WESTERN CLASSICS: James Oliver Curwood Edition. James Oliver Curwood
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his natural spirits, and both Wabi and he were soon laughing and planning again as they made their cedar-bough shelter. Supper on the big flat stone—a feast of bear steak, hot-stone biscuits, coffee, and that most delectable of all wilderness luxuries, a potato apiece,—and the two irrepressible young gold hunters were once more scheming and building their air-castles for the following day. Mukoki listened, and attended to the clothes drying before the fire, now and then walking out into the gloom of the chasm to look up to where the white rim of the fall burst over the edge of the great rock above them. All that afternoon Wabi and Rod had forgotten the mad hunter and the strange, smoothly worn tree. Mukoki had not.
In the glow of the camp-fire the two boys read over again the old account of John Ball and the two Frenchmen. The tiny slip of paper, yellow with age, was the connecting link between them and the dim and romantic past, a relic of the grim tragedy which these black and gloomy chasm walls would probably keep for ever a secret.
"Twenty-seven pounds," repeated Rod, as if half to himself. "That was one month's work!"
"Pretty nearly a pound a day!" gasped Wabi. "I tell you, Rod, we haven't hit the right spot—yet!"
"I wonder why John Ball's share was twice that of his companions'? Do you suppose it was because he discovered the gold in the first place?" speculated Rod.
"In all probability it was. That accounts for his murder. The Frenchmen were getting the small end of the deal."
"Eighteen hundred fifty-nine," mused Rod. "That was forty-nine years ago, before the great Civil War. Say—"
He stopped and looked hard at Wabigoon.
"Did it ever strike you that John Ball might not have been murdered?"
Wabi leaned forward with more than usual eagerness.
"I have had a thought—" he began.
"What?"
"That perhaps he was not killed."
"And that after the two Frenchmen died in the knife duel he returned and got the gold," continued Rod.
"No, I had not thought of that," said Wabi. Suddenly he rose to his feet and joined Mukoki out in the gloom of the chasm.
Rod was puzzled. Something in his companion's voice, in his face and words, disturbed him. What had Wabigoon meant?
The young Indian soon rejoined him, but he spoke no more of John Ball.
When the two boys went to their blankets Mukoki still remained awake. For a long time he sat beside the fire, his hands gripping the rifle across his knees, his head slightly bowed in that statue-like posture so characteristic of the Indian. For fully an hour he sat motionless, and in his own way he was deeply absorbed in thought. Soon after their discovery of the first golden bullet Wabigoon had whispered a few words into his ear, unknown to Rod; and to-night out in the gloom of the chasm, he had repeated those same words. They had set Mukoki's mind working. He was thinking now of something that happened long ago, when, in his reasoning, the wilderness was young and he was a youth. In those days his one great treasure was a dog, and one winter he went with this faithful companion far into the hunting regions of the North, a long moon's travel from his village. When he returned, months later, he was alone. From his lonely hunting shack deep in the solitudes his comrade had disappeared, and had never returned. This all happened before Mukoki met the pretty Indian girl who became his wife, and was afterward killed by the wolves, and he missed the dog as he would have missed a human brother. The Indian's love, even for brutes, is some thing that lives, and more than twenty moons later—two years in the life of a man—he returned once again to the old shack, and there he found Wholdaia, the dog! The animal knew him, and bounded about on three legs for joy, and because of the missing leg Mukoki understood why he had not returned to him two years before. Two years is a long time in the life of a dog, and the gray hairs of suffering and age were freely sprinkled in Wholdaia's muzzle and along his spine.
Mukoki was not thinking of Wholdaia without a reason. He was thinking of Wabigoon's words—and the mad hunter. Could not the mad hunter do as Wholdaia had done? Was it possible that the bad-dog man who shot golden bullets and who screamed like a lynx was the man who had lived there many, many years ago, and whom the boys called John Ball? Those were the thoughts that Wabi had set working in his brain. The young Indian had not suggested this to Rod. He had spoken of it to Mukoki only because he knew the old pathfinder might help him to solve the riddle, and so he had started Mukoki upon the trail.
The next morning, while the others were finishing their breakfast, Mukoki equipped himself for a journey.
"Go down chasm," he explained to Rod "Fin' where get out to plain. Shoot meat."
That day the gold hunters were more systematic in their work, beginning close to the fall, one on each side of the stream, and panning their way slowly down the chasm. By noon they had covered two hundred yards, and their only reward was a tiny bit of gold, worth no more than a dollar, which Rod had found in his pan. By the time darkness again compelled them to stop they had prospected a quarter of a mile down stream without discovering other signs of John Ball's treasure. In spite of their failure they were less discouraged than the previous evening, for this failure, in a way, was having a sedative and healthful effect. It convinced them that there was a hard and perhaps long task ahead of them, and that they could not expect to find their treasure winnowed in yellow piles for them.
Early in the evening Mukoki returned laden with caribou meat, and with the news that the first break in the chasm walls was fully five miles below. The adventurers now regretted that they had chopped down the stub, for it was decided that the next work should be in the stream above the fall, which would necessitate a ten-mile tramp, five miles to the break and five miles back. When the journey was begun at dawn the following morning several days' supplies were taken along, and also a stout rope by means of which the gold hunters could lower themselves back into their old camp when their work above was completed. Rod noticed that the rocks in the stream seemed much larger than when he had first seen them, and he mentioned the fact to Wabigoon.
"The floods are going down rapidly," explained the young Indian. "All of the snow is melted from the sides of the mountains, and there are no lakes to feed this chasm stream. Within a week there won't be more than a few inches of water below the fall."
"And that is when we shall find the gold!" declared Rod with his old enthusiasm. "I tell you, we haven't gone deep enough! This gold has been here for centuries and centuries, and it has probably settled several feet below the surface of the river-bed. Ball and the Frenchmen found twenty-seven pounds in June, when the creek was practically dry. Did you ever read about the discoveries of gold in Alaska and the Yukon?"
"A little, when I was going to school with you."
"Well, the richest finds were nearly always from three to a dozen feet under the surface, and when a prospector found signs in surface panning he knew there was rich dirt below. Well find our gold in this chasm, and near the fall!"
Rod's confidence was the chief thing that kept up the spirits of the treasure seekers during the next few days, for not the first sign of gold was discovered above the fall. Yard by yard the prospectors worked up the chasm until they had washed its sands for more than a mile. And with the passing of each day, as Wabigoon had predicted, the stream became more and more shallow, until they could wade across it without wetting themselves above their knees. At the close of the fourth day the three lowered themselves over the face of the rock into the second chasm. So convinced was Rod in his belief that the gold was hidden deep down under the creek bed that he dug a four-foot hole by torch-light and that night after supper washed out several pans of dirt in the glow of the camp-fire. He still found no signs of gold.
The next day's exertions left no room for doubt. Beyond two or three tiny flecks of gold the three adventurers found nothing of value in the deeper sand and gravel of the stream. That night absolute dejection settled on the camp. Both Rod and Wabigoon made vain efforts to liven up their drooping spirits. Only Mukoki, to whom gold carried but a fleeting and elusive value, was himself, and even his hopefulness was dampened by the gloom of his companions. Rod could see but one explanation of their failure. Somewhere near the cataract John