CHAPTER XIV.
WHAT THE WOLF FOUND.
About midnight Rampike returned to his hut, and as the moonlightstreamed through the doorway across the floor, Corbett rose without aword 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 nowevery 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 strongermen than you get the 'jim-jams' from overwork."
Ned laughed. He hardly thought that a man who had not tasted liquor fora month was likely to suffer much from the "jim-jams."
"That's all right," said Rampike testily. "You may laugh, but I've seenmore of this kind of life than you'll ever see, and I tell you, you'dbetter 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 thanlikely that he won't."
"Then it will be a painful necessity for Roberts and myself to pack himback."
"If you get him back the law can't touch him, and the boys won't lynchhim just for swindling a tenderfoot."
"The law can't touch him?"
"Why, certainly not. If you were such a blessed fool as to buy claimswithout a frontage on the crik, that's your business. He didn't say asthey 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 Chancecopied was the best he knew how to make. He sold you what he said he'dsell 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 feltstaggered by it, but only for a moment. After all, it was not for thesake 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 leaveold Roberts alone with that scoundrel even if I was. Have you got thegrub there?"
"Well, if that's your reason for going I've no more to say, except as Ireckon Roberts is pretty good at taking care of himself. However, apal's a pal, and if you mean to stay by him, I'll not hinder you. Here'sthe grub;" and so saying he helped Ned to fix a little bundle upon hisshoulders, taking care that whatever weight there was should lie easilyin 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 toomuch 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 regularrustler if you can get him any work to do."
"Don't worry yourself about your pals. You are going to look for DickRampike'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, hadnow reached the foot of the trail by which Ned had arrived at WilliamsCreek.
"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'tbuilt 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'sgoing to be any trouble;" and with this consoling reflection in hismind, the old hard-fist returned to his cabin, pulled off his long gumboots, and lay down on the floor beside the still sleeping Chance andPhon.
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'sthe matter with a good deal floor?' he often used to ask; and as henever got a satisfactory answer, he never bothered to build himself abunk.
Meanwhile Ned Corbett was standing for a moment on the top of a bluffabove Williams Creek, whence he could still see the lights of the camp,and still hear faint strains of music from the dance-house and themonotonous "clink, clink" of the miner's pick. The next moment he turnedhis back upon it all; a rising bank shut out the last glimpse of thefires and the last faint hum of human life. The forest swallowed themup, and Ned was alone with the silence.
Never in all his life had he been in so strange a mood as he was thatnight.
It seemed to him that every nerve and muscle in his body, every facultyof his brain, had been tuned to concert pitch. All his old calmness haddeserted 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, andyet, though the miles flew past him, he was not satisfied. On! on! avoice seemed to cry to him, and in spite of his speed the voice stillurged him to further efforts. That was the worst of it. Instead of thesilence the forest seemed full of voices,--not voices which spoke to hisear, but voices which cried to the soul that was within him. The shadowswere full of these inarticulate cries, the night air throbbed with them,all nature was full of them, and of a secret which he alone seemedunable to grasp.
But it was no good standing still to listen, so he pressed on until hecame to the bridge of pines where the day before Phon had clung,swinging between this world and the next. Here Corbett hesitated for thefirst time, standing at the top of that arch of pines, looking acrossthe black gulf in which the unseen waters moaned horribly. If his footslipped or his hands failed him for the tenth part of a second, he woulddrop from the moonlight into eternal darkness, leaving no trace behindby which men could tell that Ned Corbett had ever existed.
For a moment a cold horror seized him, he clung wildly to the boughsround him and looked backwards instead of forwards. But this fit onlylasted for a moment, and then the bold English blood came back to hisheart with a rush. "Good heavens!" he muttered, "am I turning Chinaman?"and as he muttered it he launched himself boldly across the gap, caughtat the rope to steady himself, and having crossed the bridge set hisface 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 forestglades, tireless as a wolf and silent as a shadow.
When the dawn came he paused in his race, and sat down for a quarter ofan hour to eat a frugal meal of dried meat. Had he been living thenormal life of a civilized man in one of the cities of Europe, he wouldhave needed much less food and eaten much more. All civilized humanbeings overeat themselves. Perhaps if the food at the Bristol or theWindsor 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 hehad been restless and anxious to get on. Fatigue seemed not to touchhim, 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 thatthey had been up too long the night before. A little later thesquirrels began to chatter and swear angrily at him as he passed, and agray old _coyote_ slinking home to bed stood like a shadow watching himas he went, wondering, no doubt, who this early-rising hunter might be,with the swift silent feet, white set face, and stern blue eyes whichlooked 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 warmhim in his slumbers, as it does all the rest of that great world whichgets on very well without blankets.
Until the shadow had crept to the other side of the tree under which helay, Ned Corbett slept without moving; then he rose again, ate a fewmouthfuls of dried meat, took a modest draught of the white water whichfoamed 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, andon the third day he had his reward. At last on the trail in front of himhe saw the tracks of horses, nine in number, all of them shod before andbehind as his own had been, and the tracks of _one_ man driving them.
That was singular. There were two men left with Ned Corbett'spack-train. Where had the other gone to? Backwards and forwards he went,bending low over the trail and scrutinizing every inch of it, but hecould see no sign of that other man. Perhaps he had tired and had foundroom upon one of the least laden of the pack animals. It would be hardupon the beast and most uncomfortable for the rider, but it waspossible.
Or perhaps the tracks of the man who "led out" had been quiteobliterated by the feet of the beasts which followed him. That too waspossible, and Ned remembered how he had noticed upon the trail that ahorse's stride and a man's were almost exactly the same length, so thatit might be that for a few hundred yards at any rate one of the animalshad gone step for step over Cruikshanks or old Rob's tracks.
But this could not have lasted for long; either the man or the beastwould have strayed a yard or two from the track once in the course of amile; but Corbett had examined the tracks for more than a mile, andstill the story of them was the same: "nine pack-horses driven by oneman 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 thetracks on the path by which he himself had come from the Balm-of-Gileadcamp to Williams Creek, at a point as nearly as he could judge fivemiles on the Williams Creek side of that camp. So far then thepack-train had followed him, but at this point it had turned away almostat right angles to follow a well-beaten trail which Corbett and Stevehad overlooked when they passed it a week earlier.
"That, I suppose, is where we went wrong, and this must be the properpack-trail to Williams Creek," soliloquized Ned, and then for a momenthe stood, doubting which way he should turn. Should he follow hispack-train, or should he go back until the tracks told him something ofthat other man, whose feet had left no record on the road?
The same instinct which had urged him on for the last three days, tookhold upon him again and turned him almost against his will towards theold Balm-of-Gilead camp.
It was nearly dark when he reached it, and he would perhaps have passedit by, but that he stumbled over the half-burnt log which had been usedas the side log for his own fire. Since Ned had camped there a littlesnow had fallen, a trifling local storm such as will take place in themountains even in May, and this had sufficed to hide almost all trace ofthe camp in that rapidly waning light.
As well as he could, Corbett examined the camp, going carefully overevery 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 ofammunition for a revolver. This he at once recognized as belonging toRoberts.
"By Jove, that's careless," he muttered, "and unlike the old man. Ishould have thought at any rate that he would have found out his lossbefore 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 hisface, so making the best of a bad business Ned sat down at the foot of abig pine, and leaning his back against it tried to doze away the timeuntil the moon should rise and enable him to proceed on his way. Butthough Corbett's muscles throbbed and his limbs trembled fromover-exertion, no sleep would come to him. In spite of himself his brainkept on working, not in its ordinary methodical fashion, but as if itwere red-hot with fever. Indeed poor Ned began to think that he wasgoing mad. If he were not, what was this new fancy which possessed him?
For some reason beyond his own comprehension his brain would now donothing but repeat over and over again the refrain of Roberts' favouritesong. The tune of "the old pack-mule" had taken possession of him andwould give him no peace. Without his will his fingers moved to the timeof it; if he tried to think of something else his thoughts putthemselves in words, and the words fell into the metre of it, and atlast he became convinced that he could actually with his own bodily earshear the refrain of it, sad and distant as he had last heard it beforeleaving that camp.
There it came again, wailing up out of the darkness, the very ghost of asong, 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 astart. There was no doubt about _that_ weird note anyway; and though itwas but the howl of a wolf which roused him from his doze, Ned shudderedas the long-drawn yell died away in the darkness, which was now slowlygiving way to the light of the rising moon.
Brave man though he was, Ned Corbett felt a chill perspiration break outall over him, and his heart began to beat in choking throbs. The wolf'sweird music had a meaning for him which he had never noticed in itbefore. He knew now why it was so sad. Had it not in it all the miseryof homeless wandering, all the hopelessness of the Ishmael, whose handis against every man as every man's hand is against him, all thebitterness of cold and hunger and darkness? Was his own lot to be likethe wolf's?
"Great Scott, this won't do!" cried the lad, and snatching up his packhe blundered away upon the trail, prepared to face anything rather thanhis own fancies.
As he moved away down the trail Corbett thought that he caught aglimpse of the beast, whose hideous voice had dispelled his dreams andjarred so roughly upon his nerves.
Fear makes most men vicious, and Corbett was very human in all hismoods, so that his first impulse on seeing the beast which hadfrightened him was to give it the contents of his revolver. Stoopingdown to see more clearly, he managed to get a faint and spectral outlineof his serenader against the pale moonlight, and into the middle of thishe fired. A wolf's body is not at any time too large a mark for abullet, even if it be a rifle bullet; but a wolf's body is a very smallmark indeed for a revolver bullet at night, and so Ned found it, andmissed. To his intense surprise, however, the gray shadow was in nohurry to be gone. Though the report of the revolver seemed curiouslyloud in the absolute silence of a northern night, the wolf only cantereda few yards and then stood still again, and again sent his hideous crywailing through the forest aisles.
"Curse you, you won't go, won't you?" hissed Ned, his nerve completelygone, and his heart full of unreasonable anger; and again he fired atthe brute, and this time rushed in after his shot, determined if hecould 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 ashadow, and his howl but the offspring of Corbett's fancy. For a fewyards Ned followed in the direction in which the beast seemed to havegone, until his eyes fell upon a swelling in the snow, near to which thewolf had been when the first shot was fired.
What is that other sense which we all of us possess and for which thereis no name,--that sense which is neither sight nor hearing, nor any ofthe other three common to our daily lives? Before Ned Corbett's eyesthere lay a low swelling mound of snow, smooth white snow, still andcold in the pale moonlight. There were ten thousand other mounds justlike it in the forest round him, and yet before _this_ mound Corbettstood rooted to the ground, whilst his eyes dilated and he felt his hairrising with horror, and in the utter stillness heard his own heartthundering against his side.
Until that moment Ned Corbett had never looked upon the dead. He hadheard and read of death, and knew that in his turn he too must die; butas it chanced, he had never yet seen that dumb blind thing which livemen bury, saying this _was_ a man. And yet it needed not thedisappointed yell of that foul scavenger to tell him what lay beneaththe snow.
Slowly he compelled himself to draw near, and stooping he completed withreverent hands what the claws of the hungry beast had already begun, andthen the moon and the man, with wan white faces, looked down togetherupon all that remained of cheery old Rob. Corbett knew at last why therehad been no peace for him in the
forests that night. There was nomystery about his old comrade's death. The whole foul story of murderwas written so large that the woods knew it, and were full of it. Thiswas the story which the shuddering pines had whispered all along thetrail, and at last Corbett had grasped their secret and knew what thevoices kept saying.
Just where the curly hair came down upon his friend's sturdy neck, was asmall dark hole; a trifling wound it looked to have killed so strong aman, and yet when the bullet struck him there, Roberts had fallenwithout knowing who had struck him.
Then for one moment, perhaps, the man who did this thing had stoodglaring at what he had done, more afraid of the dead man at his feetthan his victim had ever been of any man. The position of the body toldthe rest of the story. Though he could kill him, Cruickshank dared notleave those death-sharpened features staring up to heaven appealing forvengeance against the murderer, so he had seized the corpse by itswrists and dragged it away from the camp-fire, away to where the darkbalsams threw their heaviest shadows, and there left it, its armsstretched out stiff and rigid for the snows to cover and hide until itshould melt away into the earth whence it came.
And what was Corbett to do? Men do not weep for men--their grief liestoo 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 nothingunto Thee? Dost Thou see what man has done?"
And even then, while the infinitely small pleaded from the depth of theforest to the Infinitely Mighty, a little wind came and shook the topsof the pines, and the dawn came.
Thereafter, as far as Corbett knew, time ceased. Only the pines went byand the trail slipped past under his feet, until, in spite of all hisefforts, and although the trees seemed still to go past him, he himselfstood still. Then there came a humming in the air and the thunder of agreat river in his ears, and the earth began to rise and fall, andsuddenly it was night!
* * * * * * * *
It was on a Monday morning that Ned Corbett started from Williams Creekto search for Cruickshank, and on Saturday old Bacon Brown from Oregonbrought his train into Antler, and with it a tall, fair-haired man, whomhe had found upon the trail some fifteen miles back he said--a man whomhe guessed had had the "jim-jams" pretty bad, "and come mighty nigh tosending in his chips, you bet."
Gold, Gold, in Cariboo! A Story of Adventure in British Columbia Page 14
