The Project Gutenberg eBook, Gold, Gold, in Cariboo!, by Clive Phillipps-Wolley, Illustrated by Godfrey C. Hindley

"Gold, Gold, in Cariboo!"

CORBETT SEIZES HIS ONE CHANCE FOR LIFE.

Gold, Gold, in Cariboo!

A STORY OF
ADVENTURE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

BY

CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY

Author of "Snap" "A Sportsman's Eden" &c.

ILLUSTRATED BY GODFREY C. HINDLEY

NEW EDITION

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
LONDON GLASGOW AND DUBLIN
1903

CONTENTS.

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I. THE GOLD FEVER.

In the April of 1862, Victoria, British Columbia, was slowly recovering from what her inhabitants described as a serious "set back."

From the position of a small Hudson Bay station she had suddenly risen in '58 to the importance of a city of 17,000 inhabitants, from which high estate she had fallen again with such rapidity, that in 1861 there were only 5000 left in her to mourn the golden days of the "Frazer River humbug."

In '48 the gold fever broke out in California, and for ten years, in the words of an eye-witness, 50,000 adventurers of every hue, language, and clime were drifting up and down the slopes of the Great Sierra, in search of gold, ready to rush this way or that at the first rumour of a fresh find.

In '58 California's neighbour, British Columbia, took the fever. The cry of "Gold, gold!" was raised upon the Frazer, and the wharves of San Francisco groaned beneath the burden of those who sought to take ship for this fresh Eldorado.

In a year most of these pilgrims had returned from the new shrine, poorer by one year of their short lives, beaten back by the grim canyons of the Frazer river, or cheated of their reward by those late floods, which kept the golden sands hidden from their view. In '58 and '59 the miner cursed Victoria as a city of hopes unfulfilled, and left her to dream on undisturbed of the greater days to come.

She looked as if, on this April day of '62, her dreams were of the fairest. The air, saturated with spring sunshine, was almost too soft and sweet to be wholesome for man. There was a languor in it which dulled the appetite for work; merely to live was happiness enough; effort seemed folly, and if a man could have been found with energy enough to pray, he would have prayed only that no change might come to him, that the gleam of the blue waters of the straits and the diamond brightness of the distant snow-peaks might remain his for ever, balanced by the soft green of the island pine-woods: that the hollow drumming of the mating grouse and the song of the meadow lark, and the hum of waking nature might continue to caress his ear, while only the scent of the fresh-sawn lumber suggested to him that labour was the lot of man.

And yet, in spite of this seeming dreaminess in nature, the old earth was busy fashioning new things out of the old, and the hearts of men all along the Pacific slope were waking and thrilling in answer to the new message of Mammon—"Gold! gold by the ton, to be had for the gathering in Cariboo!" The reports which had come down from Quesnel, of the fortunes made in '61 upon such creeks as Antler and Williams, had restored heart to the Victorians, and even to those Californian miners who still sojourned in their midst, so that quite half the people in the town, old residents as well as new-comers, were only waiting for the snows to melt, ere they rushed away to the mining district beyond the Bald Mountains.

But the snows tarry long in the high places of British Columbia, and the days went on in spite of the men and their desire, and bread had to be earned even in such an Elysium as Vancouver Island, with all the gold which a man could want, as folks said, within a few weeks' march of them; so that hands and brains were busy, in spite of the temptations of Hope and the spring sunshine. Moreover, there were dull dogs even then in Victoria, who believed more in the virtue of steady toil than in gold-mining up at Cariboo.

Thus it happened, then, that a big, yellow-headed axeman, and a ray of evening sunlight, looking in together through an open doorway upon Wharf Street, found a man within in his shirt sleeves, still busily engaged upon his daily task.

"Hullo, Corbett, how goes it? Come right in and take a smoke."

The voice, a cheery one with a genuine welcome in it, came from the inside of the house, and in answer the axeman heaved his great shoulder up from the door-post and loafed in.

In every movement of this man there was a suggestion of healthy weariness, that most luxurious and delightful sensation which comes over him who has used his muscles throughout the day in some one of those outdoor forms of labour which earn an appetite, even if they do not gain a fortune.

As he stood in the little room looking quizzically at his friend's work, Ned Corbett, in his old blue shirt and overalls, with the axe lying across one bare brown forearm, might have served an artist as a model for Labour; but the artist into whose studio he had come had no need for such models. There was no money in painting such subjects, and Steve Chance painted for dollars, and for dollars only. Round the room at the height of a man's shoulder was stretched a long, long strip of muslin (not canvas, canvas would cost six bits a picture), and this strip had been sized and washed over with colour. When Corbett entered, Chance had just slapped on the last patch of this preliminary coat of paint, so that now there was nothing more to be done until the morrow.

"Well, Steve, how many works of art have you knocked off to-day?" asked Corbett.

"Works of art be hanged!" replied his friend. "I've covered about twenty feet of muslin, and that at five dollars a picture isn't a bad day's work. What have you done?"

"Let me see, I've cut down a tree or two and earned an appetite, and—oh, yes, a couple of dollars to satisfy the same. Isn't that enough?"

"All depends upon the way you look at things. I call it fooling your time away."

"And I call this work of yours a waste of talent worse, fifty times worse, than my waste of time. Look at that thing, for instance;" and Ned pointed to a large canvas, bright with all the colours of the rainbow.

"That! Well, you needn't look as if the thing might bite, Ned. That is the new map of Ophir, a land brimming 'ophir'—forgive the joke—with coarse gold, and, what is more important, bonded by those immaculate knights of the curbstone, Messrs. Dewd and Cruickshank."

"An advertisement, is it? Well, it is ugly enough even for that. How much lower do you mean to drag your hapless art, you vandal? 'Auctioning pictures,' as you call it, is bad enough, but this is simple sign-painting!"

"Well, and why not, if sign-painting pays? You take my advice, Ned; get the 'sugar' first, the fame will come at its leisure. Sign-painting is honest anyway, and more remunerative than felling trees, you bet."

"That may be," replied the younger man, balancing his axe in his strong hands, "and more intellectual, I suppose; but, by George, there's a pleasure in every ringing blow with the axe, and the scent of the fresh pine-wood is sweeter than the smell of your oil-paints."

"Pot-paints, Ned, two bits a pot. We don't run to tube-paints in this outfit."

"Well, pot-paints if you like; but even so you are not making a fortune. We can't always sell those panoramas of yours, you know, even at a dollar a foot."

"That's your fault, Ned; you've no eye for the latent merits of my pictures, and therefore make a shocking mess of the auctioneer's department. However, I am not wedded to my art. If lumbering and painting don't pay, what do you say to real estate?" and as he spoke, Chance put his "fixins" together and proceeded to lock up the studio for the night.

"Real estate! Why, fifty per cent of the inhabitants of the Queen City are real estate agents professionally, and most of the others are amateurs. Be a little original, outside your art anyway, old fellow. I don't want anything to do with real estate, except in acre blocks beyond the city limits, and a jolly long way beyond at that!"

"Is that so?" asked a mellow voice from behind the last speaker. "Then, my dear sir, Messrs. Dewd and Cruickshank can fix you right away. What do you say to a little farm on the gorge, fairly swarming with game, and admirably suited for either stock raising or grain growing?"

"Viticulture, market-gardening, or a gentleman's park! Better go the whole hog at once, Cruickshank," laughed Chance, turning round to greet the new-comer, a dark, stout man with an unlit cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth.

"You must have your joke, Mr. Chance; but the farm is really a gem for all that, and with the certainty of a large advance in price this summer, a man could not do better than buy."

"What, is the farm better than a claim in Ophir?" laughed Chance.

"Ah, well, that is another matter!" said Cruickshank. "The farm is a gilt-edged investment. There is, of course, just a suspicion of speculation in all gold-mining operations, though I can't see where the risk is in such claims as those you mention. By the way, have you finished the map?"

"Yes, here it is," replied the artist, producing a roll from under his arm, and partly opening it to show it to his questioner. "I call it rather a neat thing in sign-boards, don't you? I know I've used up all my brightest colours upon it."

"Yes, it will do; and though I don't suppose Williams Creek is quite that colour," laughed Cruickshank, "I am happy to say that our reports are not over-coloured, even if our map is. Do you know the Duke of Kent, Mr. Corbett?"

"No. Who is the Duke of Kent? I'd no idea that we had any aristocrats out here."

"Oh, the duke's is only a fancy title; most titles are that way in the far west."

"My sentiments exactly, Colonel Cruickshank," replied Corbett; and anyone inclined to quarrel with him might have thought that Corbett dwelt just a thought too long upon the "colonel."

But Cruickshank was not inclined to quarrel with a man who stood six feet two, and girthed probably forty inches round the chest, and who was reported, moreover, to be master of quite a snug little sum in good English gold.

"The Duke of Kent has a claim alongside those which we bonded last fall, and he tells me that he has already refused a hundred thousand dollars for a half share in it."

"A hundred thousand dollars for a half share! Great Cæsar's ghost, why, you could buy half Victoria for the money!" cried Chance.

"Well, not quite, but a good deal of it, and yet I've no doubt but that we have quite as rich claims amongst those we offer for sale. How can it be otherwise? They lie side by side on the same stream."

"Have you seen any of these claims yourself, colonel?" asked Corbett.

"Every one of them, my good sir. My clients are for the most part my own countrymen, and you may bet that I won't let them be done by any beastly Yank."

"Civil to you, Steve," laughed Corbett.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Chance, but there are Americans and Americans; and you can understand that a man who has spent the best years of his life wearing the Queen's uniform feels hotly about some of the frauds practised upon tender-feet by Californian bilks."

"Why, certainly; don't apologize. I suppose there are a few honest men and a good many rogues in every nation. Did you say you had seen the claims yourself? I thought you were in Victoria in the fall."

"No; Dewd and I were up together. I came down and he stayed there. There is big money in them. Change your minds, gentlemen, and give up art for gold-mining."

"No, thanks; I think not," replied Corbett.

"No! Well, you know best. Good-day to you. You won't take a drink, will you?"

"No, I won't spoil my appetite even for a cock-tail."

"So long, then!" and with a flourish of his gold-headed cane, which was meant to represent a military salute, the somewhat florid warrior dived through a swing-door, over which was written in letters of gold, "The Fashion Bar."

"Say, Corbett," remarked Chance as Cruickshank disappeared, "don't you make yourself so deuced disagreeable to my best customers. Cruickshank's orders keep our firm in bread and cheese, and I can see you want to kick the fellow all the time he is in your company."

"All right, old chap; but I didn't say anything rude, did I? If he would only drop the 'British army' and 'we English' I wouldn't even want to be rude. What the deuce does he care whether he gets his dollars from a Britisher or a Yank?"

"Not much, you bet! But here we are. Hullo, Phon, have you got the muck-a-muck ready?"

"You bet you! Soup all ready. Muck-a-muck heap good to-day you see;" and laughing and chattering Phon dived into the tent, and rattled about the tin plates and clucked as if he were calling chickens to be fed.

Phon was a character in his way, and a good one at that; a little wizen, yellow body, with an especially long pig-tail coiled up on his head like a turban; eyes and tongue which were in perpetual motion, and a great affection for the two white men, who treated him with the familiarity of old friendship.

"What are you in such a deuce of a hurry for to-night, Phon?" asked Corbett a little later, when the Chinaman rushed in to take away the remains of dinner.

"S'pose I tell you, you no let me go?" replied the fellow, half interrogatively.

"Go! of course I'll let you go. I couldn't help myself, I suppose. Where are you going to—the hee-hee house?"

"No, no. Hee-hee house no good. No makee money there. Pay all the time. Me go gamble."

"Gamble, you idiot! What, and lose all your pay for a month?"

"'Halo' (anglice not) lose. Debbil come to me last night; debbil say, 'Phon, you go gamble, you win one hundred dollars.' I go win, you see."

"Please yourself. You'll see as much of that hundred dollars as you did of the devil. Who's that calling?"

Phon went out of the tent for a moment and then returned, and holding up the tent flap for someone to enter, said:

"Colonel Cruickshank want to see you. Me go now?"

"All right! go to blazes, only don't expect us to pay you any more wages if you lose. Come in, colonel."

"Won't you come out instead, Mr. Corbett? It's better lying on the grass outside than in to-night."

"Guess he is right, Ned. Come along, you lazy old beggar!" cried Chance. And the three men in another minute were all lying prone on a blanket by the embers of a camp-fire, smoking their pipes and chatting lazily.

Corbett's tent—a marvel of London make, convertible into anything from a Turkish bath to a suit of clothes, and having every merit except the essential one of portability—stood upon the very edge of the encampment, commanding a view of the sea and the Olympic Range on the farther shore.

The encampment itself was a kind of annexe of the town of Victoria, standing where James Bay suburb now stands, although what is to-day covered with villas and threatened by an extension of the electric tramway was in '62 a place of willows and wild rosebushes.

Here lived part of the floating population of Victoria, miners en route to Cariboo, remittance-men sent away from home to go to the dogs out of sight of their affectionate relatives, and a good many other noisy good-fellows who liked to live in their shirt sleeves in the open air.

Corbett and Chance were the aristocrats of this quarter, thanks to the magnificence of their abode and the general "tonyness" of their outfit. In their own hearts they knew that they were victims to their outfitter—that they were living where they were instead of in a house merely out of regard for their tent, and for those mysterious camp appliances which all fitted into one another like Chinese puzzles.

That was where the shoe pinched. In a moment of pride they had pitched their tent (according to written instructions) and unpacked their "kitchen outfits," and they had never been able to repack them.

It was all very well to advertise the things as packing compactly into a case two feet by one foot six inches, but it required an expert to pack them; and so, unless they were minded to abandon their "fixings," they had to stay by them. Therefore they stayed, and said they preferred the open air, even when it rained, as it sometimes does even on Vancouver Island.

Later on they learnt better, and were consoled for their losses by the sight of the hundred and one "indispensable requisites of a camp life" cast away by weary pilgrims all along the Frazer river road. It is a pity that the gentlemen who sell camp outfits cannot be compelled to pass one year in prospecting before they enter upon their trade.

But an April evening by the Straits of Fuca, with a freshly-lit pipe between your teeth, will put you in charity even with a London outfitter. The warm air was full of the scent of the sea and the sweet smoke of the camp-fires, while the chorus of the bull-frogs sounded like nature's protest against the advent of man.

As the darkness grew the forest seemed to close in round the intruding houses, and for a while even the estate agent was silent, oppressed by the majesty of night and nature.

It was Corbett who broke the silence at last.

"Do you know that long, blue valley, Steve—you can hardly see it now,—the one that goes winding away back into the mountains from the gate of the Angels?"

Steve nodded. He was too lazy to answer.

"That valley is my worst tempter. I know I ought to settle here and work: keep a store and grow up with the country; but I can't do it. That valley haunts me with longings to follow it through the blue mists to—"

"To the place where the gold comes from—eh, Ned? To the place where it lies in lumps still, not worn into dust by its long journey down stream from the heart of its parent mountain. Old Sobersides, you have been reading your Colonist too much lately."

Ned smiled, and knocking the ashes out of his pipe, began to refill it.

"How much of all these yarns about gold up at Antler and Williams Creek do you believe, colonel?" he asked, turning to Cruickshank. "Do you really think anyone ever took out fifty ounces in a day with a rocker?"

"I know it, my good sir. I have seen it. When Antler was found in 1860 the bed-rock was paved with gold, and you could not wash a shovelful of dirt that had not from five to fifty dollars' worth of dust in it."

"Oh, there's gold up in Cariboo, Ned, but it wants finding. You've only got to go into the saloons to know that there is plenty of dust for the lucky ones. Fellows pay with pinches of dust for liquors whose names they did not know a year ago."

"Paid, you mean, Chance," corrected Cruickshank. "They are all pretty near stone-broke by now. But are you longing to go and bail up gold in your silk hat, Mr. Corbett?"

"I am longing to be doing something new, colonel. I've taken the prevalent fever, I think, and want to make one in this scrimmage. I can't sit still and see band after band of hard-fists going north any longer. Town life may be more profitable, perhaps, but I want to be with the men."

"Bully for you, Ned! English solidity of intellect for ever! Why, you villain, you're as bad a gambler as Yankee Chance."

"Worse, I expect, Mr. Chance," remarked Cruickshank, eyeing the two young men critically. "You would play to win, he would play for the mere fun of playing."

"Which would give me the advantage," retorted Corbett; "because in that case I should stop when I was tired of the game."

"Never mind the argument," broke in Chance; "gambler or no gambler, if you go I go. I'm sick of that picture of the pines and the waterfall, anyway."

"So is Victoria. 'Bloomin' red clothes'-props and a mill-race,' one chap called the last copy I tried to sell," muttered Corbett.

"Well, why not buy a couple of those claims of mine?" suggested Cruickshank. "I always like to do a fellow-countryman a good turn, and it would really be a genuine pleasure to me to put you two into a good thing."

"How many have you left, Colonel Cruickshank?" He could not help it for the life of him, but the moment Cruickshank became more than ordinarily affectionate and open-hearted Corbett put on the colonel, and, as it were, came on guard. He was angry with himself directly afterwards for doing so, but he could no more help it than a man can help pulling himself together when he hears the warning of the rattlesnake.

"Only three, Mr. Corbett; and I doubt whether I can hold those till to-morrow morning. I am to meet a man in town at nine about them."

"What do you want for the three?"

"As a mere matter of curiosity?" put in Chance.

"Well, let me see. They are '100-foot' claims, right alongside the places where the big hauls were made last year; but they are the last, and as you are an Englishman and a friend—"

"Oh, please be good enough to treat this as a purely business matter," ejaculated Corbett, blushing up to the temples, whilst anyone looking at Cruickshank might for the moment have thought that his speech had had exactly the effect he intended it to have.

"Well, say two thousand dollars apiece; that is cheap and fair."

"Two thousand dollars apiece! What a chap you are to chaff, Cruickshank!" cried Chance, breaking in. "Do you take us for millionaires?"

"In embryo if you buy my shares, certainly, my dear sir."

"Perhaps. But look here, say a thousand dollars apiece, half cash, and half when we make our pile."

"Can't do it; but I'll knock off a hundred dollars from each claim, as we are friends."

"The market value is two thousand dollars, you say, Colonel Cruickshank (my dear Chance, do leave this to me), and you have yourself inspected these claims?"

"Certainly."

"And they are good workable claims, adjoining those you spoke of?"

"Undoubtedly, that gives them their principal value."

"Very well then, I'll buy the three. Here is a hundred dollars to bind our bargain. We'll settle the rest to-morrow. Now, let me give you a drink."

"Thank you. Are the claims to stand in your name?"

"In Chance's, Phon's, and mine. How will that do, Steve?"

"Settle it your own way; if you have gone crazy I suppose I must humour you. But there is a good deal owing to our firm from yours, colonel, isn't there?"

"Of course. That can be set off against a part of the sum due as payment for the claims. Good-night, Mr. Corbett. Thank you for the confidence you show in me. Treat a gentleman like a gentleman, and an honest man like an honest man, say I."

"And a thief or a business man like a thief or a business man," muttered Chance, as Cruickshank walked away. "Oh, Ned, Ned! What a lot nature wasted on your muscles which she had much better have put into your head!"

CHAPTER II. A "GILT-EDGED" SPECULATION.

"Ned, were you drunk last night, or am I dreaming?" asked Chance next morning, as the two sat over their breakfast, while the canoes of the early Indian fishers stole out along the edges of the great kelp beds.

It was a lovely scene upon which Corbett's tent looked out, but Chance at the moment had no eyes for the blue water, or the glories of the snow range beyond, all he could think of was "three claims at two thousand dollars apiece."

"Neither, that I am aware of, Steve. You eat as if you had all your faculties about you, and I've no head ache."

"Then you did not buy three claims from Cruickshank at two thousand dollars apiece?"

"Yes, I did; and why not?"

"Where is the money to come from?"

"I'll see to that," replied Corbett. "I am quite aware that six thousand dollars is twelve hundred pounds; but if you don't want to take a share in my speculation, I propose to invest that much of my capital in the venture, and even if I lose it all I shall still have something left, besides my muscles, thank God. You two, Phon and yourself, can work for me on wages if you like, or we'll make some other arrangement to keep the party together."

For a minute or two Chance said nothing, and then he began laughing quietly to himself.

"Say, Ned, you took scarlatina pretty bad when you were a kiddy, didn't you?"

"I don't remember, old chap. Why do you ask?"

"And whooping-cough, and measles, and chicken-pox, and now its gold fever, and my stars isn't it a virulent attack?" and Chance broke out laughing afresh.

"I don't see," began Corbett, growing rather red in the face.

"Oh, no; you don't see what all this has to do with me," interrupted Chance, "and it's infernal impertinence on my part to criticise your actions, and if I wasn't so small you would very likely punch my head. I know all that. But, you see, we two are partners, and I am not going to dissolve partnership because I think you are taking bigger risks than you ought to. If you put up three thousand dollars I will put up as much, and part of it can come out of the money owing to the firm."

"But why do this if you think the risk too big?" asked Corbett.

"Why ask questions, Ned? I feel like taking the risk; I am a Yankee, and therefore a natural gambler. You of course are not, are you? And then it's spring-time, and from twenty-three to the other end of threescore years and ten is a long, long time; and even if we 'bust,' there'll be lots of time to build again. So we will go halves, the third claim to be held in Phon's name, and Phon to work on wages."

"Let us have old Phon in. Phon! Phon!" shouted Corbett.

The Chinaman, who was cleaning the tin plates by a creek hard by, came slowly towards them.

"Well, Phon, did you lose all your dollars last night?" asked his master.

"Me tell you debbil say me win—debbil know, you bet," replied Phon coolly.

"And did you win?"

"Me win a hundred dollars—look!" and the little man held out a roll of dirty notes, amounting to something more than the sum named.

"You were in luck, Phon. 'Spose I were you, I no go gamble any more," remarked Corbett, dropping into that pigeon English, which people seem to think best adapted to the comprehension of the Chinaman.

"Oh yes, you go gamble too. Debbils bodder me very bad last night. They say you go gamble, Chance he go gamble, Phon he go gamble too. All go gamble togedder. And then debbil he show me gold, gold,—so much gold me no able to carry it. Where you goin' now?"

"I guess your friends, the devils, might have told you that too," remarked Chance. "Don't you know?"

"No, me no savey. You tell me."

"Corbett and myself are going up to Cariboo mining, and if you like you can come as cook, or you can come and work on wages in our claims. How would you like that?"

"Me come, all-lite me come; only you give me one little share in the claims—you let me put in one hundred dollars I win last night."

"Better keep what you've got and not gamble any more," replied Corbett kindly.

"Halo! Halo keep him. 'Spose you not sell me share I go gamble again to-night."

"Better let him have his way, Ned. Let the whole crowd go in together, 'sink or swim.'"

"Very well, Phon, then you will come."

"You bet you, Misser Corbett. Who you 'spose cook for you 'spose I no come?" And having proposed this final conundrum, Phon retired again to his kitchen.

"Rum, the way in which he seemed to know all about our movements, Ned," remarked Chance, when the Chinaman had done.

"Oh, he overheard what we said last night, or at breakfast this morning," replied Corbett.

"He wasn't here last night, and he was down by the stream whilst we were at breakfast."

"All right, old man, perhaps his 'debbil' told him. It doesn't much matter anyway. Did you see this piece in the Colonist?"

"About us? No. Read it out."

"'We understand that Colonel Cruickshank, the Napoleon of Victorian finance, the mammoth hustler of the Pacific coast, has determined to conduct those gentlemen who have bought his bonded claims to the fortunes which await them. This additional proof of the colonel's belief in the property which he offers for sale should ensure a keen competition for the one claim still left upon his hands, which we understand will be raffled for this afternoon at 4 p.m. at Smith's saloon. Tickets, ten dollars each. We are informed that amongst the purchasers of claims in the Cruickshank reserve are an English gentleman largely interested in the lumber business, and an American artist rapidly rising into public notice.'"

"What cheer, my lumber king!" laughed Chance as Corbett laid down the paper. "These journalists are wonderful fellows, but I suspect most of that paragraph was inspired and paid for by the 'mammoth hustler.' By the way, if it is true that he means to personally conduct a party to Williams Creek, it does really look as if he had some belief in the claims."

"Yes, IF he means to; but I expect that is simply to draw people to his raffle this afternoon."

"Probably; but if he were to go up to Williams Creek we might as well go up with him. You see, he has travelled along the trail before."

"Well, I'll see about that, and make any arrangements I can for getting up to Cariboo, if you will try to get our accounts settled up, Steve. I'm no good at figures, as you know."

"That's what!" replied Chance laconically; and the two young men got upon their legs and prepared to start on their day's business.

It will be as well here to enter upon a short explanation of the law as it then stood in British Columbia with regard to the bonding of claims. Experience had shown that in the upper country, early winters and late springs, with their natural accompaniment of deep snows, made mining impossible for about half the year. In consequence of this a law had been passed enabling miners to "bond" claims taken up late in the fall until the next spring. Upon claims so bonded it was not necessary to do any work until the 1st of June of the ensuing year, so that from November to June the claims lay safe under the wing of the law; but should their owners neglect to put in an appearance or fail to commence work upon the 1st of June, they forfeited all right to the claims, which could then be "jumped" or seized upon by the first comer.

It was under this law that Corbett and Chance had bought, so that it was imperatively necessary that they should reach their claims by the 1st of June; and although there was still ample time in which to make the journey, there was no time to waste. The Cariboo migration had already begun, and every day saw fresh bands of hard-fists leave Victoria for the mines. Already the gamblers had gone, the whisky trains and other pack trains had started, and the drain upon the stock of full-grown manhood in Victoria was easily noticeable. It was no vain boast which the miners made that the men of Cariboo were the pick of the men of their day. Physically, at any rate, it would have been hard indeed to find a body of men tougher in fibre and more recklessly indifferent to hardships than the pioneers who pushed their way through the Frazer valley to the gold-fields beyond. In that crowd there was no room for the stripling or the old man. The race for gold upon the Frazer was one in which only strong men of full age could live even for the first lap.

And this was the crowd which Corbett and Chance sought to join. To some men the mere idea of a railway journey, entered upon without due consideration and ample forethought, is fraught with terrors. Luckily neither Corbett nor Chance were men of this sort. Chance was a Yankee to the tips of his fingers, and had therefore no idea of distance or fear of travel. The world was nearly big enough for him, and he cared just as little about "crossing the herring-pond" as he did about embarking on a ride in a 'bus. As for Corbett, nature had made him a nomad—one of those strangely restless beings, who, having a lovely home, and knowing it to be lovely, still long for constant change, and circle the world with tireless feet, only to bring home the report that "after all England is the only place fit for a fellow to live in." The odd part of it all is, that that being their conviction, most of these wanderers contrive to live out of England for three parts of their lives.

It was no wonder, then, that when Corbett and Chance met again at dusk everything had been, as Chance said, "fixed right away."

"It's a true bill about Cruickshank, old man," Corbett said. "And if you can get the bills paid and our kit packed he wants us to start with him on the Umatilla for Westminster the day after to-morrow."

"I don't know about getting the bills paid," replied Chance. "A good many fellows who owe us money appear to have gone before to Cariboo, but I reckon we must look upon that as the opening of an account to our credit in the new country."

"Not much of an account to draw upon; but I suppose it can't be helped. I believe, though, that to do the thing properly we ought both to get stone-broke before starting," remarked Corbett.

"That will come later. Hullo, Cruickshank! what is in the wind now?" cried Steve, turning to the new-comer.

"Gold, gold, nothing but gold, Chance. But I say, gentlemen, are those your packs?" asked the colonel, pointing to two small mountains of luggage which nearly filled the interior of the tent.

"Yes. That is Chance's pack, and this is mine. There will be a sort of joint-stock pack made up to-morrow of the kitchen stuff and the tent. And I think that will be all."

"And you think that will be all, Mr. Corbett?" repeated Cruickshank. "You are a strong man; can you lift that pack?" and he pointed to the biggest of the two.

"Oh yes, easily; carry it a mile if necessary," replied Corbett, swinging the great bundle up on to his shoulders.

"You are a stout fellow," admitted Cruickshank admiringly; "but hasn't it occurred to you that you may have to carry all you want for a good many miles? And even if you can do that, who is to carry the joint-stock pack? Not Phon, surely?"

"Well, but won't there be any pack ponies?" asked Corbett.

"For hire on the road, do you mean? Certainly not."

"All right, then," replied Corbett, after a minute or two spent in solemnly and somewhat sadly contemplating all the neatly-packed camp equipage. "I can do with two blankets and a tin pannikin if it comes to that. Can't you, Steve?"

"A tin pannikin and blanket goes," answered Chance. "To blazes with all English outfits anyway!"

"Well, I don't know about that," put in Cruickshank, who seemed hardly as well pleased at his comrade's readiness to forswear comfort as might have been expected. "I thought that you fellows might like to take a few comforts along with you, so I had mentally arranged a way in which we might combine pleasure with profit."

"Pleasure with profit by all means, my boy. Unfold your scheme, colonel; we are with you," cried Chance.

"Well, stores are terribly high up in Cariboo. Whisky is about the only thing these packers think of packing up to the mines, and if you fellows had the coin I could easily buy a little train of cayuses down at Westminster pretty cheap, and load them up with stuff which would pay you cent per cent, and between us the management of a little train like that would be a mere nothing."

"How about packing? You cain't throw a diamond hitch by instinct," remarked Chance, who knew a little from hearsay of the life of the road.

"Oh, I can throw the hitch, and so I guess can your heathen, and we'll deuced soon teach both of you to take the on-side if you are wanted to."

"How much would such a train cost?"

"The ponies ought not to cost more than fifty dollars apiece; as to the stores, of course it depends upon what you choose to take. The ponies will carry about two hundred pounds apiece, if they are good ones."

"What do you say to it, Steve?" asked Ned.

"Seems a good business," replied Chance, "and we may as well put our last dollars into a pack-train as leave them in the bank or chuck them into the Frazer. A pack-train goes."

And so it was settled that the two friends should invest the balance of their funds in a pack-train and stores for Cariboo. The venture looked a promising one, with no possibility of failure or loss, and even if things went wrong the boys would only be stone-broke; and who cares whether he is stone-broke or not at twenty-three, in a new country with no one dependent upon him?

It was only eighteen months before that Edward Corbett had left home, a home in which it was part of the duty of about five different human beings to see that Master Edward wanted for nothing. At about the same time one of the finest houses in New York would have been disturbed to its very foundations if it were suspected that Mr. Steve Chance wanted for any of the luxuries of the nineteenth century, and yet here were Steve Chance and Ned Corbett, their last dollar invested in a doubtful venture, their razors abandoned, their toilet necessaries reduced to one cake of soap and a towel between two (Cruickshank condemned the habit of washing altogether upon the road), and their whole stock of household goods reduced to two light packs, to be carried mile after mile upon their own strong shoulders. There was daily labour ahead of them such as a criminal would hardly have earned for punishment at home, there was a certainty before them of bad food, restless nights, thirst, hunger, and utter discomfort, and yet this life was of their own choosing, and a smile hovered round the lips of each of them as the pipes dropped out of their mouths and they turned over to sleep.

As for "gold," the prize which both of them appeared to be making all these sacrifices for, neither of the boys, oddly enough, had thought of it that night. With Phon it was different, but then he was a celestial. He played for the stakes. Both the whites played, though in different ways, for the fun of the game.

CHAPTER III. A LITTLE GAME OF POKER.

"Well, Ned, how do our fellow-passengers strike you? This is a pretty hard crowd, isn't it?" asked Chance, as his eyes wandered over the mob of men of every nationality, who were jostling one another on board the steamer Umatilla, ten minutes after she had left Victoria for New Westminster.

"Yes, they look pretty tough, most of them," assented Corbett; "but a three-weeks' beard, a patch in the seat of your pants, and a coat of sun-tan, will bring you down to the same level, Steve. Civilized man reverts naturally to barbarism as soon as he escapes from the tailor and the hair-dresser."

"That's what, sonny! And I believe the only difference between a white man and a siwash, is that one has had more sun and less soap than the other."

"Oh, hang it, no! I draw the line there," cried Corbett. "But look, there go the gamblers already;" and Ned pointed to a little group which had gathered together aft, the leading spirit amongst them appearing to be a dark, overdressed person, who was inviting everybody at the top of his voice to "Chip in and take a drink."

"They don't mean to lose much time, do they?" remarked Chance. "And, by the way, do you see that the 'mammoth hustler,' our own colonel, is among them?"

"And seems to know every rascal in the gang," muttered Corbett.

"Come and look on, Ned, and don't growl. You don't expect a real-estate agent to be a saint, do you?" remonstrated Chance.

"Not I. I don't care a cent for cards. You go if you like. I'll just loaf and look at the scenery."

"As you please. I don't take much stock in scenery unless I have painted it myself, and even that sours on me sometimes;" and with this frank and quaintly expressed confession, Steve Chance turned and pushed his way through the crowd to a place behind Cruickshank, who welcomed him effusively, and introduced him to his friends.

Ned saw the artist gulp down what looked like a doctor's prescription, and light up a huge black cigar, and then turning his back upon the noisy expectorating crowd, he leant upon the bulwarks and forgot all about it.

Before his eyes stretched a vast field of blue water; blue water without a ripple upon it, save such as the steamer made, or the diving "cultus" duck, which the boat almost ran down, before the bird woke and saw its danger. Here and there on this blue field were groups of islands, wooded to the water's edge, and inhabited only by the breeding ducks and a few deer. As yet no one owned these islands, and, except for an occasional fishing Indian, no one had ever set foot on most of them. Everything spoke of rest and dreamful ease. What birds there were, were silent and asleep, rocked only in their slumbers by the swell from the passing boat, or else following in her wake on gliding wings which scarcely seemed to stir. There was no wind to fret the sea, or stir an idle sail. Nature was asleep in the spring sunlight, her calm contrasting strangely with the noise, and passion, and unrest on board the tiny boat which was puffing and churning its way through the still waters of the straits.

As for Ned, his ears were as deaf to the oaths and noise behind him as his eyes were blind to the calm beauty beneath them. His eyes were wide open, but his mind was not looking through them. As a matter of fact Ned Corbett, the real Ned Corbett, was just then day-dreaming somewhere on the banks of the Severn.

"Can you spare me a light, sir?"

This was the first sound that broke in upon his dreams, and Ned felt instinctively in his waistcoat pocket, and handed the intruder the matches which he found there.

"Thank you. I was fairly clemmed for a smoke."

"Clemmed" for a smoke! It was odd, but the dialect was the dialect of Ned's dream still, and as he looked at the speaker, a broad burly fellow, who evidently had made up his mind to have a chat, a pouch of tobacco was thrust out to him with the words: "Won't you take a fill yourself. It's pretty good baccy, and it ought to be. I had it sent to me all the way from the Wyle Cop."

"The Wyle Cop!" ejaculated Ned. "I thought there was only one Wyle Cop. Where do you come from, then?"

The stranger's face broadened into an honest grin.

"What part do I come from? Surely you ought to guess. Dunno yo' know a Shropshire mon, when yo' sees un?" he added, dropping into his native dialect, and holding out to Corbett a hand too broad to get a good grip of, and as hard as gun-metal.

Ned took the proffered hand eagerly. The sound of the home dialect stirred every chord in his heart.

"How did you know I was Shropshire?" he asked, laughing.

"How did I know? Well, I heard your friend call you Corbett, and that and your yellow head and blue eyes were enough for me. But say," he continued, resuming the Yankee twang which he had acquired in many a western mining camp, "if that young man over there is any account to you, you'd better go and see after him. They'll skin him clean in another half hour unless he owns the Bank of England."

Corbett's eyes involuntarily followed those of his newly-found friend, and he started as they rested upon Steve Chance, who now sat nervously chewing at the end of an unlit cigar in the middle of the poker players.

"Your friend ain't a bad player, but he ain't old enough for that crowd," remarked Roberts; and so saying he pushed a way for himself and his brother Salopian through the crowd to the back of Chance's chair.

Except for the addition of Chance, and another youngish man who appeared to be at least half-drunk, the party of poker players was the same which sat down to play when the Umatilla left the Victoria wharf.

Cruickshank faced Chance, and the same noisy dark fellow, who had been anxious to assuage everyone's thirst in the morning, appeared to be still ready to stand drinks and cigars. But the little crowd was quieter than it had been in the morning. The players had settled down to business.

"How deuced like Cruickshank that fellow is!" whispered Corbett to Roberts.

"Which?" answered his friend. "There are two Cruickshanks playing—Dan and Bub."

"But is the colonel any relation to the other?"

"I do not know which you call the colonel: never heard him called by that name before; but that's Bub" (pointing to the ringleader of the party), "and that's Dan" (pointing to the colonel). "Some say they are brothers, some say they are cousins. Anyway, I know one is a scoundrel."

"The deuce you do. Which of them?" But his inquiries were cut short and his attention diverted by the action of a new-comer, who just then pushed past him with a curt, "'Scuse me, sir."

"Let him through," whispered Roberts. "I tipped him the wink, and if you let him alone he'll fix them."

Ned was mystified, but did as he was bid. Indeed it was too late to attempt to do otherwise, for the last-joined in that little crowd, a withered gray man, whose features looked as if they had been hardened by a hundred years of rough usage, had quietly forced his way to the front until he had reached a seat at Steve Chance's elbow. It was noticeable that though the crowd was by no means tolerant of others who tried to usurp a front place amongst them, it gave way by common consent to the new-comer, who was moreover specially honoured with a nod and a smile from each of the Cruickshanks.

Steve only seemed inclined to resent the old man's familiarity, and for any effect it had he might as well have hidden his resentment.

"Pretty new to this coast, ain't you, sir?" remarked Mr. Rampike, after he had watched the game in silence for some minutes.

"Yes, I've only been out from the East a year," replied Steve shortly, as he examined his hand.

"Bin losing quite a bit, haven't you?" persisted his tormentor. Steve growled out that he had lost "some," and turned his back on old Rampike with an emphatic rudeness which would have silenced most men.

"'Scuse me, sir, one moment," remarked Rampike utterly unabashed, and half rising to inspect Steve's hand over his shoulder.

A glance seemed to satisfy him.

"Who cut those cards?" he sung out.

"Dan Cruickshank," answered a voice from the crowd.

"Who dole those cards?" he persisted.

"Bub Cruickshank," replied the voice.

"Then, young man, you pass;" and without stirring a muscle of his face he coolly took from the astounded Steve four queens, and threw them upon the table.

For a moment Steve sat open-mouthed, utterly astounded by his adviser's impudence, and when he tried to rise and give vent to his feelings, Corbett's heavy hand was on his shoulder and kept him down.

Meanwhile an angry growl rose from the gamblers, but it was drowned at once in the laugh of the crowd, as without a sign of feeling of any kind, or a single comment, old Rampike slowly pulled from a pocket under his coat-tails an old, strangely-fashioned six-shooter, which he began to overhaul in the casual distrait manner of one who takes a mild interest in some weapon of a remote antiquity.

One by one, as the old hard-fist played with his ugly toy, those who objected to his intervention found that they had business elsewhere, so that when at last he let down the hammer, and replaced his "gun" under his coat-tails, Steve and the two Shropshiremen alone remained near him. Glancing round for a moment, the old man came as near smiling as a man could with features such as his, and then recovering himself he turned to Steve and remarked:

"This ain't no concern of mine, mister, but my pardner there, Roberts, I guess he takes some stock in you and he called me, so you'll 'scuse my interfering, but ef you should happen to play agen with California bilks, you mout sometimes go your pile on a poor hand, but pass four aces, quicker nor lightning, if Bub Cruickshank deals 'em," with which piece of advice the old man retired again into his shell, becoming, as far as one could judge, an absolutely silent machine for the chewing of tobacco.

Chance, now that he had had time to pull himself together, would gladly have had a talk with his ally; but old Rampike would have none of him, and Corbett, in obedience to a sign from Roberts, put his arm through his friend's and carried him off to another part of the ship.

"Let the old man alone," remarked Roberts, "talking isn't in his line. That is my share of the business. I sing and he fiddles."

"All right, as you please; but I say, Mr. Roberts," said Chance, "what in thunder did your partner mean by making me throw down four queens?"

"Mean! why, that Bub Cruickshank had four kings or better. You don't suppose that those chaps are here for their health, do you?"

"Here for their health?"

"Well, you don't suppose that they have come all the way to British Columbia to play poker on the square?"

"Then who are the Cruickshanks?" demanded Chance.

"That is more than I know. Bub Cruickshank is just about as low-down a gambler as there is on the coast; not a chap who pays up and stands drinks when he is bust, like the count and that lot."

"And is the colonel his brother?"

"Some say he is, some say he isn't. But I never knew him regularly on the gambling racket before, though he won a pile of money up at Williams Creek last fall.

"Then you have been in Cariboo," Corbett remarked.

"In Cariboo? Rather! I was there when Williams Creek was found, and for all that had to sing my way out with a splinter in my hand, and not a nickel in my pocket."

"How do you mean 'sing your way out?'"

"I mean just what I say. My hand went back on me and swelled, so that I couldn't work, and I just had to sing for my grub as I went along. Old Rampike had a fiddle and used to play, and I used to make up the songs and sing 'em. Perhaps you've heard the 'Old pack mule.' It's a great favourite at the mines:

"Ted staked and lost the usual way,

But his loss he took quite cōōl;

He was near the mines, and he'd start next day

Riding on his old pack mūle."

"Riding, riding, riding on his old pack mule," sang Chance.

"Oh, you know it, do you? Seems to me it suits your case pretty well. Well, I made that;" and so saying the poet protruded his portly bosom three inches further into space, with the air of one who had done well by his fellow-men and knew it.

"Are you coming up to Cariboo this spring?" asked Corbett.

"No, we haven't dust enough to pay our way so far, more's the pity."

"Why not come with us? I'll find the dollars if you'll lend a hand with our pack-train," suggested Corbett.

"Well, I don't know, perhaps I might do worse; and as to that, if you are taking a pack-train along I daresay I could pretty nearly earn my grub packing. But I must talk it over with Rampike."

"All right, do you fix it your own way," put in Chance; "but mind, if you feel at all like coming, there need be no difficulty about the dollars either for you or your partner. I am pretty heavily in your debt anyway."

"Not a bit of it. Those bilks owe us something perhaps, and if they get a chance they won't forget to pay their score. But I guess they'll hardly care to tackle Rampike, or me either for the matter of that;" and whistling merrily his favourite tune, "Riding, riding, riding on the old pack mule," the Cariboo poet went below for refreshment.

CHAPTER IV. "THE MOTHER OF GOLD."

From Victoria to the mouth of the Frazer river is about seventy miles, and thence to New Westminster is at least another sixteen. As the steamers which used to ply between the two young cities in '62 were by no means ocean racers, none of the passengers on board the S.S. Umatilla were in the least degree disappointed, although the shadows of evening were beginning to fall before they passed the Sandheads, and ran into the yellow waters of the Frazer.

Very few of those on board had eyes for scenery. A rich-looking bar or a wavy riband of quartz high up on a mountain-side would have attracted more attention from that crowd than all the beauties of the Yosemite, and even had they been as keen about scenery as Cook's tourists, there was but little food for their raptures in the delta they were entering. The end of a river, like the end of a life, is apt to be ugly and dull, and the Frazer exhibits no exception to this rule. Child as she is of the winter's snows and the summer's sun, she loses all the purity of the one and the gleam of the other long before she attains her middle course, and at her mouth this "mother of gold" is but a tired, dull, old river, sordid and rich with golden sands, glad, so it seems, to slip by her monotonous mud-banks and lose herself and her yellow dross in the purifying waters of the salt sea.

As Corbett gazed upon the wide expanse of dun-coloured flood, he saw no sign even of that savage strength of which he had heard so much, except one. Far out, and looking small in the great waste of waters, was a stranded tree—a great pine, uprooted and now stranded on a sunken bank, its roots upturned, its boughs twisted off, and its very bark torn from its side by the fury of the riffles and whirlpools of the upper canyons. To Corbett there was something infinitely sad in this lonely wreck, though it was but the wreck of a forest tree. Had he known the great sullen river better he would have known that she brought down many sadder wrecks in those early days—human wrecks, whose wounds were not all of her making, though the river got the evil credit of them.

As it was, the first sight of the Frazer depressed him, and his depression was not dispelled by the sight of New Westminster. The idea of a new city hewed by man out of the virgin forest is noble enough, and whilst the sun is shining and the axes are ringing, the life and energy of the workers makes some compensation for the ugliness of their work. But it is otherwise when the sun is low and labour has ceased. Then "Stump-town" seems a more appropriate title than New Westminster, and a new-comer may be forgiven for shuddering at the ugliness of the new frame-houses, at the charred stumps still left standing in the main streets, at the little desolate forest swamps still left undrained within a stone's-throw of the Grand Hotel, and at all the baldness and beggarliness of the new town's surroundings. To Ned Corbett it looked as if Nature had been murdered, and civilization had not had time to throw a decent pall over her victim's body. Certainly in 1862 New Westminster might be, as its citizens alleged, an infant prodigy, but it was not a picturesque city.

However, as the S.S. Umatilla ran alongside her wharf, a voice roused Corbett from his musings, and turning he found Cruickshank beside him.

"What do you think about camping to-night, Corbett?" asked the colonel. "It will be rather dark for pitching our tent, won't it?"

Now, since the poker-playing incident Corbett had not spoken to Cruickshank. Indeed he had not seen him, and he had hardly made up his mind how to treat him when they met. That Cruickshank had a good many objectionable acquaintances was clear, but on the other hand there was nothing definite which could be alleged against him. Moreover, for the next month Ned and the estate-agent were bound to be a good deal together, and taking this into consideration, Ned decided on the spur of the moment to let all that had gone before pass without comment. Cruickshank had evidently calculated upon Corbett taking this course, for though there had been a shade of indecision in his manner when he came up, he spoke quietly, and as one who had no explanations to make or apologies to offer.

"Yes, it is too dark to make a comfortable camp to-night," assented Corbett. "What does Chance want to do?"

"Oh, I vote for an hotel," cried Steve, coming up at the moment. "Let us be happy whilst we may, we'll be down to bed-rock soon enough."

"All right, 'the hotel goes,' as you would say, Steve;" and together the young men followed the crowd which streamed across the gangway to the wharf.

There the arrival of the S.S. Umatilla was evidently looked upon as the event of the day, and a great crowd of idlers stood waiting for the disembarkation of her passengers; and yet one man only seemed to be there on business, the rest were merely loafing, and would as soon have thought of lending a hand to carry a big portmanteau to the hotel as they would have thought of touching their hats.

This one worker in the crowd was an old man in his shirt sleeves, who caught Ned by the arm, as he had caught each of his predecessors, as soon as his foot touched the wharf, and in a tone of fatherly command bade him "Go up to the Mansion House. Best hotel in the city. It's the miners' house," he added. "Three square meals a day every time, and don't you forget it."

Ned laughed. The last recommendation was certainly worthy of consideration, and as no one else seemed anxious for his patronage he turned to Cruickshank with, "Is it to be the Mansion House?"

"Oh yes," replied the latter, "all the hard-fists stay with Mike."

"How long do you mean to stay here anyway?" asked Chance.

"Four or five days,—perhaps a week," replied Cruickshank. "There is a boat for Douglas to-night, but we could not buy the horses and the stores so as to be ready in less than a couple of days."

"That is so. We shall have to stay a week then?" asked Steve.

"Unless you like to intrust me with the purchase of your train. I could hire a man to help me and come on by the next boat if you want particularly to catch this one—"

The eyes of Corbett and Chance met, and unluckily Cruickshank saw the glance, and interpreted it as correctly as if the words had been spoken.

Corbett noticed the flush on the man's face and the ugly glitter in his eye, and hastened to soothe him.

"Oh no, colonel, it is deuced good of you," he said; "but we would rather wait and all go together. We are looking to you to show us a good deal besides the mere road in the next six weeks. But what are we to do with our packs now?"

"We can't leave them here, can we?" asked Chance, pointing to where their goods lay in a heap on the wharf.

"I don't see why not," growled Cruickshank; and then added significantly, "Murder or manslaughter are no great crimes in the eyes of some folk around here, but miners are a bit above petty larceny;" and so saying he turned on his heel and left Chance and Corbett to shift for themselves.

"Better take care what you say to that fellow," remarked Corbett, looking after the retreating figure; "although I like him better in that mood than in his oily one."

"Oh, I think he is all right; at any rate you won't want my help to crush him, Ned, if he means to cut up rough."

"Not if he fights fair, Steve; but I don't trust the brute—I never did."

"Just because he plays cards and calls himself a colonel? Why, everyone is a colonel out here. But to blazes with Cruickshank anyway. Come and get some grub."

And so saying Steve Chance entered the principal hotel of New Westminster, down the plank walls of which the tears of oozing resin still ran, while the smell of the pine-forest pervaded the whole house.

The "newness" of these young cities of the West is perhaps beyond the imagination of dwellers in the old settled countries of Europe. It is hard for men from the East to realize that the hotel, which welcomes them to all the comforts and luxuries of the nineteenth century, was standing timber a month before, that the walls covered with paper in some pretty French design, and hung with mirrors and gilt-framed engravings, were the homes of the jay and the squirrel, and that the former tenants have hardly had time yet to settle in a new abode.

And yet so it is: we do our scene-shifting pretty rapidly out West, and though there may not be time to perfect anything, the general effect is wonderful in the extreme.

The Westminster hotel was a gem of its class, and even Ned and Steve, who had become fairly used to Western ways, were a little aghast at the contrast between the magnificence of some of the new furniture and the simplicity of the sleeping accommodation, as illustrated by the rows of miners' blankets neatly laid out along the floor. Luckily Cruickshank had cautioned them to take their bedding with them, or they might have been obliged to pass a cheerless night in one of the highly-gilded arm-chairs, which looked as comfortless as they were gaudy.

The old tout upon the wharf, who owned what he advertised, had not misrepresented his house. As he had said, the meals were square enough even for the hungry miners who swarmed around his board, and though it was dull to lie upon their oars and wait, Steve and Ned might have found worst places to wait in than the Mansion House. For at Westminster a delay arose, as delays will the moment a man begins packing or touches cayuses out West. Of course there were a few horses to be bought, but equally, of course, everyone in the city and its suburbs seemed to know by instinct that Corbett & Co. were cornered, and must buy, however bad the beasts and however high the prices.

An old Indian, one Captain Jim, who with the assistance of all his female relatives used to pack liquor and other necessaries to the mines, had part of an old train to sell, horses, saddles, and all complete, and for the first three days of their stay at Westminster Corbett & Co. expected every minute to become owners of this outfit. But the business dragged on, until the noble savage upon whom they had looked as the type of genial simplicity had become an abomination in their eyes, and they had decided to leave the management of him to Cruickshank, resolving that if the train was not bought and ready to be shipped on the next boat to Douglas that they would go without a pack-train altogether. In the meanwhile they had to get through the time as best they could, assisted by the Cariboo poet, who had stayed on like themselves at Westminster.

To Chance this was no hardship; what with a little sketching, a little poker, and a great deal of smoking, he managed to get through the days with a good deal of satisfaction to himself. As to Ned, the delay and inaction disgusted him and spoilt his temper, which may account in some measure for an unfortunate incident which occurred on the second day of his stay at the Mansion House.

As the day was hot and he had nothing to do, the big fellow had laid out his blankets in a shady corner and prepared to lie down and sleep the weary hours away. Before doing so he turned for a minute or two to watch a game of piquet, in which Roberts appeared to be invariably "piqued, repiqued, pooped, and capoted," as his adversary, a red-headed Irishman, announced at the top of his voice.

Tired of the game, Ned turned and sought his couch, upon which two strangers had taken a seat. Going up to them, Ned asked them to move, and as they did not appear to hear him he repeated his request in a louder tone. Perhaps the heat and the flies had made him irritable, and a tone of angry impatience had got into his voice which nettled the men, one of whom, turning towards him, but not attempting to make room, coolly told him "to go to blazes."

As the man turned, Ned recognized him as Bub Cruickshank, the brother or cousin of the Colonel; but it needed neither the recognition nor the laugh that ran round the room to put Ned's hackles up.

Without stopping to think, he picked up the fellow by the scruff of his neck and the slack of his breeches and deposited him with the least possible tenderness upon an untenanted piece of the floor.

Before he had time to straighten himself, the dislodged Bub aimed a furious kick at Ned, and in another minute our hero was in the thick of as merry a mill as any honest young Englishman could desire. Time after time Ned floored his man, for though Bub knew very little of the use of his hands he was a determined brute, and kept rushing in and trying to get a grip of his man at close quarters, and, moreover, it was a case of one down the other come on, for as soon as Ned had floored one fellow and put him hors de combat for a short time, his companion took up the battle.

"Take care, Corbett,—take care of his teeth!" shouted Roberts all at once; and Ned felt a horrible faint feeling come over him, robbing him for the moment of all his strength, as Bub fastened on his thumb.

For a moment the Shropshireman almost gave up the battle. Those only who have suffered from this dastardly trick of the lowest of Yankee roughs, can have any idea of the effect it has upon a man's strength. But Corbett was almost as mad with rage at what he considered unsportsman-like treatment as he was with pain, so that he managed to wrench himself free and send his man to earth again with another straight left-hander.

Meanwhile the red-haired Irishman, who had been playing piquet with Roberts, had lost all interest in his game since the fight began, and was fairly writhing in his seat with suppressed emotion.

At last flesh and blood (or at least Irish flesh and blood) could endure it no longer, so that, jumping up from his seat, he took Ned just by the shoulders and lifted him clean out of the way as if he had been a baby, remarking as he did so—

"You stay there, sonny, and let me knock 'em down awhile."

But the poor simple Celt was doomed to disappointment. The truth was that Ned had been greedy, and taken more than his share of this innocent game of skittles, so that, as Mr. O'Halloran remarked sorrowfully at supper, he did but get in "one from the shoulther, and thin them two murtherin' haythens lit right out."

When the scrimmage was over Roberts took Ned on one side, and after looking at the bitten thumb and bandaging it up for his friend, he gave Ned a little advice.

"Fighting is all very well, Mr. Corbett, where people fight according to rules, but you had better drop it here. If you don't, some fellow will get level on you with the leg of a table or a little cold lead. If you must fight, you had better learn to shoot like old Rampike."

"Where is old Rampike now?" asked Ned, anxious to turn the conversation, and feeling a little ashamed of his escapade.

"Rampike went right on by the boat that met the Umatilla. He got a job up at Williams Creek, and will be there ahead of us."

"Then you mean to come up too, Roberts, that's right," said Corbett genially.

"Yes, I am coming up with your crowd. I met the count in town last night and borrowed the chips from him. I am thinking that if you make a practice of quarrelling with Cruickshank and all his friends you will need someone along to look after you."

"But who is the count, and why could you not have borrowed the money from us?" asked Corbett in a tone of considerable pique.

"The count! Oh, the count is an old friend, and lends to most anyone who is broke. It's his business in a way. You see, he is the biggest gambler in the upper country. Skins a chap one day and lends him a handful of gold pieces the next. He'll get it back with interest from one of us even if I don't pay him, so that's all right;" and honest Roberts dismissed all thought of the loan from his mind, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a professional gambler to lend an impecunious victim a hundred dollars on no security whatever.

Luckily for Ned his fellow countryman took him in hand after this, and what with singing and working managed to keep him out of mischief. For Roberts found Corbett work in Westminster which just suited his young muscles, though it was as quaint in its way as Roberts' own financial arrangements in their way.

It seemed that in the young city there was no church and no funds to build one, but there was a sturdy, energetic parson, and a mob of noisy, careless miners, who rather liked the parson; not, perhaps, because he was a parson, but because he had in some way or other proved to them that he was a "man."

Had they been on the way down with their pockets full of "dust" the boys would soon have built him anything he wanted, whether it had been a church or a gin-shop. I am afraid it would have mattered little. As it was they were unluckily on their way up, and their pockets were empty.

But as the will was there the parson found the way, and all through that week of waiting Ned and a gang of other strong hardy fellows like himself made their axes glitter and ring on the great pines, clearing a site, and preparing the lumber for the first house of God erected in New Westminster.

Who shall say that their contribution had not as much intrinsic value as the thousand-dollar cheque which Crœsus sends for a similar object. A good deal more labour goes to the felling of a pine ten feet through than to the signing of a cheque, anyway.

CHAPTER V. "IS THE COLONEL 'STRAIGHT?'"

At the very last moment, when all Corbett's party, except Cruickshank, had yielded to despair, the Indian Jim gave in, and sold his animals as they stood for sixty dollars a head. This included the purchase of pack-saddles, cinches, and other items essential to a packer's outfit.

The steamer for Douglas started at 8 p.m., and it was long after breakfast on the same day that the eyes of Corbett and Chance, who were smoking outside their inn, were gladdened by the sight of Phon and Cruickshank driving ten meek-looking brutes up to the front of the Mansion House.

Having tied each pony short by the head to the garden rail, Cruickshank began to organize his forces. There were the ponies, it was true, but their packs and many other things had still to be bought. There was much to be done and very little time to do it in. Then it was that Cruickshank showed himself to the greatest advantage. For days he had appeared to dawdle over his bargaining with Jim, until Ned almost thought that Indian and white together were in league against him; now he felt miserable at the mere memory of his former suspicions. Cruickshank knew that no man can hurry an Indian, and therefore abstained from irritating Jim by attempting the impossible. The result of this was that at the end of the time at his disposal Cruickshank had by his indifference convinced Jim that he cared very little whether he got the horses or not, so that now the Indian was in a hurry to sell before the steamer should carry Cruickshank and his dollars away to Douglas. So Cruickshank bought the ponies, bought them cheap, and, moreover, just in time to catch the boat. This was all he had struggled for.

But now that he had white men to deal with his tactics changed. These men knew the value of time and could hurry, therefore Cruickshank hurried them. To every man he gave some independent work to do. No one was left to watch another working. Whilst one dashed off to buy stores another took the horses to the forge to be shod, and old Phon was left to repair the horse furniture and overhaul the outfit generally. Cruickshank himself went off to buy gunny sacks, boxes, ropes, and such-like, rendered necessary by the absence of aparejos, needing the knowledge of an expert in their selection.

It was already late in the afternoon, and Ned, hot and dusty, and as happy as a schoolboy, was helping the smith to shoe the last of the ponies, when Roberts, who had done his own work, walked into the forge.

For a minute or two Roberts stood unnoticed, observing his fellow-countryman with eyes full of a sort of hero-worship, commoner at a public school than in the world.

But Ned was one of those fellows who win men's hearts without trying to do so; a young fellow who said what he thought without waiting to pick his words, who did what he liked, and luckily liked what was good, and honest, and manly, and who withal looked the man he was, upstanding, frank, and absolutely fearless. Ned had been in the forge for perhaps half a day or more, and had already so won the heart of the smith that that good man with his eyes on the boy's great forearm had been hinting that there was "just as much money in a good smithy as there was in most of them up-country claims."

But Ned was bent on gold-mining and seeing life with the hard-fists, so though he loved to swing the great smith's hammer he was not to be tempted from his purpose, though he was quite ready to believe that a smith in New Westminster could earn more by his hands than many a professional man by his brains in Westminster on the Thames.

"Hullo, Rob! have you got through with your work?" cried Ned, catching sight of his friend at last.

"Yes. I've done all I've got to do; can I lend you a hand?"

"Why, no, thanks; my friend here is putting on the last shoe. But what is the matter? you look as if you had got 'turned round' in the bush, and were trying to think your way out;" and Ned laid his hand laughingly on his friend's shoulder.

Roberts laughed too, but led the younger man outside, and once there blurted out his trouble.

"Look here, Corbett, ever since that gambling row I've had my eye on Cruickshank, and I thought that I knew him for a rascal, but blow me if he hasn't got beyond me this time."

"How so, Rob?"

"Well, I'm half-inclined to think he's honest after all. He is a real rustler when he chooses anyway," added the poet admiringly.

"Oh, I expect he is as honest as most of his kind. Why shouldn't he be? All men haven't the same ideas of honesty out here; and if he isn't honest it doesn't matter much to us, does it?" asked Ned carelessly.

"Doesn't it? Ain't you trusting him with a good many thousand dollars?" asked Roberts with some asperity.

"No, I don't think so. You see, Rob, if he is, as you thought, a card-sharper and a bogus estate-agent, my money is lost already; he can't clear out with the claims or the packs even if he wants to. But why do you think he is a rogue?"

"I tell you I'm beginning to think that he isn't."

"Bully for you, that's better!" cried Ned approvingly; "but what has worked this change in your opinions, Rob?"

"Well, last night that scoundrelly siwash, Captain Jim, tried to work a swindle with those pack-ponies, and Cruickshank wouldn't have it. Jim was to sell you a lot of unsound beasts at eighty dollars a head. You would never have noticed that they had healed sores on their backs, and if Cruickshank had held his tongue he was to have had twenty dollars a pony, and the way he 'talked honest' to that Indian was astonishing, you bet."

"How did you find all this out?" asked Ned.

Roberts looked a little uncomfortable and flushed to the roots of his hair, but at length made the best of it, and admitted that he had followed the two men and overheard their conversation.

"You see, Ned," he added, "it's not very English, I know, but you must fight these fellows with their own weapons."

For a while Ned said nothing, though he frowned more than Roberts had ever seen him frown before, and his fingers tugged angrily at his slight moustache.

"Roberts," he said at last, "I agree with you, this sort of thing isn't very English, I'm hanged if it is; but I've been pretty nearly as suspicious as you have, so I can't afford to talk. Once for all, do you know anything against the colonel?"

"No," hesitated Roberts, "I don't know anything against Dan, but Bub—."

"Oh, to blazes with Bub!" broke in Corbett angrily. "A man cannot be responsible for every one of his cousins and kinsmen. From to-day I mean to believe in Cruickshank as an honest man, until I prove him to be a knave. You had better do the same, Rob; spying after a fellow as we have been doing is enough to make an honest man sick;" and Ned Corbett made a wry face as if the mere thought of it left a bad taste in his mouth.

"All right, that's a-go then. He was honest about these cayuses anyway, and if he does go back on us we'll fire him higher than a sky-rocket;" and so saying Roberts lent Ned a hand to collect the said cayuses. These at the first glance would have struck an English judge of horseflesh as being ten of the very sorriest screws that ever stood upon four legs; but at least they showed to Roberts' practised eye no signs of old sore backs, none of those half-obliterated scars which warn the cognoscenti of evils which have been and are likely to recur.

Taken in a body, they were a little too big for polo ponies, and a little too ragged, starved, and ill-shaped for a respectable costermonger's cart. There was one amongst them, a big buckskin standing nearly 14.2 hands, which looked fairly plump and able-bodied, but atoned for these merits by an ugly trick of laying back her ears and showing the whites of her eyes whenever she got a chance.

The most typical beast of his class was one Job, a parti-coloured brute (or pinto as they call them in British Columbia), with one eye brown and the other blue, and a nose of the brightest pink, as if he suffered from a chronic cold and a rough pocket-handkerchief. Job's bones stared at you through his skin, his underlip protruded and hung down, giving him an air of the most abject misery, and even a Yorkshire horse-dealer could not have found a good point to descant upon from his small weak quarters to his ill-shaped shoulder.

But though Job's head was fiddle-shaped there was a good deal in it, as those were likely to discover who had given sixty dollars for him, and expected to get sixty dollars' worth of work out of him. He had not been packing since the days when he trotted as a foal beside a "greasers'" train for nothing. At present he was the meekest, most ill-used-looking brute on the Pacific coast, and Corbett was just remarking to Roberts "that that poor devil of a pony would never be able to carry a hundred and fifty pounds let alone two hundred over a bad road," when the buckskin let out, and caught the bay alongside of him such a kick on the stifle as made that poor beast go a little lame for days. No one noticed that the bite which set the buckskin kicking was given by old Job, who moved his weary old head sadly, just in time, however, to let the kick go by and land on the unoffending body of his neighbour.

An hour later all the horses were up again at the hotel, and the bill having been settled Phon and Roberts drove the train down to the wharf, where the steamer for Douglas, a small stern-wheeler, was waiting for her passengers and her cargo. With the exception of Job, all the cayuses were put on board at once and secured, but seeing that there was still a good deal of luggage in small parcels up at the hotel, Chance kept "that quiet old beast Job, just to carry down the odds and ends;" and Job, with a sigh which spoke volumes to those who could understand, plodded away to do the extra work set aside as of right for the meek and long-suffering.

It is an aggravating employment under any circumstances, the employment of packing. Many men, otherwise good men, swear naturally (and freely) as soon as they engage in it; but then, why I know not, the very presence of a horse makes some men swear. Steve knew very little about packing anyway, and had he known more he would not have found it easy to fasten his bundles on to the back of a beast which shifted constantly from one leg to another, and always seemed to be standing uphill or downhill, with one leg at least a foot shorter than the other three.

When Steve spoke to him (with an angry kick in the stomach), Job would lift his long-suffering head with an air of meek dejection, and shifting his leg as required plant a huge hoof solidly upon Steve's moccasined foot. If I could paint the look on that great ugly equine head as it turned with leering eye and projecting nether lip, and looked into the anguished face of Steve Chance, I should be able to teach my reader more of cayuses (the meanest creatures on God's earth) than I can ever hope to do. But even with Job to help him, Steve got his load down to the boat at last, and put all aboard except a new pack-saddle, which he had taken off the pack-horse and laid down on the ground beside him.

With lowered head and half-shut eyes Job stood for some minutes patiently waiting, and then, as Steve came over the side to drive him on board with his fellows, the old horse heaved a long, long sigh, and before Steve could reach him lay down slowly and gently upon that pack-saddle. Of course when he got up, the pack-saddle was demolished, and as the last whistle had sounded, there was no time to get another before leaving Westminster.

A new saddle would have to be bought at Douglas, and that would cost money, or made upon the road, and that would mean delay, so Job, with a cynical gleam in his wall-eye, trotted meekly and contentedly on board. He had entered his first protest against extra work.

Five minutes later the steamer Lillooet cast loose from her moorings, the gangway was taken in, and the gallant little stern-wheeler went cleaving her way up through the yellow Frazer, on her forty-mile run to the mouth of Harrison river, steaming past long mud-flats and many a mile of heavy timber.

A day and a half was the time allowed for the journey from New Westminster to Douglas, but Corbett and Chance could hardly believe that they had taken so long when they came to their moorings again at the head of the Harrison Lake.

To them the hours had seemed to fly by, for their eyes and thoughts were busy, intent at one moment upon the bare mud-banks, watching for game or the tracks of the game, the next straining to catch a glimpse of deer feeding at dawn upon the long gray hills—hills which were a pale dun in the light of early morning, but which became full of rich velvety shadows as the day wore on.

Overhead floated the fleecy blue and white sky of spring-time; on the hills patches of wild sunflower mingled with the greenish gray of the sage brush, and here and there, even on the arid barren banks of the Frazer itself, occurred little "pockets" of verdure—hollows with fresh-water springs in them, where the tender green of the young willows, and the abundant white bloom of the choke cherries and olali bushes, made Edens amongst the waste of alkaline mud-banks, Edens tenanted and made musical by all the collected bird-life of that barren land.

The only difficult bit of water for the little steamer was the seven miles of the Harrison river, a rapid, turbulent stream, up which the S.S. Lillooet had to fight every inch of the way; but beyond that lay the lake, a broad blue lake, penned in by steep and heavily-timbered mountains, and beyond the one-house town of Douglas, at which Ned and his fellow-passengers disembarked about noon of the second day out from Westminster.

From Douglas the ordinary route was by river and lake, with a few short portages to Lillooet on the Frazer; and in 1862 there were steamers upon all the lakes (Lillooet, Anderson, and Seton), and canoes (with a certainty of a fair breeze in summer) for such as preferred them.

But Ned and his friends had decided that as they had a pack-train, and would be compelled to pack part of the way in any case, they might just as well harden their hearts and pack the whole distance, more especially since they had ample time to make their journey in, and not too much money to waste upon steamboat fares. So at Douglas Cruickshank bought another pack-saddle for about twice what it would have cost at Westminster (freight was high in the early days), and suggested that as the one house (half store, half hotel) was full to overflowing, they might as well strike out for themselves, and as it was only mid-day make a few miles upon their road before camping for the night.

"You see," argued Cruickshank, "it's no violet's camping where so many men have camped before, and a good many of them greasers and Indians."

Corbett and Chance were new to the discomforts of the road, and had still to learn the penalty for camping where Indians have camped; but for all that they took the colonel's advice and assented to his proposal, though it meant bidding good-bye to their fellow-men a day or two sooner than they need have done.

Once the start had been decided upon Cruickshank lost no time in getting under weigh. The diamond hitch had no mysteries for him, the loops flew out and settled to an inch where he wanted them to, every strand in his ropes did its share of binding and holding fast; his very curses seemed to cow the most stubborn cayuse better than another man's, and when he cinched the unfortunate beasts up you could almost hear their ribs crack.

Job alone nearly got the better of the colonel, but even he just missed it. Cruickshank cinched this wretched scarecrow a little less severely than the rest, but when later on he saw old Job with his cinch all slack, a malevolent grin came over his face, and he muttered, "Oh, that's your sort, is it, an old-timer? So am I!" And after giving Job a kick which would have knocked the wind out of anything, he cinched him up again before he could recover himself, and then led him to drink. As the horse sucked down the water greedily Cruickshank muttered to himself, "Bueno, I guess your load will stick now until you are thirsty again." After this Job and the colonel seemed to have a mutual understanding, and as long as he was within hearing of Cruickshank's curses there was no better pack-pony on the road than old Job.

It seems as if men who have been used to packing, and have had a spell of rest from their ordinary occupation, itch to handle the ropes again; at least, it is only in this way that I can explain the readiness displayed by so many of Ned's fellow-passengers to lend a hand in fixing his packs for him.

In an hour from the time of disembarkation the train was ready to start, and the welcome cry of "All set!" rang out, after which there was a little hand-shaking, a lighting of pipes, and the procession filed away up the river, Cruickshank leading the first five ponies, then Roberts plodding patiently along on foot, then another five ponies, and then, as long as the narrow train would permit of it, Ned and Steve trudging along, chatting and keeping the ponies on the move.

Cruickshank was already some distance ahead, and even Steve and Ned were almost outside the little settlement, when a big red-headed Irishman, whom Corbett remembered as his fighting friend at Westminster, came running after him.

"Say," asked Mr. O'Halloran, rather out of breath from his run. "Say, are you and that blagyard partners?"

"Which?" asked Ned in amaze. "My friend Chance?"

"No, no, not this boy here—that fellow riding ahead of the train."

"Cruickshank? Yes, we are partners in a way," replied Ned.

"And you know it was his brother you laid out? Faith, you laid him out as nate as if it was for a berryin'," he added with a grin.

"I've heard men say that the colonel is Bub Cruickshank's brother," admitted Ned; "but the colonel is all right, whatever Bub is."

"And you and he ain't had no turn-up along of that scrimmage down at Westminster?" persisted O'Halloran.

"Not a word. I don't think he knew about it."

"Oh yes, he did. I saw Bub and him talking it over, and you may bet your boots the only reason he didn't bark is that he means to bite—yes, and bite hard too. It's the way with them dark, down-looking blagyards," added the honest Irishman, in a tone of the deepest scorn.

"Ah, well, I don't think Cruickshank is likely to try his teeth on me," laughed Ned. "If he does I must try that favourite rib-bender of yours upon him," and Ned gripped O'Halloran's hand and strode gaily after his train.

For a moment the red-headed one stood looking after his friend, and then heaving a great sigh remarked:

"Indade and I'd like a turn wid you mesilf, but if that black-looking blagyard does a happorth of harm to you, it's Kornaylius O'Halloran as 'll put a head on him."

CHAPTER VI. THE WET CAMP.

As his pack-train wound away along the trail from Douglas, Ned Corbett gave a great deep sigh as if there was something which he fain would blow away from him. And so there was.

As he left the last white man's house between Douglas and Lillooet, he hoped and believed that he left behind him towns and townsmen, petty delays, swindlings, and suspicions of swindlings.

He was going to look for gold, and give a year at least of his young life to be spent in digging for it, and yet this absurd young Englishman was actually thanking his stars that now, at last, he was rid of dollars and dollar hunters, business and business men, for at least a month.

There was food enough on the beasts in front of him to last his party for a year. He was sound in wind and limb, his rifle was not a bad one, and he had seen lots of game tracks already, and that being so he really cared very little whether he reached his claims in time or not. But of course, as Cruickshank said, there was ample time to make the journey in, time indeed and to spare, as every one he had met admitted, so that no doubt Steve and he would reach Williams Creek in time, find the claims as Cruickshank had represented them, and make no end of money.

That would just suit Steve; and after all a lot of money would be a good thing in its way. It would make a certain old uncle at home take back a good many things he had once said about his nephew's "great useless body and ramshackle brains," and besides, he would like a few hundred pounds himself to send home, and a bit in hand to hire a boat to go to Alaska in. That had been Ned's day-dream ever since he had seen a certain cargo of bear-skins which had come down from that ice-bound terra incognita to Victoria.

So Ned sighed a great sigh of relief and contentment, took off his coat and slung it on his back, opened the collar of his flannel shirt and let the soft air play about his ribs, turned his sleeves up over his elbows, tied a silk handkerchief turban-wise on his yellow head, and having cut himself a good stout stick trudged merrily along, sucking in the glorious mountain air as greedily as if he had spent the last six months of his life waiting for briefs in some grimy fog-haunted chamber of the Temple.

He would have liked the ponies to have moved along a little faster, because as it was he found it difficult to keep behind them, five miles an hour suiting his legs better than two. But this was his only trouble, and as every now and then he got a breather, racing up some steep incline to head back a straggler to the path of duty, Ned managed to be perfectly happy in spite of this little drawback.

As for the others, Cruickshank, who had seemed restless and nervous as long as he had been with the crowd of miners on the boat and at Douglas, had now relapsed into a mere automaton, which strode on silently ahead of the pack-train, emitting from time to time little blue jets of tobacco smoke. Steve seemed buried in calculations, based on a miner's report that the dirt at Williams Creek had paid as much as fifty cents to the shovelful, an historical fact which Phon and the young Yankee discussed occasionally at some length; and old Roberts, having agreed to leave his suspicions behind him, shared his tobacco cheerily with Cruickshank, and from time to time startled the listening deer with scraps of his favourite ditties.

It was the refrain of the old pack mule, "Riding, riding, riding on my old pack mule," which at last roused Steve Chance's indignation against the songster.

"Confound the old idiot!" growled the Yankee; "I wish he wouldn't remind me of the unattainable. I shouldn't mind riding, but I am getting pretty sick of tramping. Isn't it nearly time to camp, Ned?"

"Nearly time to camp? Why, we haven't made eight miles yet," replied Corbett.

"Oh, that be hanged for a yarn! We have been going five solid hours by my watch, and five fours are twenty."

"That may be, but five twos are ten, and what with stoppages to fix packs, admire the scenery, and give you time to munch a sandwich and tie up your moccasins, I don't believe we have been going two miles an hour. But are you tired, Steve?"

"You bet I am, Ned. If there really is no particular hurry let us camp soon."

"All right, we will if you like. Hullo, Cruickshank!" Cruickshank turned.

"Steve is tired and wants to camp—what do you say?"

Cruickshank hesitated a moment and then agreed to the proposition, beginning at once to loosen the packs upon the beasts nearest to him.

"Here, I say, steady there!" cried Corbett; "you take me too literally. Steve can go another mile if necessary. We'll stop at the next good camping-ground."

"I'm afraid you won't get anything better than this," replied the colonel. "Why, what is the matter with this? You didn't expect side-walks and hotels on the trail, did you, Corbett?"

Even in his best moods there was a nasty sneering way about Cruickshank, which put his companions' backs up.

"No, but I did think we might find a flat spot to camp on."

"Did you? Then I'm sorry to disappoint you. You won't find anything except a swamp meadow flatter than this for the next ten miles or so, and the swamps are a little too wet for comfort at this time of year."

"Do you mean to say, Cruickshank, that we can't find a flatter spot than this? Why, hang it, man, you couldn't put a tea-cup down here without spilling the contents," remonstrated Corbett.

"Well, if you think you can better this, let us go on; perhaps you know best. What is it to be, camp or 'get?'"

"Oh, if you are certain about it I suppose we may as well stay here; but, by Jove, we shall have to tie ourselves up to trees when we go to sleep to prevent our straying downhill." And Ned laughed at the vision he had conjured up.

A minute later a bale,—bigger, heavier, and more round of belly than its fellows,—escaped from Steve Chance's grip and fell heavily to the earth. Steve was not a strong man, certainly not a man useful for lifting weights, besides he was a careless fellow, and tired. For a moment Steve stood looking at the bale as it turned slowly over and over. Twice it turned round and Steve still looked at it. The next moment it gathered way, and before Steve could catch it was hopping merrily downhill, in bounds which grew in length every time it touched the hillside. Steve, assisted by Phon, had the pleasure of recovering that bale from the group of young pines amongst which it eventually stuck, and brought it with many sobs and much perspiration to the point from which it originally started. It took Steve and Phon longer to get over that two hundred feet of hillside than it had taken the bale.

That first camp of theirs has left an impression upon Ned's mind and Steve's which years will not efface. Ned was too tough to look upon it as more than a somewhat rough practical joke, likely to pall upon a man if repeated too often, but to Chance that camp was a camp of misery and a place of tears. There was water, but it was a long way downhill; there was, as Cruickshank said, timber enough to keep a mill going for a twelvemonth, but whatever was worth having for firewood was either uphill or downhill—you had to climb for everything you happened to want; and to wind up with, you absolutely had to dig a sort of shelf out of the hillside upon which to pitch your tent.

It was here, too, that Steve had his first real experience of camping out. He helped to unpack the horses, but he took so long to retrieve the bale which had gone downhill that some one had to lend him a hand even with the one beast which he unpacked. He volunteered to cook, but when on investigation it was discovered that he would have fried beans without boiling them, a community unduly careful of its digestion scornfully refused his assistance. In despair he seized an axe, and went away as "a hewer of wood and a drawer of water." By and by the voice of his own familiar friend came to him again and again in tones of cruel derision:

"Where is that tree coming down, Steve?"

"I don't know and don't care, but it's got to come somewhere," replied the operator angrily, as he hewed blindly at the tough green pine.

"But it won't do for firewood anyway, Steve, this year, and if you don't take care you will never need firewood again. Don't you know how to make a tree fall where you want it to?" and Ned took the tool from his hand, and completing what his companion had so badly begun, laid the tree out of harm's way.

"Well, it seems that I can't do anything to please you," grumbled Steve, now thoroughly angry. "When there is anything that you and Cruickshank reckon you want my help in you can call me, Corbett. I'll go and smoke whilst you run this show to your own satisfaction."

"No you won't, old man, and you won't get riled either. Just be a good chap and go and cut us some brush for bedding. See, this is the best kind," and Ned held out to his friend a branch of hemlock. Although an hour later Ned noticed that there was every kind of brush except hemlock in the pile which Steve had collected, he wisely complimented him on his work, and said nothing about his mistake. A man does not become a woodsman in a week.

Meanwhile the tent had been pitched; Cruickshank was just climbing up the hill again after driving the ponies to a swamp down below, and old Phon was handling a frying-pan full of the largest and thickest rashers of bacon on record. Little crisp ringlets of fried bacon may serve very well for the breakfast of pampered civilization, but if you did not cut your rashers thick out in the woods you would never stop cutting.

Lucky would it have been for Steve and Ned if rough fare and a rocky camp had been the worst troubles in store for them, but unluckily, even as they lit their post-prandial pipes, the storm-clouds began to blow up the valley, ragged and brown, and whilst poor Steve was still tossing on a sleepless pillow, vexed by the effects of black tea on his nerves, and crawling beasts upon his sensitive skin, the first great drops of the coming storm splashed heavily on the sides of the tent.

Of course the tent was new. Everything the two young miners had was new, brand-new, and made upon the most recent and improved lines. None of the old, time-tried contrivances of practical men are ever good enough for beginners. So the fourth or fifth drop of rain which hit that tent came through as if it had been a sieve, and when well-meaning Steve rubbed his hand over the place "feeling for the leak," the water came in in a stream.

When the next morning broke, the wanderers looked out upon that most miserable of all things, a wet camp in the woods. The misery of a wet camp is the one convincing argument in favour of civilization.

It was still early in the year, and the season was a late one even for British Columbia, amongst whose mountains winter never yields without a struggle. On the dead embers of last night's camp-fire were slowly melting snowflakes, and a chill wet wind crept into Ned's bosom, as he looked out upon the morning, and made him shudder.

But Ned was hard, so that careless of rain and puddles he splashed out past the camp-fire, and after a good many failures kindled a little comparatively dry wood, over which to make the morning tea, and then drew upon himself the scorn of that old campaigner Cruickshank by washing.

What work they could find to do the men did, but even so the hours went wearily by. Cruickshank was opposed to making a start, for fear lest the rain should damage the packs, which now lay all snug beneath their manteaux. So they waited until Cruickshank was tired of smoking, and Roberts of hearing himself sing; until Corbett could sleep no more, and Steve was hoarse with grumbling. Only Phon, lost in thought which white men cannot fathom, and the pack animals full of sweet young grass, seemed content.

For three whole days the party stopped in the same camp, gazing hour after hour upon a limited view of stiff burnt pines, with the melting snow drifting down through them, and the fog wrapping them and hiding away all the distance. Even the fire of piled logs shone, not with heat but with damp, and the monotonous splash of the drops as they fell from a leak in the tent into the frying-pan set to catch them, combined with Phon's harsh cough, to break the silence.

At last, when even Ned was beginning to think of rheumatism, and to long for a glass of hot toddy and a Turkish bath, the sun came back again, and cast long rich shadows from the red stems of the bull-pines across the trail, over which Steve nearly ran, in his anxiety to leave the wet camp as far behind him as possible.

But even the wet camp was only the beginning of troubles. Three days they lost waiting for the sun, and in the next camp they waited three more days for their horses.

At the first camp Cruickshank had been careful to hobble the horses, which would not have strayed had he left them free in a small naturally inclosed pasture, like that swamp at the foot of the side hills. But at the second camp, where the feed was bad and the ways open, he neglected to hobble any of them, and, oddly enough, old packer though he was, he overlooked the whole band in his first day's search, so that no one went that way to look for them again, until it occurred to Corbett to try to puzzle out their tracks in that direction for himself. There he found them, in the very meadow in which they had pastured the first night, all standing in a row behind a bush no bigger than a cabbage, old Job at their head, every nose down, every ear still, even Job's blue eye fixed in a kind of glassy stare, and the bell round Job's neck dumb, for it was full of mud and leaves. It was deuced odd, Ned thought, as he drove the beasts home. Cruickshank didn't seem to know as much of packing and the care of horses as he appeared to know at first; but if he knew too little, that wall-eyed fiend, Job, knew too much.

Anyway, they had taken eight days to do two days' travel, up to that time. It was well that they had ample time in which to make their journey to Cariboo.

CHAPTER VII. FACING DEATH ON THE STONE-SLIDE.

It was the last day of Corbett's journey between the Harrison and the Frazer, and a boiling hot day at that. With the exception of Corbett himself, and perhaps Cruickshank, whose back alone was visible as he led the train, the whole outfit had relapsed into that dull mechanical gait peculiar to packers and pack animals. To Chance it seemed that he was in a dream—a dream in which he went incessantly up and up or down, down day after day without pause or change. To him it seemed that there was always the same gray stone-slide under foot, the same hot sun overheard, and the same gleaming blue lake far below; like the pack animals, he was content to plod along hour after hour, seeing nothing, thinking of nothing, unless it was of that blessed hour when the camp would be pitched and the tea made, and the soothing pipe be lighted.

But though Chance had no eyes for it, the end of this first part of his journey was near at hand. Fourteen miles away the great grisly mountains came together and threw a shadow upon Seton Lake, building a wall and setting a barrier over or through which there seemed no possible way of escape. As Corbett looked at it, he could see the trees quite plainly on the narrow rim of grass between that mountain wall and the lake, and though he could not see that too, he knew that through them ran a trail which led to Lillooet on the Frazer. Even Ned longed to reach that trail and catch a glimpse of the little town, in which he and his weary beasts might take at least one day's rest and refreshment.

Since leaving Douglas, Cruickshank and Corbett had been upon the best of terms. Cruickshank knew how everything ought to be done, and Corbett was quick and tireless to do it, so that between them these two did most of the work of the camp; and though Ned noticed that his guide was not as anxious to get to Lillooet as he had been to get away from Douglas, he made allowances for him. Cruickshank was hardly a young man, and no doubt his strength was not equal to his will.

As to the straying of the horses at the second camp, there could be but one opinion. It was a bad mistake to leave them unhobbled; but after all everyone made mistakes sometimes, and though that mistake had involved the loss of a great deal of time, it was the only one which could be laid to Cruickshank's account. So far not one single thing, however unimportant, had been left behind in camp or lost upon the trail; there had been no accidents, no lost packs, nor any sign of sore backs. Day after day Cruickshank himself had led the train, choosing the best going for his ponies, and seeing them safely past every projecting rock and over every mauvais pas.

On this day for the first time Cruickshank proposed to give up his position in front of the train to Ned. Stopping at a place where there was room to shunt the rear of his column to the front, the colonel hailed Ned, and suggested that they should change places.

"Come on and set us a quick step, Corbett. Even if you do overtire the ponies a bit, it doesn't matter now that we are so near Lillooet. They can rest there as much as they like."

"Very well. I expect you must want a change, and I'll bet old Steve does. Why, you have hardly had anyone to speak to for a week," replied Corbett good-naturedly.

"That's so, but I must save my breath a little longer still. If Roberts will go behind with Phon and Chance, I'll keep the first detachment as close to your heels as I can; and, by the way, we had better make a change with the horses whilst we are about it."

"Why?" asked Ned. "What is the matter with them?"

"Not much, but if we are to have any more swimming across places where the bridging is broken down, we may as well have the horses that take kindly to water in front, and send that mean old beast to the rear;" and the colonel pointed to Job, which with its head on one side and an unearthly glare in its blue eye, appeared to be listening to what was being said.

"All right, we can do that here if you will lend a hand. Which shall we put the bell on?" and Ned took the bell off Job, and turned that veteran over to the second half of the train.

"Put it on this fellow; he takes to the water like an otter, and he will make a good leader. Wherever his packs can go, any of the others can follow;" and Cruickshank pointed to the great bulging bales upon the back of the buckskin.

"I expect Steve and Roberts packed him, didn't they?" Cruickshank added. "Well, they aren't pretty to look at, but I guess they'll stick;" and so saying, he gave the buckskin a smack on his quarters which sent that big star-gazing brute trotting to the front, where Ned invested him with the order of the bell.

"Is it all right now, Cruickshank?" asked Corbett.

"All right."

"Forrard away then!" cried Ned, and turning he strode merrily along a narrow trail, which wound up and up across such sheer precipitous side hills as would make some men dizzy to look at. A slip in some places would have meant death to those who slipped, long before their bruised bodies could reach the edge of the lake glittering far below; but neither men in moccasins nor mountain ponies are given to slipping.

After the rain had come the sunshine and the genial warmth of spring, under the influence of which every hill was musical with new-born rivulets, and every level place brilliant with young grass. The very stone-slides blossomed in great clumps of purple gentian, and over even the stoniest places crept the tendrils of the Oregon vine, with its thorny shining leaves and flower-clusters of pale gold.

Now and again the trail rose or fell so much that it seemed to Ned as if he had passed from one season of flowers to another. Down by the lake, where the pack animals splashed along the bed of a little mountain stream, the first wild rose was opening, a mere speck of pink in the cool darkness made by the overhanging bushes. Here by the lake side, too, were numerous butterflies—great yellow and black "swallow tails," hovering in small clouds over the damp stones, or Camberwell beauties in royal purple, floating through sun and shadow on wings as graceful in flight as they were rich in colour. Higher up, where the sun had heated the stone-slides to a white heat, were more butterflies (fritillaries and commas and tortoise-shells), while now and again a flash of orange and a shrill little screech told Ned that a humming-bird went by.

In the highest places of all, where the snow still lingered in tiny patches, the red-eyed spruce-cocks hooted from the pines, the ruffed grouse strutted and boomed in the thickets, and the yellow flowers of lilies gave promise of many a meal for old Ephraim, when their sweet bulbs should be a few weeks older.

To Ned, merely to swing along day after day in the sunshine and note these things, was gladness enough, and it was little notice he took of heat, or thirst, or weariness. Unfortunately he became too absorbed, and as often happens with men unused to leading out, forgot his train and walked right away from his ponies.

When this fact dawned upon him it was nearly mid-day, and he found himself at the highest point which the path had yet reached, from which, looking back, he could see the train crawling wearily after him. He could see, too, that Cruickshank was signalling him to stop, so nothing loth Ned sat down and waited. The path where he sat came out to a sharp promontory, and turning round this it began to pass over the worst stone-slide Ned had yet seen. Most of those he had hitherto encountered had been mere narrow strips of bad going from fifty to a hundred yards across, but this was nearly five hundred yards from side to side, and except where the trail ran, there was not foothold upon it for a fly. Properly speaking it was not, as the natives called it, a stone-slide at all, but rather the bed or shoot, by which, century after century, some hundreds of stone-slides had gone crashing down into the lake below.

As soon as Ned had assured himself that the train was once more as near to him as it ought to be, he knocked off as much of the projecting corner as he could, and passed round it on to the slide.

Looking up from the narrow trail, the young Englishman could see the great rocks which hung out from the cliffs above; rocks whose fellows had been the makers of this slide, letting go their hold up above as the snows melted and the rains sapped their foundations, and then thundering down to the lake with such an army of small stones and debris that it seemed as if the whole mountain-side was moving. When this stone-avalanche crashed into the water a wave rolled out upon the lake big as an ocean swell from shore to shore.

Looking down, a smooth shoot sloped at an angle from him to the blue water.

"Well, that is pretty sheer," muttered Ned, craning his neck to look down to where the lake glistened a thousand feet below, "and if one of our ponies gets his feet off this trail, there won't be anything of him left unbroken except his shoes;" and so saying, he turned to see how the leader would turn the awkward corner which led on to this via diabolica.

As he did so the report of a pistol rang out sharp and clear, followed by a rush and the clatter of falling stones, and the next moment Ned saw the leading pony dash round the overhanging rocks, its ropes all loose, its packs swinging almost under its belly, its bell ringing as if it were possessed, and its eyes starting from its head in the insanity of terror.

At every stride it was touch-and-go whether the brute would keep its legs or not. Each slip and each recovery at that flying pace was in itself a miracle, and Ned hardly hoped that he could stop the maddened beast before it and the packs went crashing down to the lake.

Stop the pony! He might as well have tried to stop a stone-slide. And as he realized this, the danger of his own position flashed across him for the first time.

Coming towards him, now not fifty yards away, was the maddened horse, which probably could not have stopped if it wanted to in that distance, and on such a course. Behind Ned was four hundred yards of such a trail as he hardly dared to run over to escape death, and even if he had dared, what chance in the race would he have had against the horse? Above him there was nothing to which even his strong fingers could cling, and below the trail—well, he had already calculated on the chances of any living thing finding foothold below the trail. Instinctively Ned shouted and threw up his hands. He might as well have tried to blow the horse back with his breath. In another ten seconds the brute would be upon him; in other words, in another ten seconds horse and packs and Ned Corbett would be the centre of a little dust-storm bounding frantically down that steep path to death!

In such a crisis as this men think fast, or lose their wits altogether. Some, perhaps, rather than face the horror of their position shut their eyes, mental and physical, and are glad to die and get it over. Ned was of the other kind: the kind that will face anything with their eyes open, and fight their last round with death with eyes that will only close when the life is out of them.

There was just one chance for life, and having his eyes open, Ned saw it and took it.

Twenty yards from him now was that hideous maddened brute, with its ears laid back, its teeth showing, the foam flying from its jaws, and its great blood-shot eyes almost starting from their sockets. Twenty yards, and the pace the brute was coming at was the pace of a locomotive!

And yet, though Corbett's face was gray as a March morning, and his square jaws set like a steel trap, there was no blinking in his eyes. He saw the blow coming, and quick as light he countered. Never on parade in the old school corps did his rifle come to his shoulder more steadily than it came now; not a nerve throbbed as he pressed (not pulled) the trigger, nor was it until he stood alone upon that narrow path that his knees began to rock beneath him, while the cold perspiration poured down his drawn white face in streams.

One man only besides Corbett saw that drama; one man, whose features wore a look of which hell might have been proud, so fiendish was it in its disappointed malice, when through the dust he saw the red flame flash, and then, almost before the report reached him, saw the body of the big buckskin, a limp bagful of broken bones, splash heavily into the Seton Lake.

But the look passed as a cloud passes on a windy morning, and the next moment Cruickshank was at Corbett's side, a flood of congratulations and inquiries pouring from his ready lips. As for Ned, now that the danger was over, he was utterly unstrung, and a bold enemy might have easily done for him that which the runaway horse had failed to do. Perhaps that thought never occurred to any enemy of Ned's; perhaps the quick, backward glance, in which Cruickshank recognized old Roberts' purple features, was as effectual a safeguard to the young man's life as even his own good rifle had been; be that as it may, a few moments later Ned stumbled along after his friend to a place of safety, and there sat down again to collect himself.

Meanwhile, Roberts and Cruickshank stood looking at one another, an expression in the old poet's face, which neither Corbett nor Cruickshank had ever seen there before, the hand in his coat pocket grasping a revolver, whose ugly muzzle was ready to belch out death from that pocket's corner at a moment's notice. At last Cruickshank spoke in a voice so full of genuine sorrow, that even Roberts slackened his hold upon the weapon concealed in his coat pocket.

"You've had a near shave to-day, Corbett, and it was my fault. I am almost ashamed to ask you to forgive me."

"How—what do you mean? Did you fire that shot?"

"I did, like a cursed idiot," replied Cruickshank.

Roberts' face was a study for an artist. Speechless surprise reigned upon it supreme.

"I did," Cruickshank repeated. "I fired at a grouse that was hooting in a bull-pine by the track, and I suppose that that scared the cayuse—though I've never known a pack-horse mind a man shooting before."

"Nor I," muttered Roberts. "I suppose you didn't notice if you hit that fool-hen, Colonel Cruickshank?"

"No; I don't suppose I did. I'd enough to think of when I saw what I had done."

"Well, it didn't fly away, and it ain't there now," persisted Roberts. "Perhaps you'd like to go and look for it."

However, Cruickshank took no notice of Roberts' speech, but held out his hand to Corbett with such an honest expression of sorrow, that if it was not sincere, it was superb as a piece of acting.

Without a word Corbett took the proffered hand. There are some natures which find it hard to suspect evil in others, and Ned Corbett's was one of these. Only he made a mental note, that though Cruickshank had only made two mistakes since starting from Douglas, they had both been of rather a serious nature.

Only one man climbed down to look at the dead cayuse as it lay half hidden in the shallow water at the edge of the lake, and that was only a Chinaman. Of course he went to see what he could save from the wreck; equally, of course, he found nothing worth bringing away; found nothing and noticed nothing, or if he did, only told what he had seen to old Roberts. There seemed to be an understanding between these two, for Phon trusted the hearty old Shropshireman as much as he seemed to dread and avoid the colonel.

CHAPTER VIII. THEIR FIRST "COLOURS."

"Lillooet at last!"

Steve Chance was the speaker, and as his eyes rested upon the Frazer, just visible from the first bluff which overlooks the Lillooet, his spirits rose so that he almost shouted aloud for joy. There beneath him, only a short mile away, lay most of the things which he longed for: rest after labour, good food, and pleasant drinks. Steve's cravings may not have been the cravings of an ideal artist's nature, but let those who would cavil at them tramp for a week over stone-slides and through alkaline dust, and then decide if these are not the natural longings of an ordinary man.

To tell the whole truth, Steve had amused himself and his comrade Roberts for more than a mile by discussing what they would order to eat and drink when once they reached comparative civilization again. Even the hardest of men tire in time of bacon and beans and tea.

A "John Collins," a seductive fluid, taken in a long glass and sipped through a straw, was perhaps what Steve hankered after most; but there were many other things which he longed for besides that most delectable of drinks, such for instance as a "full bath," a beefsteak, and clean sheets to follow.

Alas, poor Steve! There was the Frazer to wash in if he liked, and no doubt he could have obtained something which called itself a steak at the saloon, but a "John Collins" and clean sheets he was not likely to obtain west of Chicago.

Indeed, to this day long glasses and "drinketty drinks" are rare in the wild west; "drunketty drinks" out of short thick vulgar little tumblers being the order of the day. And apart from all this, Lillooet, though larger in 1862 than it is to-day, was even then but a poor little town, a town consisting only of one long straggling street, which looked as if it had lost its way on a great mud-bluff by the river. Benches of yellow mud and gray-green sage-brush rose above and around the "city," tier above tier, until they lost themselves in the mountains which gathered round, and deep down at the foot of the bluffs the Frazer roared along.

Since Chance had last seen the Frazer at Westminster its character had considerably changed. There it was a dull heavy flood, at least half a mile in breadth from bank to bank; here it was an angry torrent, roaring between steep overhanging banks, nowhere two hundred yards apart. There the river ran by flat lands, and fields which men might farm; here the impending mountains hung threateningly above it. The most daring steamboat which had ever plied upon the Frazer had not come nearer to Lillooet than Lytton, and that was full forty miles down stream.

In one thing only the Frazer was unchanged. At Lillooet, as at Westminster, it was a sordid yellow river, with no sparkle in it, no blue backwaters, no shallows through which the pebbles shone like jewels through liquid sunshine. And yet, artist though he was in a poor tradesman-like fashion, Steve gazed on the Frazer with a rapture which no other stream had ever awakened in him. At the portage between Seton and Anderson lakes he had passed a stream such as an angler dreams of in his dusty chambers on a summer afternoon, but he had hardly wasted a second glance upon it. Only trout lay there, great purple-spotted fellows, who would make the line vibrate like a harp string, and thrash the water into foam, ere they allowed themselves to be basketed; but in the Frazer, though the fish were only torpid, half-putrid salmon, that would not even take a fly, there was gold, and gold filled Steve's brain and eyes and heart just then to the exclusion of every other created thing. All he wanted was gold, gold; and his spirits rose higher and higher as he noted the flumes which ran along the river banks, and saw the little groups of blue-shirted Chinamen who squatted by their rockers, or shovelled the gravel into their ditches.

So keen, indeed, was Steve to be at work amongst his beloved "dirt," that tired though he was, he persuaded Ned to come with him and wash a shovelful of it, whilst dinner was being prepared.

Right at the back of the town a little company of white men had dug deep into the gravel of the beach, set their flumes, and turned on a somewhat scanty supply of water, and here Steve obtained his first "colours."

A tall old man who ran the mine lent him a shovel, and showed him where to fill it with likely-looking dirt; taught him how to dip the edge of his shovel in the bucket, and slowly swill the water thus obtained round and round, so as to wash away the big stones and the gravel which he did not want.

The operation looks easier than it is, and at first Steve washed his shovel cleaner than he meant to, in a very short time. By and by, however, he learnt the trick, and was rewarded by seeing a patch of fine gravel left in the hollow of the shovel, with here and there a tiny ruby amongst it, and here and there an agate. The next washing took away everything except a sediment of fine black sand,—sand which will fly to a magnet, and is the constant associate and sure indication of gold.

Steve was going to give this another wash when old Pete stopped him. "Steady, my lad, don't wash it all away; there it is, don't you see it!" and sure enough there it was, up by the point of the shovel, seven, eight—a dozen small red specks, things that you almost needed a microscope to see, not half as beautiful as the little rubies or the pure white agates; but this was gold, and when the old miner, taking back his shovel, dipped it carelessly into the water of his flume, Chance felt for a moment a pang of indignation at seeing his first "colours" treated with such scant ceremony, although the twelve specks together were not, in all probability, worth a cent.

But the sight of the gold put new life into Chance and filled Phon's veins with fever. One night at Lillooet, Steve said, was rest enough for him; and most of that night he and Phon spent either down by the river or in the saloon, watching the Chinese over their rockers, or listening to the latest accounts from Cariboo. Men could earn good wages placer mining at Lillooet in '62, even as they can now, but all who could afford it were pushing on up stream to golden Cariboo. What was five dollars a day, or ten, or even twenty for the matter of that, when other men were digging out fortunes daily on Williams Creek and Antler Cunningham's, and the Cottonwood?

And in this matter Cruickshank humoured Steve's feverish impatience to get on. Here, as at Douglas, the gallant colonel showed a strange reluctance to mingle with his fellows, or at least with such of them as had passed a season in the upper country, and even went so far as to camp out a mile away from the town, to give the pack animals a better chance of getting good feed, and to secure them, so he said, against all temptations to stray up stream with somebody else. Horseflesh was dear at Lillooet in '62; and the colonel said that morals were lax, though why they should have been worse than at Westminster, Ned could not understand.

However, it suited him to go on, so he raised no objection to Cruickshank's plans, more especially as the rest did not seem beneficial to his honest old chum, Roberts, who had been the centre of a hard-drinking, hard-swearing lot of mining men, ever since he arrived at Lillooet. Whenever Ned came near, these men sunk their voices to a whisper, and once when Cruickshank came in sight, the scowl upon their brows grew so dark, and their mutterings so ominous, that the colonel took the hint and vanished immediately. When Ned saw him next he was at their trysting-place, a mile and a half from the saloon, and very impatient to be off,—so impatient, indeed, that he absolutely refused to wait for Roberts, who, he "guessed," was drunk.

"Those old-timers are all the same when they get amongst pals, and as for Roberts, we are deuced well rid of him, he is no use anyway," said the colonel.

This might very well be Cruickshank's opinion. It was not Ned's, and Ned had a way of thinking and acting for himself, so without any waste of words he bade his comrades "drive ahead," whilst he turned back in search of Roberts.

By some accident this worthy had not heard of the intended start, and was, as Ned expected, as innocent of any intention to desert as he was of drunkenness.

When Ned found him he was sitting in the barroom with a lot of his pals, and the conversation round him had grown loud and angry; indeed, as Ned entered, a rough, weather-beaten fellow in his shirt sleeves was shouting at the top of his voice, "What the deuce is the good of all this jaw? Lynch the bilk, that's what I say, and save trouble."

But Ned's appearance put a stop to the proceedings, though an angry growl broke out when he was overheard to say that Cruickshank and Steve had started half an hour ago, and that he himself had come back to look for old Roberts.

"Don't you go, Bob," urged one of his comrades; "them young Britishers are bound to stay by their packs, but you've no call to."

"Not you. You'll stay right here, if you ain't a born fool," urged another.

But Bob was not to be coaxed or bantered out of his determination to stay by his brother Salopian.

"No, lads," he retorted, "I ain't a born fool, and I ain't the sort to go back on a pal. If Corbett goes I'm going, though I don't pretend to be over-keen on the job."

"Wal, if you will go, go and be hanged to you; only, Bob, keep your eye skinned, and, I say, shoot fust next time, shoot fust; now don't you forget it!" with which mysterious injunction Bob's big friend reeled up from the table (he was half-drunk already), shook hands, "liquored" once more, and left. He said he had some business to attend to down town; and as it was nearly noon, and he had done nothing but smoke and drink short drinks since breakfast-time, he was probably right in thinking that it was time to attend to it.

Whilst this gentleman rolled away down the street with a fine free stride, requiring a good deal of sea-room, Ned and his friend had to put their best feet foremost (as the saying is) to make up for lost time. When you are walking fast over rough ground you have not much breath left for conversation, and this, perhaps, and the roar of the sullen river, accounts for the fact that the two men strode along in silence, neither of them alluding to the conversation just overheard in the saloon, although the minds of both were running upon that subject, and Ned noticed that the pistol which Roberts pulled out and examined as they went along was a recent purchase.

"Hullo, you've got a new gun, Rob," he remarked. Everything with which men shoot is called a gun in British Columbia.

"Yes, it's one I bought at Lillooet. I hadn't got a good one with me."

"Well, I don't suppose you'll want it, now you have got it," replied Corbett.

"Well, I don't know. I might want it to shoot grouse with by the side of the trail."

And the old fellow laid such an emphasis upon his last words and chuckled so grimly, that Ned half suspected that he had wetted his whistle once too often after all.

CHAPTER IX. UNDER THE BALM-OF-GILEAD TREE.

From noon of the day upon which Ned Corbett and old Roberts strode out of Lillooet until the night upon which we meet them again was a fortnight and more, a fortnight of which I might, if I chose, write a history, but it would only be the history of almost every mining party and pack-train that ever went up the Frazer. The incidents of those days are indelibly engraved upon the memories of Steve and of Corbett, but to Roberts they passed without remark and left no impression behind. The life was only the ordinary miner's life; and there was nothing new to the old-timer in buoyant hopes wearing away day by day; nothing new in the daily routine of camps broken by starlight and pitched again at dusk; in trails blocked by windfalls or destroyed by landslips; in packs which would shift, tie them ever so tightly; in stones which cut the moccasins, and prickly pears which filled the sole with anguish; or in cruel fire-hardened rampikes, which tore the skin to rags and the clothes to ribands. Three weeks upon the road had done its work upon the party, had added much to their knowledge, and taken much away that was useless from their equipment.

When they left Westminster they were five smart, well-fed, civilized human beings; when they struggled up out of the valley of the Frazer towards Cariboo, at Soda Creek, they were five lean, weather-hardened men, their clothes all rags and patches, their skin all wounded and blistered, every "indispensable adjunct of a camp," as made by Mr. Silver, discarded long ago; but every article of camp furniture which was left, carried where it could be got at, ready when it was wanted, and thoroughly adapted to the rough and ready uses of those who took the trouble to "pack it along."

Even to Steve it seemed ages now since his nostrils were used to any other odour than the pungent scent of the pines; ages since his ears listened to any other sound than the roar of the yellow river and the monotonous tinkle of the leader's bell; ages even since washing had been to him as a sacred rite, and a clean shirt as desirable as a clean conscience.

And yet Corbett and Chance had seen, on their way up, men who led harder lives than theirs; blue-shirted, bearded fellows, who carried their all upon their own shoulders; and others who had put their tools and their grub in the craziest of crafts, and, climbing one moment and wading the next, strove to drag it up stream in the teeth of the Frazer.

As Ned saw the frail canoes rear up on end against the angry waters, he understood why the old river carried so many down stream whose dead hands grasped no dollars, whose dead lips told no tales. But the river trail had come to an end at last, and the five were now steering north-east for the bold mountains and their gold-bearing rivers and creeks. They had now put many a mile between themselves and Soda Creek, and were lying smoking round their camp-fire, built under a huge balm-of-gilead tree, which stood in the driest part of what we call a swamp, and Canadians a meadow. The pack-saddles were set in orderly line, with their ropes and cinches neatly coiled alongside them; the packs were snug under their manteaux, and the tent was pitched as men pitch a tent who are used to their work, not with its sides all bellying in, strained in one place slack in another, but just loose enough to allow for a wetting if it should happen to rain in the night. Now and again the bell of one of the pack animals sounded not unmusically from some dark corner of the swamp, or the long "ho-ho" of kalula, the night-owl, broke the silence, which but for these sounds would have been complete.

Suddenly a voice said:

"Great Scott! do you know what the date is?"

Since the pipes had been lighted no one had spoken, and as Cruickshank broke the silence, it was almost under protest that Ned rolled round on his blanket to face the speaker, and dropped a monosyllabic "Well?" The men were too tired to talk, and night, which in these northern forests is very still, had thrown its spell upon them. Steve and Phon merely turned their heads inquiringly to the speaker, who sat upon a log turning over the leaves of a little diary, and waited.

"To-morrow will be the 27th of May."

"The 27th of May—what then?" asked Ned dreamily. He was hardly awake to everyday thoughts yet.

"What then! What then! Why, if you are not at Williams Creek by the 1st of June your claims can be jumped by anyone who comes along."

"But can't we get there by the 1st of June?" asked Ned, sitting up and taking his pipe out of his mouth.

"Impossible. If you could drive the ponies at a trot you could only just do it. It is five good days' journey with fresh animals, and we have only four to do it in, and grizzlies wouldn't make our ponies trot now."

"Well, what are we to do?" broke in Chance. "You calculated the time, and said that we had enough and to spare."

"I know I did, but I made a mistake."

"Oh to blazes with your mistakes, Colonel Cruickshank," cried Chance angrily; "they seem to me a bit too expensive to occur quite so often."

"Don't lose your temper, my good sir. I couldn't help it, but I am willing to atone for it. I calculated as if April had thirty-one days in it, and it hasn't; and, besides, I've dropped a day on the road somehow."

"Looking for horses," growled Roberts, "or shooting grouse, maybe."

"What do you propose to do, Colonel Cruickshank?" asked Corbett, whose face alone seemed still perfectly under his own control.

"Well, Mr. Corbett, I've led you into the scrape, so I must get you out of it. If either you or Roberts will stay with me I'll bring the horses on for you to Williams Creek, whilst the rest can start away right now and make the best of their time to the claims. You could do the distance all right if it wasn't for the pack-ponies."

"But how could I stay?" asked Corbett.

"Well, you needn't, of course, if Roberts doesn't mind staying; otherwise you could assign your interest in your claim to him, and he could go on and hold it for you."

"But it will be deuced hard work for two men to manage nine pack-ponies over such a trail as this."

"It won't be any violets," replied Cruickshank, "you may bet on that; but it's my fault, so I'll 'foot the bill.'"

"I don't know about its being your fault either," broke in Corbett, "I was just as big an ass as a man could be. I ought to have calculated the time for myself. Can't we all stop and chance it?"

"What, and lose a good many thousand dollars paid, and every chance of making a good many thousand more, for which we have been tramping over a month—that would be lunacy!" broke in Chance.

"Well, if you don't mean to lose the claims, I know no other way of getting to Williams Creek in time," said Cruickshank; and, looking up at the sky, he added, "you might have two or three hours' sleep, and then be off bright and early by moonlight. The moon rises late to-night."

It was a weird scene there by that camp-fire; and there were things written on the faces of those sitting round it, which a mere outsider could have read at a glance.

The moon might be coming up later on, but just at that moment there was neither moon nor star, only a black darkness, broken by the occasional sputtering flames of the wood fire. Out of the darkness the men's faces showed from time to time as the red gleams flickered over them; the faces of Corbett, Steve, and Roberts full of perplexity and doubt; the eyes of Phon fixed in a frightened fascinated stare upon the colonel; and Cruickshank's face white with suppressed excitement, the coarse, cruel mouth drawn and twitching, and the eyes glaring like the eyes of a tiger crouching for its prey.

"Well, what had we better do?" asked Corbett at last from somewhere amongst the shadows, and Cruickshank's eyes shifted swiftly to where Steve and Roberts lay, as if anxious to forestall their answer.

"I'll stay, Ned Corbett. It's safer for me than it would be for you," said Roberts. "I can only lose a little time, not much worth to anyone, and you have a good deal to lose."

After all it was only a small question. They had driven the pack animals now for a month, and, whoever stayed, would only at the worst have to drive them for another week. The work, of course, would be rather heavy with only two to divide it among; but on the other hand those who went ahead would have to make forced marches and live upon very short rations.

Ned was rather surprised then that Roberts answered as if it was a matter of grave import, and that his voice seemed to have lost the jolly ring which was natural to it.

"Don't stop if you don't like to, old chap. Phon can assign his interests to you and stay behind instead."

"No, no, me h[=a]lò stay. H[=a]lò! h[=a]lò!" and the little Chinaman almost shrieked the last word, so emphatic was his refusal.

"It's no good leaving Phon," replied Roberts, casting a pitying look towards that frightened heathen; "he would see devils all the time, and be of no use after it got dark. I tell you, I'll stay and take care of the ponies; and now you had better all turn in and get some sleep. You will have to travel pretty lively when you once start. I'll see to your packs."

Probably Ned had been mistaken from the first, but if any feeling had shaken his friend's voice for a moment, it had quite passed away now, and Roberts was again his own genial, helpful self.

After all, he was the very best person to leave behind. Except Cruickshank, he was the only really good packer amongst them. He was as strong as a horse, and besides, he had no particular reason for wanting to be at Williams Creek by the 1st of June.

"You really don't mind stopping, Rob?" asked Corbett.

"Not a bit. Why should I? I'd do a good deal more than that for you, if it was only for the sake of the dear old country, my lad."

Again, just for a moment, there seemed to be a sad ring in his voice, and he stretched out his hand and gripped Ned's in the darkness.

Ned was surprised.

"The old man is a bit sentimental to-night," he thought. "It's not like him, but, I suppose, these dismal woods have put him a little off his balance. They are lonesome."

With which sage reflection Ned turned his eyes away from the dark vista down which he had been gazing, and rolling round in his blankets forgot both the gloom and the gold.

For two or three hours the sleepers lay there undisturbed by the calls of the owls, or the stealthy tread of a passing bear, which chose the trail as affording the best road from point to point. At night, when there is no chance of running up against a man, no one appreciates a well-made road better than a bear. He will crash through the thickest brush if necessary, but if you leave him to choose, he will avoid rough and stony places as carefully as a Christian.

Towards midnight Cruickshank, who had been tossing restlessly in his blankets, sat up and crouched broodingly over the dying embers, unconscious that a pair of bright, beady eyes were watching him suspiciously all the time.

But Phon made no sign. He was only a bundle of blankets upon the ground, a thing of no account.

By and by, when Cruickshank had settled himself again to sleep, this bundle of blankets sat up and put fresh logs on the camp-fire. The warmth from them soothed the slumberers, and after a while even Cruickshank lay still. Phon watched him for some time, until convinced that his regular breathing was not feigned, but real slumber, and then he too crept away from the fire-side, not to his own place, but into the shadow where Roberts lay.

After a while an owl, which had been murdering squirrels in their sleep, came gliding on still wings, and lit without a sound on the limb of a tall pine near the camp. The light from the camp-fire dazzled its big red-brown eyes, but after a little time it could see that two of the strange bundles, which lay like mummies round the smouldering logs, were sitting up and talking together. But the owl could not catch what they said, except once, when it saw a bright, white gleam flash from the little bundle like moonlight showing through a storm-cloud, and then as the bigger bundle snatched the white thing away, the listening owl heard a voice say:

"No, my God, no! That may do very well for a Chinee; it won't do for a Britisher, Phon!"

And another voice answered angrily:

"Why not? You white men all fool. You savey what he did. S'pose you no kill him, by'm bye he—"

But the rest was lost to the owl, and a few minutes later, just as it raised its wings to go, it saw the smaller bundle wriggle across the ground again to its old place by the embers.

CHAPTER X. THE SHADOWS BEGIN TO FALL.

When Corbett woke, the first beams of the rising moon were throwing an uncertain light over the forest paths, and the children of night were still abroad, the quiet-footed deer taking advantage of the moonlight to make an early breakfast before the sun and man rose together to annoy them.

The camp-fire had just been made up afresh, and a frying-pan, full of great rashers, was hissing merrily upon it, while a kettle full of strong hot coffee stood beside it, ready to wash the rashers down.

Men want warming when they rise at midnight from these forest slumbers, and Roberts, knowing that it would be long ere his friends broke their fast again, had been up and busy for the last half-hour, building a real nor'-west fire, and preparing a generous breakfast.

Cruickshank too was up, if not to speed the parting, at any rate to see them safely off the premises, a smile of unusual benevolence on his dark face.

Between them, he and Roberts put up the travellers' packs, taking each man's blankets as he got out of them, and rolling in them such light rations as would just last for a four days' trip. In twenty minutes from the time when they crawled out of their blankets, the three stood ready to start.

"Are you all set?" asked Cruickshank.

"All set," replied Chance.

"Then the sooner you 'get' the better. It will be as much as your heathen can do to make the journey in time, I'll bet."

"Why, is the trail a very bad one?"

"Oh, it's all much like this, but it's most of it uphill, and there may be some snow on the top. But you can't miss your way with all these tracks in front."

"You will be in yourself a day or two after us, won't you?" asked Corbett.

"Yes. If you don't make very good time I daresay I shall, although the snow may delay the ponies some. But don't you worry about them. I'll take care of the ponies, you can trust me for that."

"Then, if you will be in so soon, I won't trouble to take anything except one blanket and my rifle," remarked Ned.

"Oh, take your rocker. It looks more business-like; and, besides, all the millionaires go in with 'nothing but a rocker-iron for their whole kit, and come out worth their weight in gold.'"

There was a mocking ring in Cruickshank's voice as he said this, at variance with his oily smile, but Steve Chance took his words in good faith. Steve still believed in the likelihood of his becoming a millionaire at one stroke of the miner's pick.

"I guess you're right, colonel. I'll take my rocker-iron, whatever else I leave behind. Lend a hand to fix it on to my pack, will you?" and then, when Cruickshank had done this, Steve added with a laugh: "I shall consider you entitled to (what shall we say?) one per cent on the profits of the mine when in full swing, for your services, colonel."

"Don't promise too much, Chance. You don't know what sort of a gold-mine you are giving away yet;" and the speaker bent over a refractory strap in Steve's pack to hide an ugly gleam of white teeth, which might have had a meaning even for such an unsuspicious fool as Ned Corbett, who at this moment picked up his Winchester and held out his hand to Cruickshank.

"Good-bye, colonel," he said. "What with the claims and the packs, we have trusted you now with every dollar we have in the world. Lucky for us that we are trusting to the honour of a soldier and a gentleman, isn't it? Good-bye to you."

It was the kindliest speech Ned had ever made to Cruickshank. Weeks of companionship, and the man's readiness to atone for his mistake, had had their effect upon Corbett's generous nature; but its warmth was lost upon the colonel.

Either he really did not see, or else he affected not to see the outstretched hand; in any case he did not take it, and Ned went away without exchanging that silent grip (which a writer of to-day has aptly called "an Englishman's oath") with the man to whom he had intrusted his last dollar.

As for old Roberts, he followed his friends for a couple of hundred yards upon their way, and then wrung their hands until the bones cracked.

"Give this to Rampike when you see him, Ned. I guess he'll be at Williams Creek, or Antler; Williams Creek most likely," said the old poet in parting, and handed a note with some little inclosure in it to Ned.

"All right, I won't forget. Till we meet again, Rob;" and Corbett waved his cap to him.

"Till we meet again!" Roberts repeated after him, and stood looking vacantly along the trail until Steve and Corbett passed out of sight. Then he, too, turned and tramped back to camp, cheering himself as he went with a stave of his favourite ditty.

The last the lads heard of their comrade on that morning was the crashing of a dry twig or two beneath old Roberts' feet, and the refrain of his song as it died away in the distance—

"Riding, riding, riding on my old pack-mule."

Ned Corbett could not imagine how he had ever thought that air a lively one. It was stupidly mournful this morning, or else the woods and the distance played strange tricks with the singer's voice. But if Ned was affected by an imaginary minor key in his old friend's singing, a glimpse at the camp he had left would not have done much to restore his cheerfulness.

The embers had died down, and looked almost as gray and sullen as the face of the man who sat and scowled at them from a log alongside. The only living thing in camp besides the colonel was one of those impudent gray birds, which the up-country folk call "whisky-jacks." Of course he had come to see what he could steal. That is the nature of jays, and the whisky-jack is the Canadian jay. At first the bird stood with his head on one side eyeing the colonel, uncertain whether it would be safe to come any closer or not. But there was a fine piece of bacon-rind at the colonel's feet, so the bird plucked up his courage and hopped a few paces nearer. He had measured his distance to an inch, and with one eye on the colonel and one on the bacon, was just straining his neck to the utmost to drive his beak into the succulent morsel, when the man whom he thought was asleep discharged a furious kick at an unoffending log, and clenching his fist ground out between his teeth muttered:

"A soldier and a gentleman! a soldier and a gentleman! Yes, but it came a bit too late, Mr. Edward Corbett. Hang it, I wish you had stayed behind instead of that fool, Roberts."

Of course the "whisky-jack" did not understand the other biped's language, but he was a bird of the world, and instinct told him that his companion in camp was dangerous; so, though the bacon-rind still lay there, he flitted off to a tree hard by, and spent the next half-hour in heaping abuse upon the colonel from a safe distance.

That "whisky-jack" grew to be a very wise bird, and in his old days used to tell many strange stories about human bipeds and the Balm-of-Gilead camp.

But there was half a mile of brush between Ned and their old camp, so he saw nothing of all this; and after the fresh morning air had roused him, and the exercise had set his blood going through his veins at its normal pace, he went unconcernedly on his way, talking to Steve as long as there was room enough for the two to walk side by side, and then gradually forging ahead, and setting that young Yankee a step which kept him extended, and made poor little Phon follow at a trot.

Though Ned and Steve had grown used to isolation upon the trail with ten laden beasts between the two, they made several attempts upon this particular morning to carry on a broken conversation, or lighten the road with snatches of song.

Perhaps it was that they were making unconscious efforts to drive away a feeling of depression, which sometimes comes over men's natures with as little warning as a storm over an April sky.

But their efforts were in vain; nature was too strong for them. In the great silence amid these funereal pines their voices seemed to fall at their own feet, and ere long the forest had mastered them, as it masters the Indians, and the birds, and the wild dumb beasts which wander about in its fastnesses. The only creature which retains its loquacity in a pine-forest is the squirrel, and he is always too busy to cultivate sentiment of any kind.

Cruickshank had warned them that the trail led uphill, and it undoubtedly did so. At first the three swung along over trails brown with the fallen pine needles of last year, soft to the foot and level to the tread, with great expanses of fruit bushes upon either side,—bushes that in another month or two would be laden with a repast spread only for the bear and the birds. Salmon-berry and rasp-berry, soap-berry and service-berry, and two or three different kinds of bilberry were there, as well as half a dozen others which neither Ned nor Steve knew by sight. But the season of berries was not yet, so they wetted their parched lips with their tongues and passed on with a sigh.

Then the road began to go uphill. They knew that by the way they kept tripping over the sticks and by the increased weight of their packs. By and by Steve thought they would come to a level place at the top, and there they would lie down for a while and rest. But that top never came, or at least the sun was going round to the south, and it had not come yet. And then the air began to grow more chill, and the trees to change. There were no more bushes, or but very few of them; and the trees, which were black dismal-looking balsams, were draped with beard-moss, the winter food of the cariboo, and there was snow in little patches at their feet. When the sun had gone round to the west the snow had grown more plentiful, and there were glades amongst the balsams, and at last Steve was glad, for they had got up to the top of the divide.

But he was wrong again, for again the trail rose, and this time through a belt of timber which the wind had laid upturned across their path. Heavens! how heavy the packs grew then, and how their limbs ached with stepping over log after log, bruising their shins against one and stumbling head-first over another. At first Steve growled at every spiked-bough which caught and held him, and groaned at every sharp stake which cut into the hollow of his foot. But anger in the woods soon gives place to a sullen stoicism. It is useless to quarrel with the unresponsive pines. The mountains and the great trees look down upon man's insignificance, and his feeble curse dies upon his lips, frozen by the terrible sphinx-like silence of a cold passionless nature.

As long as the sunlight lasted the three kept up their spirits fairly well. The glades in their winter dress, with the sunlight gleaming upon the dazzling snow and flashing from the white plumes of the pines, were cheery enough, and took Corbett's thoughts back to Christmas in the old country; besides, there were great tracks across one glade—tracks like the tracks of a cow, and Ned was interested in recognizing the footprints of the beast which has given its name to Cariboo.

But when the sun went, everything changed. A great gloom fell like a pall upon man and nature: the glitter which made a gem of every lakelet was gone, and the swamps, which had looked like the homes of an ideal Father Christmas, relapsed into dim shadowy places over whose soft floors murder might creep unheard, whilst the balsam pines stood rigid and black, like hearse plumes against the evening sky.

"Ned, we can't get out of this confounded mountain to-night, can we?" asked Chance.

"No, old man, I don't think we can," replied Ned, straining his eyes along the trail, which still led upwards.

"Then I propose that we camp;" and Chance suited the action to the word, by heaving his pack off his shoulders and dropping on to it with a sigh of relief.

Perhaps the three sat in silence for five minutes (it certainly was not more), asking only for leave to let the aching muscles rest awhile; though even this seemed too much to ask, for long before their muscles had ceased to throb, before Steve's panting breath had begun to come again in regular cadence, the chill of a winter night took hold upon them, stiffened their clothes, and would shortly have frozen them to their seats.

"This is deuced nice for May, isn't it, Steve?" remarked Ned with a shiver. "Lend me the axe, Phon; it is in your pack. If we don't make a fire we shall freeze before morning. Steve, you might cut some brush, old chap, and you and Phon might beat down some of the snow into a floor to camp on. I'll go and get wood enough to last all night;" and Corbett walked off to commence operations upon a burnt "pine stick," still standing full of pitch and hard as a nail. But Ned was used to his axe, and the cold acted on him as a spur to a willing horse, so that he hewed away, making the chips fly and the axe ring until he had quite a stack of logs alongside the shelter which Steve had built up.

Then the sticks began to crackle and snap like Chinese fireworks, and the makers of the huge fire were glad enough to stand at a respectful distance lest their clothes should be scorched upon their backs. That is the worst of a pine fire. It never gives out a comfortable glow, but either leaves you shivering or scorches you.

Having toasted themselves on both sides, the three travellers found a place where they would be safe from the wood smoke, and still standing pulled out the rations set apart for the first day's supper, and ate the cold bacon and heavy damper slowly, knowing that there was no second course coming.

When you are reduced to two slices of bread and one of bacon for a full meal, with only two such meals in the day, and twelve hours of abstinence and hard labour between them, it is wonderful how even coarse store bacon improves in flavour. I have even known men who would criticise the cooking at a London club, to collect the stale crumbs from their pockets and eat them with apparent relish in the woods, though the crumbs were thick with fluff and tobacco dust! As they stood there munching, Ned said:

"I suppose, Steve, we did wisely in coming on?"

"What else could we have done, Ned?"

"Yes, that's it. What else could we have done? And yet—"

"And yet?" repeated Steve questioningly. "What is your trouble, Ned?"

"Do you remember my saying, when I bought the claims, that with Cruickshank under our eyes all the time we should have a good security for our money?"

"Yes, and now you have let him go. I see what you mean; but you can rely upon Roberts, can't you?"

"As I would upon myself," replied Corbett shortly. "But still I have broken my resolution."

"Oh, well, that is no great matter; and besides, I don't believe that the colonel would do a crooked thing any more than we would."

"He-he! He-he-he!"

It was a strangely-harsh cackle was Phon's apology for a laugh, and coming so rarely and so unexpectedly, it made the two speakers start.

But they could get nothing out of the man when they talked to him. He was utterly tired out, and in another few minutes lay fast asleep by the fire.

"I am afraid that quaint little friend of ours doesn't care much for the colonel," remarked Ned.

"Oh, Phon! Phon thinks he is the devil. He told me so;" and Steve laughed carelessly.

What did it matter what a Chinaman thought! A little yellow-skinned, pig-tailed fellow like Phon was not likely to have found out anything which had escaped Steve's Yankee smartness.

CHAPTER XI. "JUMP OR I'LL SHOOT."

Three days after they left the Balm-of-Gilead camp, Ned Corbett and his two friends stood upon a ridge of the bald mountains looking down upon the promised land.

"So this is Eldorado, is it?"

Ned Corbett himself was the speaker, though probably those who had known him at home or in Victoria would have hardly recognized him. All the three gold-seekers had altered much in the last month, and standing in the bright sunlight of early morning the changes wrought by hard work and scanty food were very apparent.

Bronzed, and tired, and ragged, with a stubble of half-grown beards upon their chins, with patches of sacking or deer-skin upon their trousers, and worn-out moccasins on their feet, none of the three showed signs of that golden future which was to come. Beggars they might be, but surely Crœsus never looked like this!

"We shall make it to-day, Ned," remarked Chance, taking off his cap to let the cool mountain breeze fan his brow.

"We may, if we can drag him along, but he is very nearly dead beat;" and the direction in which Ned glanced showed his companion that he was speaking of a limp bundle of blue rags, which had collapsed in a heap at the first sign of a halt.

"Why not leave Phon to follow us?" asked Steve in a low tone. Low though the tone was, the bundle of blue rags moved, and a worn, shrivelled face looked piteously up into Ned's.

"No, no, Steve," replied Corbett. "All right, Phon, I'll not leave you behind, even if I have to pack you on my own shoulders."

Thus reassured, the Chinaman collapsed once more. There was not a muscle in his body which felt capable of further endurance, and yet, with the gold so near, and his mind full of superstitious horrors, he would have crawled the rest of the journey upon his hands and knees rather than have stayed behind.

"Thank goodness, there it is at last!" cried Corbett a minute later, shading his eyes with his hand. "That smoke I expect rises from somewhere near our claims;" and the speaker pointed to a faint column of blue which was just distinguishable from the surrounding atmosphere.

"I believe you are right, Ned. Come, Phon, one more effort!" and Steve helped the Chinaman on to his legs, though he himself was very nearly worn out.

Ned took up the slender pack which Phon had carried until then, and added it to the other two packs already upon his broad shoulders. After all the three packs weighed very little, for Ned's companions had thrown away everything except their blankets, and Steve would have even thrown his blanket away had not Ned taken charge of it. Ned knew from experience that so long as he sleeps fairly soft and warm at night a man's strength will endure many days, but once you rob him of his rest, the strongest man will collapse in a few hours.

As for their food, that was not hard to carry. Each man had a crust still left in his pocket, and more than enough tobacco. Along the trail there were plenty of streams full of good water, and if bread and water and tobacco did not satisfy them, they would have to remain unsatisfied. It had been a hard race against time, and the last lap still remained to be run; but that smoke was the goal, and with the goal in sight even Phon shuffled along a little faster, though he was so tired that, whenever he stumbled he fell from sheer weakness.

The bald mountains so often alluded to in Cariboo story are ranges of high upland, rising above the forest level, and entirely destitute of timber at the top.

Here in late summer the sunnier slopes are slippery with a luxuriant growth of long lush grasses and weeds, and ablaze with the vivid crimson of the Indian pink. In early spring (and May is early spring in Cariboo) there is still snow along the ridges, and even down below, though the grasses are brilliantly green, the time of flowers has hardly yet come.

Here and there as the three hurried down they came across big boulders of quartz gleaming in the sun. These were as welcome to Steve as the last milestone on his road home to a weary pedestrian. Where the quartz was, there would the gold be also, argued Steve, and the thought roused him for a moment out of the mechanical gait into which he had fallen. But he soon dropped into it again. A hill had risen and shut the column of smoke out of his sight, and the trail was leading down again to the timber.

Away far to the east a huge dome of snow gleamed whitely against the sky-line. That was the outpost of the Rockies. But Steve had no eyes even for the Rockies. All he saw was a sea of endless brown hills rolling and creeping away fold upon fold in the distance, all so like one to another from their bald ridges to the blue lakes at their feet, that his head began to spin, and he almost thought that he must be asleep, and this some nightmare country in which he wandered along a road that had no end.

Luckily Ned roused him from this dreamy fit from time to time, or it might well have happened that Steve's journey would have ended on this side of Williams Creek in a rapid slide from the narrow trail to the bottom of one of the little ravines along which it ran.

Both men were apparently thinking of the same subject. So that though their sentences were short and elliptical, they had no difficulty in understanding each other's meaning. Men don't waste words on such a march as theirs.

"Another three hours ought to do it," Ned would mutter, shifting his pack so as to give the rope a chance of galling him in a fresh place.

"If we get there by midnight, I reckon it would do."

"Yes, if we could find the claims."

"Ah, there is that about it! Have you got the map?"

"Yes. I've got that all right. Oh, we shall do it in good time;" and Ned looked up at his only clock, the great red sun, which was now nearly overhead.

The next moment Corbett's face fell. The path led round a bluff, beyond which he expected to see the trail go winding gradually down to a little group of tents and huts gathered about Williams Creek. Instead of that he found himself face to face with one of those exasperating gulches which so often bar the weary hunter's road home in the Frazer country. The swelling uplands rolled on, it was true, sinking gradually to the level of Williams Creek, and he could see the trail running from him to his goal in fairly gentle sweeps, all except about half a mile of it, and that half-mile lay right in front of him, and was invisible.

It had sunk, so it seemed to Ned, into the very bowels of the earth, and another hundred yards brought him to the edge of the gulch and showed him that this was the simple truth. As so often happens in this country which ice has formed (smoothing it here and cutting great furrows through it elsewhere), the downs ended without warning in a precipitous cliff leading into a dark narrow ravine, along the bottom of which the gold-seekers could just hear the murmur of a mountain stream.

It was useless to look up and down the ravine. There was no way over and no way round. It was a regular trap. A threadlike trail, but well worn, showed the only way by which the gulch could be crossed, and as Ned looked at it he came to the conclusion that if there was another such gulch between him and Williams Creek it would probably cost him all he was worth, for no one in his party could hope to cross two such gulches before nightfall.

"It's no good looking at it, come along, Steve!" he cried, and grasping at any little bush within reach to steady his steps, Ned began the descent.

Who ever first made that trail was in a hurry to get to Williams Creek. The recklessness of the gold miner, determined to get to his gold, and careless of life and limb in pursuit of it, was apparent in every yard of that descent, which, despising all circuitous methods, plunged headlong into the depths below.

Twice on the way down Steve only owed his life to the stout mountain weeds to which his fingers clung when his feet forsook him, and once it was only Ned's strong hand which prevented Phon from following a great flat stone which his stumbling feet had sent tobogganing into the dark gulf below.

For two or three minutes Ned had to hold on to Phon by the scruff of the neck before he was quite certain that he was to be trusted to walk alone again. Even Steve kept staring into that "dark-profound" into which the stone had vanished in a way which Corbett did not relish. Though he had never felt it himself, he knew all about that strange fascination which seems to tempt some men, brave men too, to throw themselves out of a railway-carriage, off a pier-head, or down a precipice, and therefore Ned was not sorry to be at the bottom of that precipitous trail without the loss of either Steve or Phon.

"Say, Ned, how does that strike you? It's a 'way-up' bridge, isn't it, old man?" and the speaker pointed to a piece of civil engineering characteristic of Cariboo.

Two tall pines had grown upon opposite edges of the narrow ravine in which the gulch ended. From side to side this ravine was rather too broad for a single pine to span, and far down below, somewhere in the darkness of it, a stream roared and foamed along. The rocks were damp with mist and spray, but the steep walls of the narrow place let in no light by which the prisoned river could be seen. In order to cross this place, men had loosened the roots of the two pines with pick and shovel, until the trees sinking slowly towards each other had met over the mid-stream. Then those who had loosened the roots did their best to make them fast again, weighting them with rocks, and tethering them with ropes. When they had done this they had lashed the tops of the trees together, lopped off a few boughs, run a hand-rope over all, and called the structure a bridge.

Over this bridge Ned and his comrades had now to pass, and as he looked at the white face and quaking legs of Phon, and then up at the evening sky, Ned turned to Steve and whispered in his ear: "Pull yourself together, Steve. This is a pretty bad place, but we have got to get over at once or not at all. That fellow will faint or go off his head before long."

Luckily for Ned, Steve Chance had plenty of what the Yankees call "sand."

"I'm ready, go ahead," he muttered, keeping his eyes as much as possible averted from the abyss towards which they were clambering.

"I'll go first," said Corbett, when they had reached the roots of the nearest pine; "then Phon, and you last, Steve." Then bending over his friend he whispered, "Threaten to throw him in if he funks."

Of course the bridge in front of Corbett was not the ordinary way to Williams Creek. Pack-trains had come to Williams Creek even in those early days, and clever as pack-ponies are, they have not yet developed a talent for tree climbing. So there was undoubtedly some other way to Williams Creek. This was only a short cut, a route taken by pedestrians who were in a hurry, and surely no pedestrians were ever in a much greater hurry than Steve and Ned and Phon.

Consider! Their all was on the other side of that ravine; all their invested wealth and all their hopes as well; all the reward for weeks of weary travel, as well as rest, and shelter, and food. They had much to gain in crossing that ravine, and the slowly sinking sun warned them that they had no time to look for a better way round. They must take that short cut or none. And yet when Ned got closer to the rough bridge he liked it less than ever. Where the trees should have met and joined together a terrible thing had happened. Ned could see it now quite plainly from where he stood. A wind, he supposed, must have come howling up the gulch in one of the dark days of winter, a wind so strong that when the narrow gully had pent it in, it had gone rushing along, smashing everything that it met in its furious course, and amongst other things it had struck just the top of the arch of the bridge.

The result was that just at the highest point there was a gap, not a big gap, indeed it was so small that some of the ropes still held and stretched from tree to tree, but still a gap, six feet wide with no bridge across it, and black, unfathomable darkness down below. Ned Corbett was one of those men who only see the actual danger which has to be faced, the thing which has to be done—that which is, and not that which may be. For instance, Ned saw that he had to jump from one stout bough to another, that he would have to cling to something with his hands on the other side, and that it would not do to make a false step, or to clutch at a rotten bough.

That was all he saw. So he leapt with confidence (he had taken twenty worse leaps in an afternoon in the gymnasium at home for the fun of the thing), and of course he alighted in safety, clambered down the other pine-tree trunk, and landed safe and sound on the farther shore. He had never stayed to think of the awful things which would have happened if he had slipped; of that poor body of his which might have gone whirling round and round through the darkness, until it plunged into the waters out of sight of the sun and his fellow-men.

But all men are not made after this fashion. When Ned turned towards the bridge he had just passed his face turned white, and his hands, which had until then been so firm trembled. What he saw was this. Phon had been driven ahead of Steve, as Corbett and Steve had arranged. As long as the big broad trunk of the pine was beneath him, with plenty of strong boughs all round him to cling to, Phon had listened to Steve and obeyed him. Now it was different. Phon had come to the end of the pine, to the place from which Corbett had leaped, and nothing which Steve could say would move him another inch. Chinamen are not trained in athletics as white men are, and to Phon that six-foot jump appeared to be a simply impossible feat. Steve might threaten what he liked, but jump Phon would not. The mere sight of the horrible darkness below made his head reel, and his fingers cling to the rough pine like the fingers of a drowning man to a plank.

And now Ned noticed a worse thing even than this Phon had been driven to the very end of the tree by Steve, and Steve himself was close behind him. The result was that the weight of two men had to be borne at once by the thin end of what, after all, was but a small pine, and one extended almost like a fishing-rod across the ravine. So the tree began to bow with the weight, and then to lift itself again until it was swinging and tossing, swaying more and more after every recoil, so that at each swing Ned expected to see one or both of his friends tossed off into the gulf below. There must come an end to such a scene as this sooner or later, and Ned could see but one chance of saving his friend.

"Chance," he shouted, "hold tight! I am going to shoot that cursed Chinaman!"

The miserable wretch heard and understood the words, and saw the Winchester, the same which had sent the runaway cayuse spinning down the stone-slide, come slowly up to Corbett's shoulder.

"Jump or I'll shoot! It's your last chance!" and Phon heard the clank of the pump as his master forced up a cartridge into the barrel of his rifle.

It was now death anyway. Phon realized that, and even at that moment his memory showed him plainly a picture of that pinto mare, whose bruised and battered body, with a great ghastly hole between the eyes, he had seen by the edge of Seton Lake. That last thought decided him, and with a scream of fear he sprang out, and managed to cling, more by sheer luck than in any other way, to the pine on the Williams Creek side of the ravine. When Ned grounded arms and reached out to help Phon across the last few feet of the bridge he was wet through with perspiration, and yet he was as cool as a new-made grave.

"Ned," said Steve five minutes later, "I would give all the gold in Cariboo if I had it, rather than cross that place again!"—and he meant it.

For a few minutes Steve's gold fever had abated, and in the terror of death even the Chinaman had forgotten the yellow metal. And yet their journey was now over, and within half an hour's walk of them lay the claims they had bought, the wonderful spot of earth out of which they were to dig their heart's desire, the key to all pleasures and the master of nine men out of every ten—gold!

Ned laughed to himself. Was a steady head and the agility of a very second-rate gymnast worth more than all the gold in Cariboo?

"WITH A SCREAM OF FEAR THE CHINAMAN SPRANG OUT."

CHAPTER XII. A SHEER SWINDLE.

It is hard to sever the idea of a journey's end from ideas of rest and comfort. A is the starting-point, B the goal, and no matter how distant, no matter how wild the region in which B lies, the mind of the traveller from A to B is sure to picture B as a centre of creature comforts and a haven of luxurious rest.

Thus it was then that Steve and Corbett hurried through the lengthening shadows, eager for the city that was to come, their eyes strained to catch a glow of colour, and their ears alert for the first hum which should tell of the presence of their fellow-men.

After the gloom of the northern forests, the silence of the pack-trail, and the monotony of forced marches, they were ready to welcome any light however garish, any revelry however mad it might be. Life and light and noise were what both hankered after as a relief from the silence and solitude of the last few days, and it is this natural craving for change in the minds of men who have been too much alone, which accounts for half the wild revels of the frontier towns.

As a matter of history, the first impression made by Williams Creek upon the sensitive mind of the artist Chance was one of disappointment. Perhaps it was that the heavy shadows of the mountains drowned all colour, or that the day was nearly over and the dance-house not yet open; whatever the cause Williams Creek struck Chance with a chill. It was a miserable, mean-looking little place for so much gold to come from. In his visions of the mines Steve had dwelt too much upon the glitter of the metal, and too little on the dirt and bare rock from which the gold has to be extracted; extracted, too, by hard labour, about the hardest labour probably which the bodies of men were ever made to undergo.

As his eyes gradually took in the details of the scene, Steve Chance remembered Cruickshank's glowing word-pictures of the mines, and his own gaudy map of them, and remembering these things a great fear fell upon him. Steve had accomplished a pilgrimage over a road upon which stronger men had died, and brave men turned back, and now the shrine of his golden god lay at his feet, and this is what it looked like.

In the shadow of a spur of wooded mountains, lay a narrow strip of land which might by comparison be called flat. It was lower than the bald mountains which were at its back, so the melted snows of last winter had trickled into it, until the whole place was a damp, miserable bog, through the centre of which the waters had worn themselves a bed, and made a creek.

There were many such bogs and many such creeks about the foothills of the bald mountains, but these were for the most part hidden by an abundant growth of pine, or adorned by a wealth of long grass and the glory of yellow lily and blue larkspur. But this bog was less fortunate than its fellows. Gold had been found in the creek which ran through it, so that instead of the spring flowers and the pines, there were bare patches of yellow mud, stumps rough and untrained where trees had stood, tunnels in the hillside, great wooden gutters mounted high in the air to carry off the stream from its bed and pour it into all manner of unexpected places, piles of boulders and rubbish, so new and unadorned by weed or flower that you knew instinctively that nature had had no hand in their arrangement.

And everywhere amongst this brutal digging and hewing there were new log huts, frame shanties, wet untidy tents, and shelters made of odds and ends, shelters so mean that an African Bushman would have turned up his nose at them. Instead of the telegraph and telephone wires that run overhead in ordinary cities, there were in the mining camp innumerable flumes, long wooden boxes or gutters, to carry water from point to point. These gutters were everywhere. They ran over the tops of the houses, they came winding down for miles along precipitous side-hills, and they ran recklessly across the main street; for traffic there was none in those days, or at any rate none which could not step over, or would not pass round the miners' ditch. In 1862 rights of way were disregarded up in Cariboo, but an inch of water if it could be used for gold-washing was a matter of much moment.

"I say, Ned, this looks more like a Chinese camp than a white man's, doesn't it?" remarked Steve with a shudder.

"What did you expect, Steve,—a second San Francisco?"

"Not that; but this place looks so dead and seems so still."

"Silence, they say, is the criterion of pace," quoted Ned; "but I can hear the noise of the rockers and the rattle of the gravel in the sluices. It looks to me as if men were at work here in grim earnest.—Good-day. How goes it, sir?"

The last part of Corbett's speech was addressed to a man of whom he just caught sight at that moment, standing in a deep cutting by the side of the trail, and busily employed in shovelling gravel into a sluice-box at his side.

"Day," grunted the miner, not pausing to lift his head to look at the man who addressed him until he had finished his task.

"Are things booming here still?" asked Chance.

"Booming, you bet! Why, have you just come up from the river?" and the man straightened his back with an effort and jerked his head in the general direction of the Frazer.

"That's what," replied Steve, dropping naturally into the brief idioms of the place.

"Seen anything of the bacon train?" asked the miner after a pause, during which he had again ministered to the wants of his sluice-box.

"The bacon train! What's that?"

"Brown's bacon train from Oregon. Guess you haven't, or you'd know about it. Bacon is played out in Williams Creek, and we are all going it straight on flour."

The thought of "going it straight on flour" was evidently too much for Steve's new friend, for he actually groaned aloud, and dug his shovel into the wall of his trench with as much energy as if he had been driving it into the ribs of the truant Bacon Brown.

"That will suit us royally," ejaculated Ned. "We shall have a small train here in a day or two, and there's a good deal of bacon amongst our stores."

"You've got a train acomin'! By thunder! I thought I knowed your voices. Ain't you them two Britishers as were along of Cruickshank?"

"Strike me pink if it isn't Rampike!" cried Steve, and the next minute the old gentleman who had helped Steve in his little game of poker climbed out of the mud-pie he was making, and shook hands, even with the Chinaman.

"But where's Roberts, and where's Cruickshank?" he asked.

Corbett told him.

"Wal, as you've left Roberts with him I suppose it's all right. Did you meet any boys going back from these parts?"

"Only two, going back for grub," replied Ned.

"I guess they told you how short we were up here, and they are worse off at Antler."

"No, they said very little to us. They had a bit of a yarn with Cruickshank though. He was leading out and met them first. He didn't say anything about the want of grub to us."

"That's a queer go. Why, it would almost have paid you to go to Antler instead of coming here. You would get two dollars a pound for bacon up there."

"Ah! but you see we were bound to be here for the 1st of June, because of those claims we bought."

"Is that so? Bob did say summat about those claims. Do you know where they are?"

"Here's our map," replied Corbett, producing the authorized map of Dewd and Cruickshank, upon which the three claims had been duly marked. "Is Dewd in the camp?" he added.

"I don't know; but come along, there goes Cameron's triangle. Let us go and get some 'hash,' and we can find out about Dewd and the claims." And so saying Rampike laid aside his shovel, put on his coat, and led the way down to a big tent in the middle of the mining camp.

Here were gathered almost half the population of Williams Creek for their evening meal, the other half having finished theirs and departed to work upon the night-shift; for most of the claims were worked night and day, their owners and the hired men dividing the twenty-four hours amongst them.

Here, as on board the steamer, Rampike was evidently a man of some account; one able to secure a place for himself and his chums in spite of the rush made upon the food by the hungry mob in its shirt sleeves.

At first all three men were too busy with their knives and forks to notice anyone or hear what men were saying about themselves, but in a little while, when the edge of appetite was dulled, Ned caught the words repeated over and over again—"Bacon Brown's men, I guess," and at last had to answer point blank to a direct question, that he had "never heard of Mr. Brown before."

"These fellows hain't seen Brown at all," added Rampike. "They're looking for Dewd. Have you seen him anywhere around?"

At the mention of Dewd's name a broad grin passed over the faces of those who heard it, and one man looked up and remarked that a good many people had been inquiring kindly after Dewd lately. The speaker was a common type amongst the miners, but in those early days his rough clothes and refined speech struck Ned as contrasting strangely.

Truth to tell, he had been educated at Eton and Oxford, had thrown up a good tutorship to come out here, and here he was happy as a king, though all his classical education was thrown away, and his blue pantaloons were patched fore and aft with bits of sacking once used to contain those favourite brands of flour known respectively as "Self-rising" and the "Golden Gate."

As he rose to his feet with the names of the brands printed in large letters on either side of him, he looked something between a navvy and a "sandwich man."

"Dewd," he went on, "has been playing poker lately a little too well to please the boys. Say, O'Halloran, do you know where Dewd is?"

"Faith and I don't. If I did, Sandy M'Donald would give me half his claim for the information. Hullo, have you got here already, sonny? I was before ye though." And Ned's red-headed friend of fighting proclivities held out his hand to him over the heads of his neighbours.

"What does Sandy want him for?" asked someone in the crowd.

"You'd betther ax Sandy. All I know is that he went gunning for him early this morning, and if he wasn't so drunk that he can't walk he'd be afther him still."

"Who's drunk, Pat,—Dewd or Sandy?"

"Oh, don't be foolish! Whoever heard of Dewd touching a drop of good liquor. That's the worst of that mane shunk; he gets you blind drunk first and robs you afther."

"What, have you been bitten too, O'Halloran?" asked the tutor; and while the laugh was still going at the wry face poor Corny O'Halloran pulled, Rampike and his three friends slipped quietly out of the room.

"I guess we may as well locate those claims of yourn right away," remarked Rampike as soon as they were clear of Cameron's tent, "so as there'll be no trouble about securing them to-morrow. Not as I think any one is likely to jump 'em. Let me see your map."

Ned handed over the map before alluded to.

"Why, look ye here, these claims are right alongside the Nugget, the richest claim on the creek!" cried their friend, after studying the map for a few minutes.

"Quite so, that is what gives them their exceptional value," remarked Chance, quoting from memory Cruickshank's very words.

"Oh, that's what gives them their 'ceptional vally, is it, young man?" sneered Rampike. "Wal, I guess they ought to have a 'ceptional vally' to make it worth while working them there;" and Rampike, who was now standing by the Nugget claim alongside the bed of the creek, pointed upwards to where the bluffs, two hundred feet high, hung precipitously over their heads.

It was no good arguing, no good swearing that the map must be wrong, that Cruickshank had marked the wrong lots, that there was a mistake somewhere.

"Just one of the colonel's mistakes, that's what it is. Come and see the gold Commissioner, he'll straighten it out for you," retorted Rampike, hurrying the three off into the presence of a big handsome man, whose genial ways and handsome face made "the judge" a great favourite with the miners.

All he could do he did, and was ready to go far beyond the obligations of his office in his desire to help Cruickshank's victims. It was a very common kind of fraud after all. The colonel had drawn a sufficiently accurate map of the Williams Creek valley; he had even given accurately every name upon that map, and moreover the claims which he had sold to Corbett & Co. adjoined the Nugget claim, and had been regularly taken up and bonded by his partner and himself. Cruickshank's story indeed was true in every particular.

Gold was being taken out of the Nugget mine at the rate of several lbs. per diem; why should it not be taken out of the claims which it adjoined?

There was only one objection to Cruickshank's map,—he had not drawn it in relief. There was only one objection to Corbett's claim—the surface of it would have adjoined the surface of the Nugget claim had they both been upon the same level, only,—only, you see, they were not. There was a trifling difference of two hundred and fifty feet in the altitude of the Nugget claim and the bluff adjoining it, and Corbett's claim was on the top of that bluff. Now a claim on the top of a bluff, where no river could ever have run to deposit gold, and whither no water could be brought to wash for gold, was not considered worth two thousand dollars even in Cariboo.

CHAPTER XIII. THE BULLET'S MESSAGE.

"Wal, those'll maybe make vallible building lots when Williams Creek has growed as big as 'Frisco, but somehow trade in building lots ain't brisk here just now."

No one answered old Rampike. Steve and Ned felt rather hurt at the levity of his remarks. It is poor fun even for a rich man to be robbed of six thousand dollars, and neither Ned nor Steve were rich men. In fact, in losing the six thousand dollars they had lost their all except the pack-train.

"It ain't no manner of good to grizzle over it," continued this philosopher, "Cruickshank has got the cinch on you to rights this time. Six thousand dollars cash, the pleasure of your company from Victoria, and your pack-train to remember you by! Ho! ho!" and although it was very annoying to Ned, and quite contrary to Rampike's nature to do so, he laughed aloud at his own grim joke.

The laugh roused Chance. He was a Yankee to the tips of his finger-nails, one of those strange beings who "bust and boom" by turns—millionaires to-day, bankrupts to-morrow, equally sanguine, happy, and go-ahead in either extreme.

"Ned," he said, his face relaxing into a somewhat wintry smile, "I guess you were right after all. Cruickshank is no Britisher, you bet."

"Glad you think so; hang him!" growled Ned.

"No Britisher could ever have planned so neat a swindle," continued Steve meditatively. "By Jove, it is a 'way up'!" and this strange young man really seemed lost in admiration at the smartness from which he himself had suffered.

"I don't see much to admire in a thief and a liar. We prefer honesty to smartness in my country, thank God!"

There was no disguising the fact that Ned Corbett was in a very ugly temper. Not being one of those who look upon the whole struggle for wealth as a game of chance and skill, in which everything is allowable except a plain transgression of the written rules of the game, he could not even simulate any admiration for a successful swindler's smartness.

Old Rampike saw his mood, and laying his hand on his shoulder gave him a friendly shake. "Never mind, sonny," he said. "It's no good calling names; and as for being stone-broke, why there isn't a man in Cariboo to-day, I reckon, who hasn't been stone-broke, aye and most of 'em mor'n once or twice."

"Oh, yes, I suppose that is so," said Ned a little wearily, but rousing himself all the same. "What can a man earn here as a digger in another fellow's claim?"

"Anything he likes to ask almost. Men who are worth anything at all as workers are scarce around these parts."

"Then we sha'n't starve, that is some consolation. By the way, I have a note here for you. This confounded business nearly made me forget it;" and so saying Corbett produced from an inner pocket the little note given him by Roberts at the Balm-of-Gilead camp.

For a few moments Rampike twisted and turned the note about, trying to decipher the faint pencil-marks in the dim light. At last he got the note right side up and began to read. Evidently he hardly understood what he read at first, for those who were watching him saw that he read the note through a second time, as if looking for some hidden meaning in every word. When he had done this a vindictive bitter oath burst from between his set teeth.

"If Cruickshank ain't dead by now, my old pal Roberts is. You may bet on that. Look ye here!" and the speaker handed Ned a flattened, blood-stained bullet which he had taken from Roberts' letter.

"Do you know what that is?" he asked.

"It looks like a revolver bullet," answered Ned.

"And so it is. That's the identical bullet as Dan Cruickshank fired at a grouse and hit a cayuse with. Pretty shooting, wasn't it?" and Rampike ground his teeth with anger.

"What the deuce do you mean?" cried Steve in blank astonishment.

"Mean—mean! Why, that if you warn't such a durned tenderfoot you'd have tumbled to the whole thing long ago! Men like Cruickshank don't leave horses unhobbled by mistake, don't hit and scare pack-horses on a stone-slide by mistake, don't get to Williams Creek a day late by mistake. Oh, curse his mistakes! If he makes one more there'll be the best pal and the sweetest singer in Cariboo lying dead up among them pines."

"Do you mean that Cruickshank did these things on purpose?" asked Corbett slowly, his face growing strangely hard as he spoke.

"Read Rob's letter," said Rampike, and gave Ned the scrap of paper on which Rob had found time to write a brief record of the journey from Douglas, ending his story in these words—"Cruickshank means Corbett mischief, so I am staying instead of the lad. What his game is with the pack-ponies I am blowed if I know, but if I don't come in with them inside of a week, do some of you fellows try and get even with the colonel for the sake of your old pal Roberts."

For several minutes after reading this note no one spoke; each man was thinking out the situation after his own fashion.

"Will you trust me with grub for a fortnight, Rampike?" asked Ned at last.

"Yes, lad, if you like; but you won't want to borrow. Men like you can earn all they want here;" and the miner looked appreciatively at the big-limbed man before him.

"I'll earn it by and by, Rampike. I'm going after Roberts first," replied Ned quietly.

"How's that?" demanded Rampike.

"I'm going after Roberts and Cruickshank. Can I have the grub?"

"If that's your style, you can have all the grub you want if I have to go hungry for a week. When will you start?"

"It will be dark in two hours," replied Ned, "and the moon comes up about midnight. I shall start as soon as the moon is up."

"Impossible, man!" cried Chance. "I could not drag myself to the top of that first bluff unless I had had twenty-four hours' solid sleep, if my life depended upon it."

"I know, old fellow, and I don't want you to; but you see a life may depend upon it."

"But you aren't going alone, Corbett. I'll not hear of that."

"We will talk about that by and by, Steve. Let us go and turn in for a little while now. I am dead tired myself." And so saying Corbett turned on his heel and followed Rampike to his hut, where the old man found room for all three of them upon the floor.

"If Steve and I go to look for Roberts can you find a job for our Chinaman until we come back? I should not like the poor beggar to starve," said Ned, pointing to where Phon lay already fast asleep. The moment he laid down his head Phon had gone to sleep, and since then not a muscle had twitched to show that he was alive. Whatever his master might choose to arrange for his benefit the Chinaman was not likely to overhear or object to.

"Oh yes, I can fix that easy enough. I'll set him to wash in my own claim. I can afford to pay him good wages as well as feed him. Men are scarce at Williams Creek."

Again for a time there was silence in the hut, Corbett and Rampike puffing away at their pipes, and Steve Chance trying hard to keep his eyes open as if he suspected mischief. At last nature got the better of him; the young Yankee's head dropped on his arm, and in another moment he was as sound asleep as Phon.

Then Ned stood up and went over to sit beside the old miner Rampike, remarking as he did so:

"Thank heaven Steve is off at last. I thought the fellow never meant to go to sleep."

"What! Do you mean to leave him behind?" asked Rampike.

"Does he look as if he could do another week's tramping?" retorted Ned, glancing at the limp, worn-out figure of his friend. "He has pluck enough to try, but he would only hinder me."

"If that's so, I'll chuck my claim and come along too."

"Nonsense, you can't afford to lose your claim; and, besides, you couldn't help me."

"Couldn't help you! How's that?" snorted Rampike indignantly.

"A man can always hunt better alone than with another fellow. One makes less noise than two in the woods."

"But you ain't going hunting?"

"Yes I am,—hunting big game too." And there was a light in Ned Corbett's eye, as he overhauled his Winchester, that looked bad for an enemy.

"You ain't afraid of—losing your way?" asked Rampike. He was going to say "You ain't afraid of Cruickshank, are you?" but a look on Corbett's face stopped that question.

"No, I'm used to the woods," Ned answered shortly; and then again for a while the two men smoked on in silence.

Presently Corbett knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and put it away carefully in his pocket.

"Do you work in the night-shift on your place?" he asked Rampike.

"Either me or my partner is there all the while."

"Shall you be there to-night?"

"I'll be going on at midnight, but I'll fix up a pack with some grub in it for you before I go."

"Thank you, I'll leave that to you, if I may. Will you call me before you go? I mean to try to get all the sleep I can before the moon is up."

"Well, lie down right now. I'll call you, you bet. You're a good sort for a Britisher—give us a shake;" and Rampike held out a hand as hard and as honest as the pick-handle to which it clung day after day.

Perhaps it was the thought of his old friend's danger which made Rampike blind and careless, or perhaps it was only his natural clumsiness. In any case he steered very badly for his own door, so badly indeed that he tripped over Chance's prostrate form, dealing him a kick that might have roused a dead man. But Steve only turned over restlessly in his sleep, like one who dreams, and then lay as still again as ever.

Ned smiled. "No danger of waking him, I think, when I want to go. Poor old Steve! the loss of the money does not seem to spoil your sleep much."

Five minutes later, when Rampike had gone out to get together the provisions which his guest needed, anyone listening to that guest's regular breathing would have been of opinion that the loss of the dollars troubled Ned Corbett as little as it troubled Steve Chance.

CHAPTER XIV. WHAT THE WOLF FOUND.

About midnight Rampike returned to his hut, and as the moonlight streamed through the doorway across the floor, Corbett rose without a word and joined the old miner outside.

"You didn't need much waking, lad."

"No; and yet I slept like a top. But I felt you were coming, and now every nerve in my body is wide awake."

Rampike looked at his companion curiously.

"You're a strong man, Ned Corbett, but take care. I've known stronger men than you get the 'jim-jams' from overwork."

Ned laughed. He hardly thought that a man who had not tasted liquor for a month was likely to suffer much from the "jim-jams."

"That's all right," said Rampike testily. "You may laugh, but I've seen more of this kind of life than you'll ever see, and I tell you, you'd better stay where you are."

"What! and let Cruickshank go?"

"What are you going to do with Cruickshank when you catch him?"

"Bring him back to look at the mistake he made about my claims," answered Corbett grimly.

"And suppose Cruickshank don't feel like coming back? It's more than likely that he won't."

"Then it will be a painful necessity for Roberts and myself to pack him back."

"If you get him back the law can't touch him, and the boys won't lynch him just for swindling a tenderfoot."

"The law can't touch him?"

"Why, certainly not. If you were such a blessed fool as to buy claims without a frontage on the crik, that's your business. He didn't say as they weren't on the top of a mountain."

"But no mountain was shown on his map," argued Corbett.

"I guess he'd say as he couldn't draw maps well and the one Steve Chance copied was the best he knew how to make. He sold you what he said he'd sell you, and if you didn't ask any questions that's your fault."

This was a new view of the case to Corbett, and for a moment he felt staggered by it, but only for a moment. After all, it was not for the sake of the claims that he had made up his mind to pursue Cruickshank.

"Thanks, Rampike, for trying to make me stay here. I know what you mean, but I am not as nearly 'beat' as you think I am, and I wouldn't leave old Roberts alone with that scoundrel even if I was. Have you got the grub there?"

"Well, if that's your reason for going I've no more to say, except as I reckon Roberts is pretty good at taking care of himself. However, a pal's a pal, and if you mean to stay by him, I'll not hinder you. Here's the grub;" and so saying he helped Ned to fix a little bundle upon his shoulders, taking care that whatever weight there was should lie easily in the small of his back. "It's only dried venison," continued Rampike, "and I didn't put any bread in. Bread weighs too much and takes up too much room. You can go it on meat straight for a week, can't you?"

"I'll try to. Give Chance a helping hand if you can. He is a regular rustler if you can get him any work to do."

"Don't worry yourself about your pals. You are going to look for Dick Rampike's old partner, and you may bet your sweet life that he won't let your pals starve."

The two men, who had been walking slowly through the mining camp, had now reached the foot of the trail by which Ned had arrived at Williams Creek.

"Well, good-bye, Rampike," said Ned, stopping and holding out his hand. "It's no good your coming any farther. Don't let Steve follow me."

"Good-bye, lad; I'll see that Steve Chance don't follow you. He ain't built to go your pace," he added, looking after Ned, "if he wanted to, but there'll be me and some of the boys after you afore long, if there's going to be any trouble;" and with this consoling reflection in his mind, the old hard-fist returned to his cabin, pulled off his long gum boots, and lay down on the floor beside the still sleeping Chance and Phon.

Mr. Rampike had not as yet had time to furnish his country residence, and after all, in his eyes a bed was rather a useless luxury. 'What's the matter with a good deal floor?' he often used to ask; and as he never got a satisfactory answer, he never bothered to build himself a bunk.

Meanwhile Ned Corbett was standing for a moment on the top of a bluff above Williams Creek, whence he could still see the lights of the camp, and still hear faint strains of music from the dance-house and the monotonous "clink, clink" of the miner's pick. The next moment he turned his back upon it all; a rising bank shut out the last glimpse of the fires and the last faint hum of human life. The forest swallowed them up, and Ned was alone with the silence.

Never in all his life had he been in so strange a mood as he was that night.

It seemed to him that every nerve and muscle in his body, every faculty of his brain, had been tuned to concert pitch. All his old calmness had deserted him, and in place of it a very fire of impatience devoured him. Wherever the trail allowed of it he broke into a long swinging run, and yet, though the miles flew past him, he was not satisfied. On! on! a voice seemed to cry to him, and in spite of his speed the voice still urged him to further efforts. That was the worst of it. Instead of the silence the forest seemed full of voices,—not voices which spoke to his ear, but voices which cried to the soul that was within him. The shadows were full of these inarticulate cries, the night air throbbed with them, all nature was full of them, and of a secret which he alone seemed unable to grasp.

But it was no good standing still to listen, so he pressed on until he came to the bridge of pines where the day before Phon had clung, swinging between this world and the next. Here Corbett hesitated for the first time, standing at the top of that arch of pines, looking across the black gulf in which the unseen waters moaned horribly. If his foot slipped or his hands failed him for the tenth part of a second, he would drop from the moonlight into eternal darkness, leaving no trace behind by which men could tell that Ned Corbett had ever existed.

For a moment a cold horror seized him, he clung wildly to the boughs round him and looked backwards instead of forwards. But this fit only lasted for a moment, and then the bold English blood came back to his heart with a rush. "Good heavens!" he muttered, "am I turning Chinaman?" and as he muttered it he launched himself boldly across the gap, caught at the rope to steady himself, and having crossed the bridge set his face firmly once more for the bald mountains above him.

All through the night Corbett maintained that long swinging stride, climbing steadily up the steep hills and passing swiftly down the forest glades, tireless as a wolf and silent as a shadow.

When the dawn came he paused in his race, and sat down for a quarter of an hour to eat a frugal meal of dried meat. Had he been living the normal life of a civilized man in one of the cities of Europe, he would have needed much less food and eaten much more. All civilized human beings overeat themselves. Perhaps if the food at the Bristol or the Windsor was served as dry and as little seasoned as Rampike's venison, less would be eaten and more digested.

Breakfast over, Ned resumed his course. Even during his hurried meal he had been restless and anxious to get on. Fatigue seemed not to touch him, or a power over which mere human weariness could not prevail, possessed him.

As the air freshened and the stars paled, the tits and "whisky-jacks" began their morning complaints, their peevish voices convincing Ned that they had been up too long the night before. A little later the squirrels began to chatter and swear angrily at him as he passed, and a gray old coyoté slinking home to bed stood like a shadow watching him as he went, wondering, no doubt, who this early-rising hunter might be, with the swift silent feet, white set face, and stern blue eyes which looked so keen and yet saw nothing.

Then the sun rose, and at last, taking a hint from the tall red-deer, Ned threw himself down on the soft mosses, trusting in the sun to warm him in his slumbers, as it does all the rest of that great world which gets on very well without blankets.

Until the shadow had crept to the other side of the tree under which he lay, Ned Corbett slept without moving; then he rose again, ate a few mouthfuls of dried meat, took a modest draught of the white water which foamed and bubbled through the moss of the hillside, and again went on.

One day went and another came, and still Corbett held on his course, and on the third day he had his reward. At last on the trail in front of him he saw the tracks of horses, nine in number, all of them shod before and behind as his own had been, and the tracks of one man driving them.

That was singular. There were two men left with Ned Corbett's pack-train. Where had the other gone to? Backwards and forwards he went, bending low over the trail and scrutinizing every inch of it, but he could see no sign of that other man. Perhaps he had tired and had found room upon one of the least laden of the pack animals. It would be hard upon the beast and most uncomfortable for the rider, but it was possible.

Or perhaps the tracks of the man who "led out" had been quite obliterated by the feet of the beasts which followed him. That too was possible, and Ned remembered how he had noticed upon the trail that a horse's stride and a man's were almost exactly the same length, so that it might be that for a few hundred yards at any rate one of the animals had gone step for step over Cruikshanks or old Rob's tracks.

But this could not have lasted for long; either the man or the beast would have strayed a yard or two from the track once in the course of a mile; but Corbett had examined the tracks for more than a mile, and still the story of them was the same: "nine pack-horses driven by one man over the trail nearly a week ago;" that was the way the tracks read, and Ned could make nothing else out of them.

There was one thing, however, worth mentioning. Corbett had hit upon the tracks on the path by which he himself had come from the Balm-of-Gilead camp to Williams Creek, at a point as nearly as he could judge five miles on the Williams Creek side of that camp. So far then the pack-train had followed him, but at this point it had turned away almost at right angles to follow a well-beaten trail which Corbett and Steve had overlooked when they passed it a week earlier.

"That, I suppose, is where we went wrong, and this must be the proper pack-trail to Williams Creek," soliloquized Ned, and then for a moment he stood, doubting which way he should turn. Should he follow his pack-train, or should he go back until the tracks told him something of that other man, whose feet had left no record on the road?

The same instinct which had urged him on for the last three days, took hold upon him again and turned him almost against his will towards the old Balm-of-Gilead camp.

It was nearly dark when he reached it, and he would perhaps have passed it by, but that he stumbled over the half-burnt log which had been used as the side log for his own fire. Since Ned had camped there a little snow had fallen, a trifling local storm such as will take place in the mountains even in May, and this had sufficed to hide almost all trace of the camp in that rapidly waning light.

As well as he could, Corbett examined the camp, going carefully over every inch of it; but the only thing he could find was a cartridge belt, hung up on the branch of a pine,—a cartridge belt half full of ammunition for a revolver. This he at once recognized as belonging to Roberts.

"By Jove, that's careless," he muttered, "and unlike the old man. I should have thought at any rate that he would have found out his loss before he got very far away, and have come back for the belt."

In another quarter of an hour it was too dark to see his hand before his face, so making the best of a bad business Ned sat down at the foot of a big pine, and leaning his back against it tried to doze away the time until the moon should rise and enable him to proceed on his way. But though Corbett's muscles throbbed and his limbs trembled from over-exertion, no sleep would come to him. In spite of himself his brain kept on working, not in its ordinary methodical fashion, but as if it were red-hot with fever. Indeed poor Ned began to think that he was going mad. If he were not, what was this new fancy which possessed him?

For some reason beyond his own comprehension his brain would now do nothing but repeat over and over again the refrain of Roberts' favourite song. The tune of "the old pack-mule" had taken possession of him and would give him no peace. Without his will his fingers moved to the time of it; if he tried to think of something else his thoughts put themselves in words, and the words fell into the metre of it, and at last he became convinced that he could actually with his own bodily ears hear the refrain of it, sad and distant as he had last heard it before leaving that camp.

There it came again, wailing up out of the darkness, the very ghost of a song, and yet as distinct as if the singer's mouth had been at his ear—

"Riding, riding, riding on my old pack-mule."

When things had gone as far as this, Ned sprang to his feet with a start. There was no doubt about that weird note anyway; and though it was but the howl of a wolf which roused him from his doze, Ned shuddered as the long-drawn yell died away in the darkness, which was now slowly giving way to the light of the rising moon.

Brave man though he was, Ned Corbett felt a chill perspiration break out all over him, and his heart began to beat in choking throbs. The wolf's weird music had a meaning for him which he had never noticed in it before. He knew now why it was so sad. Had it not in it all the misery of homeless wandering, all the hopelessness of the Ishmael, whose hand is against every man as every man's hand is against him, all the bitterness of cold and hunger and darkness? Was his own lot to be like the wolf's?

"Great Scott, this won't do!" cried the lad, and snatching up his pack he blundered away upon the trail, prepared to face anything rather than his own fancies.

As he moved away down the trail Corbett thought that he caught a glimpse of the beast, whose hideous voice had dispelled his dreams and jarred so roughly upon his nerves.

Fear makes most men vicious, and Corbett was very human in all his moods, so that his first impulse on seeing the beast which had frightened him was to give it the contents of his revolver. Stooping down to see more clearly, he managed to get a faint and spectral outline of his serenader against the pale moonlight, and into the middle of this he fired. A wolf's body is not at any time too large a mark for a bullet, even if it be a rifle bullet; but a wolf's body is a very small mark indeed for a revolver bullet at night, and so Ned found it, and missed. To his intense surprise, however, the gray shadow was in no hurry to be gone. Though the report of the revolver seemed curiously loud in the absolute silence of a northern night, the wolf only cantered a few yards and then stood still again, and again sent his hideous cry wailing through the forest aisles.

"Curse you, you won't go, won't you?" hissed Ned, his nerve completely gone, and his heart full of unreasonable anger; and again he fired at the brute, and this time rushed in after his shot, determined if he could not kill him with a bullet to settle matters with the butt.

But the wolf vanished in the uncertain light as if he had really been a shadow, and his howl but the offspring of Corbett's fancy. For a few yards Ned followed in the direction in which the beast seemed to have gone, until his eyes fell upon a swelling in the snow, near to which the wolf had been when the first shot was fired.

What is that other sense which we all of us possess and for which there is no name,—that sense which is neither sight nor hearing, nor any of the other three common to our daily lives? Before Ned Corbett's eyes there lay a low swelling mound of snow, smooth white snow, still and cold in the pale moonlight. There were ten thousand other mounds just like it in the forest round him, and yet before this mound Corbett stood rooted to the ground, whilst his eyes dilated and he felt his hair rising with horror, and in the utter stillness heard his own heart thundering against his side.

Until that moment Ned Corbett had never looked upon the dead. He had heard and read of death, and knew that in his turn he too must die; but as it chanced, he had never yet seen that dumb blind thing which live men bury, saying this was a man. And yet it needed not the disappointed yell of that foul scavenger to tell him what lay beneath the snow.

Slowly he compelled himself to draw near, and stooping he completed with reverent hands what the claws of the hungry beast had already begun, and then the moon and the man, with wan white faces, looked down together upon all that remained of cheery old Rob. Corbett knew at last why there had been no peace for him in the forests that night. There was no mystery about his old comrade's death. The whole foul story of murder was written so large that the woods knew it, and were full of it. This was the story which the shuddering pines had whispered all along the trail, and at last Corbett had grasped their secret and knew what the voices kept saying.

Just where the curly hair came down upon his friend's sturdy neck, was a small dark hole; a trifling wound it looked to have killed so strong a man, and yet when the bullet struck him there, Roberts had fallen without knowing who had struck him.

Then for one moment, perhaps, the man who did this thing had stood glaring at what he had done, more afraid of the dead man at his feet than his victim had ever been of any man. The position of the body told the rest of the story. Though he could kill him, Cruickshank dared not leave those death-sharpened features staring up to heaven appealing for vengeance against the murderer, so he had seized the corpse by its wrists and dragged it away from the camp-fire, away to where the dark balsams threw their heaviest shadows, and there left it, its arms stretched out stiff and rigid for the snows to cover and hide until it should melt away into the earth whence it came.

And what was Corbett to do? Men do not weep for men—their grief lies too deep for that—and, moreover, there is nothing practical in tears.

And yet what was Corbett to do? He might hide the dead again for awhile, but in the end he would be meat for the wolf and the raven.

"Oh God!" he cried in the bitterness of his spirit, "is this nothing unto Thee? Dost Thou see what man has done?"

And even then, while the infinitely small pleaded from the depth of the forest to the Infinitely Mighty, a little wind came and shook the tops of the pines, and the dawn came.

Thereafter, as far as Corbett knew, time ceased. Only the pines went by and the trail slipped past under his feet, until, in spite of all his efforts, and although the trees seemed still to go past him, he himself stood still. Then there came a humming in the air and the thunder of a great river in his ears, and the earth began to rise and fall, and suddenly it was night!

* * * * * * * *

It was on a Monday morning that Ned Corbett started from Williams Creek to search for Cruickshank, and on Saturday old Bacon Brown from Oregon brought his train into Antler, and with it a tall, fair-haired man, whom he had found upon the trail some fifteen miles back he said—a man whom he guessed had had the "jim-jams" pretty bad, "and come mighty nigh to sending in his chips, you bet."

CHAPTER XV. IN THE DANCE-HOUSE.

"Chassey to the right, chassey to the left, swing your partners round, and all promenade!" sang Old Dad, fiddler and master of ceremonies at Antler, British Columbia.

It was early in June. The moon was riding high above the pine-trees, and the men of the night-shifts were dropping in one by one for a dance with Lilla and Katchen before going to supper.

Claw-hammer coats and boiled shirts were not insisted upon in the Antler dance-house, so most of the men swaggered in in their gray suits and long gum boots, all splashed with blue mud, and took their waltz just as we should take our sherry and bitters, as a pleasant interlude between business and dinner.

Some fellows found time to eat and sleep, and a few were said to wash, but no one could afford to waste time in changing his clothes at the Cariboo gold-mines in '62. When your overalls wore out you just handed your dust over the store-keeper's counter and got into a new pair right there, and some fellows took off their gum boots when they lay down for a sleep. Wasn't that change enough?

At any rate the hurdy girls were content with their partners, and their partners were all in love with the "hurdies."

Now, it may be that some unfortunate person who knows nothing of anything west of Chicago may read this book, and may want to know what a "hurdy" is or was, for, alas! the "hurdies," like the dodo, are extinct.

Be it known then to all who do not know it already, that the hurdy-gurdy girls (to give them their full title) were douce, honest lassies from Germany, who, being fond of dancing and fond of dollars, combined business with pleasure, and sold their dances to the diggers at so many pinches of dust per dance. It was an honest and innocent way of earning money, and if any sceptic wants to sneer at the gentle hurdies, there need be no difficulty in finding an "old-timer" to argue with him; only the arguments used in Cariboo are forcible certainly, and might even seem somewhat "rocky" to a mild-mannered man.

Well, now you know what a "hurdy" was, and when I tell you that a troop of hurdies had just come up from Kamloops, you will understand that Antler was very much en fête on this particular June night.

Indeed, the long wooden shanty known as the dance house was full to overflowing, full of miners having what they considered a good time—dancing in gum boots, drinking bad whisky, singing songs, and swearing wonderfully original "swears." But there was no popping of pistols, no flashing of bowie-knives at Antler. That might do very well in Californian mining camps, but in British Columbia, in early days, even the strong men had been taught by a stronger to respect the law.

So Old Dad took command in the noisy room, and was under no apprehension for his personal safety. He might be dead drunk before morning or "dead-broke" before the end of the season, but there was very little chance that a stray bullet would end his career before that terrible time came round when the camp would be deserted, and he would have to sneak away to the lower country to earn his living by pig-feeding and "doing chores."

But the pig-feeding days were far distant still, so that this most dissolute yet tuneful fiddler continued to incite his clients to fresh efforts in dancing.

There were those, though, even at Antler, who were too staid, or too shy, or too stolid to dance, and for the benefit of such as these small tables had been arranged, not too far from the refreshments—small tables at which they could sit and smoke in peace.

At one of these, in a pause between the dances, a tall, fair-haired girl, all smiles and ribbons, came to a halt before a solitary, dark-visaged misanthrope, who sat abstractedly chewing the end of an unlit cigar.

LILLA ACCOSTS THE COLONEL IN THE DANCE-HOUSE.

"What's the trouble, Colonel? Have you anyone murdered?"

The words were lightly spoken, and a laugh rippled over the speaker's pretty face, but no answering smile came into the smoker's deep-set eyes. On the contrary, he sprang to his feet with so fierce an oath that Lilla started back, and the smokers at the next table turned with savage scowls to see who it was who dared to swear at their little German sweetheart.

"By mighty, I believe the girl's right!" said one of these; "the fellow looks pretty scared."

"Like enough. A fellow who cain't speak civil to a woman might do anything," growled another. This last was a Yankee, and Yankees have a great respect for the ladies, all honour to them for it.

Meanwhile the colonel and the dancing-girl stood facing each other, the smile dying out of her face as the scowl died out of his. She was half-frightened, and he had overheard his neighbours' remarks, and recognized the necessity for self-control.

"I beg your pardon, Lilla. What a brute you must think me! But don't you know better than to wake a sleeping dog suddenly?"

"But no dog is so mean as to bite a woman," protested Lilla.

"That's so, and I only barked. I've been so long packing all alone that I have lost my company manners. Won't you forgive me, Lilla?" and he held out his hand to her. Now it was part of Lilla's business to pour oil upon the troubled waters of society at Antler, and, besides, the colonel was an old acquaintance and excellent dancer, so Lilla took his hand.

"Well, I'll try, but you pay me a fine. See, not once have you asked me to dance this time in Antler. Now dance with me."

"Is that all, Lilla? Come then." And so saying he offered the girl his arm, and walked away with her to another part of the room out of ear-shot of the angry Yankee.

"I wanted to talk to you, Lilla," he began; but just then the music struck up, and the girl, who had quite recovered her spirits, beat the ground with a pretty impatient toe, exclaiming, "The talk will keep; come on now, we mustn't lose a bar of it." And then, as her partner steered her gracefully over the floor, she gave a little contented sigh and muttered, "So you have not forgotten. Ach, himmel! this is to dance."

And indeed the dark-faced man might have committed many crimes, but he was not one to trample upon a woman's tenderest feelings by treading on her toes, tearing her dress out at the gathers, and disregarding good music.

On the contrary, he had a perfect ear for time, steered by instinct, and held his partner like one who was proud of her and wanted to show her off to advantage.

When the music ceased, and not until then, Lilla and the colonel stopped dancing, and the girl had just enough breath left to say in a tone of absolute conviction:

"You must be a good man, I think, you dance so well."

"Of course I'm a good man, Lilla," laughed her partner. "Why should I not be?"

"Well, I don't know, but you frightened me pretty bad just now. What was it with you?"

"Oh, nothing—at least nothing much. I was sulky and you startled me. Are you never sulky, Lilla?"

"What is that sulky, traurig?" asked the girl.

"No, not quite. More like what you feel when a frock won't fit you, Lilla."

"So! I understand: well, wherefore are you sulky?"

"I can't sell my freight at my price. Just think what rough luck it was for me that Bacon Brown got in so soon after me. And after bringing the stuff so far and at such a cost too!" and again for a moment the colonel's face looked white and drawn in the lamp light.

The Frazer river trail was a bad one, but once its perils were passed there seemed to be no reason why an old packer should turn pale at the mere memory of them.

"Ach, sacrifice!" cried the girl. "You sell your bacon a dollar a pound, and you call that sacrifice. Have you no shame?"

"All very well for you, Lilla. You are a girl who owns a gold-mine; I'm only a poor packer. By the way, have you done anything more about Pete's Creek since last season?"

"No, but I think I'll do something soon."

"Better send me to find it for you, Lilla, before someone else gets hold of it, and give me a share in it for my work. I'll take you, and you keep the creek. How will that do?"

"And what do I become—ach, I mean what shall I get for my share?"

Her partner laid his hand upon his heart and made her his most impressive bow, but the girl only burst out laughing merrily. Perhaps the noise and bright lights of a dance-house are unfavourable to sentiment.