The Trail of 98 (28 page)

"What luck, boys?" His breath came like steam.

"None, so far," we told him, wearily, and off he went into the frozen gloom,
saying he hoped we would strike it before long.

"Wait a while."

We were working two men to a shaft, burning our ground over night. The
Prodigal and I manned the windlasses, while the old miners went down the drifts.
It was a cold, cold job standing there on that rugged platform turning the
windlass-crank. Long before it was fairly light we got to our posts, and lowered
our men into the hole. The air was warmer down there; but the work was harder,
more difficult, more dangerous.

At noon there was no sunshine, only a wan, ashen light that suffused the sky.
A deathlike stillness lay
on the valley, not a quiver or movement in leaf or blade. The
snow was a shroud, smooth save where the funereal pines pricked through. In that
intensity of cold, that shivering agony of desolation, it seemed as if nature
was laughing at usthe Cosmic Laugh.

Our meals were hurriedly cooked and bolted. We grudged every moment of our
respite from toil. At night we often were far too weary to undress. We lost our
regard for cleanliness; we neglected ourselves. Always we talked of the result
of the day's panning and the chances of to-morrow. Surely we would strike it
soon.

"Wait awhile."

Colder it grew and colder. Our kerosene flowed like mush. The water froze
solid in our kettle. Our bread was full of icy particles. Everything had to be
thawed out continually. It was tiresome, exasperating, when we were in such a
devil of a hurry. It kept us back; it angered us, this pest of a cold. Our
tempers began to suffer. We were short, taciturn. The strain was beginning to
tell on us.

"Wait awhile."

Then, one afternoon, the Something happened. It was Jim who was the chosen
one. About three o'clock he signalled to be hoisted up, and when he appeared he
was carrying a pan of dirt. "Call the others," he said.

All together in the little cabin we stood round, while Jim washed out the pan
in snow-water melt over our stove. I will never forget how eagerly we watched
the gravel, and the whirling, dexterous movements
of the old man. We could see gleams of yellow in the
muddy water. Thrills of joy and hope went through us. We had got the thing, the
big thing, at last.

"Hurry, Jim," I said, "or I'll die of suspense."

Patiently he went on. There it was at last in the bottom of the pansweeter
to our eyes than to a woman the sight of her first-born. There it lay,
glittering, gleaming gold, fine gold, coarse gold, nuggety gold.

"Now, boys, you can whoop it up," said Jim quietly; "for there's many and
many a pan like it down there in the drift."

But never a whoop. What was the matter with us? When the fortune we had
longed for so eagerly came at last, we did not greet it even with a cheer. Oh,
we were painfully silent.

Solemnly we shook hands all round.

"Now to weigh it," said the Prodigal.

On the tiny pair of scales we turned it outninety-five dollars' worth.

Well, it was a good start, and we were all possessed with a frantic eagerness
to go down in the drift. I crawled along the tunnel. There, in the face of it, I
could see the gold shining, and the longer I looked the more I seemed to see. It
was rich, rich. I picked out and burnished a nugget as large as a filbert. There
were lots of others like it. It was a strike. The question was: how much was
there of it? The Halfbreed soon settled our doubts on that score.

"It stands to reason the pay runs between where I first found it and where
we've struck it now. That alone means a tidy stake for each of us. Say, boys, if
you were to cover all that distance with twenty-dollar gold pieces six feet
wide, and packed edge to edge, I wouldn't take them for our interest in that bit
of ground. I see a fine big ranch in Manitoba for my share; ay, and hired help
to run it. The only thing that sticks in my gullet is that fifty per cent. to
the Company."

"Well, we can't kick," I said; "we'd never have got the lay if they'd had a
hunch. My! won't they be sore?"

Sure enough, in a
few days the news leaked out, and the Manager came post-haste.

"Hear you've struck it rich, boys."

"So rich that I guess we'll have to pack down gravel from the benches to mix
in before we can sluice it," said the Prodigal.

"You don't say. Well, I'll have to have a man on the ground to look after our
interests."

"All right. It means a good thing for you."

"Yes, but it would have meant a better if we had worked it ourselves.
However, you boys deserve your luck. Hello, the devil"

He turned round and saw the Halfbreed. He gave a long whistle and went away,
looking pensive.

It was the night of the discovery when the Prodigal made us an address.

"Look here, boys; do you know what this means? It means victory; it means
freedom, happiness, the things we want, the life we love. To me it means travel,
New York, Paris, evening dress, the opera. To McCrimmon here it means his farm.
To each according to his notion, it means the 'Things That Matter.'

"Now, we've just begun. The hardest part is to come, is to get out the
fortune that's right under our feet. We're going to get every cent of it, boys.
There's a little over three months to do it in, leaving about a month to make
sluice-boxes and clean up the dirt. We've got to work like men at a burning
barn. We've worked hard, but we've got to go
some yet. For my part, I'm willing to do stunts that
will make my previous record look like a plugged dime. I guess you boys all feel
the same way."

"You bet we do."

"Well, nuf sed; let's get busy."

So, once more, with redoubled energy, we resumed our tense, unremitting round
of toil. Now, however, it was vastly different. Every bucket of dirt meant money
in our pockets, every stroke of the pick a dollar. Not that it was all like the
first rich pocket we had struck. It proved a most erratic and puzzling
paystreakone day rich beyond our dreams, another too poor to pay for the
panning. We swung on a pendulum of hope and despair. Perhaps this made it all
the more exciting, and stimulated us unnaturally, and always we cursed that
primitive method of mining that made every bucket of dirt the net result of
infinite labor.

Every day our two dumps increased in size (for we had struck pay on the other
shaft), and every day our assurance and elation increased correspondingly. It
was bruited around that we had one of the richest bits of ground in the country,
and many came to gaze at us. It used to lighten my labours at the windlass to
see their looks of envy and to hear their awe-stricken remarks.

"That's one of them," they would say; "one of the lucky four, the lucky
laymen."

So, as the facts, grossly exaggerated, got noised abroad, they came to call
us the "Lucky Laymen."

Looking back, there will always seem to me something
weird and incomprehensible in those
twilight days, an unreality, a vagueness like some dreary, feverish dream. For
three months I did not see my face in a mirror. Not that I wanted to, but I
mention this just to show how little we thought of ourselves.

In like manner, never did I have a moment's time to regard my inner self in
the mirror of consciousness. No mental analysis now; no long hours of
retrospection, no tete-a-tete interviews with my soul. At times I felt as if I
had lost my identity. I was a slave of the genie Gold, releasing it from its
prison in the frozen bowels of the earth. I was an automaton turning a crank in
the frozen stillness of the long, long night.

It was a life despotically objective, and now, as I look back, it seems as if
I had never lived it at all. I seem to look down a long, dark funnel and see a
little machine-man bearing my semblance, patiently, steadily, wearily turning
the handle of a windlass in the clear, lancinating cold of those sombre, silent
days.

I say "bearing my outward semblance," and yet I sometimes wonder if that
rough-bearded figure in heavy woollen clothes looked the least like me. I wore
heavy sweaters, mackinaw trousers, thick German socks and moccasins. From
frequent freezing my cheeks were corroded. I was miserably thin, and my eyes had
a wild, staring expression through the pupils dilating in the long darkness.
Yes, mentally and physically I was no more like myself than a convict enduring
out his life in the soulless routine of a prison.

The days were
lengthening marvellously. We noted the fact with dull joy. It meant more light,
more time, more dirt in the dump. So it came about that, from ten hours of toil,
we went to twelve, to fourteen; then, latterly, to sixteen, and the tension of
it was wearing us down to skin and bone.

We were all feeling wretched, overstrained, ill-nourished, and it was only
voicing the general sentiment when, one day, the Prodigal remarked:

"I guess I'll have to let up for a couple of days. My teeth are all on the
bum. I'm going to town to see a dentist."

"Let me look at them," said the Halfbreed.

He looked. The gums were sullen, unwholesome-looking.

"Why, it's a touch of scurvy, lad; a little while, and you'd be spitting out
your teeth like orange pips; your legs would turn black, and when you squeezed
your fingers into the flesh the hole would stay. You'd get rotten, then you'd
mortify and die. But it's the easiest thing in the world to cure. Nothing
responds to treatment so readily."

He made a huge brew of green-spruce tea, of which we all partook, and in a
few days the Prodigal was fit again.

It was mid-March when we finished working out our ground. We had done well,
not so well, perhaps, as we had hoped for, but still magnificently well. Never
had men worked harder, never fought more desperately for success. There were our
two
dumps, pyramids of
gold-permeated dirt at whose value we could only guess. We had wrested our
treasure from the icy grip of the eternal frost. Now it remainedand O, the
sweetness of itto glean the harvest of our toil.

"The water's beginning to run, boys," said the Halfbreed. "A few more days
and we'll be able to start sluicing."

The news was like a flood of sunshine to us. For days we had been fixing up
the boxes and getting everything in readiness. The sun beat strongly on the
snow, which almost visibly seemed to retreat before it. The dazzlingly white
surface was crisp and flaky, and around the tree boles curving hollows had
formed. Here and there brown earth peered nakedly through. Every day the
hillside runnels grew in strength.

We were working at the mouth of a creek down which ran a copious little
stream all through the Springtime. We tapped it some distance above us, and ran
part of it along our line of sluice-boxes. These boxes went between our two
dumps, so that it was easy to shovel in from both sides. Nothing could have been
more convenient.

At last, after a day of hot sunshine, we found quite a freshet of water
coming down the boxes, leaping and dancing in the morning light. I remember how
I threw in the first shovelful of dirt, and how good it was to see the bright
stream discolour as our friend the water began his magic work. For three days we
shovelled in, and on the fourth we made a clean-up.

"I guess it's time,"
said Jim, "or those riffles will be gettin' choked up."

And, sure enough, when we ran off the water there were some of them almost
full of the yellow metal, wet and shiny, gloriously agleam in the morning
light.

"There's ten thousand dollars if there's an ounce," said the Company's man,
and the weigh-up proved he was right. So the gold was packed in two long
buckskin pokes and sent into town to be deposited in the bank.

Day after day we went on shovelling in, and about twice a week we made a
clean-up. The month of May was half over when we had only a third of our dirt
run through the boxes. We were terribly afraid of the water failing us, and
worked harder than ever. Indeed, it was difficult to tell when to leave off. The
nights were never dark now; the daylight was over twenty hours in duration. The
sun described an ellipse, rising a little east of north and setting a little
west of north. We shovelled in till we were too exhausted to lift another ounce.
Then we lay down in our clothes and slept as soon as we touched the pillow.

"There's eighty thousand to our credit in the bank, and only a third of our
dump's gone. Hooray, boys!" said the Prodigal.

About one o'clock in the morning the birds began to sing, and the sunset glow
had not faded from the sky ere the sunrise quickened it with life once more. Who
that has lived in the North will ever forget the charm, the witchery of those
midnight skies, where
the fires of the sun are banked and never cold? Surely, long
after all else is forgotten, will linger the memory of those mystic nights with
all their haunting spell of weird, disconsolate solitude.

One afternoon I was working on the dump, intent on shovelling in as much dirt
as possible before supper, when, on looking up, who should greet me but Locasto.
Since our last interview in town I had not seen him, and, somehow, this sudden
sight of him came as a kind of a shock. Yet the manner of the man as he
approached me was hearty in the extreme. He held out his great hand to me, and,
as I had no desire to antagonise him, I gave him my own.

He was riding. His big, handsome face was bronzed, his black eyes clear and
sparkling, his white teeth gleamed like mammoth ivory. He certainly was a
dashing, dominant figure of a man, and, in spite of myself, I admired him.

His manner in his salutation was cordial, even winning.

"I've just been visiting some of my creek properties," he said. "I heard you
fellows had made a good strike, and I thought I'd come down and congratulate
you. It is pretty good, isn't it?"