CHAPTER I.
AND the gold was red—red as blood—like as if the blood of them that had died for it on the long, long trail had stained it clean down into the frozen mud! And I had some of it in my hands—so! In these hands! And it ran between my fingers like little frozen drops of blood! And then I lost it, and I'll never find it again! Never!”
I heard a thin, cracked voice above me, and, leaning on my shovel, looked up to where sat an old man with hands held out, lifting them up and down, clawlike, with the palms upward, and fingers opened as if still scooping up and letting fall through them the streams of gold, red and hard, like frozen blood.
I had not seen him before. I did not know when he had come. His hair hung in long gray strands from under his mink cap, and the cap was so old that the fur was worn away to show the black, greasy skin beneath. His hair dropped to his shoulders, and covered his ears, and joined the straggling, white, unkempt beard that covered his face. His parka was too large for him, and had apparently been worn to the verge of uselessness. Now the sleeves were rolled up, to expose the skinny old arms, which were more like the scaly, attenuated legs of a bird than the members of a human body. His trousers were patched with anything that had come to hand until the original color was lost. His mukluks, the skin boots of the old Alaska, were patched, also, and frayed until they no longer protected his feet.
He did not notice me, but reached his withered hands downward, made an imaginary scoop between his feet, held them up again, and repeated:
“Gold! Red gold! Red as blood!”
He did not look at me until my curt “Hello!” aroused him, and then his hands; held themselves poised, and he shifted his bleached blue eyes toward me, and appeared to be trying to recall me to his recollection.
“I don't know you,” he said soberly.
“I don't suppose you do,” I answered. “I just came in. I'm from Cassiar.”
Some remnant of sanity seemed to control the faded eyes, and the withered hands dropped again to their normal position of rest.
“Cassiar? I used to work there. So you're no chechahco, eh? And I've been to Killisnu. Know Killisnu and old Bill Joyce, him they called Killisnuish? And Bevins, and Sinclair, and Chapman, and” his voice trailed off into a list of inarticulate names, as his mind reverted to the past.
“That's old Bill Wilton. Touched he is, poor old cuss!” said a soft, growling voice behind me, and I turned to the man working with me, through whom I had come from Circle City, far up on the lazy stretches of the Yukon River.
He put a finger on his lips, and added: “Don't pay any attention to him. Get Cavanaugh to tell you about it when old Bill isn't around. Bill's got ears like a burro, and he's—well, he's sensitive.”
He resumed his shovel again, and I did likewise, knowing that the day was waning, and that we must try to get the last of the pay dump we had bought shoveled in before our scant supply of water, impounded in the dam above, had exhausted itself; but I thought of the little information my partner, Dan Hillyer, had vouchsafed me, and wondered at the strange old man who still sat above us on the bank, and still reached his hands down now and then, scooped up the dried gravel, and let it run through his fingers with that monotonous singsong of gold—“Red gold! Red as blood!”
I looked up in time to see a girl come behind him, and lay a gentle hand on his shoulder. My work was forgotten in the instant. My partner called to her, and lifted his hat, and she smiled at him gravely, and with friendliness. Then she leaped down the bank with nimble grace, and met him as, still holding his hat, he advanced.
“Why, Bessie,” he said, with his slow drawl, smiling at her, “you've grown to be a woman—all in a couple of years! And prettier'n ever. How are you, anyway?”
She laughed, and I noted that her lips were red, her teeth white and even, and that I was enchained by her eyes. They were like those one dreams of sometimes—eyes that are not quite plain in their message, but deep, and soft, and intelligent. Hers were tempered by some suggestion of lasting sadness, and I wondered if it had anything to do with the wreck of a man on the bank above; still sifting pebbles. I was to have this answered by Hillyer's introduction.
“Tom,” he said, turning to me, “this is Bessie Wilton. That's her daddy up there on the bank. Bess and me's been friends since the day she was born, and that's pretty close to twenty year ago, ain't it, Bess?”
She did not smile when she shook hands with me in acknowledging the introduction, but gave me a long, steady scrutiny, as if wondering who I was, and what my character. I felt the need to answer her unasked question, but was spared the trouble by Dan.
“Tom Amann's his full name,” he said, “and we hooked up together down in the Cassiar. He's from the Mother Lode mines, and is all right. He's an old friend of Cavanaugh's. Came on down here after I'd come ahead to see whether she was any good in this camp. Cassiar was petered out.”
“But you must have made something from it,” she said, addressing her remarks impersonally to both Dan and me, “or you couldn't have bought Markam's pay dump.”
I did not feel called upon to answer, or explain that the purchase had been a gamble, pure and simple, and that Markam, hurrying out to the States with gold from another claim, had made a mistake when he sold us this part of his winter's work; for we were cleaning up ten times as much as we had paid for it. My partner laughed, with his long-drawn, soft rumble, and his next words diverted her from the topic.
“How's the old man making it? Is he getting any better?”
Her face became more grave as she turned and looked at her father, on the bank.
“I don't know' she answered hesitatingly. “There are days at a time when he seems better, and says nothing of—of what he suffered. Then there are other days when he rambles on continually. Once, last spring, when the river broke and the green came out on the trees back on the hills, I was disturbed in the night. It was a sort of stealthy noise. I got up and looked in his part of the cabin. He was making a pack, and his old, mildewed pack straps were spread out on the floor, with the ragged old canvas laid over them, and he was laying bacon and beans, and baking powder and flour, in parcels on top of it. 'It's spring,' he said; 'it's spring, and I must be off. I'll find it for you this time, girl.' And it was all I could do to get him to postpone his trip. Sometimes I give up hope. Then again I have more courage, and think perhaps he will get well.”
She stopped speaking, and I saw that my partner's face was grave with sympathy, which she appeared to appreciate.
“But what are you doing?” he asked directly, and with the frontiersman's camaraderie which prompted him to speak of her financial affairs as if they were public.
“Oh, I am working for Mr. Cavanaugh,” she answered easily. “I'm in the trading post now; keep the books, when he will let me, read his books, which he always volunteers, and so—well—we get along. Only, sometimes, I get tired of it all.”
There was a slight note of rebellion in her voice and words, and I knew, in a flash, that, creature of the wilderness and the edge of the world as she was, she still had vague longings to pass out into that life whose tales of glamour and unrest had reached her here, more than a thousand miles from the nearest place that could be called civilized.
She turned away from us, calling back an invitation to Dan to come and visit her cabin, and wishing me a mere good-by, and spoke to her father, who obediently rose to his feet and followed her away toward the mouth of the creek, which poured its shallow waters into the Yukon.
We did not speak as we began shoveling in again, hurrying to make up for lost time, and the sun crept across until it was low in the west, lacing the broad river with threads of shifting gold, and permitting the purples of the long Arctic twilight to fasten themselves and grow upon the hills.
It was a familiar, brooding poem to me, this twilight of the North, for I had striven for gold in British Columbia and Alaska for three years, with varying success. Sometimes it had promised largely, and I had dreamed of what greater ventures I should assume when the spring dumps were cleaned, and at other times, hungry, cold, and trail-wearied, I had cursed the white pallor which had beckoned me with pale, illusive fingers, into its heartless depths, to whisper madness into my ears. But now it was summer, and I loved it.
Cassiar had not treated us ill. We had no fortune, but we had enough to move on, and to keep from owing the trader for supplies. We had enough to buy Markam's dump, and I had come down the river, in response to a letter from my partner of three years' time, on a real steamboat, which had churned around bars, perilously threaded the sloughs of the Yukon Flats, and dumped me, the night before, at Neucloviat, the new camp, that, so far, had promised more than it had yielded.
Dan had taken a cabin from another old sourdough we had known at Circle City, and who was going “outside” to pass a winter in a warmer climate—“to thaw out his bones,” he said.
“Well, she's dry again.” My partner's voice aroused me, and I looked at him where he stood at the head of our little string of sluice boxes, and then climbed up and saw that the stream was running so low and slow that it refused to pass the mud over the riffles. “Guess we'd better knock off. Let's go up and shut down the sluices, so that fool dam will fill up again. No use in tryin' to clean up with what water's left running in from the overflow.”
He threw his shovel on the bank, wiped his forehead with the back of his shirt sleeve, and we trudged up the creek beside our little ditch. At the top we noted that the creek was daily running lower, at an almost alarming rate, and discussed this as we retraced our steps and started along the pebbles of the river beach for the camp, which lay almost two, miles up the Yukon.
“She looks like business, all right, don't she?” Dan asked, waving his hand toward it as we came closer, after a long, silent tramp, in which each had been occupied with his own thoughts.
I studied the long range of high bank facing the river, which at that point was a full half mile broad. Here and there it rose into high cliffs, cut away into sheer lines by the ferocity of spring ravages of flood and ice. Across from the camp it stretched away into long, gradually ascending slopes, timbered in a heavy green. The camp itself was on a bench full sixty feet above the low-water mark, and, back of that again, the mountains climbed abruptly upward, clad in somber firs, and lightened by patches of silver birch, among which the evening shadows seemed lingering in a soft, hazy good night.
More than two hundred cabins were there, including the straggling row of dance halls, trading posts, “stores,” saloons, and “outfitters” which fronted the river as if inviting it to stop and view the grandeur of pioneerdom.
From some of the cabins, which scattered without pretense of Street back toward the hills behind, pale wreaths of blue smoke crawled lazily upward, and the ring of an ax as some miner, loafing for the summer, chopped barely wood enough for his evening meal, mingled with the soft cry of the waterfowl speeding here and there in quest of night feeding grounds.
In the strange, vibrant stillness of a summer's night on the arctic circle, all sounds were magnified. The “squawling” of a baby from the native village on the far side of the river, the bawling song of a boatman coming across, the barking of the Malemutes as they tore up and down the shingle beach in front of the native village, and the fierce crescendo of howls and growls when they engaged in a fight; the guttural cries of a squaw as she put an end to the altercation with a club, and drove the combatants, yelping, to the igloos of their owners; a bellow of laughter from the front of one of the rival trading posts where some man told a story that sounded as if meeting with the approval of his auditors.
Somehow, in its wild freedom, it was inspiriting, and I was glad to be alive, to be a part of it, and to forget that winter was coming again inexorably. But as I walked I thought of Elizabeth Wilton, and wondered why she was there; who she was; where she had gathered that cultivated speech; and what brought the sadness and longing to her eyes as she turned them on the man who reiterated the drone of gold that was red as blood!