CHAPTER VI.
We did not see the end of that night of gaining, for we were depressed, and hurried back to the gulch, running now and then between the long slopes, and up that stretch of trail which lay along the white surface of the river. But we heard of the outcome two nights later, when Kentucky came down to our cabin to learn if we had any news for him.
“I reckon you-all heard what happened after you left the Horn Spoon the other night?”
“No,” we chorused, looking at him.
“Well, that Sam Barstow sure had the devil's own luck from the minute he banged that queer-lookin' gold of his on the wheel. He broke the wheel in one turn, and Billy Abramsky pulled the cloth over it. Then he howled like a timber wolf with joy, and went back to the layout. He grabbed up that belt he had around him, put the gold back in it, buckled it under his shirt, and started in to play with what he'd got from the wheel. In just two hours he'd won his eight thousand back, and at seven in the mornin' he walked out of the Horn Spoon with eighteen thousand dollars of its money, and a bill of sale for the place.”
It was astonishing news, and our exclamations betrayed our surprise.
“Yes, sir, the Horn Spoon's got a new proprietor now. It's Sam Barstow, and he's runnin' the place. The boys that owned it are workin' for him. He hasn't got time. Too busy payin' his fond respects to Marie Devinne. I reckon, too, that he'll get her. He looks pretty good to her, with all the wad of dust he has, and with that red stuff that makes folks believe there might be plenty more where that came from. I reckon Sam Barstow's due to make a home stake.”
Kentucky was sitting with his elbows on his knees, and his moccasin heels up on the rungs of his stool, and his eyes looked thoughtfully at the little round hole in the end of the Yukon stove, that seemed to be watching him. I fancied I read a trace of homesickness in his boyish eyes, and a despondency that I had never before seen in them.
The country and its round of misfortune appeared to be telling on him. I was sorry that all our efforts had failed to develop any chance for him that was worth taking. All the ground worth leasing had been let out long before that time, and there were but few claims working where men were hired for day's wages. We tried to talk cheerfully to him, but he must have felt that we had nothing to offer, and that our encouragement was hollow, when he left us that night to tramp back up to his cabin at the head of the gulch.
It stands out, quite clear to me in the light of after events, the peculiar amazement I felt on the following morning. Yet in the telling it seems nothing.
I had got up early, it being my week to build the fire and cook the breakfast, a simple, primitive task; for our larder was scant as measured by civilized standards. It was still dark, and the candies, stuck in homemade brackets in the corner by the stove, writhed and twisted as the beat waves eddied upward, and the room was choked with the fumes of bacon frying, and desiccated eggs simmering on the back of the stove, and the blubbering of the oatmeal pot.
Dan threw his legs out of the bunk, gasping, and called sleepily: “Hey, Tom! Your bacon's going too hot. Give us a breath of air, can't you?”
I choked, and laughed, and went to the door and threw it open. Coming up the trail, far down the hillside, was a sled drawn by straining Malemutes, who looked like the wolves of death in that pallid hour. I stood with the frying pan in hand, looking at them when they stopped, and their driver turned up the trail leading to our cabin, leaving his team behind. He advanced until he was close to me.
“Chimoy!” I called the native greeting, and then, still in the tongue: “What do you want?”
He answered in English:
“Want moose meat?”
“Moose meat? Sure!”
It was like the voice of an angel, the proffer of any one offering fresh meat to men who had lived on tinned stuff and bacon for so many months. Dan came hurrying to the door with the strings of his moccasins dangling and trailing behind him, and his hair still ruffled.
“How much you take? Heap good meat, huh?” he called.
The visitor stood quietly for an instant, and then approached until he stood in front of us. I saw that he was not of any tribe with which I was familiar. There was less of the Oriental squattiness of face, less of the Oriental squattiness of figure. He was lithe and straight, and his nose was the high, fine, warrior nose of the red-Indian tribes—the nose of the hereditary fighter and hunter. His eyes were frowning, and with a certain defiant dignity.
“You needn't trouble to talk pidgin English to me,” he said, with perfectly correct pronunciation. “I can speak it as well as you can. I am a Sioux! No dog-trotting, fish-eating mongrel of a Siwash. I have moose meat to sell. It will cost you a dollar a pound.”
There was an instant's silence, and then I tried to soften his indignation with a question. “A Sioux? And away up here? Why?”
“To hunt. To make a living.”
His voice sounded as if he were slightly mollified.
“Where did you go to school?” I asked, still feeling that strange curiosity.
“Carlisle. But do you want fresh meat?”
He had repulsed our overtures again, and was all Sioux, ugly and aloof; so we bought from him what meat we could use, and saw him start up the creek on his journey without regret. We talked of him after he had gone, and I think in a measure I sympathized with him, the descendant of a race of warriors and hunters, who had refused to live anywhere except in the condition of his heredity.
“It was easy to tell he'd been somewhere with white men,” Dan commented. “Did you notice his tooth?”
“No,” I said, interested.
“Why, one of his front teeth had been broken off, and fixed with silver. Shows he knew what dentists were for, but thought silver good enough for a Sioux!”
I did remember something about his crooked lips when he spoke, but had not been as observing as my partner.
Kentucky and I talked of the Sioux when we visited the camp and Bessie Wilton, together, on the following night. She scoffed at any sentiment.
“I saw him,” she said. “He came into the post to buy some stuff. I don't see him as you do. He is treacherous, and a savage still, more savage than any Alaskan native, in spite of his Carlisle education. There is cruelty in him, and it peers from his eyes. Ugh! He makes me shiver! He stands so immovable! He stares at one so steadily, and with a sort of contempt. And that isn't all!”
She threw her hands upward, and shook her head.
“Didn't try to bite you, did he?” Kentuck drawled, in a teasing voice.
She ignored him, and spoke to me.
“He wanted the best string of beads in the post. It was part of a rosary, and there was a cross on it. He bought it, and then what do you think he did? Wrenched the cross loose, and ground it under his heel! And he sneered at me when I expostulated.”
“Sneered? Sneered at you? Why, the first time I meet him I'll twist his dirty neck!” Kentucky burst forth in indignant, boyish wrath. “The scrubby scoundrel! To show his blasphemous impertinence before a white girl. I'll teach him!”
I cannot but admit that I shared his anger, although I said nothing, when I thought of the Sioux's insolence. Yet I knew that perhaps there had been no intention to affront one whom he saw as a mere person. behind a counter in a frontier post.
“The natives call him the Hatchet,” she went on, without noticing Kentucky's outburst. “I believe they are all a little afraid of him; but he is smart. They say he can speak their language. Oh, but say! Have you heard of the camp courtship? Sam Barstow has infatuated your friend Marie.”
She looked at Kentuck mischievously.
“They are to be married. They say he is loading her with presents, and he has bought that cabin that Sturgis and Buckingham built, the one back toward the gulch, and has four or five men making it suitable for the residence of the charming Marie. This camp is not without society, you know.”
She ended with a drawling laugh, and Kentuck took advantage of the pause to say that he wished he could have got the job of carpentering for the cabin. We did not laugh at that, for I think we both surmised that Kentuck's financial outlook was worrying him more than he cared to mention.
“And the wedding,” Bessie went on hurriedly, as if to arouse Kentucky from his brooding, and rally him to better spirits, “takes place day after to-morrow—that is, the night after to-morrow night. Had you heard that yet?”
The Kentuckian came gallantly to a recovery.
“No, we hadn't heard that,” he asserted. “Now, what other news is there hereabouts, Miss Walkin' Newspaper?”
She laughed, seeing that he was in a better mood, and for an hour subtly encouraged him, told of camp rumors, and of native gossip, until we went away.
And we, with every one else on the gulch, attended the wedding of Sam Barstow and Marie Devinne. The Horn Spoon was its setting. The paraphernalia of chance had been removed, and the floor cleaned and waxed to a glistening white, and no man might buy anything at the bar. A United States commissioner, from Taninaw, performed the ceremony, and it was somewhat oratorical, inasmuch as the gentleman was from Texas, and loved flowers of speech. There was a good deal of the “grand old flag” business, and a lot of talk about the hardy pioneer, and the wealth of the nation being in its offspring, and Sam Barstow caught his bride in his big arms, held her up, and kissed her, threw a bag of dust in the commissioner's hands, and invited everybody to “have somethin'.”
It was while standing in front of the pine bar that he made his wedding present. He winked at the bartender, and called in a loud voice; “Give me that package for Mrs. Barstow, will you?”
The bartender handed him a bundle, and from it Sam took out something that made us stare—that is, it made Cavanaugh and me interchange glances. It was a pair of moccasins, absurd and heavy. They were literally covered with gold, and it required no second glance to see that the gold was red! He had taken the gold he had gathered from that Northern trip, and selected and hammered nuggets enough to present his bride with a pair of gold moccasins.
Pierced, and laid thickly over the buckskin, they were cumbersome, and showy, and red. He insisted on putting them on her feet, and she shambled less lightly in the dance as she carried their weight. But one round of the room she made when the wretched attempt at an orchestra began, and then, panting, she exchanged them for her others, and relinquished them to the care of the bartender.
A native from across the river, who had timidly entered the door, looked at them with wide eyes, and abruptly turned and vanished into the night. A prospector from the Hootalinqua peered at them, started to test their weight in his hand, and then drew back. The music went on, and above it all rose the boisterous shouts of Sam Barstow, urging his guests to “Hit her up! Step lively!”
“Them's some moccasins,” the bartender remarked, as he threw them back on the bar. “They weigh an even forty ounces, and that spells about seven hundred and fifty dollars, the way gold's runnin' now. Some golden shoes, eh?”
The men standing in front of his bar assured him vociferously that they were. Only Cavanaugh and I, standing there at the end, and not participating, failed to wonder whence came the gold.
“Come on. Let's go home,” a voice sounded behind me, and I turned to see my partner, who was apparently satisfied with the night's entertainment, and, with a curt good night to the trader, I went.
I did not see the moccasins of gold again for some time. At least a month went by, in which my partner and I continued to work, with always alluring and never satisfying prospects. And in that time the news of the camp down on the river, with its small happenings, drifted upward to our gulch with more or less veracious details. Now it was that the Hatchet had been away on another hunting trip, and returned without meat, the game having run toward the east; now that some one had struck pay on Hoosier Creek; and again that Sam Barstow had gone down to the mouth of the Taninaw—two days' hard travel—to buy some extra furnishings and supplies from a steamer which had laid up there for the winter.
It was in the early days of February when the most exciting news broke, and, as fate would so have it, it was on another night when I was in the camp. For three days no one had seen Marie Barstow, and—coincidentally, the camp believed—no one had seen Spider Riggs. In that time Sam Barstow had wandered backward and forward in the Horn Spoon, glowering at any one who spoke, and muttering to himself.
It was the talk of the camp on the night when I went down alone. I was in no mood for the divided companionship of Bessie, and Kentuck was there in her cabin, gay and musical as ever. After a short visit, I excused myself on the ground of my partner's anxiety to return quickly, and went down the hill with a certain bitterness in my heart. It was not late in the evening, but the night was gloomy and lighted by the stars alone.
I looked in at the Horn Spoon and the Honolulu. In neither place did I see Sam Barstow. I turned for the long, lonely walk over the trail leading to the mines, for I had misled—plainly lied—to Bessie Wilton and Kentucky, when I intimated that I had been accompanied by my partner.
I stopped for an instant where the trail entered the low-lying and scraggly pines and firs shutting off the view of the camp. From that site it was black, a gathering of low-built log cabins, with windows fronting the white expanse of the river only. I was almost beyond the sound of its night voice. Nearest to me was the pretentious structure which Sam Barstow called home.
I stood musing over the disappearance of Marie, and wondering if she were there, when suddenly, as if from all sides of it, belched sound and flame. The spot was a lurid mass of light. I surmised that it had been blown up, and ran toward it. Men were running from other directions, also, and the night had become a pandemonium.
We began hurrying toward the cabin, to save its contents, when a voice bellowed commandingly, from the outer darkness, rendered more dense by the flames; “Let it alone! It's mine. I want it to burn!”
We who were there, and others running toward us, turned in the direction of the voice, arrested by its savage order. Into the edge of the light stalked Sam Barstow, and in his hand was a gun. The light played dully on its blue barrel and his knuckles, for he gripped it tightly.
“I blew it up!” he said, so loudly that his voice could be heard above the crackling of the flames that were gaining headway, and the sound of moccasins crunching over the frozen snow as other men arrived, panting, and formed a circle around him. “It was mine. I'm through with it.”
He stood and cursed for a moment, and I stared closer at him, wondering if he had been drinking to excess; but the light that was in his smoldering eyes was not that of drunkenness.
“I built that cabin for her,” he said, still speaking in loud vigor. “You know who I mean. I did other things for her, and after that I wasn't an honest man. I went after it, and got it—the red gold. I even gave that to her. You saw the moccasins! And what did I get in the end? When I came back from Taninaw, I trailed till late in the morning to be with her. She was there, all right! And that sneaking-faced Spider Riggs was with her! With my wife! Do you know what I did with them?”
He shook his hands in the air, one fist clenched, and the other still holding the gun.
“I drove 'em before me on the trail for a full twenty-four hours, without blankets or tent to shelter 'em, and grub enough for only a day's rations. Then I told 'em if they ever came back, or I ever saw 'em again, I'd kill 'em like the Judases they were. And they're gone! I knew they wouldn't come back. I knew they'd die together out there in the cold, and that it beat killin' 'em then and there. She could go out with those cursed moccasins in her hands. They were all I gave her. And I'm through with it all. Get out of my way!”
He had swung with his last words on the men nearest him, and they opened out to give him passage. He walked with steady steps toward the river bank, and plunged down it, and out upon the white expanse. He did not pause or look back, and we thought he was heading for the native village on the opposite bank. His steps led him toward the one dark spot on the river's face, where the camp water hole was kept open throughout the winter season. Against the snow and under the brightening stars, he was plainly visible as he halted by it, and then his voice came to us across the stillness:
“Good-by! I'll save you a burial.”
His arm seemed waving toward us, and then there was a short, white flash of yellow, and his figure appeared to crumple forward and plunge into the dark spot.
“Shot himself!” several men exclaimed, as we ran down the bank, and out toward the water hole. There was nothing there but the black water rushing fiercely and smoothly toward the ice-bound Ramparts. The thin coating of ice that had formed since the last bucket had been dipped into it in the evening had given way beneath the falling weight, and Barstow's last words had proved true. He had saved us the trouble of burying him.