The Trail of 98 (24 page)

"Yes, it's strange;" and for some time I pondered over the remarkable
strangeness of it.

"That reminds me," said Jim; "has any one seen the Jam-wagon?"

"Oh yes," answered the Prodigal; "poor beggar! he's down and out. After the
fight he went to pieces, every one treating him, and so on. You remember
Bullhammer?"

"Yes."

"Well, the last I saw of the Jam-wagonhe was cleaning cuspidors in
Bullhammer's saloon."

We had hauled the logs for the cabin, and the foundation was laid. Now we
were building up the
walls, placing between every log a thick wadding of moss.
Every day saw our future home nearer completion.

One evening I spied the saturnine Ribwood climbing the hill to our tent. He
hailed me:

"Say, you're just the man I want."

"What for?" I asked; "not to go down that shaft again?"

"No. Say! we want a night watchman up at the claim to go on four hours a
night at a dollar an hour. You see, there's been a lot of sluice-box robberies
lately, and we're scared for our clean-up. We're running two ten-hour shifts now
and cleaning up every three days; but there's four hours every night the place
is deserted, and Hoofman proposed we should get you to keep watch."

"Yes," I said; "I'll run up every evening if the others don't object."

They did not; so the next night, and for about a dozen after that, I spent
the darkest hours watching on the claim where previously I had worked.

There was never any real darkness down there in that narrow valley, but there
was dusk of a kind that made everything grey and uncertain. It was a vague,
nebulous atmosphere in which objects merged into each other confusedly. Bushes
came down to within a few feet of where we were working, dense-growing alder and
birch that would have concealed a whole regiment of sluice-robbers.

It was the dimmest and most uncertain hour of the four, and I was sitting at
my post of guard. As the
night was chilly I had brought along an old grey blanket,
similar in colour to the mound of the pay-dirt. There had been quite a cavity
dug in the dump during the day, and into this I crawled and wrapped myself in my
blanket. From my position I could see the string of boxes containing the
riffles. Over me brooded the vast silence of the night. By my side lay a loaded
shot-gun.

"If the swine comes," said Ribwood, "let him have a clean-up of lead instead
of gold."

Lying there, I got to thinking of the robberies. They were remarkable. All
had been done by an expert. In some cases the riffles had been extracted and the
gold scooped out; in others a quantity of mercury had been poured in at the
upper end of the boxes, and, as it passed down, the "quick" had gathered up the
dust. Each time the robbers had cleaned up from two to three thousand dollars,
and all within the past month. There was some mysterious master-crook in our
midst, one who operated swiftly and surely, and left absolutely no clue of his
identity.

It was strange, I thought. What nerve, what cunning, what skill must this
midnight thief be possessed of! What desperate chances was he taking! For, in
the miners' eyes, cache-stealing and sluice-box robbing were in the same
category, and the punishment waswell, a rope and the nearest tree of size.
Among those strong, grim men justice would be stern and swift.

I was very quiet for a while, watching dreamily the dark shadows of the
dusk.

Hist! What was that?
Surely the bushes were moving over there by the hillside. I strained my eyes. I
was right: they were.

I was all nerves and excitement now, my heart beating wildly, my eyes boring
through the gloom. Very softly I put out my hand and grasped the shot-gun.

I watched and waited. A man was parting the bushes. Stealthily, very
stealthily, he peered around. He hesitated, paused, peered again, crouched on
all-fours, crept forward a little. Everything was quiet as a grave. Down in the
cabins the tired men slept peacefully; stillness and solitude.

Cautiously the man, crawling like a snake, worked his way to the
sluice-boxes. None but a keen watcher could have seen him. Again and again he
paused, peered around, listened intently. Very carefully, with my eyes fixed on
him, I lifted the gun.

Now he had gained the shadow of the nearest sluice-box. He clung to the
trestle-work, clung so closely you could scarce tell him apart from it. He was
like a rat, dark, furtive, sinister. Slowly I lifted the gun to my shoulder. I
had him covered.

I waited. Somehow I was loath to shoot. My nerves were a-quiver. Proof, more
proof, I said. I saw him working busily, lying flat alongside the boxes. How
crafty, how skilful he was! He was disconnecting the boxes. He would let the
water run to the ground; then, there in the exposed riffles, would be his
harvest. Would I shoot ... now ... now....

Then, in the midnight hush, my gun blazed forth. With one scream the man
tumbled down, carrying
along with him the disconnected box. The water rushed over the
ground in a deluge. I must capture him. There he lay in that pouring stream....
Now I had him.

In that torrent of icy water I grappled with my man. Over and over we rolled.
He tried to gouge me. He was small, but oh, how strong! He held down his face.
Fiercely I wrenched it up to the light. Heavens! it was the Worm.

I gave a cry of surprise, and my clutch on him must have weakened, for at
that moment he gave a violent wrench, a cat-like twist, and tore himself free.
Men were coming, were shouting, were running in from all directions.

"Catch him!" I cried. "Yonder he goes."

But the little man was shooting forward like a deer. He was in the bushes
now, bursting through everything, dodging and twisting up the hill. Right and
left ran his pursuers, mistaking each other for the robber in the semi-gloom,
yelling frantically, mad with the excitement of a man-hunt. And in the midst of
it all I lay in a pool of mud and water, with a sprained wrist and a bite on my
leg.

"Why didn't you hold him?" shouted Ribwood.

"I couldn't," I answered. "I saved your clean-up, and he got some of the
lead. Besides, I know who he is."

"You don't! Who is he?"

"Pat Doogan."

"You don't say. Well, I'm darned. You're sure?"

"Dead sure."

"Swear it in Court?"

"I will."

"Well, that's all right. We'll get him. I'll go into town first thing in the
morning and get out a warrant for him."

He went, but the next evening back he returned, looking very surly and
disgruntled.

"Well, what about the warrant?" said Hoofman.

"Didn't get it."

"Didn't get"

"No, didn't get it," snapped Ribwood. "Look here, Hoofman, I met Locasto.
Black Jack says Pat was cached away, dead to all the world, in the backroom of
the Omega Saloon all night. There's two loafers and the barkeeper to back him
up. What can we do in the face of that? Say, young feller, I guess you mistook
your man."

"I guess I did not," I protested stoutly.

They both looked at me for a moment and shrugged their shoulders.

Time went on and the cabin was quietly nearing completion. The roof of poles
was in place. It only remained to cover it with moss and thawed-out earth to
make it our future home. I think these were the happiest days I spent in the
North. We were such a united trio. Each was eager to do more than the other, and
we vied in little acts of mutual consideration.

Once again I congratulated myself on my partners. Jim, though sometimes
bellicosely evangelical, was the soul of kindly goodness, cheerfulness and
patience. It was refreshing to know among so many sin-calloused men one who
always rang true, true as the gold in the pan. As for the Prodigal, he was a
Prince. I often thought that God at the birth of him must have reached out to
the sunshine and crammed a mighty handful of it into the boy. Surely it is
better than all the riches in the world to have a temperament of eternal
cheer.

As for me, I have ever been at the mercy of my moods, easily elated, quickly
cast down. I have always been abnormally sensitive, affected by sunshine and by
shadows, vacillating, intense in my feelings. I was truly happy in those days,
finding time in the long evenings to think of the scenes of stress and sorrow I
had witnessed, reconstructing the past, and having
importune me again and again the many characters in
my life drama.

Always and always I saw the Girl, elusively sweet, almost unreal, a thing to
enshrine in that ideal alcove of our hearts we keep for our saints. (And God
help us always to keep shining there a great light.)

Many others importuned me: Pinklove, Globstock, Pondersby, Marks, old
Wilovich, all dead; Bullhammer, the Jam-wagon, Mosher, the Winklesteins, plunged
in the vortex of the gold-born city; and lastly, looming over all, dark and
ominous, the handsome, bold, sinister face of Locasto. Well, maybe I would never
see any of them again.

Yet more and more my dream hours were jealously consecrated to Berna. How
ineffably sweet were they! How full of delicious imaginings! How pregnant of
high hope! O, I was born to love, I think, and I never loved but one. This story
of my life is the story of Berna. It is a thing of words and words and words,
yet every word is Berna, Berna. Feel the heartache behind it all. Read between
the lines, Berna, Berna.

Often in the evenings we went to the Forks, which was a lively place indeed.
Here was all the recklessness and revel of Dawson on a smaller scale, and
infinitely more gross. Here were the dance-hall girls, not the dazzling
creatures in diamonds and Paris gowns, the belles of the Monte Carlo and the
Tivoli, but drabs self-convicted by their coarse, puffy faces. Here the men,
fresh from their day's work, the mud of the claim hardly dry on their boot-tops,
were buying
wine with
nuggets they had filched from sluice-box, dump and drift.

There was wholesale robbery going on in the gold-camp. On many claims where
the owners were known to be unsuspicious, men would work for small wages because
of the gold they were able to filch. On the other hand, many of the operators
were paying their men in trade-dust valued at sixteen dollars an ounce, yet so
adulterated with black sand as to be really worth about fourteen. All these
things contributed to the low morale of the camp. Easy come, easy go with money,
a wild intoxication of success in the air; gold gouged in glittering heaps from
the ground during the day, and at night squandered in a carnival of lust and
sin.

The Prodigal was always "snooping" around and gleaning information from most
mysterious sources. One evening he came to us.

"Boys, get ready, quick. There's a rumour of a stampede for a new creek,
Ophir Creek they call it, away on the other side of the divide somewhere. A
prospector went down ten feet and got fifty-cent dirt. We've got to get in on
this. There's a mob coming from Dawson, but we'll get there before the
rush."

Quickly we got together blankets and a little grub, and, keeping out of
sight, we crawled up the hill under cover of the brush. Soon we came to a place
from which we could command a full view of the valley. Here we lay down,
awaiting developments.

It was at the hour of dusk. Scarfs of smoke wavered over the cabins down in
the valley. On the
far
slope of Eldorado I saw a hawk soar upwards. Surely a man was moving amid the
brush, two men, a dozen men, moving in single file very stealthily. I pointed
them out.

"It's the stampede," whispered Jim. "We've got to get on to the trail of that
crowd. Travel like blazes. We can cut them off at the head of the valley."

So we struck into the stampede gait, a wild, jolting, desperate pace, that
made the wind pant in our lungs like bellows, and jarred our bones in their
sockets. Through brush and scrub timber we burst. Thorny vines tore at us
detainingly, swampy niggerheads impeded us; but the excitement of the stampede
was in our blood, and we plunged down gulches, floundered over marshes, climbed
steep ridges and crashed through dense masses of underwood.

"Throw away your blankets, boys," said the Prodigal. "Just keep a little
grub. Eldorado was staked on a stampede. Maybe we're in on another Eldorado. We
must connect with that bunch if we break our necks."

It was hours after when we overtook them, about a dozen men, all in the
maddest hurry, and casting behind them glances of furtive apprehension. When
they saw us they were hugely surprised. Ribwood was one of the party.

"Hello," he says roughly; "any more coming after you boys?"

"Don't see them," said the Prodigal breathlessly. "We spied you and cottoned
on to what was up, so
we made a fierce hike to get in on it. Gee, I'm all tuckered
out."

"All right, get in line. I guess there's lots for us all. You're in on a good
thing, all right. Come along."

So off we started again. The leader was going like one possessed. We
blundered on behind. We were on the other side of the divide looking into
another vast valley. What a magnificent country it was! What a great
manuvring-ground it would make for an army! What splendid open spaces, and
round smooth hills, and dimly blue valleys, and silvery winding creeks! It was
veritably a park of the Gods, and enclosing it was the monstrous, corrugated
palisade of the Rockies.

But there was small time to look around. On we went in the same mad,
heart-breaking hurry, mile after mile, hour after hour.

"This is going to be a banner creek, boys," the whisper ran down the line.
"We're in luck. We'll all be Klondike Kings yet."

Cheering, wasn't it? So on we went, hotter than ever, content to follow the
man of iron who was guiding us to the virgin treasure.

We had been pounding along all night, up hill and down dale. The sun rose,
the dawn blossomed, the dew dried on the blueberry; it was morning. Still we
kept up our fierce gait. Would our leader never come to his destination? By what
roundabout route was he guiding us? The sun climbed up in the blue sky, the heat
quivered; it was noon. We panted as
we pelted on, parched and weary, faint and footsore. The
excitement of the stampede had sustained us, and we scarcely had noted the
flight of time. We had been walking for fourteen hours, yet not a man faltered.
I was ready to drop with fatigue; my feet were a mass of blisters, and every
step was intolerable pain to me. But still our leader kept on.