the moment a man begins packing or touches
cayuses out West. Of course there were a few horses to be bought, but
equally, of course, everyone in the city and its suburbs seemed to know
by instinct that Corbett & Co. were cornered, and must buy, however bad
the beasts and however high the prices.

An old Indian, one Captain Jim, who with the assistance of all his
female relatives used to pack liquor and other necessaries to the mines,
had part of an old train to sell, horses, saddles, and all complete, and
for the first three days of their stay at Westminster Corbett & Co.
expected every minute to become owners of this outfit. But the business
dragged on, until the noble savage upon whom they had looked as the type
of genial simplicity had become an abomination in their eyes, and they
had decided to leave the management of him to Cruickshank, resolving
that if the train was not bought and ready to be shipped on the next
boat to Douglas that they would go without a pack-train altogether. In
the meanwhile they had to get through the time as best they could,
assisted by the Cariboo poet, who had stayed on like themselves at
Westminster.

To Chance this was no hardship; what with a little sketching, a little
poker, and a great deal of smoking, he managed to get through the days
with a good deal of satisfaction to himself. As to Ned, the delay and
inaction disgusted him and spoilt his temper, which may account in some
measure for an unfortunate incident which occurred on the second day of
his stay at the Mansion House.

As the day was hot and he had nothing to do, the big fellow had laid out
his blankets in a shady corner and prepared to lie down and sleep the
weary hours away. Before doing so he turned for a minute or two to watch
a game of piquet, in which Roberts appeared to be invariably "piqued,
repiqued, pooped, and capoted," as his adversary, a red-headed Irishman,
announced at the top of his voice.

Tired of the game, Ned turned and sought his couch, upon which two
strangers had taken a seat. Going up to them, Ned asked them to move,
and as they did not appear to hear him he repeated his request in a
louder tone. Perhaps the heat and the flies had made him irritable, and
a tone of angry impatience had got into his voice which nettled the men,
one of whom, turning towards him, but not attempting to make room,
coolly told him "to go to blazes."

As the man turned, Ned recognized him as Bub Cruickshank, the brother
or cousin of the Colonel; but it needed neither the recognition nor the
laugh that ran round the room to put Ned's hackles up.

Without stopping to think, he picked up the fellow by the scruff of his
neck and the slack of his breeches and deposited him with the least
possible tenderness upon an untenanted piece of the floor.

Before he had time to straighten himself, the dislodged Bub aimed a
furious kick at Ned, and in another minute our hero was in the thick of
as merry a mill as any honest young Englishman could desire. Time after
time Ned floored his man, for though Bub knew very little of the use of
his hands he was a determined brute, and kept rushing in and trying to
get a grip of his man at close quarters, and, moreover, it was a case of
one down the other come on, for as soon as Ned had floored one fellow
and put him _hors de combat_ for a short time, his companion took up the
battle.

"Take care, Corbett,--take care of his teeth!" shouted Roberts all at
once; and Ned felt a horrible faint feeling come over him, robbing him
for the moment of all his strength, as Bub fastened on his thumb.

For a moment the Shropshireman almost gave up the battle. Those only
who have suffered from this dastardly trick of the lowest of Yankee
roughs, can have any idea of the effect it has upon a man's strength.
But Corbett was almost as mad with rage at what he considered
unsportsman-like treatment as he was with pain, so that he managed to
wrench himself free and send his man to earth again with another
straight left-hander.

Meanwhile the red-haired Irishman, who had been playing piquet with
Roberts, had lost all interest in his game since the fight began, and
was fairly writhing in his seat with suppressed emotion.

At last flesh and blood (or at least _Irish_ flesh and blood) could
endure it no longer, so that, jumping up from his seat, he took Ned just
by the shoulders and lifted him clean out of the way as if he had been a
baby, remarking as he did so--

"You stay there, sonny, and let me knock 'em down awhile."

But the poor simple Celt was doomed to disappointment. The truth was
that Ned had been greedy, and taken more than his share of this innocent
game of skittles, so that, as Mr. O'Halloran remarked sorrowfully at
supper, he did but get in "one from the shoulther, and thin them two
murtherin' haythens lit right out."

When the scrimmage was over Roberts took Ned on one side, and after
looking at the bitten thumb and bandaging it up for his friend, he gave
Ned a little advice.

"Fighting is all very well, Mr. Corbett, where people fight according to
rules, but you had better drop it here. If you don't, some fellow will
get level on you with the leg of a table or a little cold lead. If you
must fight, you had better learn to shoot like old Rampike."

"Where is old Rampike now?" asked Ned, anxious to turn the conversation,
and feeling a little ashamed of his escapade.

"Rampike went right on by the boat that met the _Umatilla_. He got a job
up at Williams Creek, and will be there ahead of us."

"Then you mean to come up too, Roberts, that's right," said Corbett
genially.

"Yes, I am coming up with your crowd. I met the count in town last night
and borrowed the chips from him. I am thinking that if you make a
practice of quarrelling with Cruickshank and all his friends you will
need someone along to look after you."

"But who is the count, and why could you not have borrowed the money
from us?" asked Corbett in a tone of considerable pique.

"The count! Oh, the count is an old friend, and lends to most anyone who
is broke. It's his business in a way. You see, he is the biggest gambler
in the upper country. Skins a chap one day and lends him a handful of
gold pieces the next. He'll get it back with interest from one of us
even if I don't pay him, so that's all right;" and honest Roberts
dismissed all thought of the loan from his mind, as if it was the most
natural thing in the world for a professional gambler to lend an
impecunious victim a hundred dollars on no security whatever.

Luckily for Ned his fellow countryman took him in hand after this, and
what with singing and working managed to keep him out of mischief. For
Roberts found Corbett work in Westminster which just suited his young
muscles, though it was as quaint in its way as Roberts' own financial
arrangements in their way.

It seemed that in the young city there was no church and no funds to
build one, but there was a sturdy, energetic parson, and a mob of noisy,
careless miners, who rather liked the parson; not, perhaps, _because_ he
was a parson, but because he had in some way or other proved to them
that he was a "man."

Had they been on the way down with their pockets full of "dust" the
boys would soon have built him anything he wanted, whether it had been a
church or a gin-shop. I am afraid it would have mattered little. As it
was they were unluckily on their way up, and their pockets were empty.

But as the will was there the parson found the way, and all through that
week of waiting Ned and a gang of other strong hardy fellows like
himself made their axes glitter and ring on the great pines, clearing a
site, and preparing the lumber for the first house of God erected in New
Westminster.

Who shall say that their contribution had not as much intrinsic value as
the thousand-dollar cheque which Croesus sends for a similar object. A
good deal more labour goes to the felling of a pine ten feet through
than to the signing of a cheque, anyway.




CHAPTER V.

"IS THE COLONEL 'STRAIGHT?'"


At the very last moment, when all Corbett's party, except Cruickshank,
had yielded to despair, the Indian Jim gave in, and sold his animals as
they stood for sixty dollars a head. This included the purchase of
pack-saddles, cinches, and other items essential to a packer's outfit.

The steamer for Douglas started at 8 p.m., and it was long after
breakfast on the same day that the eyes of Corbett and Chance, who were
smoking outside their inn, were gladdened by the sight of Phon and
Cruickshank driving ten meek-looking brutes up to the front of the
Mansion House.

Having tied each pony short by the head to the garden rail, Cruickshank
began to organize his forces. There were the ponies, it was true, but
their packs and many other things had still to be bought. There was much
to be done and very little time to do it in. Then it was that
Cruickshank showed himself to the greatest advantage. For days he had
appeared to dawdle over his bargaining with Jim, until Ned almost
thought that Indian and white together were in league against him; now
he felt miserable at the mere memory of his former suspicions.
Cruickshank knew that no man can hurry an Indian, and therefore
abstained from irritating Jim by attempting the impossible. The result
of this was that at the end of the time at his disposal Cruickshank had
by his indifference convinced Jim that he cared very little whether he
got the horses or not, so that now the Indian was in a hurry to sell
before the steamer should carry Cruickshank and his dollars away to
Douglas. So Cruickshank bought the ponies, bought them cheap, and,
moreover, just in time to catch the boat. This was all he had struggled
for.

But now that he had white men to deal with his tactics changed. These
men knew the value of time and could hurry, therefore Cruickshank
hurried them. To every man he gave some independent work to do. No one
was left to watch another working. Whilst one dashed off to buy stores
another took the horses to the forge to be shod, and old Phon was left
to repair the horse furniture and overhaul the outfit generally.
Cruickshank himself went off to buy gunny sacks, boxes, ropes, and
such-like, rendered necessary by the absence of _aparejos_, needing the
knowledge of an expert in their selection.

It was already late in the afternoon, and Ned, hot and dusty, and as
happy as a schoolboy, was helping the smith to shoe the last of the
ponies, when Roberts, who had done his own work, walked into the forge.

For a minute or two Roberts stood unnoticed, observing his
fellow-countryman with eyes full of a sort of hero-worship, commoner at
a public school than in the world.

But Ned was one of those fellows who win men's hearts without trying to
do so; a young fellow who said what he thought without waiting to pick
his words, who did what he liked, and luckily liked what was good, and
honest, and manly, and who withal looked the man he was, upstanding,
frank, and absolutely fearless. Ned had been in the forge for perhaps
half a day or more, and had already so won the heart of the smith that
that good man with his eyes on the boy's great forearm had been hinting
that there was "just as much money in a good smithy as there was in most
of them up-country claims."

But Ned was bent on gold-mining and seeing life with the hard-fists, so
though he loved to swing the great smith's hammer he was not to be
tempted from his purpose, though he was quite ready to believe that a
smith in New Westminster could earn more by his hands than many a
professional man by his brains in Westminster on the Thames.

"Hullo, Rob! have you got through with your work?" cried Ned, catching
sight of his friend at last.

"Yes. I've done all I've got to do; can I lend you a hand?"

"Why, no, thanks; my friend here is putting on the last shoe. But what
is the matter? you look as if you had got 'turned round' in the bush,
and were trying to think your way out;" and Ned laid his hand laughingly
on his friend's shoulder.

Roberts laughed too, but led the younger man outside, and once there
blurted out his trouble.

"Look here, Corbett, ever since that gambling row I've had my eye on
Cruickshank, and I thought that I knew him for a rascal, but blow me if
he hasn't got beyond me this time."

"How so, Rob?"

"Well, I'm half-inclined to think he's honest after all. He is a real
rustler when he chooses anyway," added the poet admiringly.

"Oh, I expect he is as honest as most of his kind. Why shouldn't he be?
All men haven't the same ideas of honesty out here; and if he isn't
honest it doesn't matter much to us, does it?" asked Ned carelessly.

"Doesn't it? Ain't you trusting him with a good many thousand dollars?"
asked Roberts with some asperity.

"No, I don't think so. You see, Rob, if he is, as you thought, a
card-sharper and a bogus estate-agent, my money is lost already; he
can't clear out with the claims or the packs even if he wants to. But
why do you think he is a rogue?"

"I tell you I'm beginning to think that he isn't."

"Bully for you, that's better!" cried Ned approvingly; "but what has
worked this change in your opinions, Rob?"

"Well, last night that scoundrelly siwash, Captain Jim, tried to work a
swindle with those pack-ponies, and Cruickshank wouldn't have it. Jim
was to sell you a lot of unsound beasts at eighty dollars a head. You
would never have noticed that they had healed sores on their backs, and
if Cruickshank had held his tongue he was to have had twenty dollars a
pony, and the way he 'talked honest' to that Indian was astonishing, you
bet."

"How did you find all this out?" asked Ned.

Roberts looked a little uncomfortable and flushed to the roots of his
hair, but at length made the best of it, and admitted that he had
followed the two men and overheard their conversation.

"You see, Ned," he added, "it's not very English, I know, but you must
fight these fellows with their own weapons."

For a while Ned said nothing, though he frowned more than Roberts had
ever seen him frown before, and his fingers tugged angrily at his slight
moustache.

"Roberts," he said at last, "I agree with you, this sort of thing isn't
very English, I'm hanged if it is; but I've been pretty nearly as
suspicious as you have, so I can't afford to talk. Once for all, do you
know anything against the colonel?"

"No," hesitated Roberts, "I don't know anything against Dan, but Bub--."

"Oh, to blazes with Bub!" broke in Corbett angrily. "A man cannot be
responsible for every one of his cousins and kinsmen. From to-day I mean
to believe in Cruickshank as an honest man, until I prove him to be a
knave. You had better do the same, Rob; spying after a fellow as we have
been doing is enough to make an honest man sick;" and Ned Corbett made a
wry face as if the mere thought of it left a bad taste in his mouth.

"All right, that's a-go then. He was honest about these cayuses anyway,
and if he does go back on us we'll fire him higher than a sky-rocket;"
and so saying Roberts lent Ned a hand to collect the said cayuses. These
at the first glance would have struck an English judge of horseflesh as
being ten of the very sorriest screws that ever stood upon four legs;
but at least they showed to Roberts' practised eye no signs of old sore
backs, none of those half-obliterated scars which warn the _cognoscenti_
of evils which have been and are likely to recur.

Taken in a body, they were a little too big for polo ponies, and a
little too ragged, starved, and ill-shaped for a respectable
costermonger's cart. There was one amongst them, a big buckskin standing
nearly 14.2 hands, which looked fairly plump and able-bodied, but atoned
for these merits by an ugly trick of laying back her ears and showing
the whites of her eyes whenever she got a chance.

The most typical beast of his class was one Job, a parti-coloured brute
(or pinto as they call them in British Columbia), with one eye brown and
the other blue, and a nose of the brightest pink, as if he suffered from
a chronic cold and a rough pocket-handkerchief. Job's bones stared at
you through his skin, his underlip protruded and hung down, giving him
an air of the most abject misery, and even a Yorkshire horse-dealer
could not have found a good point to descant upon from his small weak
quarters to his ill-shaped shoulder.

But though Job's head was fiddle-shaped there was a good deal in it, as
those were likely to discover who had given sixty dollars for him, and
expected to get sixty dollars' worth of work out of him. He had not been
packing since the days when he trotted as a foal beside a "greasers'"
train for nothing. At present he was the meekest, most ill-used-looking
brute on the Pacific coast, and Corbett was just remarking to Roberts
"that that poor devil of a pony would never be able to carry a hundred
and fifty pounds let alone two hundred over a bad road," when the
buckskin let out, and caught the bay alongside of him such a kick on the
stifle as made that poor beast go a little lame for days. No one noticed
that the bite which set the buckskin kicking was given by old Job, who
moved his weary old head sadly, just in time, however, to let the kick
go by and land on the unoffending body of his neighbour.

An hour later all the horses were up again at the hotel, and the bill
having been settled Phon and Roberts drove the train down to the wharf,
where the steamer for Douglas, a small stern-wheeler, was waiting for
her passengers and her cargo. With the exception of Job, all the cayuses
were put on board at once and secured, but seeing that there was still a
good deal of luggage in small parcels up at the hotel, Chance kept "that
quiet old beast Job, just to carry down the odds and ends;" and Job,
with a sigh which spoke volumes to those who could understand, plodded
away to do the extra work set aside as of right for the meek and
long-suffering.

It is an aggravating employment under any circumstances, the employment
of packing. Many men, otherwise good men, swear naturally (and freely)
as soon as they engage in it; but then, why I know not, the very
presence of a horse makes some men swear. Steve knew very little about
packing anyway, and had he known more he would not have found it easy to
fasten his bundles on to the back of a beast which shifted constantly
from one leg to another, and always seemed to be standing uphill or
downhill, with one leg at least a foot shorter than the other three.

When Steve spoke to him (with an angry kick in the stomach), Job would
lift his long-suffering head with an air of meek dejection, and shifting
his leg as required plant a huge hoof solidly upon Steve's moccasined
foot. If I could paint the look on that great ugly equine head as it
turned with leering eye and projecting nether lip, and looked into the
anguished face of Steve Chance, I should be able to teach my reader more
of cayuses (the meanest creatures on God's earth) than I can ever hope
to do. But even with Job to help him, Steve got his load down to the
boat at last, and put all aboard except a new pack-saddle, which he had
taken off the pack-horse and laid down on the ground beside him.

With lowered head and half-shut eyes Job stood for some minutes
patiently waiting, and then, as Steve came over the side to drive him on
board with his fellows, the old horse heaved a long, long sigh, and
before Steve could reach him lay down slowly and gently upon that
pack-saddle. Of course when he got up, the pack-saddle was demolished,
and as the last whistle had sounded, there was no time to get another
before leaving Westminster.

A new saddle would have to be bought at Douglas, and that would cost
money, or made upon the road, and that would mean delay, so Job, with a
cynical gleam in his wall-eye, trotted meekly and contentedly on board.
He had entered his first protest against extra work.

Five minutes later the steamer _Lillooet_ cast loose from her moorings,
the gangway was taken in, and the gallant little stern-wheeler went
cleaving her way up through the yellow Frazer, on her forty-mile run to
the mouth of Harrison river, steaming past long mud-flats and many a
mile of heavy timber.

A day and a half was the time allowed for the journey from New
Westminster to Douglas, but Corbett and Chance could hardly believe that
they had taken so long when they came to their moorings again at the
head of the Harrison Lake.

To them the hours had seemed to fly by, for their eyes and thoughts were
busy, intent at one moment upon the bare mud-banks, watching for game or
the tracks of the game, the next straining to catch a glimpse of deer
feeding at dawn upon the long gray hills--hills which were a pale dun in
the light of early morning, but which became full of rich velvety
shadows as the day wore on.

Overhead floated the fleecy blue and white sky of spring-time; on the
hills patches of wild sunflower mingled with the greenish gray of the
sage brush, and here and there, even on the arid barren banks of the
Frazer itself, occurred little "pockets" of verdure--hollows with
fresh-water springs in them, where the tender green of the young
willows, and the abundant white bloom of the choke cherries and olali
bushes, made Edens amongst the waste of alkaline mud-banks, Edens
tenanted and made musical by all the collected bird-life of that barren
land.

The only difficult bit of water for the little steamer was the seven
miles of the Harrison river, a rapid, turbulent stream, up which the
S.S. _Lillooet_ had to fight every inch of the way; but beyond that lay
the lake, a broad blue lake, penned in by steep and heavily-timbered
mountains, and beyond the one-house town of Douglas, at which Ned and
his fellow-passengers disembarked about noon of the second day out from
Westminster.

From Douglas the ordinary route was by river and lake, with a few short
portages to _Lillooet_ on the Frazer; and in 1862 there were steamers
upon all the lakes (Lillooet, Anderson, and Seton), and canoes (with a
certainty of a fair breeze in summer) for such as preferred them.

But Ned and his friends had decided that as they had a pack-train, and
would be compelled to pack part of the way in any case, they might just
as well harden their hearts and pack the whole distance, more especially
since they had ample time to make their journey in, and not too much
money to waste upon steamboat fares. So at Douglas Cruickshank bought
another pack-saddle for about twice what it would have cost at
Westminster (freight was high in the early days), and suggested that as
the one house (half store, half hotel) was full to overflowing, they
might as well strike out for themselves, and as it was only mid-day make
a few miles upon their road before camping for the night.

"You see," argued Cruickshank, "it's no violet's camping where so many
men have camped before, and a good many of them greasers and Indians."

Corbett and Chance were new to the discomforts of the road, and had
still to learn the penalty for camping where Indians have camped; but
for all that they took the colonel's advice and assented to his
proposal, though it meant bidding good-bye to their fellow-men a day or
two sooner than they need have done.

Once the start had been decided upon Cruickshank lost no time in getting
under weigh. The diamond hitch had no mysteries for him, the loops flew
out and settled to an inch where he wanted them to, every strand in his
ropes did its share of binding and holding fast; his very curses seemed
to cow the most stubborn cayuse better than another man's, and when he
cinched the unfortunate beasts up you could almost hear their ribs
crack.

Job alone nearly got the better of the colonel, but even he just missed
it. Cruickshank cinched this wretched scarecrow a little less severely
than the rest, but when later on he saw old Job with his cinch all
slack, a malevolent grin came over his face, and he muttered, "Oh,
that's your sort, is it, an old-timer? So am I!" And after giving Job a
kick which would have knocked the wind out of anything, he cinched him
up again before he could recover himself, and then led him to drink. As
the horse sucked down the water greedily Cruickshank muttered to
himself, "_Bueno_, I guess your load will stick now until you are
thirsty again." After this Job and the colonel seemed to have a mutual
understanding, and as long as he was within hearing of Cruickshank's
curses there was no better pack-pony on the road than old Job.

It seems as if men who have been used to packing, and have had a spell
of rest from their ordinary occupation, itch to handle the ropes again;
at least, it is only in this way that I can explain the readiness
displayed by so many of Ned's fellow-passengers to lend a hand in fixing
his packs for him.

In an hour from the time of disembarkation the train was ready to start,
and the welcome cry of "All set!" rang out, after which there was a
little hand-shaking, a lighting of pipes, and the procession filed away
up the river, Cruickshank leading the first five ponies, then Roberts
plodding patiently along on foot, then another five ponies, and then, as
long as the narrow train would permit of it, Ned and Steve trudging
along, chatting and keeping the ponies on the move.

Cruickshank was already some distance ahead, and even Steve and Ned were
almost outside the little settlement, when a big red-headed Irishman,
whom Corbett remembered as his fighting friend at Westminster, came
running after him.

"Say," asked Mr. O'Halloran, rather out of breath from his run. "Say,
are you and that blagyard partners?"

"Which?" asked Ned in amaze. "My friend Chance?"

"No, no, not this boy here--that fellow riding ahead of the train."

"Cruickshank? Yes, we are partners in a way," replied Ned.

"And you know it was his brother you laid out? Faith, you laid him out
as nate as if it was for a berryin'," he added with a grin.

"I've heard men say that the colonel is Bub Cruickshank's brother,"
admitted Ned; "but the colonel is all right, whatever Bub is."

"And you and he ain't had no turn-up along of that scrimmage down at
Westminster?" persisted O'Halloran.

"Not a word. I don't think he knew about it."

"Oh yes, he did. I saw Bub and him talking it over, and you may bet your
boots the only reason he didn't bark is that he means to bite--yes, and
bite hard too. It's the way with them dark, down-looking blagyards,"
added the honest Irishman, in a tone of the deepest scorn.

"Ah, well, I don't think Cruickshank is likely to try his teeth on me,"
laughed Ned. "If he does I must try that favourite rib-bender of yours
upon him," and Ned gripped O'Halloran's hand and strode gaily after his
train.

For a moment the red-headed one stood looking after his friend, and then
heaving a great sigh remarked:

"Indade and I'd like a turn wid you mesilf, but if that black-looking
blagyard does a happorth of harm to you, it's Kornaylius O'Halloran as
'll put a head on him."




CHAPTER VI.

THE WET CAMP.


As his pack-train wound away along the trail from Douglas, Ned Corbett
gave a great deep sigh as if there was something which he fain would
blow away from him. And so there was.

As he left the last white man's house between Douglas and Lillooet, he
hoped and believed that he left behind him towns and townsmen, petty
delays, swindlings, and suspicions of swindlings.

He was going to look for gold, and give a year at least of his young
life to be spent in digging for it, and yet this absurd young Englishman
was actually thanking his stars that now, at last, he was rid of dollars
and dollar hunters, business and business men, for at least a month.

There was food enough on the beasts in front of him to last his party
for a year. He was sound in wind and limb, his rifle was not a bad one,
and he had seen lots of game tracks already, and that being so he really
cared very little whether he reached his claims in time or not. But of
course, as Cruickshank said, there was ample time to make the journey
in, time indeed and to spare, as every one he had met admitted, so that
no doubt Steve and he would reach Williams Creek in time, find the
claims as Cruickshank had represented them, and make no end of money.

That would just suit Steve; and after all a lot of money would be a good
thing in its way. It would make a certain old uncle at home take back a
good many things he had once said about his nephew's "great useless body
and ramshackle brains," and besides, he would like a few hundred pounds
himself to send home, and a bit in hand to hire a boat to go to Alaska
in. That had been Ned's day-dream ever since he had seen a certain cargo
of bear-skins which had come down from that ice-bound _terra incognita_
to Victoria.

So Ned sighed a great sigh of relief and contentment, took off his coat
and slung it on his back, opened the collar of his flannel shirt and let
the soft air play about his ribs, turned his sleeves up over his elbows,
tied a silk handkerchief turban-wise on his yellow head, and having cut
himself a good stout stick trudged merrily along, sucking in the
glorious mountain air as greedily as if he had spent the last six months
of his life waiting for briefs in some grimy fog-haunted chamber of the
Temple.

He would have liked the ponies to have moved along a little faster,
because as it was he found it difficult to keep behind them, five miles
an hour suiting his legs better than two. But this was his only trouble,
and as every now and then he got a breather, racing up some steep
incline to head back a straggler to the path of duty, Ned managed to be
perfectly happy in spite of this little drawback.

As for the others, Cruickshank, who had seemed restless and nervous as
long as he had been with the crowd of miners on the boat and at Douglas,
had now relapsed into a mere automaton, which strode on silently ahead
of the pack-train, emitting from time to time little blue jets of
tobacco smoke. Steve seemed buried in calculations, based on a miner's
report that the dirt at Williams Creek had paid as much as fifty cents
to the shovelful, an historical fact which Phon and the young Yankee
discussed occasionally at some length; and old Roberts, having agreed to
leave his suspicions behind him, shared his tobacco cheerily with
Cruickshank, and from time to time startled the listening deer with
scraps of his favourite ditties.

It was the refrain of the old pack mule, "Riding, riding, riding on my
old pack mule," which at last roused Steve Chance's indignation against
the songster.

"Confound the old idiot!" growled the Yankee; "I wish he wouldn't remind
me of the unattainable. I shouldn't mind riding, but I am getting pretty
sick of tramping. Isn't it nearly time to camp, Ned?"

"Nearly time to camp? Why, we haven't made eight miles yet," replied
Corbett.

"Oh, that be hanged for a yarn! We have been going five solid hours by
my watch, and five fours are twenty."

"That may be, but five twos are ten, and what with stoppages to fix
packs, admire the scenery, and give you time to munch a sandwich and tie
up your moccasins, I don't believe we have been going two miles an hour.
But are you tired, Steve?"

"You bet I am, Ned. If there really is no particular hurry let us camp
soon."

"All right, we will if you like. Hullo, Cruickshank!" Cruickshank
turned.

"Steve is tired and wants to camp--what do you say?"

Cruickshank hesitated a moment and then agreed to the proposition,
beginning at once to loosen the packs upon the beasts nearest to him.

"Here, I say, steady there!" cried Corbett; "you take me too literally.
Steve can go another mile if necessary. We'll stop at the next good
camping-ground."

"I'm afraid you won't get anything better than this," replied the
colonel. "Why, what is the matter with this? You didn't expect
side-walks and hotels on the trail, did you, Corbett?"

Even in his best moods there was a nasty sneering way about Cruickshank,
which put his companions' backs up.

"No, but I did think we might find a flat spot to camp on."

"Did you? Then I'm sorry to disappoint you. You won't find anything
except a swamp meadow flatter than this for the next ten miles or so,
and the swamps are a little too wet for comfort at this time of year."

"Do you mean to say, Cruickshank, that we can't find a flatter spot than
this? Why, hang it, man, you couldn't put a tea-cup down here without
spilling the contents," remonstrated Corbett.

"Well, if you think you can better this, let us go on; perhaps you know
best. What is it to be, camp or 'get?'"

"Oh, if you are certain about it I suppose we may as well stay here;
but, by Jove, we shall have to tie ourselves up to trees when we go to
sleep to prevent our straying downhill." And Ned laughed at the vision
he had conjured up.

A minute later a bale,--bigger, heavier, and more round of belly than
its fellows,--escaped from Steve Chance's grip and fell heavily to the
earth. Steve was not a strong man, certainly not a man useful for
lifting weights, besides he was a careless fellow, and tired. For a
moment Steve stood looking at the bale as it turned slowly over and
over. Twice it turned round and Steve still looked at it. The next
moment it gathered way, and before Steve could catch it was hopping
merrily downhill, in bounds which grew in length every time it touched
the hillside. Steve, assisted by Phon, had the pleasure of recovering
that bale from the group of young pines amongst which it eventually
stuck, and brought it with many sobs and much perspiration to the point
from which it originally started. It took Steve and Phon longer to get
over that two hundred feet of hillside than it had taken the bale.

That first camp of theirs has left an impression upon Ned's mind and
Steve's which years will not efface. Ned was too tough to look upon it
as more than a somewhat rough practical joke, likely to pall upon a man
if repeated too often, but to Chance that camp was a camp of misery and
a place of tears. There was water, but it was a long way downhill; there
was, as Cruickshank said, timber enough to keep a mill going for a
twelvemonth, but whatever was worth having for firewood was either
uphill or downhill--you had to climb for everything you happened to
want; and to wind up with, you absolutely had to dig a sort of shelf out
of the hillside upon which to pitch your tent.

It was here, too, that Steve had his first real experience of camping
out. He helped to unpack the horses, but he took so long to retrieve the
bale which had gone downhill that some one had to lend him a hand even
with the one beast which he unpacked. He volunteered to cook, but when
on investigation it was discovered that he would have fried beans
without boiling them, a community unduly careful of its digestion
scornfully refused his assistance. In despair he seized an axe, and went
away as "a hewer of wood and a drawer of water." By and by the voice of
his own familiar friend came to him again and again in tones of cruel
derision:

"Where is that tree coming down, Steve?"

"I don't know and don't care, but it's got to come somewhere," replied
the operator angrily, as he hewed blindly at the tough green pine.

"But it won't do for firewood anyway, Steve, this year, and if you don't
take care you will never need firewood again. Don't you know how to make
a tree fall where you want it to?" and Ned took the tool from his hand,
and completing what his companion had so badly begun, laid the tree out
of harm's way.

"Well, it seems that I can't do anything to please you," grumbled Steve,
now thoroughly angry. "When there is anything that you and Cruickshank
reckon you want my help in you can call me, Corbett. I'll go and smoke
whilst you run this show to your own satisfaction."

"No you won't, old man, and you won't get riled either. Just be a good
chap and go and cut us some brush for bedding. See, this is the best
kind," and Ned held out to his friend a branch of hemlock. Although an
hour later Ned noticed that there was every kind of brush _except_
hemlock in the pile which Steve had collected, he wisely complimented
him on his work, and said nothing about his mistake. A man does not
become a woodsman in a week.

Meanwhile the tent had been pitched; Cruickshank was just climbing up
the hill again after driving the ponies to a swamp down below, and old
Phon was handling a frying-pan full of the largest and thickest rashers
of bacon on record. Little crisp ringlets of fried bacon may serve very
well for the breakfast of pampered civilization, but if you did not cut
your rashers thick out in the woods you would never stop cutting.

Lucky would it have been for Steve and Ned if rough fare and a rocky
camp had been the worst troubles in store for them, but unluckily, even
as they lit their post-prandial pipes, the storm-clouds began to blow up
the valley, ragged and brown, and whilst poor Steve was still tossing on
a sleepless pillow, vexed by the effects of black tea on his nerves, and
crawling beasts upon his sensitive skin, the first great drops of the
coming storm splashed heavily on the sides of the tent.

Of course the tent was new. Everything the two young miners had was new,
brand-new, and made upon the most recent and improved lines. None of the
old, time-tried contrivances of practical men are ever good enough for
beginners. So the fourth or fifth drop of rain which hit that tent came
through as if it had been a sieve, and when well-meaning Steve rubbed
his hand over the place "feeling for the leak," the water came in in a
stream.

When the next morning broke, the wanderers looked out upon that most
miserable of all things, a wet camp in the woods. The misery of a wet
camp is the one convincing argument in favour of civilization.

It was still early in the year, and the season was a late one even for
British Columbia, amongst whose mountains winter never yields without a
struggle. On the dead embers of last night's camp-fire were slowly
melting snowflakes, and a chill wet wind crept into Ned's bosom, as he
looked out upon the morning, and made him shudder.

But Ned was hard, so that careless of rain and puddles he splashed out
past the camp-fire, and after a good many failures kindled a little
comparatively dry wood, over which to make the morning tea, and then
drew upon himself the scorn of that old campaigner Cruickshank by
washing.

What work they could find to do the men did, but even so the hours went
wearily by. Cruickshank was opposed to making a start, for fear lest the
rain should damage the packs, which now lay all snug beneath their
_manteaux_. So they waited until Cruickshank was tired of smoking, and
Roberts of hearing himself sing; until Corbett could sleep no more, and
Steve was hoarse with grumbling. Only Phon, lost in thought which white
men cannot fathom, and the pack animals full of sweet young grass,
seemed content.

For three whole days the party stopped in the same camp, gazing hour
after hour upon a limited view of stiff burnt pines, with the melting
snow drifting down through them, and the fog wrapping them and hiding
away all the distance. Even the fire of piled logs shone, _not_ with
heat but with damp, and the monotonous splash of the drops as they fell
from a leak in the tent into the frying-pan set to catch them, combined
with Phon's harsh cough, to break the silence.

At last, when even Ned was beginning to think of rheumatism, and to
long for a glass of hot toddy and a Turkish bath, the sun came back
again, and cast long rich shadows from the red stems of the bull-pines
across the trail, over which Steve nearly ran, in his anxiety to leave
the wet camp as far behind him as possible.

But even the wet camp was only the beginning of troubles. Three days
they lost waiting for the sun, and in the next camp they waited three
more days for their horses.

At the first camp Cruickshank had been careful to hobble the horses,
which would not have strayed had he left them free in a small naturally
inclosed pasture, like that swamp at the foot of the side hills. But at
the second camp, where the feed was bad and the ways open, he neglected
to hobble any of them, and, oddly enough, old packer though he was, he
overlooked the whole band in his first day's search, so that no one went
that way to look for them again, until it occurred to Corbett to try to
puzzle out their tracks in that direction for himself. There he found
them, in the very meadow in which they had pastured the first night, all
standing in a row behind a bush no bigger than a cabbage, old Job at
their head, every nose down, every ear still, even Job's blue eye fixed
in a kind of glassy stare, and the bell round Job's neck dumb, for it
was full of mud and leaves. It was deuced odd, Ned thought, as he drove
the beasts home. Cruickshank didn't seem to know as much of packing and
the care of horses as he appeared to know at first; but if he knew too
little, that wall-eyed fiend, Job, knew too much.

Anyway, they had taken eight days to do two days' travel, up to that
time. It was well that they had ample time in which to make their
journey to Cariboo.




CHAPTER VII.

FACING DEATH ON THE STONE-SLIDE.


It was the last day of Corbett's journey between the Harrison and the
Frazer, and a boiling hot day at that. With the exception of Corbett
himself, and perhaps Cruickshank, whose back alone was visible as he led
the train, the whole outfit had relapsed into that dull mechanical gait
peculiar to packers and pack animals. To Chance it seemed that he was in
a dream--a dream in which he went incessantly up and up or down, down
day after day without pause or change. To him it seemed that there was
always the same gray stone-slide under foot, the same hot sun overheard,
and the same gleaming blue lake far below; like the pack animals, he was
content to plod along hour after hour, seeing nothing, thinking of
nothing, unless it was of that blessed hour when the camp would be
pitched and the tea made, and the soothing pipe be lighted.

But though Chance had no eyes for it, the end of this first part of his
journey was near at hand. Fourteen miles away the great grisly mountains
came together and threw a shadow upon Seton Lake, building a wall and
setting a barrier over or through which there seemed no possible way of
escape. As Corbett looked at it, he could see the trees quite plainly on
the narrow rim of grass between that mountain wall and the lake, and
though he could not see that too, he knew that through them ran a trail
which led to Lillooet on the Frazer. Even Ned longed to reach that trail
and catch a glimpse of the little town, in which he and his weary beasts
might take at least one day's rest and refreshment.

Since leaving Douglas, Cruickshank and Corbett had been upon the best of
terms. Cruickshank knew how everything ought to be done, and Corbett was
quick and tireless to do it, so that between them these two did most of
the work of the camp; and though Ned noticed that his guide was not as
anxious to get to Lillooet as he had been to get away from Douglas, he
made allowances for him. Cruickshank was hardly a young man, and no
doubt his strength was not equal to his will.

As to the straying of the horses at the second camp, there could be but
one opinion. It was a bad mistake to leave them unhobbled; but after all
everyone made mistakes sometimes, and though that mistake had involved
the loss of a great deal of time, it was the only one which could be
laid to Cruickshank's account. So far not one single thing, however
unimportant, had been left behind in camp or lost upon the trail; there
had been no accidents, no lost packs, nor any sign of sore backs. Day
after day Cruickshank himself had led the train, choosing the best going
for his ponies, and seeing them safely past every projecting rock and
over every _mauvais pas_.

On this day for the first time Cruickshank proposed to give up his
position in front of the train to Ned. Stopping at a place where there
was room to shunt the rear of his column to the front, the colonel
hailed Ned, and suggested that they should change places.

"Come on and set us a quick step, Corbett. Even if you do overtire the
ponies a bit, it doesn't matter now that we are so near Lillooet. They
can rest there as much as they like."

"Very well. I expect _you_ must want a change, and I'll bet old Steve
does. Why, you have hardly had anyone to speak to for a week," replied
Corbett good-naturedly.

"That's so, but I must save my breath a little longer still. If Roberts
will go behind with Phon and Chance, I'll keep the first detachment as
close to your heels as I can; and, by the way, we had better make a
change with the horses whilst we are about it."

"Why?" asked Ned. "What is the matter with them?"

"Not much, but if we are to have any more swimming across places where
the bridging is broken down, we may as well have the horses that take
kindly to water in front, and send that mean old beast to the rear;" and
the colonel pointed to Job, which with its head on one side and an
unearthly glare in its blue eye, appeared to be listening to what was
being said.

"All right, we can do that here if you will lend a hand. Which shall we
put the bell on?" and Ned took the bell off Job, and turned that veteran
over to the second half of the train.

"Put it on this fellow; he takes to the water like an otter, and he will
make a good leader. Wherever his packs can go, any of the others can
follow;" and Cruickshank pointed to the great bulging bales upon the
back of the buckskin.

"I expect Steve and Roberts packed him, didn't they?" Cruickshank added.
"Well, they aren't pretty to look at, but I guess they'll stick;" and so
saying, he gave the buckskin a smack on his quarters which sent that
big star-gazing brute trotting to the front, where Ned invested him with
the order of the bell.

"Is it all right now, Cruickshank?" asked Corbett.

"All right."

"Forrard away then!" cried Ned, and turning he strode merrily along a
narrow trail, which wound up and up across such sheer precipitous side
hills as would make some men dizzy to look at. A slip in some places
would have meant death to those who slipped, long before their bruised
bodies could reach the edge of the lake glittering far below; but
neither men in moccasins nor mountain ponies are given to slipping.

After the rain had come the sunshine and the genial warmth of spring,
under the influence of which every hill was musical with new-born
rivulets, and every level place brilliant with young grass. The very
stone-slides blossomed in great clumps of purple gentian, and over even
the stoniest places crept the tendrils of the Oregon vine, with its
thorny shining leaves and flower-clusters of pale gold.

Now and again the trail rose or fell so much that it seemed to Ned as if
he had passed from one season of flowers to another. Down by the lake,
where the pack animals splashed along the bed of a little mountain
stream, the first wild rose was opening, a mere speck of pink in the
cool darkness made by the overhanging bushes. Here by the lake side,
too, were numerous butterflies--great yellow and black "swallow tails,"
hovering in small clouds over the damp stones, or Camberwell beauties in
royal purple, floating through sun and shadow on wings as graceful in
flight as they were rich in colour. Higher up, where the sun had heated
the stone-slides to a white heat, were more butterflies (fritillaries
and commas and tortoise-shells), while now and again a flash of orange
and a shrill little screech told Ned that a humming-bird went by.

In the highest places of all, where the snow still lingered in tiny
patches, the red-eyed spruce-cocks hooted from the pines, the ruffed
grouse strutted and boomed in the thickets, and the yellow flowers of
lilies gave promise of many a meal for old Ephraim, when their sweet
bulbs should be a few weeks older.

To Ned, merely to swing along day after day in the sunshine and note
these things, was gladness enough, and it was little notice he took of
heat, or thirst, or weariness. Unfortunately he became too absorbed, and
as often happens with men unused to leading out, forgot his train and
walked right away from his ponies.

When this fact dawned upon him it was nearly mid-day, and he found
himself at the highest point which the path had yet reached, from which,
looking back, he could see the train crawling wearily after him. He
could see, too, that Cruickshank was signalling him to stop, so nothing
loth Ned sat down and waited. The path where he sat came out to a sharp
promontory, and turning round this it began to pass over the worst
stone-slide Ned had yet seen. Most of those he had hitherto encountered
had been mere narrow strips of bad going from fifty to a hundred yards
across, but this was nearly five hundred yards from side to side, and
except where the trail ran, there was not foothold upon it for a fly.
Properly speaking it was not, as the natives called it, a stone-slide at
all, but rather the bed or shoot, by which, century after century, some
hundreds of stone-slides had gone crashing down into the lake below.

As soon as Ned had assured himself that the train was once more as near
to him as it ought to be, he knocked off as much of the projecting
corner as he could, and passed round it on to the slide.

Looking up from the narrow trail, the young Englishman could see the
great rocks which hung out from the cliffs above; rocks whose fellows
had been the makers of this slide, letting go their hold up above as the
snows melted and the rains sapped their foundations, and then thundering
down to the lake with such an army of small stones and debris that it
seemed as if the whole mountain-side was moving. When this
stone-avalanche crashed into the water a wave rolled out upon the lake
big as an ocean swell from shore to shore.

Looking down, a smooth shoot sloped at an angle from him to the blue
water.

"Well, that is pretty sheer," muttered Ned, craning his neck to look
down to where the lake glistened a thousand feet below, "and if one of
our ponies gets his feet off this trail, there won't be anything of him
left unbroken except his shoes;" and so saying, he turned to see how the
leader would turn the awkward corner which led on to this _via
diabolica_.

As he did so the report of a pistol rang out sharp and clear, followed
by a rush and the clatter of falling stones, and the next moment Ned saw
the leading pony dash round the overhanging rocks, its ropes all loose,
its packs swinging almost under its belly, its bell ringing as if it
were possessed, and its eyes starting from its head in the insanity of
terror.

At every stride it was touch-and-go whether the brute would keep its
legs or not. Each slip and each recovery at that flying pace was in
itself a miracle, and Ned hardly hoped that he could stop the maddened
beast before it and the packs went crashing down to the lake.

Stop the pony! He might as well have tried to stop a stone-slide. And as
he realized this, the danger of his own position flashed across him for
the first time.

Coming towards him, now not fifty yards away, was the maddened horse,
which probably could not have stopped if it wanted to in that distance,
and on such a course. Behind Ned was four hundred yards of such a trail
as he hardly dared to run over to escape death, and even if he had
dared, what chance in the race would he have had against the horse?
Above him there was nothing to which even his strong fingers could
cling, and below the trail--well, he had already calculated on the
chances of any living thing finding foothold below the trail.
Instinctively Ned shouted and threw up his hands. He might as well have
tried to blow the horse back with his breath. In another ten seconds the
brute would be upon him; in other words, in another ten seconds horse
and packs and Ned Corbett would be the centre of a little dust-storm
bounding frantically down that steep path to death!

In such a crisis as this men think fast, or lose their wits altogether.
Some, perhaps, rather than face the horror of their position shut their
eyes, mental and physical, and are glad to die and get it over. Ned was
of the other kind: the kind that will face anything with their eyes
open, and fight their last round with death with eyes that will only
close when the life is out of them.

There was just one chance for life, and having his eyes open, Ned saw it
and took it.

Twenty yards from him now was that hideous maddened brute, with its
ears laid back, its teeth showing, the foam flying from its jaws, and
its great blood-shot eyes almost starting from their sockets. Twenty
yards, and the pace the brute was coming at was the pace of a
locomotive!

And yet, though Corbett's face was gray as a March morning, and his
square jaws set like a steel trap, there was no blinking in his eyes. He
saw the blow coming, and quick as light he countered. Never on parade in
the old school corps did his rifle come to his shoulder more steadily
than it came now; not a nerve throbbed as he pressed (not pulled) the
trigger, nor was it until he stood _alone_ upon that narrow path that
his knees began to rock beneath him, while the cold perspiration poured
down his drawn white face in streams.

One man only besides Corbett saw that drama; one man, whose features
wore a look of which hell might have been proud, so fiendish was it in
its disappointed malice, when through the dust he saw the red flame
flash, and then, almost before the report reached him, saw the body of
the big buckskin, a limp bagful of broken bones, splash heavily into the
Seton Lake.

But the look passed as a cloud passes on a windy morning, and the next
moment Cruickshank was at Corbett's side, a flood of congratulations and
inquiries pouring from his ready lips. As for Ned, now that the danger
was over, he was utterly unstrung, and a bold enemy might have easily
done for him that which the runaway horse had failed to do. Perhaps that
thought never occurred to any enemy of Ned's; perhaps the quick,
backward glance, in which Cruickshank recognized old Roberts' purple
features, was as effectual a safeguard to the young man's life as even
his own good rifle had been; be that as it may, a few moments later Ned
stumbled along after his friend to a place of safety, and there sat down
again to collect himself.

Meanwhile, Roberts and Cruickshank stood looking at one another, an
expression in the old poet's face, which neither Corbett nor Cruickshank
had ever seen there before, the hand in his coat pocket grasping a
revolver, whose ugly muzzle was ready to belch out death from that
pocket's corner at a moment's notice. At last Cruickshank spoke in a
voice so full of genuine sorrow, that even Roberts slackened his hold
upon the weapon concealed in his coat pocket.

"You've had a near shave to-day, Corbett, and it was my fault. I am
almost ashamed to ask you to forgive me."

"How--what do you mean? Did you fire that shot?"

"I did, like a cursed idiot," replied Cruickshank.

Roberts' face was a study for an artist. Speechless surprise reigned
upon it supreme.

"I did," Cruickshank repeated. "I fired at a grouse that was hooting in
a bull-pine by the track, and I suppose that that scared the
cayuse--though I've never known a pack-horse mind a man shooting
before."

"Nor I," muttered Roberts. "I suppose you didn't notice if you hit that
fool-hen, Colonel Cruickshank?"

"No; I don't suppose I did. I'd enough to think of when I saw what I had
done."

"Well, it didn't fly away, and it ain't there now," persisted Roberts.
"Perhaps you'd like to go and look for it."

However, Cruickshank took no notice of Roberts' speech, but held out his
hand to Corbett with such an honest expression of sorrow, that if it was
not sincere, it was superb as a piece of acting.

Without a word Corbett took the proffered hand. There are some natures
which find it hard to suspect evil in others, and Ned Corbett's was one
of these. Only he made a mental note, that though Cruickshank had only
made two mistakes since starting from Douglas, they had both been of
rather a serious nature.

Only one man climbed down to look at the dead cayuse as it lay half
hidden in the shallow water at the edge of the lake, and that was only a
Chinaman. Of course he went to see what he could save from the wreck;
equally, of course, he found nothing worth bringing away; found nothing
and noticed nothing, or if he did, only told what he had seen to old
Roberts. There seemed to be an understanding between these two, for Phon
trusted the hearty old Shropshireman as much as he seemed to dread and
avoid the colonel.




CHAPTER VIII.

THEIR FIRST "COLOURS."


"Lillooet at last!"

Steve Chance was the speaker, and as his eyes rested upon the Frazer,
just visible from the first bluff which overlooks the Lillooet, his
spirits rose so that he almost shouted aloud for joy. There beneath him,
only a short mile away, lay most of the things which he longed for: rest
after labour, good food, and pleasant drinks. Steve's cravings may not
have been the cravings of an ideal artist's nature, but let those who
would cavil at them tramp for a week over stone-slides and through
alkaline dust, and then decide if these are not the natural longings of
an ordinary man.

To tell the whole truth, Steve had amused himself and his comrade
Roberts for more than a mile by discussing what they would order to eat
and drink when once they reached comparative civilization again. Even
the hardest of men tire in time of bacon and beans and tea.

A "John Collins," a seductive fluid, taken in a long glass and sipped
through a straw, was perhaps what Steve hankered after most; but there
were many other things which he longed for besides that most delectable
of drinks, such for instance as a "full bath," a beefsteak, and clean
sheets to follow.

Alas, poor Steve! There was the Frazer to wash in if he liked, and no
doubt he could have obtained something which called itself a steak at
the saloon, but a "John Collins" and clean sheets he was not likely to
obtain west of Chicago.

Indeed, to this day long glasses and "drinketty drinks" are rare in the
wild west; "drunketty drinks" out of short thick vulgar little tumblers
being the order of the day. And apart from all this, Lillooet, though
larger in 1862 than it is to-day, was even then but a poor little town,
a town consisting only of one long straggling street, which looked as if
it had lost its way on a great mud-bluff by the river. Benches of yellow
mud and gray-green sage-brush rose above and around the "city," tier
above tier, until they lost themselves in the mountains which gathered
round, and deep down at the foot of the bluffs the Frazer roared along.

Since Chance had last seen the Frazer at Westminster its character had
considerably changed. There it was a dull heavy flood, at least half a
mile in breadth from bank to bank; here it was an angry torrent,
roaring between steep overhanging banks, nowhere two hundred yards
apart. There the river ran by flat lands, and fields which men might
farm; here the impending mountains hung threateningly above it. The most
daring steamboat which had ever plied upon the Frazer had not come
nearer to Lillooet than Lytton, and that was full forty miles down
stream.

In one thing only the Frazer was unchanged. At Lillooet, as at
Westminster, it was a sordid yellow river, with no sparkle in it, no
blue backwaters, no shallows through which the pebbles shone like jewels
through liquid sunshine. And yet, artist though he was in a poor
tradesman-like fashion, Steve gazed on the Frazer with a rapture which
no other stream had ever awakened in him. At the portage between Seton
and Anderson lakes he had passed a stream such as an angler dreams of in
his dusty chambers on a summer afternoon, but he had hardly wasted a
second glance upon it. Only trout lay there, great purple-spotted
fellows, who would make the line vibrate like a harp string, and thrash
the water into foam, ere they allowed themselves to be basketed; but in
the Frazer, though the fish were only torpid, half-putrid salmon, that
would not even take a fly, there was gold, and gold filled Steve's brain
and eyes and heart just then to the exclusion of every other created
thing. All he wanted was gold, gold; and his spirits rose higher and
higher as he noted the flumes which ran along the river banks, and saw
the little groups of blue-shirted Chinamen who squatted by their
rockers, or shovelled the gravel into their ditches.

So keen, indeed, was Steve to be at work amongst his beloved "dirt,"
that tired though he was, he persuaded Ned to come with him and wash a
shovelful of it, whilst dinner was being prepared.

Right at the back of the town a little company of white men had dug deep
into the gravel of the beach, set their flumes, and turned on a somewhat
scanty supply of water, and here Steve obtained his first "colours."

A tall old man who ran the mine lent him a shovel, and showed him where
to fill it with likely-looking dirt; taught him how to dip the edge of
his shovel in the bucket, and slowly swill the water thus obtained round
and round, so as to wash away the big stones and the gravel which he did
not want.

The operation looks easier than it is, and at first Steve washed his
shovel cleaner than he meant to, in a very short time. By and by,
however, he learnt the trick, and was rewarded by seeing a patch of fine
gravel left in the hollow of the shovel, with here and there a tiny ruby
amongst it, and here and there an agate. The next washing took away
everything except a sediment of fine black sand,--sand which will fly to
a magnet, and is the constant associate and sure indication of gold.

Steve was going to give this another wash when old Pete stopped him.
"Steady, my lad, don't wash it all away; there it is, don't you see it!"
and sure enough there it was, up by the point of the shovel, seven,
eight--a dozen small red specks, things that you almost needed a
microscope to see, not half as beautiful as the little rubies or the
pure white agates; but this was gold, and when the old miner, taking
back his shovel, dipped it carelessly into the water of his flume,
Chance felt for a moment a pang of indignation at seeing his first
"colours" treated with such scant ceremony, although the twelve specks
together were not, in all probability, worth a cent.

But the sight of the gold put new life into Chance and filled Phon's
veins with fever. One night at Lillooet, Steve said, was rest enough for
him; and most of that night he and Phon spent either down by the river
or in the saloon, watching the Chinese over their rockers, or listening
to the latest accounts from Cariboo. Men could earn good wages placer
mining at Lillooet in '62, even as they can now, but all who could
afford it were pushing on up stream to golden Cariboo. What was five
dollars a day, or ten, or even twenty for the matter of that, when other
men were digging out fortunes daily on Williams Creek and Antler
Cunningham's, and the Cottonwood?

And in this matter Cruickshank humoured Steve's feverish impatience to
get on. Here, as at Douglas, the gallant colonel showed a strange
reluctance to mingle with his fellows, or at least with such of them as
had passed a season in the upper country, and even went so far as to
camp out a mile away from the town, to give the pack animals a better
chance of getting good feed, and to secure them, so he said, against all
temptations to stray up stream with somebody else. Horseflesh was dear
at Lillooet in '62; and the colonel said that morals were lax, though
why they should have been worse than at Westminster, Ned could not
understand.

However, it suited him to go on, so he raised no objection to
Cruickshank's plans, more especially as the rest did not seem beneficial
to his honest old chum, Roberts, who had been the centre of a
hard-drinking, hard-swearing lot of mining men, ever since he arrived
at Lillooet. Whenever Ned came near, these men sunk their voices to a
whisper, and once when Cruickshank came in sight, the scowl upon their
brows grew so dark, and their mutterings so ominous, that the colonel
took the hint and vanished immediately. When Ned saw him next he was at
their trysting-place, a mile and a half from the saloon, and very
impatient to be off,--so impatient, indeed, that he absolutely refused
to wait for Roberts, who, he "guessed," was drunk.

"Those old-timers are all the same when they get amongst pals, and as
for Roberts, we are deuced well rid of him, he is no use anyway," said
the colonel.

This might very well be Cruickshank's opinion. It was not Ned's, and Ned
had a way of thinking and acting for himself, so without any waste of
words he bade his comrades "drive ahead," whilst he turned back in
search of Roberts.

By some accident this worthy had not heard of the intended start, and
was, as Ned expected, as innocent of any intention to desert as he was
of drunkenness.

When Ned found him he was sitting in the barroom with a lot of his pals,
and the conversation round him had grown loud and angry; indeed, as Ned
entered, a rough, weather-beaten fellow in his shirt sleeves was
shouting at the top of his voice, "What the deuce is the good of all
this jaw? Lynch the bilk, that's what I say, and save trouble."

But Ned's appearance put a stop to the proceedings, though an angry
growl broke out when he was overheard to say that Cruickshank and Steve
had started half an hour ago, and that he himself had come back to look
for old Roberts.

"Don't you go, Bob," urged one of his comrades; "them young Britishers
are bound to stay by their packs, but you've no call to."

"Not you. You'll stay right here, if you ain't a born fool," urged
another.

But Bob was not to be coaxed or bantered out of his determination to
stay by his brother Salopian.

"No, lads," he retorted, "I ain't a born fool, and I ain't the sort to
go back on a pal. If Corbett goes I'm going, though I don't pretend to
be over-keen on the job."

"Wal, if you will go, go and be hanged to you; only, Bob, keep your eye
skinned, and, I say, _shoot fust_ next time, _shoot fust_; now don't you
forget it!" with which mysterious injunction Bob's big friend reeled up
from the table (he was half-drunk already), shook hands, "liquored" once
more, and left. He said he had some business to attend to down town; and
as it was nearly noon, and he had done nothing but smoke and drink short
drinks since breakfast-time, he was probably right in thinking that it
was time to attend to it.

Whilst this gentleman rolled away down the street with a fine free
stride, requiring a good deal of sea-room, Ned and his friend had to put
their best feet foremost (as the saying is) to make up for lost time.
When you are walking fast over rough ground you have not much breath
left for conversation, and this, perhaps, and the roar of the sullen
river, accounts for the fact that the two men strode along in silence,
neither of them alluding to the conversation just overheard in the
saloon, although the minds of both were running upon that subject, and
Ned noticed that the pistol which Roberts pulled out and examined as
they went along was a recent purchase.

"Hullo, you've got a new gun, Rob," he remarked. Everything with which
men shoot is called a gun in British Columbia.

"Yes, it's one I bought at Lillooet. I hadn't got a good one with me."

"Well, I don't suppose you'll want it, now you have got it," replied
Corbett.

"Well, I don't know. I _might_ want it to shoot grouse with by the side
of the trail."

And the old fellow laid such an emphasis upon his last words and
chuckled so grimly, that Ned half suspected that he had wetted his
whistle once too often after all.




CHAPTER IX.

UNDER THE BALM-OF-GILEAD TREE.


From noon of the day upon which Ned Corbett and old Roberts strode out
of Lillooet until the night upon which we meet them again was a
fortnight and more, a fortnight of which I might, if I chose, write a
history, but it would only be the history of almost every mining party
and pack-train that ever went up the Frazer. The incidents of those days
are indelibly engraved upon the memories of Steve and of Corbett, but to
Roberts they passed without remark and left no impression behind. The
life was only the ordinary miner's life; and there was nothing new to
the old-timer in buoyant hopes wearing away day by day; nothing new in
the daily routine of camps broken by starlight and pitched again at
dusk; in trails blocked by windfalls or destroyed by landslips; in packs
which would shift, tie them ever so tightly; in stones which cut the
moccasins, and prickly pears which filled the sole with anguish; or in
cruel fire-hardened rampikes, which tore the skin to rags and the
clothes to ribands. Three weeks upon the road had done its work upon the
party, had added much to their knowledge, and taken much away that was
useless from their equipment.

When they left Westminster they were five smart, well-fed, civilized
human beings; when they struggled up out of the valley of the Frazer
towards Cariboo, at Soda Creek, they were five lean, weather-hardened
men, their clothes all rags and patches, their skin all wounded and
blistered, every "indispensable adjunct of a camp," as made by Mr.
Silver, discarded long ago; but every article of camp furniture which
was left, carried where it could be got at, ready when it was wanted,
and thoroughly adapted to the rough and ready uses of those who took the
trouble to "pack it along."

Even to Steve it seemed ages now since his nostrils were used to any
other odour than the pungent scent of the pines; ages since his ears
listened to any other sound than the roar of the yellow river and the
monotonous tinkle of the leader's bell; ages even since washing had been
to him as a sacred rite, and a clean shirt as desirable as a clean
conscience.

And yet Corbett and Chance had seen, on their way up, men who led harder
lives than theirs; blue-shirted, bearded fellows, who carried their all
upon their own shoulders; and others who had put their tools and their
grub in the craziest of crafts, and, climbing one moment and wading the
next, strove to drag it up stream in the teeth of the Frazer.

As Ned saw the frail canoes rear up on end against the angry waters, he
understood why the old river carried so many down stream whose dead
hands grasped no dollars, whose dead lips told no tales. But the river
trail had come to an end at last, and the five were now steering
north-east for the bold mountains and their gold-bearing rivers and
creeks. They had now put many a mile between themselves and Soda Creek,
and were lying smoking round their camp-fire, built under a huge
balm-of-gilead tree, which stood in the driest part of what we call a
swamp, and Canadians a meadow. The pack-saddles were set in orderly
line, with their ropes and cinches neatly coiled alongside them; the
packs were snug under their _manteaux_, and the tent was pitched as men
pitch a tent who are used to their work, not with its sides all bellying
in, strained in one place slack in another, but just loose enough to
allow for a wetting if it should happen to rain in the night. Now and
again the bell of one of the pack animals sounded not unmusically from
some dark corner of the swamp, or the long "ho-ho" of kalula, the
night-owl, broke the silence, which but for these sounds would have been
complete.

Suddenly a voice said:

"Great Scott! do you know what the date is?"

Since the pipes had been lighted no one had spoken, and as Cruickshank
broke the silence, it was almost under protest that Ned rolled round on
his blanket to face the speaker, and dropped a monosyllabic "Well?" The
men were too tired to talk, and night, which in these northern forests
is very still, had thrown its spell upon them. Steve and Phon merely
turned their heads inquiringly to the speaker, who sat upon a log
turning over the leaves of a little diary, and waited.

"To-morrow will be the 27th of May."

"The 27th of May--what then?" asked Ned dreamily. He was hardly awake
to everyday thoughts yet.

"What then! What then! Why, if you are not at Williams Creek by the 1st
of June your claims can be jumped by anyone who comes along."

"But can't we get there by the 1st of June?" asked Ned, sitting up and
taking his pipe out of his mouth.

"Impossible. If you could drive the ponies at a trot you could only just
do it. It is five good days' journey with fresh animals, and we have
only four to do it in, and grizzlies wouldn't make our ponies trot now."

"Well, what are we to do?" broke in Chance. "You calculated the time,
and said that we had enough and to spare."

"I know I did, but I made a mistake."

"Oh to blazes with your _mistakes_, Colonel Cruickshank," cried Chance
angrily; "they seem to me a bit too expensive to occur quite so often."

"Don't lose your temper, my good sir. I couldn't help it, but I am
willing to atone for it. I calculated as if April had thirty-one days in
it, and it hasn't; and, besides, I've dropped a day on the road
somehow."

"Looking for horses," growled Roberts, "or shooting grouse, maybe."

"What do you propose to do, Colonel Cruickshank?" asked Corbett, whose
face alone seemed still perfectly under his own control.

"Well, Mr. Corbett, I've led you into the scrape, so I must get you out
of it. If either you or Roberts will stay with me I'll bring the horses
on for you to Williams Creek, whilst the rest can start away right now
and make the best of their time to the claims. You could do the
distance all right if it wasn't for the pack-ponies."

"But how could _I_ stay?" asked Corbett.

"Well, you needn't, of course, if Roberts doesn't mind staying;
otherwise you could assign your interest in your claim to him, and he
could go on and hold it for you."

"But it will be deuced hard work for two men to manage nine pack-ponies
over such a trail as this."

"It won't be any violets," replied Cruickshank, "you may bet on that;
but it's my fault, so I'll 'foot the bill.'"

"I don't know about its being your fault either," broke in Corbett, "I
was just as big an ass as a man could be. I ought to have calculated the
time for myself. Can't we all stop and chance it?"

"What, and lose a good many thousand dollars paid, and every chance of
making a good many thousand more, for which we have been tramping over a
month--that would be lunacy!" broke in Chance.

"Well, if you don't mean to lose the claims, I know no other way of
getting to Williams Creek in time," said Cruickshank; and, looking up at
the sky, he added, "you might have two or three hours' sleep, and then
be off bright and early by moonlight. The moon rises late to-night."

It was a weird scene there by that camp-fire; and there were things
written on the faces of those sitting round it, which a mere outsider
could have read at a glance.

The moon might be coming up later on, but just at that moment there was
neither moon nor star, only a black darkness, broken by the occasional
sputtering flames of the wood fire. Out of the darkness the men's faces
showed from time to time as the red gleams flickered over them; the
faces of Corbett, Steve, and Roberts full of perplexity and doubt; the
eyes of Phon fixed in a frightened fascinated stare upon the colonel;
and Cruickshank's face white with suppressed excitement, the coarse,
cruel mouth drawn and twitching, and the eyes glaring like the eyes of a
tiger crouching for its prey.

"Well, what had we better do?" asked Corbett at last from somewhere
amongst the shadows, and Cruickshank's eyes shifted swiftly to where
Steve and Roberts lay, as if anxious to forestall their answer.

"I'll stay, Ned Corbett. It's safer for me than it would be for you,"
said Roberts. "I can only lose a little time, not much worth to anyone,
and you have a good deal to lose."

After all it was only a small question. They had driven the pack animals
now for a month, and, whoever stayed, would only at the worst have to
drive them for another week. The work, of course, would be rather heavy
with only two to divide it among; but on the other hand those who went
ahead would have to make forced marches and live upon very short
rations.

Ned was rather surprised then that Roberts answered as if it was a
matter of grave import, and that his voice seemed to have lost the jolly
ring which was natural to it.

"Don't stop if you don't like to, old chap. Phon can assign his
interests to you and stay behind instead."

"No, no, me halò stay. Halò! halò!" and the little Chinaman almost
shrieked the last word, so emphatic was his refusal.

"It's no good leaving Phon," replied Roberts, casting a pitying look
towards that frightened heathen; "he would see devils all the time, and
be of no use after it got dark. I tell you, I'll stay and take care of
the ponies; and now you had better all turn in and get some sleep. You
will have to travel pretty lively when you once start. I'll see to your
packs."

Probably Ned had been mistaken from the first, but if any feeling had
shaken his friend's voice for a moment, it had quite passed away now,
and Roberts was again his own genial, helpful self.

After all, he was the very best person to leave behind. Except
Cruickshank, he was the only really good packer amongst them. He was as
strong as a horse, and besides, he had no particular reason for wanting
to be at Williams Creek by the 1st of June.

"You really don't mind stopping, Rob?" asked Corbett.

"Not a bit. Why should I? I'd do a good deal more than that for you, if
it was only for the sake of the dear old country, my lad."

Again, just for a moment, there seemed to be a sad ring in his voice,
and he stretched out his hand and gripped Ned's in the darkness.

Ned was surprised.

"The old man is a bit sentimental to-night," he thought. "It's not like
him, but, I suppose, these dismal woods have put him a little off his
balance. They _are_ lonesome."

With which sage reflection Ned turned his eyes away from the dark vista
down which he had been gazing, and rolling round in his blankets forgot
both the gloom and the gold.

For two or three hours the sleepers lay there undisturbed by the calls
of the owls, or the stealthy tread of a passing bear, which chose the
trail as affording the best road from point to point. At night, when
there is no chance of running up against a man, no one appreciates a
well-made road better than a bear. He will crash through the thickest
brush if necessary, but if you leave him to choose, he will avoid rough
and stony places as carefully as a Christian.

Towards midnight Cruickshank, who had been tossing restlessly in his
blankets, sat up and crouched broodingly over the dying embers,
unconscious that a pair of bright, beady eyes were watching him
suspiciously all the time.

But Phon made no sign. He was only a bundle of blankets upon the ground,
a thing of no account.

By and by, when Cruickshank had settled himself again to sleep, this
bundle of blankets sat up and put fresh logs on the camp-fire. The
warmth from them soothed the slumberers, and after a while even
Cruickshank lay still. Phon watched him for some time, until convinced
that his regular breathing was not feigned, but real slumber, and then
he too crept away from the fire-side, not to his own place, but into the
shadow where Roberts lay.

After a while an owl, which had been murdering squirrels in their sleep,
came gliding on still wings, and lit without a sound on the limb of a
tall pine near the camp. The light from the camp-fire dazzled its big
red-brown eyes, but after a little time it could see that two of the
strange bundles, which lay like mummies round the smouldering logs, were
sitting up and talking together. But the owl could not catch what they
said, except once, when it saw a bright, white gleam flash from the
little bundle like moonlight showing through a storm-cloud, and then as
the bigger bundle snatched the white thing away, the listening owl
heard a voice say:

"No, my God, no! That may do very well for a Chinee; it won't do for a
Britisher, Phon!"

And another voice answered angrily:

"Why not? You white men all fool. You savey what _he_ did. S'pose you no
kill him, by'm bye he--"

But the rest was lost to the owl, and a few minutes later, just as it
raised its wings to go, it saw the smaller bundle wriggle across the
ground again to its old place by the embers.




CHAPTER X.

THE SHADOWS BEGIN TO FALL.


When Corbett woke, the first beams of the rising moon were throwing an
uncertain light over the forest paths, and the children of night were
still abroad, the quiet-footed deer taking advantage of the moonlight to
make an early breakfast before the sun and man rose together to annoy
them.

The camp-fire had just been made up afresh, and a frying-pan, full of
great rashers, was hissing merrily upon it, while a kettle full of
strong hot coffee stood beside it, ready to wash the rashers down.

Men want warming when they rise at midnight from these forest slumbers,
and Roberts, knowing that it would be long ere his friends broke their
fast again, had been up and busy for the last half-hour, building a real
nor'-west fire, and preparing a generous breakfast.

Cruickshank too was up, if not to speed the parting, at any rate to see
them safely off the premises, a smile of unusual benevolence on his dark
face.

Between them, he and Roberts put up the travellers' packs, taking each
man's blankets as he got out of them, and rolling in them such light
rations as would just last for a four days' trip. In twenty minutes from
the time when they crawled out of their blankets, the three stood ready
to start.

"Are you all set?" asked Cruickshank.

"All set," replied Chance.

"Then the sooner you 'get' the better. It will be as much as your
heathen can do to make the journey in time, I'll bet."

"Why, is the trail a very bad one?"

"Oh, it's all much like this, but it's most of it uphill, and there may
be some snow on the top. But you can't miss your way with all these
tracks in front."

"You will be in yourself a day or two after us, won't you?" asked
Corbett.

"Yes. If you don't make very good time I daresay I shall, although the
snow may delay the ponies some. But don't you worry about them. I'll
take care of the ponies, you can trust me for that."

"Then, if you will be in so soon, I won't trouble to take anything
except one blanket and my rifle," remarked Ned.

"Oh, take your rocker. It looks more business-like; and, besides, all
the millionaires go in with 'nothing but a rocker-iron for their whole
kit, and come out worth their weight in gold.'"

There was a mocking ring in Cruickshank's voice as he said this, at
variance with his oily smile, but Steve Chance took his words in good
faith. Steve still believed in the likelihood of his becoming a
millionaire at one stroke of the miner's pick.

"I guess you're right, colonel. I'll take my rocker-iron, whatever else
I leave behind. Lend a hand to fix it on to my pack, will you?" and
then, when Cruickshank had done this, Steve added with a laugh: "I shall
consider you entitled to (what shall we say?) one per cent on the
profits of the mine when in full swing, for your services, colonel."

"Don't promise too much, Chance. You don't know what sort of a gold-mine
you are giving away yet;" and the speaker bent over a refractory strap
in Steve's pack to hide an ugly gleam of white teeth, which might have
had a meaning even for such an unsuspicious fool as Ned Corbett, who at
this moment picked up his Winchester and held out his hand to
Cruickshank.

"Good-bye, colonel," he said. "What with the claims and the packs, we
have trusted you now with every dollar we have in the world. Lucky for
us that we are trusting to the honour of a soldier and a gentleman,
isn't it? Good-bye to you."

It was the kindliest speech Ned had ever made to Cruickshank. Weeks of
companionship, and the man's readiness to atone for his mistake, had had
their effect upon Corbett's generous nature; but its warmth was lost
upon the colonel.

Either he really did not see, or else he affected not to see the
outstretched hand; in any case he did not take it, and Ned went away
without exchanging that silent grip (which a writer of to-day has aptly
called "an Englishman's oath") with the man to whom he had intrusted his
last dollar.

As for old Roberts, he followed his friends for a couple of hundred
yards upon their way, and then wrung their hands until the bones
cracked.

"Give this to Rampike when you see him, Ned. I guess he'll be at
Williams Creek, or Antler; Williams Creek most likely," said the old
poet in parting, and handed a note with some little inclosure in it to
Ned.

"All right, I won't forget. Till we meet again, Rob;" and Corbett waved
his cap to him.

"Till we meet again!" Roberts repeated after him, and stood looking
vacantly along the trail until Steve and Corbett passed out of sight.
Then he, too, turned and tramped back to camp, cheering himself as he
went with a stave of his favourite ditty.

The last the lads heard of their comrade on that morning was the
crashing of a dry twig or two beneath old Roberts' feet, and the refrain
of his song as it died away in the distance--


     "Riding, riding, riding on my old pack-mule."


Ned Corbett could not imagine how he had ever thought that air a lively
one. It was stupidly mournful this morning, or else the woods and the
distance played strange tricks with the singer's voice. But if Ned was
affected by an imaginary minor key in his old friend's singing, a
glimpse at the camp he had left would not have done much to restore his
cheerfulness.

The embers had died down, and looked almost as gray and sullen as the
face of the man who sat and scowled at them from a log alongside. The
only living thing in camp besides the colonel was one of those impudent
gray birds, which the up-country folk call "whisky-jacks." Of course he
had come to see what he could steal. That is the nature of jays, and the
whisky-jack is the Canadian jay. At first the bird stood with his head
on one side eyeing the colonel, uncertain whether it would be safe to
come any closer or not. But there was a fine piece of bacon-rind at the
colonel's feet, so the bird plucked up his courage and hopped a few
paces nearer. He had measured his distance to an inch, and with one eye
on the colonel and one on the bacon, was just straining his neck to the
utmost to drive his beak into the succulent morsel, when the man whom he
thought was asleep discharged a furious kick at an unoffending log, and
clenching his fist ground out between his teeth muttered:

"A soldier and a gentleman! a soldier and a gentleman! Yes, but it came
a bit too late, Mr. Edward Corbett. Hang it, I wish you had stayed
behind instead of that fool, Roberts."

Of course the "whisky-jack" did not understand the other biped's
language, but he was a bird of the world, and instinct told him that his
companion in camp was dangerous; so, though the bacon-rind still lay
there, he flitted off to a tree hard by, and spent the next half-hour in
heaping abuse upon the colonel from a safe distance.

That "whisky-jack" grew to be a very wise bird, and in his old days used
to tell many strange stories about human bipeds and the Balm-of-Gilead
camp.

But there was half a mile of brush between Ned and their old camp, so he
saw nothing of all this; and after the fresh morning air had roused him,
and the exercise had set his blood going through his veins at its normal
pace, he went unconcernedly on his way, talking to Steve as long as
there was room enough for the two to walk side by side, and then
gradually forging ahead, and setting that young Yankee a step which kept
him extended, and made poor little Phon follow at a trot.

Though Ned and Steve had grown used to isolation upon the trail with
ten laden beasts between the two, they made several attempts upon this
particular morning to carry on a broken conversation, or lighten the
road with snatches of song.

Perhaps it was that they were making unconscious efforts to drive away a
feeling of depression, which sometimes comes over men's natures with as
little warning as a storm over an April sky.

But their efforts were in vain; nature was too strong for them. In the
great silence amid these funereal pines their voices seemed to fall at
their own feet, and ere long the forest had mastered them, as it masters
the Indians, and the birds, and the wild dumb beasts which wander about
in its fastnesses. The only creature which retains its loquacity in a
pine-forest is the squirrel, and he is always too busy to cultivate
sentiment of any kind.

Cruickshank had warned them that the trail led uphill, and it
undoubtedly did so. At first the three swung along over trails brown
with the fallen pine needles of last year, soft to the foot and level to
the tread, with great expanses of fruit bushes upon either side,--bushes
that in another month or two would be laden with a repast spread only
for the bear and the birds. Salmon-berry and rasp-berry, soap-berry and
service-berry, and two or three different kinds of bilberry were there,
as well as half a dozen others which neither Ned nor Steve knew by
sight. But the season of berries was not yet, so they wetted their
parched lips with their tongues and passed on with a sigh.

Then the road began to go uphill. They knew that by the way they kept
tripping over the sticks and by the increased weight of their packs. By
and by Steve thought they would come to a level place at the top, and
there they would lie down for a while and rest. But that top never came,
or at least the sun was going round to the south, and it had not come
yet. And then the air began to grow more chill, and the trees to change.
There were no more bushes, or but very few of them; and the trees, which
were black dismal-looking balsams, were draped with beard-moss, the
winter food of the cariboo, and there was snow in little patches at
their feet. When the sun had gone round to the west the snow had grown
more plentiful, and there were glades amongst the balsams, and at last
Steve was glad, for they had got up to the top of the divide.

But he was wrong again, for again the trail rose, and this time through
a belt of timber which the wind had laid upturned across their path.
Heavens! how heavy the packs grew then, and how their limbs ached with
stepping over log after log, bruising their shins against one and
stumbling head-first over another. At first Steve growled at every
spiked-bough which caught and held him, and groaned at every sharp stake
which cut into the hollow of his foot. But anger in the woods soon gives
place to a sullen stoicism. It is useless to quarrel with the
unresponsive pines. The mountains and the great trees look down upon
man's insignificance, and his feeble curse dies upon his lips, frozen by
the terrible sphinx-like silence of a cold passionless nature.

As long as the sunlight lasted the three kept up their spirits fairly
well. The glades in their winter dress, with the sunlight gleaming upon
the dazzling snow and flashing from the white plumes of the pines, were
cheery enough, and took Corbett's thoughts back to Christmas in the old
country; besides, there were great tracks across one glade--tracks like
the tracks of a cow, and Ned was interested in recognizing the
footprints of the beast which has given its name to Cariboo.

But when the sun went, everything changed. A great gloom fell like a
pall upon man and nature: the glitter which made a gem of every lakelet
was gone, and the swamps, which had looked like the homes of an ideal
Father Christmas, relapsed into dim shadowy places over whose soft
floors murder might creep unheard, whilst the balsam pines stood rigid
and black, like hearse plumes against the evening sky.

"Ned, we can't get out of this confounded mountain to-night, can we?"
asked Chance.

"No, old man, I don't think we can," replied Ned, straining his eyes
along the trail, which still led upwards.

"Then I propose that we camp;" and Chance suited the action to the word,
by heaving his pack off his shoulders and dropping on to it with a sigh
of relief.

Perhaps the three sat in silence for five minutes (it certainly was not
more), asking only for leave to let the aching muscles rest awhile;
though even this seemed too much to ask, for long before their muscles
had ceased to throb, before Steve's panting breath had begun to come
again in regular cadence, the chill of a winter night took hold upon
them, stiffened their clothes, and would shortly have frozen them to
their seats.

"This is deuced nice for May, isn't it, Steve?" remarked Ned with a
shiver. "Lend me the axe, Phon; it is in your pack. If we don't make a
fire we shall freeze before morning. Steve, you might cut some brush,
old chap, and you and Phon might beat down some of the snow into a floor
to camp on. I'll go and get wood enough to last all night;" and Corbett
walked off to commence operations upon a burnt "pine stick," still
standing full of pitch and hard as a nail. But Ned was used to his axe,
and the cold acted on him as a spur to a willing horse, so that he hewed
away, making the chips fly and the axe ring until he had quite a stack
of logs alongside the shelter which Steve had built up.

Then the sticks began to crackle and snap like Chinese fireworks, and
the makers of the huge fire were glad enough to stand at a respectful
distance lest their clothes should be scorched upon their backs. That is
the worst of a pine fire. It never gives out a comfortable glow, but
either leaves you shivering or scorches you.

Having toasted themselves on both sides, the three travellers found a
place where they would be safe from the wood smoke, and still standing
pulled out the rations set apart for the first day's supper, and ate the
cold bacon and heavy damper slowly, knowing that there was no second
course coming.

When you are reduced to two slices of bread and one of bacon for a full
meal, with only two such meals in the day, and twelve hours of
abstinence and hard labour between them, it is wonderful how even coarse
store bacon improves in flavour. I have even known men who would
criticise the cooking at a London club, to collect the stale crumbs from
their pockets and eat them with apparent relish in the woods, though the
crumbs were thick with fluff and tobacco dust! As they stood there
munching, Ned said:

"I suppose, Steve, we did wisely in coming on?"

"What else could we have done, Ned?"

"Yes, that's it. What else could we have done? And yet--"

"And yet?" repeated Steve questioningly. "What is your trouble, Ned?"

"Do you remember my saying, when I bought the claims, that with
Cruickshank under our eyes all the time we should have a good security
for our money?"

"Yes, and now you have let him go. I see what you mean; but you can rely
upon Roberts, can't you?"

"As I would upon myself," replied Corbett shortly. "But still I have
broken my resolution."

"Oh, well, that is no great matter; and besides, I don't believe that
the colonel would do a crooked thing any more than we would."

"He-he! He-he-he!"

It was a strangely-harsh cackle was Phon's apology for a laugh, and
coming so rarely and so unexpectedly, it made the two speakers start.

But they could get nothing out of the man when they talked to him. He
was utterly tired out, and in another few minutes lay fast asleep by the
fire.

"I am afraid that quaint little friend of ours doesn't care much for the
colonel," remarked Ned.

"Oh, Phon! Phon thinks he is the devil. He told me so;" and Steve
laughed carelessly.

What did it matter what a Chinaman thought! A little yellow-skinned,
pig-tailed fellow like Phon was not likely to have found out anything
which had escaped Steve's Yankee smartness.




CHAPTER XI.

"JUMP OR I'LL SHOOT."


Three days after they left the Balm-of-Gilead camp, Ned Corbett and his
two friends stood upon a ridge of the bald mountains looking down upon
the promised land.

"So this is Eldorado, is it?"

Ned Corbett himself was the speaker, though probably those who had known
him at home or in Victoria would have hardly recognized him. All the
three gold-seekers had altered much in the last month, and standing in
the bright sunlight of early morning the changes wrought by hard work
and scanty food were very apparent.

Bronzed, and tired, and ragged, with a stubble of half-grown beards upon
their chins, with patches of sacking or deer-skin upon their trousers,
and worn-out moccasins on their feet, none of the three showed signs of
that golden future which was to come. Beggars they might be, but surely
Croesus never looked like this!

"We shall make it to-day, Ned," remarked Chance, taking off his cap to
let the cool mountain breeze fan his brow.

"We may, if we can drag him along, but he is very nearly dead beat;" and
the direction in which Ned glanced showed his companion that he was
speaking of a limp bundle of blue rags, which had collapsed in a heap at
the first sign of a halt.

"Why not leave Phon to follow us?" asked Steve in a low tone. Low though
the tone was, the bundle of blue rags moved, and a worn, shrivelled
face looked piteously up into Ned's.

"No, no, Steve," replied Corbett. "All right, Phon, I'll not leave you
behind, even if I have to pack you on my own shoulders."

Thus reassured, the Chinaman collapsed once more. There was not a muscle
in his body which felt capable of further endurance, and yet, with the
gold so near, and his mind full of superstitious horrors, he would have
crawled the rest of the journey upon his hands and knees rather than
have 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 from
somewhere near our claims;" and the speaker pointed to a faint column of
blue which was just distinguishable from the surrounding atmosphere.

"I believe you are right, Ned. Come, Phon, one more effort!" and Steve
helped the Chinaman on to his legs, though he himself was very nearly
worn out.

Ned took up the slender pack which Phon had carried until then, and
added it to the other two packs already upon his broad shoulders. After
all the three packs weighed very little, for Ned's companions had thrown
away everything except their blankets, and Steve would have even thrown
his blanket away had not Ned taken charge of it. Ned knew from
experience that so long as he sleeps fairly soft and warm at night a
man'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 crust
still left in his pocket, and more than enough tobacco. Along the trail
there were plenty of streams full of good water, and if bread and water
and 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 to
be run; but that smoke was the goal, and with the goal in sight even
Phon 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 of
high upland, rising above the forest level, and entirely destitute of
timber at the top.

Here in late summer the sunnier slopes are slippery with a luxuriant
growth of long lush grasses and weeds, and ablaze with the vivid crimson
of 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 the
grasses are brilliantly green, the time of flowers has hardly yet come.

Here and there as the three hurried down they came across big boulders
of quartz gleaming in the sun. These were as welcome to Steve as the
last milestone on his road home to a weary pedestrian. Where the quartz
was, there would the gold be also, argued Steve, and the thought roused
him 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 column
of smoke out of his sight, and the trail was leading down again to the
timber.

Away far to the east a huge dome of snow gleamed whitely against the
sky-line. That was the outpost of the Rockies. But Steve had no eyes
even for the Rockies. All he saw was a sea of endless brown hills
rolling and creeping away fold upon fold in the distance, all so like
one 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 be
asleep, and this some nightmare country in which he wandered along a
road that had no end.

Luckily Ned roused him from this dreamy fit from time to time, or it
might well have happened that Steve's journey would have ended on this
side of Williams Creek in a rapid slide from the narrow trail to the
bottom of one of the little ravines along which it ran.

Both men were apparently thinking of the same subject. So that though
their sentences were short and elliptical, they had no difficulty in
understanding each other's meaning. Men don't waste words on such a
march as theirs.

"Another three hours ought to do it," Ned would mutter, shifting his
pack 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 Ned
looked up at his only clock, the great red sun, which was now nearly
overhead.

The next moment Corbett's face fell. The path led round a bluff, beyond
which he expected to see the trail go winding gradually down to a little
group of tents and huts gathered about Williams Creek. Instead of that
he found himself face to face with one of those exasperating gulches
which so often bar the weary hunter's road home in the Frazer country.
The swelling uplands rolled on, it was true, sinking gradually to the
level of Williams Creek, and he could see the trail running from him to
his 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, and
another hundred yards brought him to the edge of the gulch and showed
him that this was the simple truth. As so often happens in this country
which ice has formed (smoothing it here and cutting great furrows
through it elsewhere), the downs ended without warning in a precipitous
cliff leading into a dark narrow ravine, along the bottom of which the
gold-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 and
no 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 Ned
looked at it he came to the conclusion that if there was another such
gulch between him and Williams Creek it would probably cost him all he
was worth, for no one in his party could hope to cross two such gulches
before nightfall.

"It's no good looking at it, come along, Steve!" he cried, and grasping
at any little bush within reach to steady his steps, Ned began the
descent.

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, and
careless of life and limb in pursuit of it, was apparent in every yard
of that descent, which, despising all circuitous methods, plunged
headlong into the depths below.

Twice on the way down Steve only owed his life to the stout mountain
weeds to which his fingers clung when his feet forsook him, and once it
was only Ned's strong hand which prevented Phon from following a great
flat stone which his stumbling feet had sent tobogganing into the dark
gulf below.

For two or three minutes Ned had to hold on to Phon by the scruff of the
neck before he was quite certain that he was to be trusted to walk alone
again. Even Steve kept staring into that "dark-profound" into which the
stone had vanished in a way which Corbett did not relish. Though he had
never felt it himself, he knew all about that strange fascination which
seems to tempt some men, brave men too, to throw themselves out of a
railway-carriage, off a pier-head, or down a precipice, and therefore
Ned was not sorry to be at the bottom of that precipitous trail without
the 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 engineering
characteristic of Cariboo.

Two tall pines had grown upon opposite edges of the narrow ravine in
which the gulch ended. From side to side this ravine was rather too
broad for a single pine to span, and far down below, somewhere in the
darkness of it, a stream roared and foamed along. The rocks were damp
with mist and spray, but the steep walls of the narrow place let in no
light by which the prisoned river could be seen. In order to cross this
place, men had loosened the roots of the two pines with pick and shovel,
until the trees sinking slowly towards each other had met over the
mid-stream. Then those who had loosened the roots did their best to make
them fast again, weighting them with rocks, and tethering them with
ropes. When they had done this they had lashed the tops of the trees
together, lopped off a few boughs, run a hand-rope over all, and called
the structure a bridge.

Over this bridge Ned and his comrades had now to pass, and as he looked
at the white face and quaking legs of Phon, and then up at the evening
sky, Ned turned to Steve and whispered in his ear: "Pull yourself
together, Steve. This is a pretty bad place, but we have got to get over
at once or not at all. That fellow will faint or go off his head before
long."

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 possible
averted from the abyss towards which they were clambering.

"I'll go first," said Corbett, when they had reached the roots of the
nearest pine; "then Phon, and you last, Steve." Then bending over his
friend he whispered, "Threaten to throw him in if he funks."

Of course the bridge in front of Corbett was not the ordinary way to
Williams Creek. Pack-trains had come to Williams Creek even in those
early days, and clever as pack-ponies are, they have not yet developed a
talent for tree climbing. So there was undoubtedly some other way to
Williams Creek. This was only a short cut, a route taken by pedestrians
who were in a hurry, and surely no pedestrians were ever in a much
greater hurry than Steve and Ned and Phon.

Consider! Their all was on the other side of that ravine; all their
invested wealth and all their hopes as well; all the reward for weeks of
weary travel, as well as rest, and shelter, and food. They had much to
gain in crossing that ravine, and the slowly sinking sun warned them
that they had no time to look for a better way round. They must take
that short cut or none. And yet when Ned got closer to the rough bridge
he liked it less than ever. Where the trees should have met and joined
together a terrible thing had happened. Ned could see it now quite
plainly from where he stood. A wind, he supposed, must have come howling
up the gulch in one of the dark days of winter, a wind so strong that
when the narrow gully had pent it in, it had gone rushing along,
smashing everything that it met in its furious course, and amongst other
things 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 big
gap, indeed it was so small that some of the ropes still held and
stretched from tree to tree, but still a gap, six feet wide with no
bridge across it, and black, unfathomable darkness down below. Ned
Corbett was one of those men who only see the actual danger which has to
be faced, the thing which has to be done--that which is, and not that
which may be. For instance, Ned saw that he had to jump from one stout
bough to another, that he would have to cling to something with his
hands 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 twenty
worse leaps in an afternoon in the gymnasium at home for the fun of the
thing), and of course he alighted in safety, clambered down the other
pine-tree trunk, and landed safe and sound on the farther shore. He had
never stayed to think of the awful things which would have happened if
he had slipped; of that poor body of his which might have gone whirling
round and round through the darkness, until it plunged into the waters
out of sight of the sun and his fellow-men.

But all men are not made after this fashion. When Ned turned towards
the 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. Phon
had been driven ahead of Steve, as Corbett and Steve had arranged. As
long as the big broad trunk of the pine was beneath him, with plenty of
strong boughs all round him to cling to, Phon had listened to Steve and
obeyed 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 Steve
could say would move him another inch. Chinamen are not trained in
athletics as white men are, and to Phon that six-foot jump appeared to
be a simply impossible feat. Steve might threaten what he liked, but
jump Phon would not. The mere sight of the horrible darkness below made
his head reel, and his fingers cling to the rough pine like the fingers
of a drowning man to a plank.

And now Ned noticed a worse thing even than this Phon had been driven to
the very end of the tree by Steve, and Steve himself was close behind
him. The result was that the weight of two men had to be borne at once
by the thin end of what, after all, was but a small pine, and one
extended almost like a fishing-rod across the ravine. So the tree began
to bow with the weight, and then to lift itself again until it was
swinging and tossing, swaying more and more after every recoil, so that
at each swing Ned expected to see one or both of his friends tossed off
into the gulf below. There must come an end to such a scene as this
sooner or later, and Ned could see but one chance of saving his friend.

"Chance," he shouted, "hold tight! I am going to shoot that cursed
Chinaman!"

The miserable wretch heard and understood the words, and saw the
Winchester, the same which had sent the runaway cayuse spinning down the
stone-slide, come slowly up to Corbett's shoulder.

"Jump or I'll shoot! It's your last chance!" and Phon heard the clank of
the pump as his master forced up a cartridge into the barrel of his
rifle.

It was now death anyway. Phon realized that, and even at that moment his
memory showed him plainly a picture of that pinto mare, whose bruised
and battered body, with a great ghastly hole between the eyes, he had
seen by the edge of Seton Lake. That last thought decided him, and with
a scream of fear he sprang out, and managed to cling, more by sheer luck
than in any other way, to the pine on the Williams Creek side of the
ravine. When Ned grounded arms and reached out to help Phon across the
last few feet of the bridge he was wet through with perspiration, and
yet he was as cool as a new-made grave.

"Ned," said Steve five minutes later, "I would give all the gold in
Cariboo if I had it, rather than cross that place again!"--and he meant
it.

For a few minutes Steve's gold fever had abated, and in the terror of
death even the Chinaman had forgotten the yellow metal. And yet their
journey was now over, and within half an hour's walk of them lay the
claims they had bought, the wonderful spot of earth out of which they
were to dig their heart's desire, the key to all pleasures and the
master of nine men out of every ten--gold!

Ned laughed to himself. Was a steady head and the agility of a very
second-rate gymnast worth more than all the gold in Cariboo?

[Illustration: "WITH A SCREAM OF FEAR THE CHINAMAN SPRANG OUT."]




CHAPTER XII.

A SHEER SWINDLE.


It is hard to sever the idea of a journey's end from ideas of rest and
comfort. 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 traveller
from A to B is sure to picture B as a centre of creature comforts and a
haven of luxurious rest.

Thus it was then that Steve and Corbett hurried through the lengthening
shadows, eager for the city that was to come, their eyes strained to
catch a glow of colour, and their ears alert for the first hum which
should 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 light
however garish, any revelry however mad it might be. Life and light and
noise were what both hankered after as a relief from the silence and
solitude of the last few days, and it is this natural craving for change
in the minds of men who have been too much alone, which accounts for
half the wild revels of the frontier towns.

As a matter of history, the first impression made by Williams Creek upon
the sensitive mind of the artist Chance was one of disappointment.
Perhaps it was that the heavy shadows of the mountains drowned all
colour, or that the day was nearly over and the dance-house not yet
open; whatever the cause Williams Creek struck Chance with a chill. It
was a miserable, mean-looking little place for so much gold to come
from. In his visions of the mines Steve had dwelt too much upon the
glitter of the metal, and too little on the dirt and bare rock from
which the gold has to be extracted; extracted, too, by hard labour,
about the hardest labour probably which the bodies of men were ever made
to undergo.

As his eyes gradually took in the details of the scene, Steve Chance
remembered Cruickshank's glowing word-pictures of the mines, and his own
gaudy map of them, and remembering these things a great fear fell upon
him. Steve had accomplished a pilgrimage over a road upon which stronger
men had died, and brave men turned back, and now the shrine of his
golden 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 land
which might by comparison be called flat. It was lower than the bald
mountains which were at its back, so the melted snows of last winter had
trickled into it, until the whole place was a damp, miserable bog,
through the centre of which the waters had worn themselves a bed, and
made a creek.

There were many such bogs and many such creeks about the foothills of
the bald mountains, but these were for the most part hidden by an
abundant growth of pine, or adorned by a wealth of long grass and the
glory of yellow lily and blue larkspur. But this bog was less fortunate
than 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 bare
patches of yellow mud, stumps rough and untrained where trees had stood,
tunnels in the hillside, great wooden gutters mounted high in the air to
carry off the stream from its bed and pour it into all manner of
unexpected places, piles of boulders and rubbish, so new and unadorned
by weed or flower that you knew instinctively that nature had had no
hand in their arrangement.

And everywhere amongst this brutal digging and hewing there were new log
huts, frame shanties, wet untidy tents, and shelters made of odds and
ends, shelters so mean that an African Bushman would have turned up his
nose at them. Instead of the telegraph and telephone wires that run
overhead in ordinary cities, there were in the mining camp innumerable
flumes, long wooden boxes or gutters, to carry water from point to
point. These gutters were everywhere. They ran over the tops of the
houses, they came winding down for miles along precipitous side-hills,
and they ran recklessly across the main street; for traffic there was
none in those days, or at any rate none which could not step over, or
would not pass round the miners' ditch. In 1862 rights of way were
disregarded up in Cariboo, but an inch of water if it could be used for
gold-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 can
hear the noise of the rockers and the rattle of the gravel in the
sluices. It looks to me as if men were at work here in grim
earnest.--Good-day. How goes it, sir?"

The last part of Corbett's speech was addressed to a man of whom he just
caught sight at that moment, standing in a deep cutting by the side of
the trail, and busily employed in shovelling gravel into a sluice-box at
his side.

"Day," grunted the miner, not pausing to lift his head to look at the
man 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 the
man straightened his back with an effort and jerked his head in the
general direction of the Frazer.

"That's what," replied Steve, dropping naturally into the brief idioms
of 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 about
it. Bacon is played out in Williams Creek, and we are all going it
straight on flour."

The thought of "going it straight on flour" was evidently too much for
Steve's new friend, for he actually groaned aloud, and dug his shovel
into the wall of his trench with as much energy as if he had been
driving it into the ribs of the truant Bacon Brown.

"That will suit us royally," ejaculated Ned. "We shall have a small
train here in a day or two, and there's a good deal of bacon amongst our
stores."

"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 minute
the old gentleman who had helped Steve in his little game of poker
climbed out of the mud-pie he was making, and shook hands, even with the
Chinaman.

"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 you
meet 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 off
at Antler."

"No, they said very little to us. They had a bit of a yarn with
Cruickshank though. He was leading out and met them first. He didn't say
anything about the want of grub to us."

"That's a queer go. Why, it would almost have paid you to go to Antler
instead of coming here. You would get two dollars a pound for bacon up
there."

"Ah! but you see we were bound to be here for the 1st of June, because
of those claims we bought."

"Is that so? Bob did say summat about those claims. Do you know where
they are?"

"Here's our map," replied Corbett, producing the authorized map of Dewd
and Cruickshank, upon which the three claims had been duly marked. "Is
Dewd in the camp?" he added.

"I don't know; but come along, there goes Cameron's triangle. Let us go
and get some 'hash,' and we can find out about Dewd and the claims." And
so saying Rampike laid aside his shovel, put on his coat, and led the
way down to a big tent in the middle of the mining camp.

Here were gathered almost half the population of Williams Creek for
their evening meal, the other half having finished theirs and departed
to work upon the night-shift; for most of the claims were worked night
and day, their owners and the hired men dividing the twenty-four hours
amongst them.

Here, as on board the steamer, Rampike was evidently a man of some
account; one able to secure a place for himself and his chums in spite
of 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 to
notice anyone or hear what men were saying about themselves, but in a
little while, when the edge of appetite was dulled, Ned caught the words
repeated over and over again--"Bacon Brown's men, I guess," and at last
had to answer point blank to a direct question, that he had "never heard
of Mr. Brown before."

"These fellows hain't seen Brown at all," added Rampike. "They're
looking for Dewd. Have you seen him anywhere around?"

At the mention of Dewd's name a broad grin passed over the faces of
those who heard it, and one man looked up and remarked that a good many
people had been inquiring kindly after Dewd lately. The speaker was a
common type amongst the miners, but in those early days his rough
clothes and refined speech struck Ned as contrasting strangely.

Truth to tell, he had been educated at Eton and Oxford, had thrown up a
good tutorship to come out here, and here he was happy as a king, though
all his classical education was thrown away, and his blue pantaloons
were patched fore and aft with bits of sacking once used to contain
those favourite brands of flour known respectively as "Self-rising" and
the "Golden Gate."

As he rose to his feet with the names of the brands printed in large
letters 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 to
please 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 his
claim for the information. Hullo, have you got here already, sonny? I
was before ye though." And Ned's red-headed friend of fighting
proclivities 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 him
early this morning, and if he wasn't so drunk that he can't walk he'd be
afther him still."

"Who's drunk, Pat,--Dewd or Sandy?"

"Oh, don't be foolish! Whoever heard of Dewd touching a drop of good
liquor. That's the worst of that mane shunk; he gets you blind drunk
first and robs you afther."

"What, have you been bitten too, O'Halloran?" asked the tutor; and while
the 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 as
there'll be no trouble about securing them to-morrow. Not as I think any
one 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, the
richest claim on the creek!" cried their friend, after studying the map
for a few minutes.

"Quite so, that is what gives them their exceptional value," remarked
Chance, 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' to
make it worth while working them there;" and Rampike, who was now
standing by the Nugget claim alongside the bed of the creek, pointed
upwards to where the bluffs, two hundred feet high, hung precipitously
over 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 mistake
somewhere.

"Just one of the colonel's mistakes, that's what it is. Come and see the
gold Commissioner, he'll straighten it out for you," retorted Rampike,
hurrying the three off into the presence of a big handsome man, whose
genial ways and handsome face made "the judge" a great favourite with
the miners.

All he could do he did, and was ready to go far beyond the obligations
of his office in his desire to help Cruickshank's victims. It was a very
common kind of fraud after all. The colonel had drawn a sufficiently
accurate map of the Williams Creek valley; he had even given accurately
every name upon that map, and moreover the claims which he had sold to
Corbett & Co. adjoined the Nugget claim, and had been regularly taken up
and bonded by his partner and himself. Cruickshank's story indeed was
true 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 it
adjoined?

There was only one objection to Cruickshank's map,--he had not drawn it
in relief. There was only one objection to Corbett's claim--the surface
of it would have adjoined the surface of the Nugget claim had they both
been upon the same level, only,--only, you see, they were not. There was
a trifling difference of two hundred and fifty feet in the altitude of
the Nugget claim and the bluff adjoining it, and Corbett's claim was on
the top of that bluff. Now a claim on the top of a bluff, where no river
could ever have run to deposit gold, and whither no water could be
brought to wash for gold, was not considered worth two thousand dollars
even in Cariboo.




CHAPTER XIII.

THE BULLET'S MESSAGE.


"Wal, those'll maybe make vallible building lots when Williams Creek has
growed as big as 'Frisco, but somehow trade in building lots ain't brisk
here just now."

No one answered old Rampike. Steve and Ned felt rather hurt at the
levity of his remarks. It is poor fun even for a rich man to be robbed
of six thousand dollars, and neither Ned nor Steve were rich men. In
fact, in losing the six thousand dollars they had lost their all except
the pack-train.

"It ain't no manner of good to grizzle over it," continued this
philosopher, "Cruickshank has got the cinch on you to rights this time.
Six thousand dollars cash, the pleasure of your company from Victoria,
and your pack-train to remember you by! Ho! ho!" and although it was
very annoying to Ned, and quite contrary to Rampike's nature to do so,
he laughed aloud at his own grim joke.

The laugh roused Chance. He was a Yankee to the tips of his
finger-nails, one of those strange beings who "bust and boom" by
turns--millionaires to-day, bankrupts to-morrow, equally sanguine,
happy, and go-ahead in either extreme.

"Ned," he said, his face relaxing into a somewhat wintry smile, "I guess
you were right after all. Cruickshank is no Britisher, you bet."

"Glad you think so; hang him!" growled Ned.

"No Britisher could ever have planned so neat a swindle," continued
Steve meditatively. "By Jove, it is a 'way up'!" and this strange young
man really seemed lost in admiration at the smartness from which he
himself had suffered.

"I don't see much to admire in a thief and a liar. We prefer honesty to
smartness in my country, thank God!"

There was no disguising the fact that Ned Corbett was in a very ugly
temper. Not being one of those who look upon the whole struggle for
wealth as a game of chance and skill, in which everything is allowable
except a plain transgression of the written rules of the game, he could
not even simulate any admiration for a successful swindler's smartness.

Old Rampike saw his mood, and laying his hand on his shoulder gave him a
friendly shake. "Never mind, sonny," he said. "It's no good calling
names; and as for being stone-broke, why there isn't a man in Cariboo
to-day, I reckon, who hasn't been stone-broke, aye and most of 'em mor'n
once or twice."

"Oh, yes, I suppose that is so," said Ned a little wearily, but rousing
himself all the same. "What can a man earn here as a digger in another
fellow's claim?"

"Anything he likes to ask almost. Men who are worth anything at all as
workers are scarce around these parts."

"Then we sha'n't starve, that is some consolation. By the way, I have a
note here for you. This confounded business nearly made me forget it;"
and so saying Corbett produced from an inner pocket the little note
given him by Roberts at the Balm-of-Gilead camp.

For a few moments Rampike twisted and turned the note about, trying to
decipher the faint pencil-marks in the dim light. At last he got the
note right side up and began to read. Evidently he hardly understood
what he read at first, for those who were watching him saw that he read
the note through a second time, as if looking for some hidden meaning in
every word. When he had done this a vindictive bitter oath burst from
between his set teeth.

"If Cruickshank ain't dead by now, my old pal Roberts is. You may bet on
that. Look ye here!" and the speaker handed Ned a flattened,
blood-stained bullet which he had taken from Roberts' letter.

"Do you know what that is?" he asked.

"It looks like a revolver bullet," answered Ned.

"And so it is. That's the identical bullet as Dan Cruickshank fired at a
grouse and _hit a cayuse_ with. Pretty shooting, wasn't it?" and Rampike
ground his teeth with anger.

"What the deuce do you mean?" cried Steve in blank astonishment.

"Mean--mean! Why, that if you warn't such a durned tenderfoot you'd have
tumbled to the whole thing long ago! Men like Cruickshank don't leave
horses unhobbled by mistake, don't hit and scare pack-horses on a
stone-slide by mistake, don't get to Williams Creek a day late by
mistake. Oh, curse his mistakes! If he makes one more there'll be the
best pal and the sweetest singer in Cariboo lying dead up among them
pines."

"Do you mean that Cruickshank did these things on purpose?" asked
Corbett slowly, his face growing strangely hard as he spoke.

"Read Rob's letter," said Rampike, and gave Ned the scrap of paper on
which Rob had found time to write a brief record of the journey from
Douglas, ending his story in these words--"Cruickshank means Corbett
mischief, so I am staying instead of the lad. What his game is with the
pack-ponies I am blowed if I know, but if I don't come in with them
inside of a week, do some of you fellows try and get even with the
colonel for the sake of your old pal Roberts."

For several minutes after reading this note no one spoke; each man was
thinking out the situation after his own fashion.

"Will you trust me with grub for a fortnight, Rampike?" asked Ned at
last.

"Yes, lad, if you like; but you won't want to borrow. Men like you can
earn all they want here;" and the miner looked appreciatively at the
big-limbed man before him.

"I'll earn it by and by, Rampike. I'm going after Roberts first,"
replied Ned quietly.

"How's that?" demanded Rampike.

"I'm going after Roberts and Cruickshank. Can I have the grub?"

"If that's your style, you can have all the grub you want if I have to
go hungry for a week. When will you start?"

"It will be dark in two hours," replied Ned, "and the moon comes up
about midnight. I shall start as soon as the moon is up."

"Impossible, man!" cried Chance. "I could not drag myself to the top of
that first bluff unless I had had twenty-four hours' solid sleep, if my
life depended upon it."

"I know, old fellow, and I don't want you to; but you see a life may
depend upon it."

"But you aren't going alone, Corbett. I'll not hear of that."

"We will talk about that by and by, Steve. Let us go and turn in for a
little while now. I am dead tired myself." And so saying Corbett turned
on his heel and followed Rampike to his hut, where the old man found
room for all three of them upon the floor.

"If Steve and I go to look for Roberts can you find a job for our
Chinaman until we come back? I should not like the poor beggar to
starve," said Ned, pointing to where Phon lay already fast asleep. The
moment he laid down his head Phon had gone to sleep, and since then not
a muscle had twitched to show that he was alive. Whatever his master
might choose to arrange for his benefit the Chinaman was not likely to
overhear or object to.

"Oh yes, I can fix that easy enough. I'll set him to wash in my own
claim. I can afford to pay him good wages as well as feed him. Men are
scarce at Williams Creek."

Again for a time there was silence in the hut, Corbett and Rampike
puffing away at their pipes, and Steve Chance trying hard to keep his
eyes open as if he suspected mischief. At last nature got the better of
him; the young Yankee's head dropped on his arm, and in another moment
he was as sound asleep as Phon.

Then Ned stood up and went over to sit beside the old miner Rampike,
remarking as he did so:

"Thank heaven Steve is off at last. I thought the fellow never meant to
go to sleep."

"What! Do you mean to leave him behind?" asked Rampike.

"Does he look as if he could do another week's tramping?" retorted Ned,
glancing at the limp, worn-out figure of his friend. "He has pluck
enough to try, but he would only hinder me."

"If that's so, I'll chuck my claim and come along too."

"Nonsense, you can't afford to lose your claim; and, besides, you
couldn't help me."

"Couldn't help you! How's that?" snorted Rampike indignantly.

"A man can always hunt better alone than with another fellow. One makes
less noise than two in the woods."

"But you ain't going hunting?"

"Yes I am,--hunting big game too." And there was a light in Ned
Corbett's eye, as he overhauled his Winchester, that looked bad for an
enemy.

"You ain't afraid of--losing your way?" asked Rampike. He was going to
say "You ain't afraid of Cruickshank, are you?" but a look on Corbett's
face stopped that question.

"No, I'm used to the woods," Ned answered shortly; and then again for a
while the two men smoked on in silence.

Presently Corbett knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and put it away
carefully in his pocket.

"Do you work in the night-shift on your place?" he asked Rampike.

"Either me or my partner is there all the while."

"Shall you be there to-night?"

"I'll be going on at midnight, but I'll fix up a pack with some grub in
it for you before I go."

"Thank you, I'll leave that to you, if I may. Will you call me before
you go? I mean to try to get all the sleep I can before the moon is up."

"Well, lie down right now. I'll call you, you bet. You're a good sort
for a Britisher--give us a shake;" and Rampike held out a hand as hard
and as honest as the pick-handle to which it clung day after day.

Perhaps it was the thought of his old friend's danger which made Rampike
blind and careless, or perhaps it was only his natural clumsiness. In
any case he steered very badly for his own door, so badly indeed that he
tripped over Chance's prostrate form, dealing him a kick that might have
roused a dead man. But Steve only turned over restlessly in his sleep,
like one who dreams, and then lay as still again as ever.

Ned smiled. "No danger of waking him, I think, when I want to go. Poor
old Steve! the loss of the money does not seem to spoil your sleep
much."

Five minutes later, when Rampike had gone out to get together the
provisions which his guest needed, anyone listening to that guest's
regular breathing would have been of opinion that the loss of the
dollars troubled Ned Corbett as little as it troubled Steve Chance.




CHAPTER XIV.

WHAT THE WOLF FOUND.


About midnight Rampike returned to his hut, and as the moonlight
streamed through the doorway across the floor, Corbett rose without a
word and joined the old miner outside.

"You didn't need much waking, lad."

"No; and yet I slept like a top. But I _felt_ you were coming, and now
every nerve in my body is wide awake."

Rampike looked at his companion curiously.

"You're a strong man, Ned Corbett, but take care. I've known stronger
men than you get the 'jim-jams' from overwork."

Ned laughed. He hardly thought that a man who had not tasted liquor for
a month was likely to suffer much from t

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