Murder Point Part 15

CHAPTER XIII

THE DEAD SOUL SPEAKS OUT

The Man with the Dead Soul was drunk, heartily and shamelessly drunk; Granger, the contriver of his condition, sat facing him, impatiently waiting to see whether that was true which the Indians said, that, when drink had subdued his body, his soul returned for a little s.p.a.ce.

The nominal occasion of the carousal was the home-coming of Eyelids and, as Granger had subtly put it, "the celebration of his own entrance into the family of Ericsen." However, in a country from which there is no means of escape, save through the magic doors of imagination, and where men get so bored with themselves, and their environment, and one another, that they are willing to seek a temporary release by drinking such noxious drugs as pain-killer, essence of ginger, of peppermint, etc., for the sake of the alcohol which they contain, the only excuse necessary for intoxication is opportunity. Spirits of any kind are strictly forbidden in Keewatin, that the Indians may be protected from intemperance; nevertheless, despite all precautions of the Mounted Police, a certain quant.i.ty finds its way up in disguised forms, or smuggled in sacks of flour and bales of traders' merchandise.

Granger, being well aware that the fool says with his lips what the wise man knows in his heart, had determined that both the menfolk of his adopted house should play the fool that night. Whatever Beorn and Eyelids might do or say, and however intoxicated they might become, he had planned for himself that he would keep quite sober, with his wits about him, that he might recall next day what they had done and said when thus taken off their guard. There were two problems which he was anxious to solve; the first, the reason for his brother-in-law's long delay; the second, what it was that they watched for with such eagerness, and waved to at the bend.

The latter problem had become still more perplexing since Eyelids'

return that morning, for in the afternoon, when they were sitting together outside the shack, he also had seen something down-river, and, following his father's and sister's example, had risen to his feet, commenced to wave, and, when it had disappeared, had inquired, "Who was that fellow?" Straightway Beorn had scowled him into silence, and Peggy, leaning over, had whispered some words in a Cree-dialect, which Granger did not understand; whereupon an expression of fear and wonder had come into Eyelids' face. When Granger, having taken him apart, had asked him for an explanation, he had only shaken his head stupidly, saying that he must have been mistaken, and that there was nothing there. This was manifestly false, for during all the remaining portion of the daylight his eyes had kept continually furtively returning down-river towards the bend.

The fact that he also had seen something, did away with Granger's supposition that it was to her brother, lurking in the vicinity, that Peggy had signalled with her hand--and made him the more curious to know the real cause. Could it be Spurling, he wondered, who had made a compact with them and lay in hiding there? If that was so, then what had been the reason of Eyelids' delay,--for he had not stayed to collect any caches of furs, but had come back empty-handed, walking by the river-bank. He had watched to see whether anyone had put out from the store to leave provisions at the bend; but no one had been there, unless at a time when he slept. His pa.s.sion to share the secret had become all-consuming, as curiosity must when it works in the mind of a lonely man. To this end he had shadowed Eyelids all that day, giving him no opportunity for private talk with his family, and, finally, had prepared this trap of a drinking-bout, hoping that someone might commit himself. As yet he had this to his advantage, that the half-breed, though he had witnessed the signals, was almost as ignorant as himself as to their real purport, and was therefore, probably, just as curious.

They were sitting in a room, empty and comfortless, which was built on to the end of the oblong which comprised the store. Its walls were damp, and the news-papers, with which they had been covered, sagged down from the boards like monstrous goitres. It had one window, which looked riverwards, across whose panes, dust and cobweb smirched, a muslin curtain had been hung by a previous agent, who was reputed to have drunk himself to death. This was its only attempt at decoration, save for a faded photo of a girl attired in early Victorian dress, across the right-hand corner of which was scrawled, "Yours, with love, from Gertrude." She looked a good girl, and Granger felt sorry for her because, by the ordinary laws of nature, she had probably been dead for many years; and he also felt sorry for her because he was certain that the man who had placed her picture there had gone away and disappointed her in her love.

Perhaps he had been the agent who, sitting there night after night, gazing upon her portrait, torturing himself with memories of the happiness which he had lost, had drunk himself to death. If that was so, she had had her revenge. Going closer, he saw that the photographer's name was recorded there, "Joseph Dean, New Bedford, Ma.s.s." So she had been a New Englander, and her lover, whoever he was, had probably started life as a sailor in the whaling fleet which at that time set out annually from New Bedford for the North. In Keewatin the memories of men for their neighbours, especially if they happen to be private traders, are very short.

The room contained little furniture. There was a wooden shelf, knocked together out of packing-cases, which ran along one side of the wall and had probably done service as a bed. There was an upturned box, on which a man might seat himself; and a low three-legged stool which would serve as a table--that was all. In imitation of the no more lavish accommodation set apart for single men at the Hudson Bay Company's forts, the room was commonly known as Bachelors' Hall. The door was fast-shut; the curtain was half-drawn before the window, shutting out the long-tarrying June twilight; the three men had been there together for four hours, and as yet nothing of importance had transpired, and no word had been spoken.

Eyelids, with his lashless lids (hence his sobriquet) half-closed, squatted on the floor, Indian fashion, directing his pipe to his mouth with uncertain hand. The other hand fumbled continually in his breast, as if he kept something hidden there. Granger wondered what it was.

Beorn sprawled his great length of legs along the shelf, his back and head resting against the wall. His eyes were very bright, and a long and ugly scar, which extended from the right of his forehead to his lower jaw, and which Granger did not remember to have noticed before, showed swollen and red through the tangled ma.s.s of his grey beard. His pipe also was in his mouth, but his hand was still steady. Under the influence of drink a new intentness had come into his face, all his features seemed to be more keen and pointed. Every now and again he would remove his pipe, as if he were about to break into speech; then, either through laziness or from the tyranny of his habitual caution, he would replace it and, as it seemed to Granger, relapse into memories. He watched him closely, and he thought he saw the elation of old successes, and emotions of forgotten defeats, flit across his countenance. Granger himself was quite sober, having only pretended to drink; if he sat a trifle huddled on his box and lurched unsteadily, it was only that he might keep his companions unsuspicious.

On the crazy little stool between them stood a candle from which the wax occasionally dripped, so that for a moment the flame would die down, causing the shadows to shorten. A jam-jar did service as a tumbler; there was one between the three of them, which meant that they had to drink quickly in order not to keep the next man waiting.

Granger served out the whisky, and he served it neat--when men are intent on getting drunk they do not procrastinate by adding water.

Eyelids was getting more and more peaceful and foolish, smiling first to himself and then slily to Granger, as though he had some very happy knowledge which he was burning to communicate. At last he pulled out his hand from his shirt, and there was something in it. Beorn, raised three feet from the floor on his shelf, could not see what his son was doing, nor did he care; he was reliving the past, when there was no Eyelids.

But Granger watched; the fingers opened a trifle and revealed the shining of something yellow. Quick as thought, before the fingers could close over it again, he pretended to lose his balance, and, shooting out his foot as if to save himself, sent the yellow lump flying from the half-breed's palm. It shot into the air, fell with a thud, and rolled scintillating into the darkness across the boarded floor. Before he could be detained, Granger had sprung after it and held it in his hand. He faced round, ready to defend himself; but there was no necessity. Eyelids, having attempted to rise and having found that his legs would not carry him, had sunk back to his squatting position on the floor, where he was smiling foolishly and nodding his head as much as to say, "I've been telling you all evening, but you would not believe me; now I have proved my word!"

Beorn was sitting upright on his shelf, looking at him keenly. As Granger approached, he held out his hand; Granger placed the yellow lump in it.

"Gold," he cried, and his eyes flashed; "a river nugget!" Then weighing it carefully, "Three ounces," he said; "it's worth about forty dollars."

"How do you know that?" asked Granger. "Was it river gold that you found on the Comstock? I thought that it was quartz."

"It was quartz afterwards, but nuggets and dust first." Then, remembering himself, he asked suspiciously, "But what d'you know about it?"

"I ought to know something," Granger replied, speaking thickly and shamming intoxication; "I ought to know something; I was one of the first men in on the Klondike gold-rush."

"d.a.m.n it! So you were one of the Klondike men? Tell me about it."

Granger had intended to spin him a yarn about great bonanzas in Yukon, which he had discovered. It was to have been a hard-luck tale of claims which had been stolen, and claims which had been jumped, and claims which had been given away for a few pounds of flour or slices of bacon in crises of starvation; but in the presence of the old man's eagerness, and with the shining nugget of temptation between them, he drifted unconsciously into straight talk and told him his own true story.

At first, while he was feeling his way, he gave the history of Bobbie Henderson, and Siwash George, and Skook.u.m Jim, the real discoverers of the Klondike; and of how Bobbie Henderson was done out of his share, so that he still remained a poor man and prospector when others, who had come into the Yukon years later, had worked their claims, grown wealthy, and departed. Then he recited the Iliad of the stampede from Forty-Mile, when the rumour had spread abroad that Siwash George had found two-dollars-fifty to the pan at the creek which he had named "Bonanza"; how drunken men were thrown into open boats, and men who refused to credit the report were bound hand and foot with ropes by their friends and compelled to go along, lest they should lose the chance of a lifetime; and how, where to-day Forty-Mile had been a noisy town, to-morrow it was silent and deserted, with none left save a few old men and sickly women to tell the story.

To all of this Beorn listened with small attention, for he kept muttering to himself, "But how did he know that there was gold there?

How did he discover it?" Granger wondered to whom he was referring--to his own son, to Siwash George, or to someone else; but he dared not ask him a leading question lest his suspicion should be aroused. He went on with his narration feverishly, forgetting in his excitement his resolution to keep sober, emptying the tumbler of whisky recklessly, turn and turn about with his companion, waiting and watching to see whether, in the Indian phrase, the dead soul would return. When he commenced to speak of himself, of his pa.s.sage from Skaguay to Dawson, of the wealth which he found and lost at Drunkman's Shallows, and of his flight, Beorn became interested; his eyes blazed and every few seconds he would give him encouragement, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. hoa.r.s.ely, "Go on. Go on."

So he carried his history to an end with a rush, for now he knew that the dead soul had come back. He finished with the sentence, "And then I went to Wrath, for I was nearly starving. 'For G.o.d's sake, man, give me some employment,' I said. 'I can't steal; they'd put me in gaol for that, and so I should disgrace my mother. And I can't cut throats for bread, for then I should get hanged. But, if I have to endure this agony much longer, I shall do both.' And his reply was to send me up here, to this ice-cold h.e.l.l of snow and silence, to mind his store and watch the Last Chance River flowing on and on, until the day of my death. G.o.d curse the reptile and his charity."

The Man with the Dead Soul turned his head aside and there was silence for a moment. Then, bending down and having a.s.sured himself that Eyelids was asleep. "I've known all that," he said; "but, unlike you, I did more 'an intend--I killed my man. I guess you an' I are o' one family now, so there's no harm in tellin'. I don't just remember who you are, nor how we happen to be here this night; but you placed that gold in my hand, so I reckon you're all right. You ain't a Mormon, are you?" he asked abruptly.

Granger, taken aback by the question, smiled slowly and shook his head.

"Well, then, I'd have you to know," Beorn continued, "that I was brought up in the Mormon faith. One o' the earliest memories I have is o' the ma.s.sacre o' the Latter-Day Saints at Gallatin, when Governor Boggs issued his order that we should be exterminated an' driven out.

I can still see the soldiery ridin' up an' down, pillagin' our city, insultin' our womenfolk, an' cuttin' down our men. I can just remember the misery o' the winter through which we fled, an' the tightness o'

my mother's arms about me as we crossed the Mississippi, goin' into Illinois for safety. From my earliest childhood my mind has bin made accustomed to travellin's, an' privations, an' deeds o' blood. That's the sort o' man I am.

"It was six years after the Gallatin affair, when our city o' Nauvoo had been founded, that the mob once more rose agin us an' murdered our prophets, an' placed our lives in danger. Again we fled, crossin' the Mississippi on the ice, till we gained a breathin' s.p.a.ce at Council Bluffs. A year after that, under Brigham Young, we pa.s.sed through the Rockies to the Great Salt Lake an' came to rest. All this persecootion caused our people to become a hard an' bitter race; but I'd have been true to 'em if it hadn't bin for my mother, an' the manner o' her death. How did she die? Don't ask me, for I can't tell you. She was a Swede, a kind o' white slave, who was kept with several other women by my father. She went out one day, an' never came back. I believe she'd got heartsick, an' was plannin' t' escape with a feller o' her own nationality, a newcomer. Anyhow, when I asked my father about her, he threatened me into silence. He was a priest o' the order o'

Melchizedek, a powerful man among the prophets. From that hour I hated Mormonism, an' determined t' escape whenever my chance occurred. It came sooner 'an I expected.

"The Californian gold-rush had robbed the Saints o' the seaboard to which they was hopin' to lay claim. They began to get nervous lest the southern territories, from Salt Lake to the Mexican frontier, might also be lost to 'em if they didn't do something so they organised the State of Deseret, an' sent out expeditions to take it up before it could fall into the Gentiles' hands. My father, I believe, had grown 'fraid o' me, lest I should take his life; so he had me included in the first expedition, which consisted o' eighty men, an' was sent to garrison a Mormon station in Carson Valley, Nevada.

"I've allaws had a nose for gold, an' we hadn't bin there a month before I'd discovered an' washed out a little dust from a neighbourin'

gulch. I kept my secret to myself, an' when I'd gathered enough, bought provisions, stole a horse, an' ran away, escapin' over the Sierras into California, where I hoped that the Mormons, an'

especially my father, would lose all trace o' me an' give me up for dead. For eight years I drifted along the coast from camp to camp, but didn't have much luck. I even went so far south as Mexico, where I laboured in the silver mines an' learned the Mexican method o'

crushin' quartz with arrastras.

"All this time I was haunted by the memory o' the gold which I'd washed out in Carson Valley; the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that untold riches lay buried there. However, I was fearful to return, lest I should fall into the clutches o' the priesthood o' Melchizedek or o' the spies o' Brigham Young. I was an apostate, an' my father was my enemy; I knew that, should I once be recovered by the Mormons, no mercy would be shown me. At last the news came that the struggle o' the Saints for possession o' Nevada had been given up, an' that messengers had bin sent out from Salt Lake biddin'

all emigrants return. For eight years I'd bin unmolested; I thought that I'd bin forgotten, an' that it was safe to turn my steps eastward.

"I travelled day an' night to get back to my first discovery; I was tortured wi' the thought that before I got there someone might have rediscovered it, an' have staked it out. I'd crossed the Sierras, an'

was within a two-days' journey o' my destination, when I came to a lonely valley as the sun was settin', an' there I camped. The place looked G.o.d-forsaken; there was nothin' in sight but rocks, an' sand, an' sage-brush. I lit my fire, an' tethered my horse, an', being dog-tired, was soon asleep. Suddenly I woke up, an' was conscious o'

footsteps goin' stealthily, away from me into the darkness. I jumped to my feet an' seized my gun; but my eyes were dazed with sleep an'

firelight so that I could see nothin'. I ran out into the shadows, followin' the footsteps, but, before I could come up with 'em, their sound had changed to that o' a horse, gallopin' northward, growin'

fainter and fainter.

"I returned to my camp an' examined my baggage; nothin' was missin', not even the gold which I'd carried--all seemed safe. I sat up an'

watched till daybreak, an', havin' s.n.a.t.c.hed a hasty breakfast, commenced t' pack my animal. Then it was that I discovered, slipped beneath a strap o' my saddle, a sheet o' paper. Unfoldin' it, I saw that it was scrawled over in a rude an' almost unreadable hand. This was what it said, 'This demand of ours shall remain uncancelled, an'

shall be to you as was the Ark o' G.o.d among the Philistines. Unless you return to your father's house an' to the people o' your father's faith, you shall be visited by the Lord o' Hosts wi' thunder an' wi'

earthquakes, wi' floods, wi' pestilence, wi' famine, an' wi'

bloodshed, until the day of your death, when your name shall not be known among men.'

"I was seized with panic, for then I knew that the spies o' Mormon had traced me. But I wouldn't turn back, for I knew that the treasure for which I had waited, as Jacob waited for Rachel, lay straight ahead. So I rode forward, tremblin' as I went, carryin' my gun in my hand. At the end o' the second day I came t' Johntown, an' found that many things had changed since I had left. There were a dozen shanties in the town; these were occupied wi' gamblers, storekeepers, an'

liquor-sellers, includin' two white women an' Sarah Winnemucca, the Piute princess. But the placer-miners had been at work, an' the gulches were dotted with the tents an' dugouts o' men who had discovered my secret for themselves. Thomas Paige Comstock was in the gang, the man who gave his name to the first great strike. They called 'im Old Pancake, 'cause he was too busy searchin' for gold to bake bread. Even at that time, as wi' spoon in hand he stirred the pancake batter, he kept his eyes on the crest o' some distant peak, an' was lost in dreams o' avarice.

"I hadn't bin there long before I took up wi' a feller named Peter O'Riley, an' we became pards. We determined to try our luck in the Walker River Mountains, where some new placers had bin started; but we hadn't got the money, so we agreed t' work a claim in Six-Mile Canon till we'd taken out enough dust t' pay for an outfit. We dug a trench straight up the hillside, by Old Man Caldwell's Spring, through blue clay an' a yellowish kind o' gravel. But the spring wasted down the slope, so we stopped work on the trench an' commenced to sink a pit to collect the water an' make a reservoir. We hadn't sunk more 'an four feet when we struck a darker an' heavier soil, which sparkled as we shovelled it above ground. We washed out a panful, an' found that the bottom was fairly covered in gold. This was the top o' the famous Ophir, had we only known it. We jumped to our feet an' shouted, for it was the richest placer that had as yet bin found. We gave up our notion o' the Walker River, an' I began to laugh int' myself at the Mormon threat, that I should suffer from all the plagues o' Egypt, an'

die an unknown man. We were rich--rich--rich.

"Just as we were finishin' our day's work, Old Pancake rides up. He'd bin lookin' for a mustang that he'd lost, an' came gallopin' over the ridge, with his long legs brushin' the sage tops. We tried to hide our discovery, but his eyes were too sharp for that. He saw the gold from our last clean-up glistenin' in the bottom o' the pan, as the sunset lit on it. 'You've struck it, boys,' he cried.

"Jumpin' from his horse, he went down into the pit t' examine for hisself. He stayed down there some time; when he come up his face was grave. He'd done a lot of thinkin' in a very short while. He sat down on the hillside, an' was silent for so long that we began to suspect there was somethin' up.

"At last he said, 'Now, see here, boys, this spring was old man Caldwell's. I an' Manny Penrod bought his claim last winter, an' we sold a tenth to Old Virginia th' other day. If you two fellers'll let Manny an' myself in on equal shares, it's all right; if not, it's all wrong.'

"We were a bit afraid o' Old Pancake; he'd bin longer in the district 'an we had. We didn't think to doubt his word, though, as we afterwards discovered, every word that he spoke was false. Anyhow, after a lot 'o argiment, we agreed to let him an' Manny Penrod in on the terms which he'd suggested. That was the beginnin' o' the Johntown gold-rush, an' I, for the second time, was one o' the discoverers. At first we named the place Pleasant Hill Camp, an' I can tell you it was mighty pleasant to be takin' out a thousand dollars a day per man. But later, when a city commenced t' spring up, it was necessary t' find some other name. We quarrelled a good deal about what we'd call it; but one night, when Old Virginia was goin' home with the boys drunk, carryin' a bottle o' whisky in 'is hand, he stumbled as he reached his cabin, an' the bottle fell an' was broke. Risin' to his knees, with the neck o' the bottle held fast in 'is hand, he coughed out, 'I baptise this ground Virginia town.' An' so Virginia town, which was afterwards changed t' city, the handful o' shanties was named.