CHAPTER II.
The lights of the kerosene lamps were dim and low when I strolled into Cavanaugh's that night. He was leaning across his rough wood desk, oilcloth covered, and totaling a column of figures. The lamp above him, the shadows behind, accentuated the whiteness of his hair, until it was rendered a halo of silver. The smell of the trading post was around him, from the damp, pungent odor of seal oil hanging from bladders in his loft, the acrid scent of furs, native cured, the sweet fragrance of sugar, freshly opened, the lower aromas of rice, and the salt smokiness of hams and bacon suspended from the rafters above. The shadows of light, playing across the lurid labels of canned vegetables and meats, and the gaudy prints which the Indians loved, and the strings of beads hanging to the shelf junctures, rendered them all a mellow setting, as they stared, harmonized, from the gloom.
“Hello,” he greeted me, lifting his head, and then, “Oh, it's you, is it, Tom Amann? Glad you dropped in. How do you like our camp? Looks like Circle used to two or three years ago, doesn't it?”
He drew away from the desk, and came back to the counter, where he threw his weight across it, leaning on his elbows, as if inviting conversation.
I studied his face as I answered with ordinary, courteous conversation. It was a strange face, full of strange complexities. It had the forehead of the student, and the thoughtful eyes of the student; yet its chin was aggressive, and the mouth clean-cut and decisive. It was that chin which must have brought him to Alaska full thirty years before, when to so venture was to make a greater essay than had been the reckless sailing of Columbus in quest of a new World.
I had heard tales of his past, that told of a fiery youth, of sudden brawls in Pacific coast camps, and of a flight after a fight when his enemy had lain white and still at his feet. Men reiterated that he was an Irish gentleman by birth, and spoke respectfully of his attainments. He was said to have known the shadows of Magdalen College in that glorious seat of learning. Oxford. And yet here he was, white and old, running a trading post that was as isolated as any in the world.
I was so absorbed in listening to his comments that I had almost forgotten my desire to know more of old Bill Wilton until he referred to it himself. It was when I suggested that I was keeping him from his bookkeeping. He laughed at that.
“Well, it really doesn't amount to much,” he said, “and can wait. I have a bookkeeper in my clerk, Bessie Wilton; but I must give her a lesson in Greek to-morrow, and so thought I would make it a trifle easier for her.”
I sustained a distinct emotion of surprise at his words, and wondered how far his educational efforts with the girl I had seen on the bank had led him. The idea of a girl so advanced in her studies as to be worrying over Greek verbs, in that most isolated spot of the wilderness, was incongruous. He must have read my thought, for again he laughed, with that low, musical, amused note.
“It has been rather a recreation of mine,” he said, “ever since she was a mere slip of a girl. She's never had a chance, and she was so bright, that I began it rather as an amusement, kept it up until I found that it was excellent mental training for myself, and, upon my word, she is a wonder!”
His voice betrayed considerable pride in his pupil. He swung his legs over the counter with such ease that his years were belied, and sat on the outer edge by my side.
“It must be something in the primitiveness of her surroundings,” he went on, “that makes her so intelligent. Nothing to distract her attention, you know. No fol-de-rols of civilization, no pink teas, pink parties, or pink young men to flirt with. Why, Tom, I believe that pupil of mine could pass with honor almost any university examination that might be put up to her. I know. I've a degree or two myself.”
It sounded almost like a boast, this pride in his pupil and his own education. The student was speaking again.
“It seems rather a pity that a man of your attainment should be buried here,” I blurted out, and for an instant he frowned and fixed his eyes on me harshly, as if satisfying himself whether or not I was impertinent; then, evidently deciding that my words veiled nothing suggestive, his face relaxed, and he gave something approaching a sigh.
“Perhaps,” he replied slowly. “But fate does for us all. Now, there's that girl. If fate had not thrust me into the out-of-the-way places, she might have grown up in the worst ignorance, and an intelligence would have been wasted. She might have reverted. The call of that eighth of Indian blood might have made itself heard, and lured her back to the barabaras.”
“Indian blood! An eighth Indian blood!” I exclaimed.
“Oh, I didn't think. I supposed you had heard the family history, and about poor old Bill. 'Red Gold Wilton,' some of the boys call him. Let's see! When you were in Circle, they were up the river with Prevost.”
“What about Wilton?” I asked eagerly. “I saw him to-day, and I was curious about him—about what brought him to that condition.”
For a moment Cavanaugh sat quietly, looking out through the door at the growing twilight, and I thought he was not going to gratify my curiosity; then he thrust his hand into the pocket of his mackinaw, pulled out a well-seasoned pipe, filled it with the black “sheepdip” of the North, and lighted it.
“Bill Wilton,” he said at last, “has gone through enough to have killed more than one man out of every ten. He was one of the handsomest men I ever saw when I first came into the North. That was thirty years ago. I had found a position with the old Hudson's Bay Company up on the Stewart, when he came there for supplies. I made up an outfit for him, and enjoyed watching him.”
Cavanaugh's voice had dropped to a reminiscent vein, and I settled myself to a more comfortable position.
“He stood at least six feet and an inch in his moccasins, had eyes like hot steel, and the grace of a jaguar. By heavens! I saw that man stand flat-footed, and, without any preliminary effort, or raising his hands, jump clear over a counter higher than this, just to stretch his muscles, apparently! His strength was prodigious. He could carry anything he could get on his back. He could outlast any native that ever lived on the trail, and go farther on snowshoes than any one I ever knew. His endurance was incredible. He was a wonderful man, and it was a joy to hear. him talk, because he enjoyed living. His voice wasn't like it is now. You've heard him?”
I nodded my head, recalling that cracked, quavering monologue of “Red gold.”
“His voice was big and round, and like—like—ever hear the big bell in Moscow? No? Well, it was like that, anyway. One of those voices that you could hear in your mind long after he had finished speaking. I've heard him come singing down the trail nearly a mile away, on a still evening, like this, and you can bet we all used to listen.”
Cavanaugh shook his head, and was silent for a moment, as if absorbed in his own memories. I was about to ask him a question, when of his own volition he resumed.
“I don't suppose you ever heard the story; but there is a legend, among the natives, dating back to I don't know how long ago, and certainly known to the old H. B. factors for more than a hundred years, that somewhere, far up in the North, there is a deposit of gold that is enormous. It is red, and the Indian sagas and tyunes will shudder when it is mentioned. They say it is accursed. I'm not superstitions; but there may be something in it. I don't know! There are lots of things in this existence, fourth dimension, perhaps, that men, puny and blunt of intelligence, may not comprehend. I'm less assertive and contradictory about those inexplicable manifestations than I used to be, thirty years ago, when I came in here, and believed that anything I couldn't explain, didn't exist!”
I was surprised at this evidence of mysticism, superstition, or whatever it might be classed, coming from his lips; but I held silence, waiting for him to continue.
“Probably Bill Wilton paid small attention to legend, although he must have heard of it,” he continued, “until after he married the daughter of old MacCulloch. Mac was the factor of the H. B. post, where I worked when I came in from—well, that doesn't matter. Mac had married a half-breed Cree klootch. Daughter of another H. B. factor, upcountry she was, and she might have been handsome when he met her; she wasn't when I got acquainted with her. Gone to fat, a screeching tongue, and he had to keep the post rum under lock and key. But she had a girl that was more Scotch than Cree. I'd have married her myself, if I could have done so, but Bill Wilton, with everything about him to command a woman's affection, got her. I couldn't blame her. He was Wilton the magnificent, with his big laugh, and his big voice, and his big strength.
“You can see what kind of a man he was when I tell you that on the day she promised to marry him he first went to old Mac, and told him that he was going to marry his daughter, then came directly to me, and put out his hand, and said: 'Sorry for you, Cavanaugh, but it's luck, and you're our best friend. Shake!' That was his way. And I danced at their wedding when the little missionary from Shebalath came up and performed the ceremony, and old MacCulloch broached a keg of brandy that had been in the post for fifty years.”
He knocked the ashes from his pipe, and, after rubbing it, with a ruminating attitude, on the tail of his mackinaw, slipped it back into his pocket, crossed one leg over the other, clasped the upraised knee with his hands, and again spoke.
“Bill had a couple of seasons of bad luck working the bars, which was about all the mining that was done in that part of the country at that time, and one day he came into the post, and sat and talked to me for a long time about his plans. He wanted to know if I had ever heard anything about the red gold. I laughed, and told him it was about as reliable a tale as any other that the natives told, and that probably it was about as true as the story of the first fire, and the first boat, and the intervention of the Great Spirit when the seven tribes went to war; but Wilton didn't laugh. I remember yet how he sat there, staring at the light through the crack of one of those big drum stoves, and smoking, and sometimes not winking his eyes for a long time, as if he Were absorbed in some dream.
“'The old woman,' he said, referring to Mac's wife, his mother-in-law, 'has been telling me about it, and I got into a native kashima coming down the trail the other night, and heard more of it from an old buck that wanted to be friendly. I believe there is such a ledge, and, Cavanaugh, I'm going to try to find it!'
“You may be sure I tried to talk him out of the notion; but you see the man had lived so long among the natives, had wandered over so many thousand miles of wilderness, was so unafraid, and so down on his luck, that he was ready to believe and to try anything. I don't think old MacCulloch was supersitious when it came to gold; but he, too, tried to dissuade Wilton, who grew more stubborn each day as he made his plans. He left his wife at the post, loaded up his dog sled, and slipped away into the North one brisk December morning, following some idea of his own, gathered probably from what he had gleaned from the native gossip.
“And the Indians? He offered all sorts of inducements to get one to go with him, because no man, no matter how brave he is, likes to pull out that way, alone. It gets on his nerves. But there wasn't an Indian could be induced to go with him for money or promise.
“I shan't forget the morning he left. The sky was cold and dusky, as it always is at that time of the year, when he straightened his dogs out and bade his wife good-by in front of the post. There was one withered old squaw there who looked like a native Witch of Endor, who abandoned her stolidity, shook her skinny, dirty old claws in the air, and told him he was going into the land of the accursed; that the end of his trail would lead him to the devil, and that God Almighty had set His seal on those barrens where the gold was supposed to be waiting, tempting and red.
“Wilton's wife cried a little, and weakened at the last, and clung to him, with her arms around his neck, out there under the cold morning dusk, and begged him to give it up; but he pulled her arms loose, tenderly but determined, and laughed, with that big, reckless, bell-like laugh of his, ran out to the handles of his sled, yelled 'Mush on!' to his leader, and tore away down the river's face, with the frosted snow skirling up behind him in a little cloud. He was a brave figure of a man as he turned, just before taking the bend, waved a good-by to us, and blew a kiss off his mittened fingers at his wife, who was clinging to her father's arm, with tears running like drops of ice down her cheeks.
“It was late in the spring when he came back. He staggered into the post one day, so lean, and thin, and bony. that one could scarcely recognize him, and fell across the steps of the storeroom where we were working. I ran over and picked him up where he had fallen inside.
“'Grub!' he croaked. 'I'm starving!'
“I got it for him, and ran across to tell his wife and old Mac that he was home again. It took him at least ten days to recover, he was so far gone. He had traveled so far that he had lost count of distances, and when his supplies ran out, ate his dogs, one at a time—ate his mukluks, boiled his fur parka, tried to eat the leather of his pack straps! And there was nothing but the iron nerve, and the iron body of Bill Wilton that brought him back alive.
“All the summer long he worked the bars and got poor pay. His strength came back, and once in a while he laughed; but he was not the same Bill Wilton. He worshiped his wife, and when she was around appeared to have a sort of content; but when she left him he would sit and brood, and there was a light in his eyes that wasn't nice to see; a something of a shadow, as if he had seen something, or his sufferings on that trip had branded his soul with a red iron—red as the gold he sought.
“In the second winter he was restless, and would have gone again, I believe, had it not been for the protestations and pleadings of his wife, who was none too well. And another summer went by, and his moodiness and nervousness grew. He wasn't the cool, laughing Bill Wilton any more. He was a man maddened by a dream. And the dream was not for himself, but for what he might do if he found that ledge, and laid its riches at his wife's feet. I credit him with that. He was a fool! He thought that it took gold to make her happy, and her happiness was his greatest ambition. You see, it had got on his mind, with its curse.
“December came again, and he had nothing to do. Mac wanted him to work for the H. B., but he had an idea that his going to work would mean my discharge, and perhaps he was right. I never quite knew, save that I fancy old Mac would have let me go as coolly as if I were a condemned dog if it served his own aims. I wish I had reasoned it out sooner, and quit. I would have lived with the natives in an igloo to have saved either Bill Wilton or his wife what followed. Yes, I'd have walked into the storeroom, stripped a boot, and found the trigger of a rifle with my toe, to have saved her the suffering that came. For Bill Wilton grew more restless day by day, and went! This time she nearly fell to her knees on the snow, in a sort of hysterical agony, to restrain him. She sobbed, and patted his cheek, and clung to him, until he almost tore himself loose from her hands, and ran away after his yelping dogs as if the devil were driving him on, and without looking back.
“Her father and I picked her up, and old Mac cursed his strange Scottish oaths, and told her not to make a fool of herself, and almost dragged her into the house. That is another day I shan't forget!
“In eight months after the dogs tore away over the snow, Bill Wilton was a father, and a widower! And on that dreadful night the withered old crone squatted on the doorstep of the pelt house, and rocked to and fro, and muttered: 'Gold! Devil's gold! Red gold! The white man's curse is come,' until I drove her away. I was half mad myself. It was horrible! I had heard those agonized cries in the night, sounding through log walls, hour after hour, with no doctor within five hundred miles, and her life going put! Going out when it might have been saved, if any one had known how. And thus was Bessie born, off up there on a winter night when the stars seemed near and listening.”
Cavanaugh's voice had dropped until it was scarcely audible. He seemed to be talking to himself, rather than to me, and for a long time he sat there, with his head drooped forward on his breast, and his hands hanging listless and inert by his sides. I respected the sorrow that I knew bridged in the unspoken sentences when he spoke of that woman whom he had loved, and who had so painfully parted soul and body on that far-gone night. His voice was dead level and old when he again took up his narrative, and he did not look at me, but rather into the shadows of the room, as if seeing ghosts of his youth.
“Wilton did not return A native brought a letter which had been passed from hand to hand, running around by the way of Point Barrow on the northern coast of Alaska to St. Michels, then up the Yukon, by slow stages, and, as if in travesty, it was addressed in its worn handwriting to his wife! To the wife that had been dead almost six months when it came. Old Mac and I tore it open, and read it together, one night in the trading post. He had suffered God only knows what, but was now fighting against fate. He had wandered, and starved, and been rescued by some hunting natives when almost dead, taken to Point Barrow, got another outfit from the whalers after he had recovered his strength, and was going back. He said he thought he knew where it was, the red gold. And that he would either die or get it.”
He suddenly leaned toward me, frowning through the gloom, and held me with his eyes and the suggestion of awe in his voice.
"Do you know what happened? That post had a barricade around the buildings. The gates had been locked that night, because some of the natives had taken to pilfering. It was almost midnight when we opened that letter and read it, and yet, when we had finished, the door opened, and into the room came that old squaw witch, with the frost falling around her in a shower as the warm air fought the draft of cold from without, and raised her hands! It is true!
“Clairvoyance you may call it, or something else. I don't know. I've never told this before to any living man, because most of them wouldn't understand, or would think me a liar; but I tell it to you because I believe you are ready to listen to some things that one doesn't often mention. She was there in the doorway. How she got in, or over the stockade, I don't know. But she was there! She stood for a full half minute, and although I'm not superstitions, I felt the hair raise on my head. Old Mac sort of stood, with the letter in his hands, as if paralyzed, and he scowled at her with his hard, weather-beaten Scotch face.
“'And he says he'll get it or die!' she croaked in her native tongue, which was as clear to us as our own. 'And he shall die! Not with the body, but with the mind! He will find it, and it is cursed. It shall be red, like blood, and it will burn his heart to a red ash.'
“Old Mac made a rush for her, white, cursing, and distraught. She spat at him venomously, held her hands up to ward him off with a dignity that made him cower back, and then the door shut with a bang, and she was gone. For a half minute we stood there looking at each other, and then, together, ran to the door, and pulled it open. The moon was in the full, and shone so bright, and cold, and white, that every building stood out.
“But the stockade was empty! The gates were shut, and we ran out to them to find them locked. I tore a key from my pocket, and my fingers shook as I sprang the lock. We ran outside. There was nothing in sight save the unbroken snow. We ran round the stockade to see where she had gone. She had disappeared as if she had been a spirit, and I was glad to return and lock the gates.
“It got on my nerves. Mac, I think, was a little affected, also, for I saw that his fingers were not steady when he unlocked the old strong box in the corner of the post, and laid Bill Wilton's letter away with the other papers in the final drawer.
“The next day I asked a native, who came in, where the old crone was. 'Gone,' he answered. 'Been gone three months. Down river, maybe, Maybe dead.'
“I don't know about that, either. Perhaps he lied. Perhaps it was the truth, and what we saw was something else! Some spirit of the night. Some hallucination. But we saw it, MacCulloch and I. That I swear.
“And we forgot about it, as men will forget, when the months went on, and we heard nothing more from Bill Wilton. Then one evening, in December again, two years after he had run down the trail after his dogs as if driven by the devil himself, a sled came jingling up to the door, and I saw the dogs come round the corner of the post. They were strange dogs, trail worn, and the sled they dragged was different from the upcountry sleds. It was a coast sled, such as the Inuits use, out on the Bering coast, more than a thousand miles away.
“Behind them ran a man whose stature was such that I gave an exclamation, and hurried to open the door. It opened before I could reach it, and inside he stepped, ice-bearded, and shouting a boisterous welcome. Bill Wilton had returned.
“'It's me, Cavanaugh,' he called, and then he suddenly stopped and said: 'What's the matter, man? What ails you? I'm no ghost!'
“I suppose something in the way I was standing there warned him. I suppose the knowledge of the blow I must deliver was mirrored in my attitude. His hands, which had evidently been badly frosted, and were heavily bandaged, fell to his sides, and he leaned his head forward, and stared at me. The sounds of his team, outside, and the voice of a native, guttural, harsh, and tired, driving away the dogs of the post, came faintly through the door. The old H. B. dock, ticking on the wall, had become a hammer beating a Steel gong remorselessly.
“'My wife?' he whispered, and his voice had the soft sharpness of death itself whispering in a listening ear. 'My wife! Where is she? I thought I might find her here, waiting! Is she in the cabin?'
“I stood there for a long time, and then shook my head. I hated to give him his deathblow, and I was so surprised by his arrival, by his unexpected appearance, there in flesh and vigor, that I could not find words. Something must have told him. He backed, step by step, tottering, until the logs of the wall stopped him, and his poor, bandaged hands went out until they rested wide behind him.
“'Dead! She's dead!' he said, and Heaven knows I hope never again to hear that profound agony in a human voice.
“I nodded acquiescence dully. Then suddenly he tore the bandages from his festering fingers where the skin had been killed by the icy cold of December, and lifted his maimed hands high up, and shook them at the blackened rafters above. I shuddered when I heard him curse life, Omnipotence, and high Heaven itself. He was a living fury, venting his bravery on fate, and challenging the thunderbolts to blot out his life.
“He begged God to grant him death, and then abruptly reached up those grasping, hideous, bleeding fingers, and, with one fierce, tearing clutch, tore his parka, mackinaw, and shirt wide, and dragged out a buckskin bag, sweat-stained. His fingers did not pause to untie it, but with maniacal strength appeared to rip the bag open, and with one sweeping throw of his arm he sent it and its contents out and over the floor.
“He had burst into cynical, bitter laughter, and now suddenly collapsed down the wall, a broken, wilted wreck of a mighty man, sobbing aloud with great, heart-rending moans. And I, starting toward him, saw what he had thrown. The floor was littered with little nuggets of gold! And they glowed dully, malevolently! For they were red! Red as blood wrung from a tortured heart!"