Part 1

BONANZA

BONANZA

A STORY OF THE OUTSIDE. By ERNEST G. HENHAM, Author of “Menotah,” etc.

[Illustration]

London Hutchinson & Co. Paternoster Row 1901

PRINTED BY COWAN & CO., LTD. PERTH

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

PAGE

I. YELLOW SANDS.

WHERE EARTH AND SKY MET 9 THE ADVENTURERS 23 A LAND OF HIDDEN TREASURE 35

II. THE LUMBER CAMP OF GULL ISLAND.

LIFE! 49 SOME HUMAN NATURE 61 AN AFFAIR WITH JAKE PETERSSEN 75 THE OLD STONE RUIN OF THE BUSH 89 CLERICAL ERRORS 101

III. ON A FRESHWATER SEA.

MORNING 115 AFTERNOON 122 EVENING 131 SEEKWAH, WHO BLOWS GOOD TO NO ONE 141 CAPTAIN CORN WHISKY 150 A MAN FOND OF LIFE 158

IV. AN UNKNOWN LAND.

WEIRD HOLLOW 175 MATERIAL GHOSTS 190 AN OLD CAMPAIGNER 202 THE SOONERS OF ELDORADO 214 HOW JUSTICE WORKS 225

V. HANAFIN CITY.

BONANZA 237 DISQUALIFIED 253 THAT PRIEST AGAIN 262

VI. THE NIGHT.

CAN A LEOPARD CHANGE HIS SPOTS? 279 THE HUNTERS AND THE HUNTED 290 WHEN SENTENCE IS GIVEN LET HIM BE CONDEMNED 299

VII. BONANZA.

WHERE THE SUN SHINES UPON THE SAND 315

I

YELLOW SANDS

BONANZA

WHERE EARTH AND SKY MET

The time was an evening in the spring when the atmosphere was all red and gold; the place the flowering grass mounds between the white poplar and birch beside little Yellow Sands River. I had walked out to haul up my sturgeon lines, and had reached the thicket of pines on the sand side of our snake fence, where I could begin to hear the splash of the waters, when my well-trained ears caught a new and different sound proceeding from the bush-bound trail. Curiosity led me to intrude, and I soon came upon a group of Indian maidens at play, pelting each other with soft green cones, and using their shawls as shields to protect their faces.

Directly they saw me a mischievous cry went up, and they united forces, their black eyes dancing with fun as they flung their dainty missiles in my direction with a pitiless accuracy. Presently I dashed forward and captured one of the girls, the most audacious, and, incidentally, the most handsome. She struggled with me, her great beautiful eyes two imps of laughter, but I held on, and, as a punishment, tried to force one of the cones into her laughing mouth. The soft scented thing crumbled upon her teeth; she twisted round, slapped me sharply across the cheek, and, with another deft twist, freed herself, her black hair dashing into my face as she escaped.

The other girls stood at a distance, and chaffed at my defeat.

“When did you come?” I called, in the Cree which I knew better than English, because the girls were strangers to me.

It was Akshelah, my chief tormentor, who replied from the summit of an ant-mound. The tribe had just come to Yellow Sands from Thunder Lake, where fish and fur-bearers had become scarce.

“Come with me,” commanded the girl, holding out her brown shapely arms. “I will take you down to the tepee, and the chief, my father, will give you some moose.”

“We have lots of moose,” I said. “Come with me, and I will give you a sturgeon for your father.”

“But the sturgeon is in the river,” said the bright girl, her head to one side.

“I hope he is pulling at my line,” I said.

Then the girl jumped from the ant-mound, and swung round, catching at my hand, and so drew me away from her companions.

“I will not walk over those stones,” said she, and I noticed then that her left foot was tied up. Yet she walked lightly enough beside me, through the thicket of pines, where some purple butterflies idled, and down to the yellow sands, where the surface was as soft and yielding as white moss.

This bright girl was full of talk, and as we walked she told me of the many things she had done, and all she had seen, the silver fox, the white bear, and Wepechenite, the walrus, himself.

“One day,” said she very sternly, “I shot a moose myself.”

“I will track a musk-ox for you, and you shall kill that,” I said.

“Perhaps I should be afraid,” said Akshelah, with a quick glance.

“You would not be afraid if I were with you.”

Said she more slowly:

“Perhaps you shall come down and dance with me at the lodge. But where is your sturgeon for my father?”

Line after line I gathered in out of the amber water, but there was no sturgeon that evening. When we had visited the last, Akshelah laughed delightedly.

“A fisherman!” she cried. “Such a fisherman! I am sure you could not catch the gold-eyes.”

These are stupid little fish, which will suffer themselves to be pulled out of the water with the hand.

“I will catch one, and put it down your back,” I threatened, but Akshelah went on laughing.

“The gold-eyes will have all sunk to the bottom because the sun is going,” said she. “You will have to go home empty-handed. We laugh at the young men when they come home empty-handed.”

“You are laughing at me now!”

“I laugh at everyone.” She tried to hush her merry voice. “In the morning sometimes I laugh into the face of the sun himself.”

Our homestead was encircled by rolling park-like country, which stretched away endlessly upon three sides; but on the fourth, the western, there was merely a strip of bush separating us from the Yellow Sands River, which made a winding course round Big Stone Point, and entered Lake Whispering some twenty-six miles lower down. Our log-house stood upon a clearing, with a little cow-byre adjoining which sheltered our few beasts in winter; both buildings were thatched with swamp grass. We had reclaimed from the bush about five acres of garden, where father grew what grain and vegetables we needed, and the flowers grew themselves. The willow scrub and the wood-ants were our principal difficulties; and Antoine, our Indian servant, whose duty it was to keep the ground clear, devoted more anathemas than labour upon his work. To this day I do not know who owns that land, whether the Crown or the Hudson Bay Company, but the matter is of no importance.

One night when I reached home father was smoking, sitting upon a log beside the door, silent as usual. Father had always been taciturn; had I not been provided with Indian companions, I might have altogether lost the use of my tongue. He eyed me more narrowly than usual, I thought, but he said nothing as I passed. We had our supper, and I was about to roam outside to watch the insects of the night at play, when my father surprised me by calling in a hoarse voice:

“Sit down, Rupert!”

I had always stood in awe of the unhappy-looking man who called himself my father. All my life I had lived with him at Yellow Sands, knowing no other relation, no other friend, except my Indians and morose MacCaskill, factor of the dying Hudson Bay Station. Why my father spent himself there I did not know, and the thought never troubled me, because I did not then know that there was any world outside that narrow circle of the horizon where earth and sky met. I had no learning; I could neither read nor write. I had often been to the lake shores, and I knew that boats sometimes came to the yellow beach; but where these boats came from I had no idea.

“Rupert,” began my father, “have I taught you anything? Do you know what London is?”

He spoke in the deliberate manner of a man little accustomed to speech, and he had his hand to his brow as though his brain were tired. I replied, not wishing to be ignorant:

“Is it anything like a moose?”

“It is not an animal,” said my father. I wonder now that he did not smile. “London is the name of a city, and you were born there.”

He stopped, and I could hear the throbbing murmurs of the night. There was no lamp in our shanty, but we could see by the northern lights, and by the fire which smouldered outside the open door to keep away the mosquitos. My father struck a match, rekindled his pipe, and, with the match still burning between his fingers, walked across to the far corner of the room, and opened a box; presently he came near, and I saw that he held a buckskin bag. He poured out the contents upon the table, but when I bent forward to look, as the light flickered up momentarily, I was disappointed. Only a few ounces of coarse dirt, and some small honey-combed stones.

“Is that stuff of any use, father?” I said. He looked across slowly, and I went on: “I picked some yellow stones like those out of the white rocks up Split Leaf Creek. I gave them to Factor MacCaskill.”

Turning upon me abruptly, my father went on:

“I have been for the best part of my life a gold-hunter. I, too, was born in London, and I was once what they call a gentleman. You may understand the meaning of the word some day. I have made more than one fortune in my time, but fortunes so made melt as quickly. During an exceptional period of prosperity I returned to my native city, there married, and you were born.” He started suddenly. “Come with me, Rupert.”

He had re-collected the gold, and now snatched at the bag and left the shanty. I followed, along the dark-blue trail, where I had lingered with Akshelah that afternoon, and out over the river falling in bars of alternate black and silver to its own soft music. Father held the buckskin bag swinging by one hand. It was large and heavy, but he launched it forth with one strong movement, and it went under the water with a sullen splash.

“When I am gone, you shall never say that I did not teach you one lesson, boy.” He went back, and I followed, wondering what this teaching meant. When we had passed the smoke of the smudge, and had regained our home, father seized my hand. “Gold has ruined me, Rupert.”

Then he went away, and I suppose to sleep, but I wandered outside, trying hard to think; and when the lights grew brighter, and the sounds of the bush more distinct, my untrained mind awoke, and I had dreams that night.

Father had always looked ill. One day I thought his face was whiter than usual. I ventured to ask after his health, and succeeded in again drawing him into conversation.

“I have only a little more time to be miserable,” he said, in his slow fashion. Then his manner became harsh. “Shall you stay here when I’m away, or will you go to find the world?”

I stared at him, and said the only thing I could: “Where is the world?”

“You will learn.” He looked up at me, his face twitching, and said more quickly, “I have seen you with that native girl. If you want to be wise, marry her when I am dead, and live your life away here. She is a natural woman. If you must be a fool, like your father, go back to the world. You will find the false thing there.”

I had picked up my muzzle-loader, thinking he had done, and was going out to the bush, but he stopped me, and his voice became nervous.

“If you ever meet with a man, a tall man, with loose white face--he would be elderly now,”--father hesitated, then laughed wretchedly, and almost shouted at me--“his name is Redpath. He has kept me here in hiding all these years.”

I did not shoot any partridges that morning. By chance I met Akshelah, and after we had been together a little while, I found that the morning had somehow slipped away. She showed me how to sew with grass upon buckskin, and all the time laughed at my clumsiness. The grass would keep breaking; she declared that I strained too heavily upon it. Her little brown fingers were so light that they might have sewn with gossamers, but when I told her so she only pricked me saucily with her needle.

Nearly every day Akshelah and I were together fishing or hunting. How stern her face would become, and how resolute, as she struggled with a wolf-like jack-fish, knee-deep in the yellow sands, and being drawn deeper every minute! She came with me to shoot tree partridges, and so sure was her eye, and so agile her every movement, that she would catch the great stupid birds as they tumbled headlong out of the black poplars. I was often at the tepee, and one midnight when the moon was large I danced at the lodge with Akshelah that exhilarating dance of friendship, which makes a man beside himself for the time with mad strength and passion. The tribe became as my own by the rights of the dance, and I was the son of the chief and the brother of each brave.

And yet nearer to me the cloud of sorrow gathered and darkened. In spite of the skilled attention of our native Antoine, father weakened fast, more quickly, perhaps, because he would not take to his bed, but insisted upon working as he was able.

Factor MacCaskill came over one day, and when he left I met him along the trail. He was a big, morose man, but his heart was sound.

“Rupe,” he said, “old man’s call is on the way. We’ll miss him hereabouts.”

That same evening I was cutting rye-grass along the snake fence, Akshelah near me hindering, when Antoine came running out of the shadows to startle me with the message that my father had fallen down unconscious. I ran back with him, and Akshelah sped to her own people to summon them to the passing of the white man.

Father was stretched along his bed, his eyes shut, his face grey-white, and I heard his hard breathing before I had entered the house.

The lamp was lighted. I sat by my father’s side, fanning the flies from his weird face.

“No good, boy,” muttered Antoine. “The Spirit call him, an’ he not say, ‘I cannot.’ He go.”

I had no religion, beyond the native belief in the two great spirits, Good and Evil, therefore I was relieved when there came against the window the deep red glow of the death fires, and I heard the solemn chant of my Indian friends beating upward. Round the house went the Cree doctors in their official mummery, marching in a solemn circle, making their incantations to keep the devils at bay, their voices rising to a dreadful yell, then sinking abruptly into a mere shivering whisper.

MacCaskill entered, and seated himself largely upon the chest in the corner. He smoked all the time, but never spoke.

“Maidens!” called a deep voice, and straightway the clear sweet voices of the maids ascended, singing the prayer of commendation to the Spirit. I heard only one voice, the clearest and best, the voice of Akshelah, and as I listened I forgot the presence, and began to dream again.

A heavy hand came upon my shoulder.

“Stir yourself, Rupe; old man’s away.”

Antoine moved about slowly, setting the house in order. The death fires were burning out, and the Indians departed in solemn file. Although I had never been what is known as friendly with my father, I felt unmistakably alone.

“Maybe ye don’t want to stop wi’ that,” went on the factor. “Come along over to the Fort, Rupe Petrie.”

I started at hearing that name. “Petrie?” I muttered.

“Ay, that’s your name. Old man went sudden, or maybe he’d have told ye.”

Rousing myself, I went out with the factor, and we walked over to the Fort through the silver night.

We buried my father the next day under a big pine a stone’s throw from the door, and Antoine heaped a mound to mark the spot. Akshelah stood with me beside the grave, her black hair wrapped in a red shawl as bright as her cheeks. We were alone.

“You will be lonely?” said she softly, her head to one side.

“I have you, and the factor, with your father and the tribe.”

“Oh, yes,” said the girl, and I saw that she was happy because I had named her first.

The evening found me turning out my father’s chest. There were letters and papers, which he would probably have destroyed, had not death tripped him up so suddenly. As I could not read, these were of slight interest, if I except one ragged sheet, half covered with writing, and the other half containing a rough diagram, where I thought I made out sea and coast, with rocks and hills behind. Always anxious to learn, I smoked over this torn sheet for a long time, and even after I had lighted the lamp I turned to it again. The letters I had put into a box and hidden.

It was a silent night. Antoine slept in the kitchen, and an electric storm might have passed leaving his slumbers unbroken. The door was open, and the smoke of the smudge hung between me and the night. I was about to go towards my bedroom, when my highly trained ears caught a sound, which was not made by any bird, or beast, or insect in the bush. I looked up, not afraid, but startled. I stepped forward, and put the lamp above my head. Through the flickering smoke I made out the figure of a man.

I took him to be an Indian, and called out in Cree. No answer came, but the man stood out from the smoke, and I then spoke to him in English, because I was sure he had mistaken my home for the Fort.

“An elderly gentleman of the name of Petrie lives here, I believe?” asked the stranger.

He was tall, loosely made, and his clothes hung on him badly. Unaccustomed to strange white people, I became confused.

“My father is outside now,” I said, not for the moment realising that my words contained a meaning I never intended.

“Ah, yes. And where, may I ask?” The stranger’s voice was smooth, and his manner deferential.

“Under the big pine.”

I indicated the shadowy outline of the tree, and immediately, to my great surprise, found myself alone. I had forgotten the sheet of paper, still spread out upon the table, and before I had collected my wits the man was back. He smiled at me with his large mouth, and looked over me with his cold eyes, making me more uncomfortable than I had ever felt before.

“I imagine it must be very easy to fool me,” he observed gently. “I have been deceived by so many people, your good father among them, and you have fooled me with your first word.” He smiled, still more guilelessly. “When did he die?”

“Yesterday,” I answered, but while I said the word his eyes started like those of a starving man.

I was too quick for him. I was nearer the table, and I snatched away the sheet of paper, as his long hands pounced at it.

“I really believe that is my property,” he said eagerly, yet backing indifferently. “My good fellow, I am positively convinced that is mine.”

“No,” I said simply.

The man felt in his pocket, and I suddenly picked up my unloaded gun.

“What are you about?” cried the stranger, with assumed horror. “Ah, you are Petrie’s son, I can see, hot, headstrong, and impulsive, mistaking a friend for an enemy, just as he always did. You must know that I’ve been searching for your good father close upon twenty years, and wasting my life doing it. He stole that plan from me. It is terrible to have to say so, but you require me to make good my claim. You know what it is, of course?”

I was quick-witted enough not to play into his hands.

“I know all about it,” I lied firmly.

The man changed completely. He made a quick move, leaned forward, his hands upon the table, his eyes freezing at me.

“Partners?” he suggested.

I could hardly guess his meaning, but I went on playing my own game.

“All right,” I answered.

He put out his long arm.

“We will make our arrangements in due time. For the present I must beg to retain my own property.”

I hesitated, and in a moment my father’s warning came. I looked at the flabby face, clean-shaven, with loose skin hanging in pouches.

“Tell me your name!” I called, but while my attention was distracted the long hungry fingers snatched the paper out of my hand.

“Redpath,” said the man, as he left me.

THE ADVENTURERS

For the first time in my healthy life I knew what it was to want sleep. After my father’s enemy had left me, taking that paper upon which he set so much store, I lay awake for hours. Despite my ignorance, I felt that the old idle life was done, that the new and stranger had already commenced, and the way ahead looked dark. At sunrise I went to the river and bathed, and after early breakfast set out for the Fort. MacCaskill was splitting logs in front of the store, and did not cease from his occupation while I was telling him of the coming of Redpath.

When I had done he sat down and refilled his pipe; after some storm-like puffs he asked me what I had made out of it, and when I helplessly shook my head, he spoke.

“What I know of your father ain’t scarce worth talkin’ about. He stopped here fifteen years, but kept himself buttoned up all the time. I knew his name. I knew he’d been a miner. I knew he was an Englishman. The rest is loose in me fancy. Like to hear?”

I was eager to hear anything, whether fact or fancy, and he went on:

“Ole Petrie never settled here, I guess, because he wanted solitude, nor yet because he liked it, but just because he was scared to live in the world. Lots like that, Rupe. He’d done something--or was suspected, and maybe wanted, and fancied he couldn’t clear himself. This Redpath knows all about it. Likely he’d run your father into doing it.”

“He was hiding from Redpath,” I said.

The factor nodded.

“There’s that bit o’ paper,” he muttered. “Why in Jerusalem didn’t I have a sight of that! Then his firing that bag o’ dirt into the river! Don’t you see, Rupe? No, course you don’t. He told me one time he wanted you kep’ ignorant, or I’d have opened up your eyes long enough ago. Old man struck a rich pay-streak one time, and all he knew is set right down on that paper. Golden gates! Why wasn’t I with ye last night? This Redpath has been hunting years for that secret.”

“What is the use of the gold?” I said.

The factor swore.

“Sit down,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll tell ye what you ought to have known soon as you was able to balance upright.”