Gold, Gold, in Cariboo! A Story of Adventure in British Columbia

by Clive Phillipps-Wolley

  CHAPTER XXII.

  GOLD BY THE GALLON!

  After the finding of Pete's Creek there was no more talk of returning tothe Frazer. In Corbett's camp the reign of gold had begun, so that noman spoke of anything or thought of anything but the yellow metal. Goldwas a god to all the three of them, and Phon and Chance and Corbettalike bowed their backs and worshipped, grovelling on their knees andtoiling with pick and pan and rocker all the day long. Only Corbettrebelled at all against the tyranny of the strange god, and he rebelledin thought only. Each day, in his heart, he swore should be the lastwhich he would waste down by the creek, and yet every fresh dawn foundhim at his place with the others. Luckily for the gold-seekers, Pete'sCreek was rich in other things besides mere gold. Trout abounded in thewater, and huckle-berries grew thick some little distance down stream;and in addition to these good things Corbett soon discovered that thetrails which ran thread-like over the face of the cliffs above Pete'sCreek owed their existence to the feet of generations upon generationsof white goats--staid stolid brutes, with humps upon their backs, littleblack horns upon their heads, wide frills to their hairy pantaloons, andbeards worn as seafaring men used to wear them, all round their chinsand cheeks.

  These were the aborigines of Pete's Creek, and were if anything moreconfiding and more easily killed than the trout. Every morning at earlydawn the gold-seekers saw the goats clambering slowly back to thelairs, in which they hid during the daytime, and just after dark therattling stones told them that their neighbours were on their way downagain to the lowlands. Whenever Ned wanted one for the pot, the stalkwas a very simple thing, the goat standing looking at the approachinggunner with stony indifference, until a bullet rolled him over. Food wasplentiful enough about the creek, and Ned was able to lay aside whatlittle flour remained, keeping it until the time came when winter shouldmake a move to some lower camping ground an absolute necessity.

  So then the three had nothing to do but to gather up the gold-dust, andadd pile to pile and bag to bag of the precious metal.

  All worked with energy, but no one with such tireless patience, suchfeverish vigour, as the little Chinaman. Compared to him Chance was asluggard, and even Corbett's strength was no match for the ceaselessactivity of this withered, yellow little mortal, whose bones staredthrough his skin, and whose eyes seemed to be burning away theirsockets.

  The stars as they faded in the morning sky saw Phon come down to work;the sun at mid-day beat upon his head but could not drive him away fromhis rocker; and night found him discontented because the hours in whichman can labour are so few and so short. As long as Phon could see the"colours" in his pan he stuck to his work, and when he could see nolonger he carried his treasure to camp and kept it within reach of him,and if possible under the protection of Ned and Ned's rifle.

  Even in the night season this slave of gold took no rest. In Victoria inold days the devils used to come to him, and tell him all manner ofthings--when to gamble and when not to gamble, for instance; now theyhaunted him, and filled him with fears lest someone else should snatchhis treasure from him.

  In spite of the absolute stillness which reigned round the creek, Phonbelieved that he was watched day and night, nor could Corbett's roughrebukes or Chance's chaff shake him in this belief. Twice he woke up,screaming that someone was taking away the gold, and once he sworepositively that he had seen a face looking at him as he washed the richdirt--a face which peered at him from the bushes, and disappearedwithout a sound before he could identify it. There were no tracks, so ofcourse Phon was dreaming; but perhaps, even if there had been anyonewatching from the place at which Phon saw the face, he would not haveleft a very distinct track, as the rock just there was as hard andunimpressionable as adamant.

  Corbett, as he watched his servant muttering to himself and glancingnervously over his shoulder at every wind which stirred in the bush,felt convinced that the gold had turned his brain. And yet in somethings Phon was sane enough. It happened that there was, in a suddenbend of the stream, a great boulder, which broke the course of thewater, and sent it boiling and gurgling in two small streams about theboulder's base. From the very first this boulder fascinated Phon. Forcenturies it had stood in the same place, until green things had grownupon it, and gray lichens had spread over it.

  It was a favourite resting-place for the white-breasted dipper on hisway up stream; the fish used to lie in the shelter of it, where theirstruggle against the water need not be so severe, or to wait for thefood which was washed off its piers and buttresses: and sometimes eventhe deer would come and stand knee-deep in the stream, to rub the velvetoff their horns against its angles.

  But Phon the Chinaman had guessed a secret which the old rock had keptfor centuries--a secret which neither the birds nor the fish nor thedeer, nor even those wise white-bearded patriarchs, the goats, had everheard a whisper of.

  That rock was set in gold, and Phon knew it.

  Year by year the pebbles and the gravel and disintegrated rock werewashed lower and lower down the bed of the stream, and all the while thegold kept sinking and staying, whilst the gravel and sand went on. Buteven gold must move, however slowly, in the bed of a rapid stream, andat last golden sand and flakes and nuggets all came to the bend wherePhon's rock stood. Here the gold stopped. Gravel might rest for a while,and then rattle on again; pebbles and boulders might be torn away fromtheir anchorage under the lee of the rock by the eager waters, but goldnever. Once there Phon knew it would stay, clinging to the bottom, andeven working under the rock itself. Knowing this Phon looked at therock, and greed and discontent tortured him beyond endurance. He hadalready amassed far more gold than he could possibly spend upon thepaltry pleasures he cared for; but he loved the yellow metal for itself,not for the things it can purchase, and this being so, he proceeded tomatch his cunning against the strength of the rock.

  First he gathered great piles of quick burning wood from the banks andpiled them upon his victim as if he would offer a sacrifice to mammon,and this he set fire to, bringing fresh supplies of wood as his fireburnt low. After a while the rock beneath the fire grew to a whiteheat, and then by means of a wooden trough which he had made, Phonturned a stream of cold water from the creek upon the place where thefire had been, and these things he continued to do for many days, untilat last the giant yielded to the pigmy, and the great boulder, which forcenturies had withstood the force of the stream in flood-time and thegrinding ice in winter, began to break up and melt away before thecunning of a wizened, yellow-skinned imp from China.

  About this time, and before the rock was finally split up and removed,Phon suggested that it would be better to try to divert the stream fromits bed at some point just above the rock, so that they might be able toget at the gold when the boulder had been removed. To do this flumes hadto be made, and axes were in request to hew them out. At the firstmention of axes Steve became uneasy. There had been two axe-heads in theoutfit originally, and he had been intrusted with one of them, and hadlost it.

  "I know I had it in the last camp," he asserted.

  "Then you had better go back for it; the last camp is only about fivehours' tramp from here. Or if you think that you can't find your way toit, I will go," remarked Corbett.

  "I can find my way all right," replied Chance in an injured tone,nettled at the implied slur upon his woodcraft; "but do you think it isworth while going back for it?"

  "Certainly. You could no doubt make a hundred dollars here in the timeit will take you to get that axe, but a hundred dollars would not buy usan axe-head at Pete's Creek."

  This argument being unanswerable, Steve took the back track, and afterbeing away from camp all day, returned about sundown with the missingaxe and an old buckskin glove.

  "So you found the axe, I see?" was Corbett's greeting when the two met.

  "Yes, I found it; I knew to a dot where I left it. But it was deucedcareless to leave it anyway, wasn't it? By the way, you did not leaveanything behind you in that camp, did you?"

  "No, not I. I a
lways go round camp before leaving to look for things. Ionly wonder that I did not see your axe."

  "Oh, you wouldn't do that, I left it sticking in a cotton-wood tree aquarter of a mile from camp. But didn't you leave your 'mitts' behind?"

  "No, my dear chap. I tell you I don't leave things behind. Here are mymitts;" and the speaker drew from his pocket a pair of buckskin glovesmuch frayed and worn.

  "Then who in thunder is the owner of this?" exclaimed Chance, holding upa single glove very similar in make to those which Corbett wore.

  "Your own glove, I expect, Steve, isn't it? I haven't seen you wearingany lately, and one wants them pretty badly amongst these rocks. Youthought that you had caught me tripping, did you, my boy?" and Nedlaughed heartily at his companion's crest-fallen appearance.

  "No, Ned, this isn't mine," replied Steve seriously. "See here, it wouldhold both my hands."

  "That is odd. Where did you find it, Steve?" and taking the glove in hishands Ned examined it carefully.

  "You can't tell how long it has been out," he muttered, "the chipamuksor some other little beasts have gnawed the fingers; but the onlywonder is that they haven't destroyed it altogether. Where did you sayyou found it?"

  "About a quarter of a mile from camp. A bear has been round the campsince we were there, and I was following his trail for a bit to see whatI could make of it when I came across this."

  "Was it a grizzly's or a black bear's track which you followed?"

  "I couldn't make out. The ground was hard, and I'm not much good attracking. I could hardly be sure that it was a bear's track at all."

  "It wasn't a man's track by any chance?"

  "Confound it, Ned, I am not such an infernal fool as you seem to think.Yesterday you suggested that I couldn't find my way to the old camp, andnow you ask me whether I know a bear's track from a man's."

  "Don't lose your temper about it, old fellow. A man's track is very likea bear's, especially if the man wears moccasins and the ground is at allhard. Of course if you are certain that what you saw were bears' tracksthere's an end of it. After all, this glove may have been where youfound it since last summer. It might have been Pete's perhaps."

  And so the matter dropped and the glove was forgotten, for there weremany things to occupy the attention of Ned and Steve in those days; andas for Phon, he never even heard of the glove, being busy at the timeupon some engineering work in connection with that great boulder of hisat the bend in the stream.

  For several days the Chinaman had ceased to wash or dig, all his timebeing devoted to preparations for the removal of the boulder, and atlast, one morning, when the gully was full of the pent smoke of hisfires, he was ready for the last act in his great work, and came toCorbett and Chance for help. On the top of the rock were the ashes ofPhon's fires, and at its feet, where once the waters ran, was dryground, while from summit to base the rock itself was split into ahundred pieces, so small as to offer no serious difficulties to theunited efforts of the three men who wanted to remove them. For centuriesthe rock had stood upon a kind of shelf, from which the three men, usinga pine-pole as a lever, pitched one great fragment after another untilthe whole of the rock's bed lay bare.

  Then for a moment they paused, while the smoke drifted about them, andthe corded veins stood out strangely upon their pale faces. Surely theywere dreaming, or their eyes were tricked by the smoke! Phon had guessedthat the boulder had caught and held some portion of the gold which hadcome down the mountain stream in the course of the last few centuries,but the sight upon which he gazed now was such as even he had onlydreamed of when the opium had possession of him body and soul.

  The bed of the boulder was a bed of gold--gold in flakes and lumps andnuggets; gold in such quantities that as Steve and Ned looked at it adoubt stole into their minds. Surely, they thought, it cannot be forthis common, ugly stuff, of which there is so much, that men toil andstrive, live and die, and are damned!

  "GOLD--GOLD IN FLAKES, AND LUMPS, AND NUGGETS."]

  The wet pebbles amongst which the gold lay were twice as beautiful, andas Ned wiped the perspiration from his brow he thought that a quart ofgold would be but a small price to pay for a quart of honest Bass. ButPhon had no such fancies. With a wild cry, like the cry of a famishedbeast, the Chinaman threw himself into the hollow he had cleared,clawing and scratching at the gold with his long, lean hands until hisnails were all broken and his flesh torn and bleeding.

  Nor was Chance far behind Phon in the scramble. Together the two delvedand scratched and picked about the bed-rock, amassing little piles andstacks of nuggets from the size of a pea to the size of a hen's egg, andso busy were they and so intent upon their labour that neither of themnoticed Corbett, who after Phon's first wild cry had turned away indisgust, and now sat solemnly smoking on a log by the camp-fire.

  Taking his pipe from his mouth, he blew away a long wreath of fragrantsmoke, and as he watched it dissolve in space his thoughts fashionedthemselves into these strange words:

  "Confound your gold anyway! I don't want any more of it in my share oflife's good things."