The Trail of 98

by Service, Robert W

  We reached the cabin, and on the threshold she paused. The others had not yet returned. She held out both hands to me, and her eyes were glittering with tears.

  "Be brave, my dearest; it's all for my sakeif you love me."

  "I love you, my darling; anything for your sake. I'll go to-morrow."

  "We're betrothed now, aren't we, dearest?"

  "We're betrothed, my love."

  She swayed to me and seemed to fit into my arms as a sword fits into its sheath. My lips lay on hers, and I kissed her with a passionate joy. She took my face between her hands and gazed at me long and earnestly.

  "I love you, I love you," she murmured; "next June, my darling, next June."

  Then she gently slipped away from me, and I was gazing blankly at the closed door.

  "Next June," I heard a voice echo; and there, looking at me with a smile, was Locasto.

  * * *

  CHAPTER VIII

  It comes like a violent jar to be awakened so rudely from a trance of love, to turn suddenly from the one you care for most in all the world, and behold the one you have best reason to hate. Nevertheless, it is not in human nature to descend rocket-wise from the ethereal heights of love. I was still in an exalted state of mind when I turned and confronted Locasto. Hate was far from my heart, and when I saw the man himself was regarding me with no particular unfriendliness, I was disposed to put aside for the moment all feelings of enmity. The generosity of the victor glowed within me.

  As he advanced to me his manner was almost urbane in its geniality.

  "You must forgive me," he said, not without dignity, "for overhearing you; but by chance I was passing and dropped upon you before I realised it."

  He extended his hand frankly.

  "I trust my congratulations on your good luck will not be entirely obnoxious. I know that my conduct in this affair cannot have impressed you in a very favourable light; but I am a badly beaten man. Can't you be generous and let by-gones be by-gones? Won't you?"

  I had not yet come down to earth. I was still soaring in the rarefied heights of love, and inclined to a general amnesty towards my enemies.

  As he stood there, quiet and compelling, there was an assumption of frankness and honesty about this man that it was hard to withstand. For the nonce I was persuaded of his sincerity, and weakly I surrendered my hand. His grip made me wince.

  "Yes, again I congratulate you. I know and admire her. They don't make them any better. She's pure gold. She's a little queen, and the man she cares for ought to be proud and happy. Now, I'm a man of the world, I'm cynical about woman as a rule. I respect my mother and my sistersbeyond that" He shrugged his shoulders expressively.

  "But this girl's different. I always felt in her presence as I used to feel twenty-five years ago when I was a youth, with all my ideals untarnished, my heart pure, and woman holy in my sight."

  He sighed.

  "You know, young man, I've never told it to a soul before, but I'd give all I'm wortha clear millionto have those days back. I've never been happy since."

  He drew away quickly from the verge of sentiment.

  "Well, you mustn't mind me taking an interest in your sweetheart. I'm old enough to be her father, you know, and she touches me strangely. Now, don't distrust me. I want to be a friend to you both. I want to help you to be happy. Jack Locasto's not such a bad lot, as you'll find when you know him. Is there anything I can do for you? What are you going to do in this country?"

  "I don't quite know yet," I said. "I hope to stake a good claim when the chance comes. Meantime I'm going to get work on the creeks."

  "You are?" he said thoughtfully; "do you know any one?"

  "No."

  "Well, I'll tell you what: I've got laymen working on my Eldorado claim; I'll give you a note to them if you like."

  I thanked him.

  "Oh, that's all right," he said. "I'm sorry I played such a mean part in the past, and I'll do anything in my power to straighten things out. Believe me, I mean it. Your English friend gave me the worst drubbing of my life, but three days after I went round and shook hands with him. Fine fellow that. We opened a case of wine to celebrate the victory. Oh, we're good friends now. I always own up when I'm beaten, and I never bear ill-will. If I can help you in any way, and hasten your marriage to that little girl there, well, you can just bank on Jack Locasto: that's all."

  I must say the man could be most conciliating when he chose. There was a gravity in his manner, a suave courtesy in his tone, the heritage of his Spanish forefathers, that convinced me almost in spite of my better judgment. No doubt he was magnetic, dominating, a master of men. I thought: there are two Locastos, the primordial one, the Indian, who had assaulted me; and the dignified genial one, the Spaniard, who was willing to own defeat and make amends. Why should I not take him as I found him?

  So, as he talked entertainingly to me, my fears were dissipated, my suspicions lulled. And when we parted we shook hands cordially.

  "Don't forget," he said; "if you want help bank on me. I mean it now, I mean it."

  * * *

  'Twas early in the bright and cool of the morning when we started for Eldorado, Jim and I. I had a letter from Locasto to Ribwood and Hoofman, the laymen, and I showed it to Jim. He frowned.

  "You don't mean to say you've palled up with that devil," he said.

  "Oh, he's not so bad," I expostulated. "He came to me like a man and offered me his hand in friendship. Said he was ashamed of himself. What could I do? I've no reason to doubt his sincerity."

  "Sincerity be danged. He's about as sincere as a tame rattlesnake. Put his letter in the creek."

  But no! I refused to listen to the old man.

  "Well, go your own gait," he said; "but don't say that I didn't warn you."

  We had crossed over the Klondike to its left limit, and were on a hillside trail beaten down by the feet of miners and packers. Cabins clustered on the flat, and from them plumes of violet smoke mounted into the golden air. Already the camp was astir. Men were chopping their wood, carrying their water. The long, long day was beginning.

  Following the trail, we struck up Bonanza, a small muddy stream in a narrow valley. Down in the creek-bed we could see ever-increasing signs of an intense mining activity. On every claim were dozens of cabins, and many high cones of greyish muck. We saw men standing on raised platforms turning windlasses. We saw buckets come up filled with the same dark grey dirt, to be dumped over the edge of the platform. Sometimes, where the dump had gradually arisen around man and windlass, the platform in the centre of that dark-greyish cone was twenty feet high.

  Every mile the dumps grew more numerous, till some claims seemed covered with them. Looking down from the trail, they were like innumerable anthills blocking up the narrow channel, and around them swarmed the little ant-men in never-resting activity. The golden valley opened out to us in a vista of green curves, and the cleft of it was packed with tents, cabins, dumps and tailing piles, all bedded in a blue haze of wood fires.

  "Look at that great centipede striding across the valley," I said.

  "Yes," said Jim, "it's a long line of sluice-boxes. See the water a-shinin' in the sun. Looks like some big golden-backed caterpillar."

  The little ants were shovelling into it from one of their heaps, and from that point it swirled on into the stream, a current of mud and stone.

  "Seems to me that stream would wash away all the gold," I said. "I know it's all caught in the riffles, but I think if that dump was mine I would want sluice-boxes a mile long and about sixteen hundred riffles. But I guess they know what they are doing."

  About noon we descended into the creek-bed and came to the Forks. It was a little town, a Dawson in miniature, with all its sordid aspects infinitely accentuated. It had dance-halls, gambling dens and many saloons: every convenience to ease the miner of the plethoric poke. There in the din and daze and dirt we tarried awhile; then, after eating heartily, we struck up Eldorado.

  Here was the same feveris
h activity of gold-getting. Every claim was valued at millions, and men who had rarely owned enough to buy a decent coat were crying in the saloons because life was not long enough to allow them to spend their sudden wealth. Nevertheless, they were making a good stab at it. At the Forks I enquired regarding Ribwood and Hoofman: "Goin' to work for them, are you? Well, they've got a blamed hard name. If you get a job elsewhere, don't turn it down."

  Jim left me; he would work on no claim of Locasto's, he said. He had a friend, a layman, who was a good man, belonged to the Army. He would try him. So we parted.

  Ribwood was a tall, gaunt Cornishman, with a narrow, jutting face and a gloomy air; Hoofman, a burly, beet-coloured Australian with a bulging stomach.

  "Yes, we'll put you to work," said Hoofman, reading the letter. "Get your coat off and shovel in."

  So, right away, I found myself in the dump-pile, jamming a shovel into the pay-dirt and swinging it into a sluice-box five feet higher than my head. Keeping at this hour after hour was no fun, and if ever a man desisted for a moment the hard eyes of Hoofman were upon him, and the gloomy Ribwood had snatched up a shovel and was throwing in the muck furiously.

  "Come on, boys," he would shout; "make the dirt fly. 'Taint every part of the world you fellers can make your ten bucks a day."

  And it can be said that never labourer proved himself more worthy of his hire than the pick-and-shovel man of those early days. Few could stand it long without resting. They were lean as wolves those men of the dump and drift, and their faces were gouged and grooved with relentless toil.

  Well, for three days I made the dirt fly; but towards quitting time, I must say, its flight was a very uncertain one. Again I suffered all the tortures of becoming toil-broken, the old aches and pains of the tunnel and the gravel-pit. Towards evening every shovelful of dirt seemed to weigh as much as if it was solid gold; indeed, the stuff seemed to get richer and richer as the day advanced, and during the last half-hour I judged it must be nearly all nuggets. The constant hoisting into the overhead sluice-box somehow worked muscles that had never gone into action before, and I ached elaborately.

  In the morning the pains were fiercest. How I groaned until the muscles became limber. I found myself using very rough language, groaning, gritting my teeth viciously. But I stayed with the work and held up my end, while the laymen watched us sedulously, and seemed to grudge us even a moment to wipe the sweat out of our blinded eyes.

  I was glad, indeed, when, on the evening of the third day, Ribwood came to me and said:

  "I guess you'd better work up at the shaft to-morrow. We want a man to wheel muck."

  They had a shaft sunk on the hillside. They were down some forty feet and were drifting in, wheeling the pay-dirt down a series of planks placed on trestles to the dump. I gripped the handles of a wheelbarrow loaded to overspilling, and steered it down that long, unsteady gangway full of uneven joins and sudden angles. Time and again I ran off the track, but after the first day I became quite an expert at the business. My spirits rose. I was on the way of becoming a miner.

  * * *

  CHAPTER IX

  Turning the windlass over the shaft was a little, tough mud-rat, who excited in me the liveliest sense of aversion. Pat Doogan was his name, but I will call him the "Worm."

  The Worm was the foulest-mouthed specimen I have yet met. He had the lowest forehead I have ever seen in a white man, and such a sharp, ferrety little face. His reddish hair had the prison clip, and his little reddish eyes were alive with craft and cruelty. I noticed he always regarded me with a peculiarly evil grin, that wrinkled up his cheeks and revealed his hideously blackened teeth. From the first he gave me a creepy feeling, a disgust as if I were near some slimy reptile.

  Yet the Worm tried to make up to me. He would tell me stories blended of the horrible and the grotesque. One in particular I remember.

  "Youse wanta know how I lost me last job. I'll tell youse. You see, it was like dis. Dere was two Blackmoor guys dat got into de country dis Spring; came by St. Michaels; Hindoos dey was. One of dem 'Sicks' (an' dey looked sick, dey was so loose an' weary in der style) got a job from old man Gustafson down de shaft muckin' up and fillin' de buckets.

  "Well, dere was dat Blackmoor down in de deep hole one day when I comes along, an' strikes old Gus for a job. So, seein' as de man on de windlass wanted to quit, he passed it up to me, an' I took right hold an' started in.

  "Say, I was feelin' powerful mean. I'd just finished up a two weeks' drunk, an' you tink de booze wasn't workin' in me some. I was seein' all kinds of funny t'ings. Why, as I was a-turnin' away at dat ol' windlass dere was red spiders crawlin' up me legs. But I was wise. I wouldn't look at dem, give dem de go-by. Den a yeller rat got gay wid me an' did some stunts on me windlass. But still I wouldn't let on. Den dere was some green snakes dat wriggled over de platform like shiny streaks on de water. Sure, I didn't like dat one bit, but I says, 'Dere ain't no snakes in de darned country, Pat, and you knows it. It's just a touch of de horrors, dat's all. Just pass 'em up, boy; don't take no notice of dem.'

  "Well, dis went on till I begins to get all shaky an' jumpy, an' I was mighty glad when de time came to quit, an' de boys down below gives me de holler to pull dem up.

  "So I started hoistin' wid dose snakes an' spiders an' rats jus' cavortin' round me like mad, when all to once who should I hoist outa de bowels of de earth but de very devil himself.

  "His face was black. I could see de whites of his eyes, an' he had a big dirty towel tied round his head. Well, say, it was de limit. At de sight of dat ferocious monster comin' after old Pat I gives one yell, drops de crank-handle of de windlass, an' makes a flyin' leap down de dump. I hears an awful shriek, an' de bucket an' de devil goes down smash to de bottom of de shaft, t'irty-five feet. But I kep' on runnin'. I was so scared.

  "Well, how was I to know dey had a Blackmoor down dere? He was a stiff when dey got him up, but how was I to know? So I lost me job."

  On another occasion he told me:

  "Say, kid, youse didn't know as I was liable to fits, did youse? Dat's so; eppylepsy de doctor tells me. Dat's what I am scared of. You see, it's like dis: if one of dem fits should hit me when I'm hoistin' de boys outer de shaft, den it would be a pity. I would sure lose me job like de oder time."

  He was the most degraded type of man I had yet met on my travels, a typical degenerate, dirty, drunken, diseased. He had three suits of underclothing, which he never washed. He would wear through all three in succession, and when the last got too dirty for words he would throw it under his trunk and sorrowfully go back to the first, keeping up this rotation, till all were worn out.

  One day Hoofman told me he wanted me to go down the shaft and work in the drift. Accordingly, next morning I and a huge Slav, by name Dooley Rileyvich, were lowered down into the darkness.

  The Slav initiated me. Every foot of dirt had to be thawed out by means of wood fires. We built a fire at the far end of the drift every night, covering the face we were working. First we would lay kindling, then dry spruce lying lengthways, then a bank of green wood standing on end to keep in the heat and shed the dirt that sloughed down from the roof. In the morning our fire would be burned out, and enough pay-dirt thawed to keep us picking all day.

  Down there I found it the hardest work of all. We had to be careful that the smoke had cleared from the drift before we ventured in, for frequently miners were asphyxiated. Indeed, the bad air never went entirely away. It made my eyes sore, my head ache. Yet, curiously enough, so long as you were below it did not affect you so much. It was when you stepped out of the bucket and struck the pure outer air that you reeled and became dizzy. It was blinding, too. Often at supper have my eyes been so blurred and sore I had to grope around uncertainly for the sugar bowl and the tin of cream.

  In the drift it was always cool. The dirt kept sloughing down on us, and we had really gone in too far for our own safety, but the laymen cared little for that. At the end of the drift the roof was so low we were bent almos
t double, picking at the face in all kinds of cramped positions, and dragging after us the heavy bucket. To the big Slav it was all in the day's work, but to me it was hard, hard.

  The shaft was almost forty feet deep. For the first ten feet a ladder ran down it, then stopped suddenly as if the excavators had decided to abandon it. I often looked at this useless bit of ladder and wondered why it had been left unfinished.

  Every morning the Worm hoisted us down into the darkness, and at night drew us up. Once he said to me:

  "Say, wouldn't it be de tough luck if I was to take a fit when I was hoistin' youse up? Such a nice bit of a boy, too, an' I guess I'd lose my job over de head of it."

  I said: "Cut that out, or you'll have me so scared I won't go down."

  He grinned unpleasantly and said nothing more. Yet somehow he was getting on my nerves terribly.

  It was one evening we had banked our fires and were ready to be hoisted up. Dooley Rileyvich went first, and I watched him blot out the bit of blue for a while. Then, slowly, down came the bucket for me.

  I got in. I was feeling uneasy all of a sudden, and devoutly wished I were anywhere else but in that hideous hole. I felt myself leave the ground and rise steadily. The walls of the shaft glided past me. Up, up I went. The bit of blue sky grew bigger, bigger. There was a star shining there. I watched it. I heard the creak, creak of the windlass crank. Somehow it seemed to have a sinister sound. It seemed to say: "Have a care, have a care, have a care." I was now ten feet from the top. The bucket was rocking a little, so I put out my hand and grasped the lowest rung of the ladder to steady myself.

  Then, at that instant, it seemed the weight of the bucket pressing up against my feet was suddenly removed, and my arm was nigh jerked out of its socket. There I was hanging desperately on the lowest rung of the ladder, while, with a crash that made my heart sick, the bucket dashed to the bottom. At last, I realised, the Worm had had his fit.

  Quickly I gripped with both hands. With a great effort I raised myself rung by rung on the ladder. I was panic-stricken, faint with fear; but some instinct had made me hold on desperately. Dizzily I hung all a-shudder, half-sobbing. A minute seemed like a year.