CHAPTER VII.
The water ran so black and cold! It was gruesome to remember that but a minute before a man, a strong man, in the flush of life, had stood there, and then deliberately chosen it as his resting place! The stars shone as they had in that minute before, and the river's surface was as white, and off on the bank the lights of the cabins glowed, and the fire of the cabin that he had fitted for his bride burned higher and higher, as if it were a funeral pyre.
“He's gone, all right!” some one said, and we turned back toward the camp.
I tramped homeward after the moon had come up, thinking of the whole sordid tragedy. It did seem as if coincidence, or something else, had been at work. I could not share the superstition of the red gold. It was beyond reason that it should have played any part in this melodrama of the wilderness. And yet there it was!
Every one, so far as I knew, who had ever had anything to do with it had paid a price. Bill Wilton his reason, Pitkok his life, Sam Barstow, first his honesty and then his life; and the lure of it had led Marie Devinne, the silly little dance-hall girl, to marry him. Perhaps the moccasins had led Spider Riggs to her side, and her undoing. And Sam Barstow had driven them out to a lingering death, with the moccasins in their hands, then brooded over it, and been his own executioner.
I laughed at myself for fancying that the gold was the cause of it all as I went wearily up the trail, to be met by the dogs, to stumble into our cabin, and awaken Dan to tell him of the tragedy. I was ashamed of myself when I put the question to him, as he sat there in his bunk smoking and listening:
“Do you suppose there is anything in that story of the gold being cursed?”
“Cursed, nothing!” he rumbled. “I only wish I had some of it, and knew where it was. I'd take the curse off it. That's a squaw's yarn, and nothin' more.”
I pulled off my damp moccasins, and opened the ventilator in the roof. I was sick of the whole sordid sorrow, and of the camp itself. I was also jealous and discouraged, because Kentucky Smith, buoyant and lovable, appeared to have the lead in the good graces of the only girl I had ever loved. Yes, I admitted it! She was all there was in life to me, and I hungered for her, and wanted her more than I wanted anything, even life itself.
My last words, as I crawled into my bed, and pulled the fur robe up around my ears, were: “I shan't go to that camp again for a week.”
I fancied that I heard a soft chuckle from the bunk above mine.
“Well, I mean it!” I asserted angrily. But I was mistaken in my forecast, although not in my resolution.
It was the very next afternoon that I heard a cheerful voice from the trail that wound past our ever-growing and ever-worthless dump. It was that of Kentucky.
“Hey, Tom,” he shouted, “the mail's in. Windy Jim brought it down from Dawson. Come, go down with me?”
In that glorious excitement I forgot that I had said I should not return to Neucloviat for a whole seven days. The arrival of the first mail in six months was too much of a temptation. It meant letters from home, news from the vast outside world from which we were shut off by thousands of miles of forest and mountain, of ice-clad rivers and snow-bound plains.
Dan came up the windlass rope hand over hand, and shouted: “What's that? Did I hear the word 'Mail'?”
“You did,” was Kentucky's answer. “Some of the boys told me it came in this morning.”
“Then here goes,” Dan jubilated. “Up to the cabin for ours, to get on some dry moccasins and a fresh parka. come on up, Kentuck, and we'll all go down together.”
Before he had finished speaking, he was running up the path leading to the cabin on the shoulder of the hill, and we followed after. No one can appreciate the eagerness with which mail is greeted unless he has lived as we lived in those far-off days. The earth now has but few places where one could find such isolation. No one who has not so lived can understand that Presidential campaigns might be fought and new Presidents elected, installed, and in power, without the citizens knowing that he existed; that kings or queens might die and their successors step in to become public among the world's figureheads, without intelligent men being aware of their elevation; that earthquakes might destroy cities, and wars be waged and fought to the bitter end without patriots hearing, even vicariously, the thunder of the guns.
So we hurried away over the trail, whose shadows were rapidly deepening into the afternoon darkness of that time of the year, and entered the camp. We passed the still-smoldering ruins of what had been Sam Barstow's home, with no more than a swift, grieved thought, and hurried onward, forgetful of the man who would no longer look for the mails, to the trading post. A crowd was there. It seemed as if every man in the hills had heard the news as it passed from mouth to mouth, and had gathered into the smoky shadows of the post.
“More dust for you, Jim,” shouted some one, as we opened the door, and the little man of the trails looked up at us over his frost-blistered cheeks, and grinned.
“About seven dollars' worth from you, Mister Kentucky Smith,” he said, shuffling over the letters from the box in front of him. “A dollar apiece is what I have to tax you for 'em. It's a mighty long trail, and the weather's none too summerish.”
Kentucky looked troubled, and I saw that he was embarrassed. I surmised that he had not that much money left in the world.
“Give me Dan's and mine, with his,” I said, shoving myself forward, “and tell us how much they all come to, and I'll trip you my poke. It saves so much weighing.”
Jim yelled a welcome to me, shook my hand, and as he began to gather the other letters together, said: “Good! That goes. Four for you, I think.”
Kentuck smiled his gratitude at me, and I was glad that I had saved him the humiliation, for my experience has taught me that Kentuckians, even the most humble, have a rare sensitiveness, the sensitiveness of gentlemen.
We took our letters into the far corners to read them. Some of them were too sacred to be read in the midst of other men. Some of those in the room watched us curiously, for the day had witnessed emotions. It had seen men break down and cry, men who would not have cried if condemned to death within the coming hour. It had seen other men almost hysterical with happiness, and others who hurried away to their own cabins to ponder over the outcome of affairs left behind. It had seen men saved from financial wreck by the extension of a friendly draft; and so they watched us.
I had a letter from my mother, closing with its “God bless you, my boy,” and one from a brother who besought me to abandon the quest, and come back to the soft life of the beaten tracks.
“Cleaned out!” I heard my partner's voice behind me. “Busted like an egg. Got nothin' left except what's here! All I've ever saved and sent out has been wiped up by the Ocean Bank, of San Francisco, where I salted it away.”
My own happiness at the news that all was well was blurred by his words, for he was my partner, and good, and loyal, and true. I turned to sympathize with him. I had never heard him speak of his other life, left behind, out in the States, even in his most confidential moods; but I saw that he was hard hit for some reason I could not fully understand.
“Cheer up, old man,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “We'll make more, some time.”
He looked at me for a long time, and his eyes were those of a sufferer.
“You see, you don't understand it all,” he said. “It ain't exactly me alone. I've got two sisters. I never had no chance, and I wanted them to get the best there was. They're in a sort of young ladies' school back East, and—well, I've paid their expenses, and now they'll have to try to go to work. You know what that means for girls who don't know how!”
I nodded my head, and felt how much it meant to him.
“And that ain't all,” he added, speaking in a lower tone. “I only had one brother, and he was white, clean through. And he helped me, always, when I was busted, so long as he lived. It wasn't so much, you understand, but when he died, and left no money, because he'd always helped me along, I swore I'd keep his wife and three kids from ever starvin'. And I've done it, up to now; but here we are on a claim that ain't made an ounce of dust, and the bank's gone under! The Ocean Bank, that everybody said was all right, and which was supposed to send money out of my eleven thousand every month to—well—to care for them other things!”
The magnitude of his loss overshadowed me, and I felt the far-reaching effects of that distant failure which might change the current of so many lives. My admiration for this silent, self-sacrificing man blazed fervidly, as I thought of all that he had borne, but never mentioned, in the two years of our companionship.
It seemed to me, standing there by his side in the dimness of the trading post, that all the world, that world outside, depended on money—on the gold that we dug from the earth. His very helplessness, his inability to even send them a word of encouragement, the months of anxiety he must endure until he could know how they had fared, and what had become of them, were appalling. He loomed large and noble in my estimation as he stood there in the corner, perturbed and gripping himself, and I would have sacrificed much to have relieved him.
“Nothing but good news, I hope?”
Cavanaugh's voice claimed our attention.
“Oh, so-so!”
Dan was still trying to bear a brave front and conceal his wounds.
“Yes,” I said, answering for myself, “I have no complaint.”
The genial trader passed on, and I saw that he stepped wide to pass the saturnine Sioux; for the Hatchet was there, sneering at the emotions of the white men around him. His eyes met mine, and he conveyed to me a flash of dislike. We had met but once, and then had engaged in neither dispute nor conflict; but I saw that in his look which was malicious. Some grim prescience told me that we were not through with each other, and that his fate line ran with mine.
A group of men near us were discussing Sam Barstow's death, and in the other end of the room a man was reading a newspaper, months old, aloud, for the benefit of his hearers. Windy Jim was still serving out his letters, and weighing the gold dust from the buckskin bags thrown across to his hands.
Some one opened the door, and through it I saw that the day had given place to the blackness of night. A man came up and began to talk in low tones to my partner, as if intrusting him with a confidence, and I felt that I was an intruder.
“Pardon me,” I interrupted. And then, to Dan: “I'll find you when I am ready to go home. I'm going up on the hill for a few minutes.”
He nodded at me, and said I should find him there, and again turned a sympathetic ear toward the other man, his own worries suppressed under the mask of his face. I threaded my way toward the door, and pulled my parka hood up over my ears, and my mittens on my hands, and prepared to face that outer, deathlike chill; but my heart was warm as I thought of Bessie Wilton up there in the cabin on the hill, the girl whom I loved, and who I had reason to believe returned my affection.
The stillness of a world frozen brooded over the camp as I turned away from its turbulent front to the well-known path in the snow, that would take me to her door. My heart leaped with exultation as each step carried me nearer, and I dismissed from my mind, as much as I could, all other things but a memory of her face. A Malemute barked at me as I walked in front of one cabin, and I called to him, and held out my hand. Once the trail was lost in the dimness, and I stepped off, hip deep, into the yielding snow, and laughed aloud at my own hasty clumsiness.
I came around by the path leading to the rear, knowing that at that hour her father might be asleep in the front room. The light shone boldly through a window which I passed in going toward the door, and the blind was not drawn. I glanced in, and then came to an abrupt and withering halt.
Kentuck was standing there looking at her, and in his hand was a letter. She was standing before him with clasped hands upraised, and a look on her face such as I had never seen before. The light was so clear and full from the hanging lamp above, that I could catch even the stray glints in her hair, the soft sparkle of her eyes, her half-parted lips. Their very attitude made me pause, tense, and leaning forward, on the worn trail. It seemed fraught with significance, the entire picture, he standing there so clean cut, and handsome, and youthful, and she, so radiant and beautiful.
Suddenly, with lips that expressed a cry of happiness, although the sound did not reach me, she stepped across to him, and threw her arms about his neck, and pillowed her face contentedly against his breast. His arms infolded her, the letter falling in fluttering, erratic circles to the floor. He bent his head over and kissed her on the waving hair, and his lips moved as his arms went round her. She looked up at him and spoke, with a face that betrayed her happiness.
My knees were weakening as I stood there on the cold snow outside, and it was no colder than my heart, which had turned to ice and frozen in my bosom. I clutched it with my hand, and gasped. The stars above had sharpened to leering, penetrating lights of mockery. The very trees of the forest behind seemed leaning forward to jeer at my distress. Life itself was an illusion, bitter and cynical!
I turned and staggered away down the trail, and that I stepped repeatedly from it and into the chilling drifts now gave me no thought, for I was miserable, and hope and ambition seemed to have been killed in one swift, unmistakable discovery. Elizabeth Wilton would never be more to me than a friend, and the youth and brilliancy of Kentuck had won. I was but an old, old man, without the grace of speech or accomplishment, and with nothing to offer to the one for whom I would have gladly surrendered life itself!