Clive Phillipps-Wolley

“ 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. ”

“ If you do, you may be able to picture what those three men felt as the frozen corpse plunged and struggled on the rope, now sucked down by the under-tow, now springing beneath the buffets of the drifting ice. Ned shuddered and felt sick as he braced himself against its unholy strength; but the Shropshire breed is like the bull-dog's, once fast in anything it will never let go whilst life lasts; so that in spite of the river, and the fear which chilled his marrow, Ned persisted until he drew his ghastly capture hand over hand to shore. ”

“ To Steve Chance every twig which lashed him across the eyes, every log against which he struck his shins, had become a sentient personal enemy, whose silence and apathy only made his attacks the harder to bear, until before the multitude of his enemies and the darkness of the trackless woods, the young Yankee's strength and courage failed him, and he sat down ready if need be to die, but too thoroughly exhausted to make another effort for life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Out of the darkness the men's [Pg 94] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After the finding of Pete's Creek there was no more talk of returning to the Frazer. In Corbett's camp the reign of gold had begun, so that no man spoke of anything or thought of anything but the yellow metal. Gold was a god to all the three of them, and Phon and Chance and Corbett alike bowed their backs and worshipped, grovelling on their knees and toiling with pick and pan and rocker all the day long. Only Corbett rebelled at all against the tyranny of the strange god, and he rebelled in thought only. ”

“ Why is it that, to even the boldest men, the dead are so very terrible? Is it their inhuman calm, their silence, or the mystery to which they alone hold the key, that awes and chills the hottest human heart? Whatever the cause of it, the nameless terror exists, and neither strong Ned Corbett, nor scoffing Chance, nor hard old Jim were proof against it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So Steve joined Corbett and Phon, and the three men sat together looking down upon as much wealth as would buy the life-long labour, aye, the very bodies and souls, of a hundred ordinary men, and yet they were conscious that it was about even betting that they would all three die beggars—die starving for want of a loaf of bread, though each man carried round his waist the price of a score of royal banquets! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The bed of the boulder was a bed of gold—gold in flakes and lumps and nuggets; gold in such quantities that as Steve and Ned looked at it a doubt stole into their minds. Surely, they thought, it cannot be for this common, ugly stuff, of which there is so much, that men toil and strive, live and die, and are damned! ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are, after all, only symbols for which we all of us spend our lives, and if the yellow dust led the old man to live the life he loved, and which suited him, what did it matter? As Ned watched the red firelight flicker about the strong square jaw, and redden like blood on the great forearm, he felt that there was at any rate one man in Cariboo in whom he could unhesitatingly trust. ”

“ For an hour Steve and Ned toiled steadily up the yellow banks, bluff rising above bluff and bench above bench, and all steep and all crumbling to the tread. The banks of the Frazer may possess the charm of picturesqueness of a certain kind for the tourist to whom time is no object, and for whom others work and carry the packs, but they were hateful as the treadmill and a very path of thorns to the men who toiled up them carrying a month's provisions on their backs, and wearing worn-out moccasins upon their swollen, bleeding feet. ”

“ In a bunk against the wall lay a fair-haired man, his eyes shut in sleep, with one powerful arm thrown limp and nerveless upon the outside of his bed. The man who watched him felt a nervous twitching at his throat as his eyes rested upon the big brown hand, contrasting so strongly with the white linen upon which it rested; for Lilla had given her patient of her best, and Ned Corbett was sleeping between the only pair of sheets in Cariboo. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Then oh, ho, ho! for the carpet of snow!
Oh, ho, for the forest of pine!
Wealth shall be yours, with its business and bores,
Health and hard labour be mine!
"Health and hard labour be mine!" thundered a score of voices, and a score of strong labour-hardened hands came crashing down upon the rough deal tables. "Bravo, Ned!" "That's your sort for Cariboo!" "Mate, we'll wet that song if you please," and a dozen other similar expressions of approval rewarded Ned for his efforts, but Steve Chance did not go as far as the rest of the audience. ”

“ Look out for the prickly pears!" said Ned, and so saying he plunged into a little ravine, whose beggarly barrenness cried aloud to winter to come and hide it from the face of the sun.
"It's all very well to tell a man to look out for them," answered Steve in the peevish voice of sickness, "but there is nothing else to step on. It's all thorns and sharp stones in this confounded country." ”

“ What they saw was the work of one man, in one winter, without proper tools, without sufficient food, and with the awful odds against him of place and weather.
"The devil fights hard for his own," muttered Ned; and indeed it seemed as if one man, unaided by supernatural powers, could not have accomplished what this man had done.
Corbett forgot that the greed of gold is almost a supernatural power. Out of the trunk of a tree, felled by his own hands, the man who dwelt in this snow-choked canyon had made himself a canoe, his one tool the blade of his axe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There were no misers amongst the miners of the West; the fortunes they made were mere counters in a game which they played, not for the stakes but for the sake of the game itself—for its very dangers and hardships; and, thanks chiefly to one strong man, who still lives in the country which owes him so much, their game was played in British Columbia with less loss of life and less lawlessness than in any other mining centre in America.
To Jim mining or prospecting was what big game hunting is to richer men. ”

“ Do you think he has cleared out, or do you think he has never been here?"
"I don't know what to think, but I expect we shall come across old Rampike on the Frazer, and I shall stop and hunt with him."
That word "hunt" has an ugly sound when the thing to be hunted is a man like yourself, and Steve looked curiously into Ned's face. Would he never get tired and give up the chase, this quiet man who looked as if he had no malice in his nature, and yet stuck to his prey with the patience of a wolf? ”

“ But even Steve, who knew Corbett as intimately as one man can know another, was astounded at the readiness with which, after one wild effort to grapple with the man who had killed Roberts, Corbett had been content to settle down quietly to his daily labour in the claims at Antler.
He could understand that his friend would take his own losses quietly. Steve, like all Yankees and all true gamblers, was a good loser himself, and didn't expect to hear a man make a moan over his own misfortunes, but he had not expected to see Ned abandon his vengeance so readily. ”

“ The rolling years are kind to most things, beautifying them with the soft tints of age or veiling them with gracious foliage, but the banks of the Frazer still look raw and crude; the gentler things of earth will have nothing to do with the accursed river, in which millions of struggling salmon rot and die, while beside its waters little will grow except the bitter sage bush and the prickly pear.
When Corbett and Chance reached Chimney Creek the fall run of salmon was at its height, and added, if possible, to the weird ugliness of the river. ”

“ 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. ”