North of Fifty-Three Part 26

Which was a contingency nearer at hand than even Bill, with a firsthand knowledge of the North's vagaries in the way of flood, quite antic.i.p.ated.

Three days after the finding of the pocket the whole floor of the creek was awash. His rocker went downstream overnight. To the mouth of the canon where the branch sought junction with the parent stream they could ascend, and no farther. And when Bill saw that he rolled himself a cigarette, and, putting one long arm across his wife's shoulders, said whimsically:

"What d'you say we start home?"

CHAPTER XXIII

THE STRESS OF THE TRAIL

Roaring Bill dumped his second pack on the summit of the Klappan, and looked away to where the valley that opened out of the basin showed its blurred hollow in the distance. But he uttered no useless regrets.

With horses they could have ridden south through a rolling country, where every stretch of timber gave on a gra.s.s-grown level. Instead they were forced back over the rugged route by which they had crossed the range the summer before. Grub, bedding, furs, and gold totaled two hundred pounds. On his st.u.r.dy shoulders Bill could pack half that weight. For his wife the thing was a physical impossibility, even had he permitted her to try. Hence every mile advanced meant that he doubled the distance, relaying from one camp to the next. They cut their bedding to a blanket apiece, and that was Hazel's load--all he would allow her to carry.

"You're no pack mule, little person," he would say. "It don't hurt me.

I've done this for years."

But even with abnormal strength and endurance, it was killing work to buck those ragged slopes with a heavy load. Only by terrible, unremitting effort could he advance any appreciable distance. From daybreak till noon they would climb and rest alternately. Then, after a meal and a short breathing spell, he would go back alone after the second load. They were footsore, and their bodies ached with weariness that verged on pain when they gained the pa.s.s that cut the summit of the Klappan Range.

"Well, we're over the hump," Bill remarked thankfully. "It's a downhill shoot to the Skeena. I don't think it's more than fifty or sixty miles to where we can take to the water."

They made better time on the western slope, but the journey became a matter of sheer endurance. Summer was on them in full blaze. The creeks ran full and strong. Thunderstorms blew up out of a clear sky to deluge them. Food was scanty--flour and salt and tea; with meat and fish got by the way. And the black flies and mosquitoes swarmed about them maddeningly day and night.

So they came at last to the Skeena, and Hazel's heart misgave her when she took note of its swirling reaches, the sinuous eddies--a deep, swift, treacherous stream. But Bill rested overnight, and in the morning sought and felled a sizable cedar, and began to hew. Slowly the thick trunk shaped itself to the form of a boat under the steady swing of his ax. Hazel had seen the type in use among the coast Siwashes, twenty-five feet in length, narrow-beamed, the sides cut to a half inch in thickness, the bottom left heavier to withstand sc.r.a.ping over rock, and to keep it on an even keel. A rude and tricky craft, but one wholly efficient in capable hands.

In a week it was finished. They loaded the sack of gold, the bundle of furs, their meager camp outfit amidships, and swung off into the stream.

The Skeena drops fifteen hundred feet in a hundred miles. Wherefore there are rapids, boiling stretches of white water in which many a good canoe has come to grief. Some of these they ran at imminent peril.

Over the worst they lined the canoe from the bank. One or two short canons they portaged, dragging the heavy dugout through the brush by main strength. Once they came to a wall-sided gorge that ran away beyond any attempt at portage, and they abandoned the dugout, to build another at the lower end. But between these natural barriers they clicked off the miles in hot haste, such was the swiftness of the current. And in the second week of July they brought up at the head of Kispiox Canon. Hazleton lay a few miles below. But the Kispiox stayed them, a sluice box cut through solid stone, in which the waters raged with a deafening roar. No man ventured into that wild gorge. They abandoned the dugout. Bill slung the sack of gold and the bale of furs on his back.

"It's the last lap, Hazel," said he. "We'll leave the rest of it for the first Siwash that happens along."

So they set out bravely to trudge the remaining distance. And as the fortunes of the trail sometimes befall, they raised an Indian camp on the bank of the river at the mouth of the canon. A ten-dollar bill made them possessors of another canoe, and an hour later the roofs of Hazleton cropped up above the bank.

"Oh, Bill," Hazel called from the bow. "Look! There's the same old steamer tied to the same old bank. We've been gone a year, and yet the world hasn't changed a mite. I wonder if Hazleton has taken a Rip van Winkle sleep all this time?"

"No fear," he smiled. "I can see some new houses--quite a few, in fact. And look--by Jiminy! They're working on the grade. That railroad, remember? See all those teams? Maybe I ought to have taken up old Hackaberry on that town-lot proposition, after all."

"Fiddlesticks!" she retorted, with fine scorn of Hazleton's real-estate possibilities. "You could buy the whole town with this."

She touched the sack with her toe.

"Not quite," Bill returned placidly. "I wouldn't, anyway. We'll get a better run for our money than that. I hope old Hack didn't forget to attend to that ranch business for me."

He drove the canoe alongside a float. A few loungers viewed them with frank curiosity. Bill set out the treasure sack and the bale of furs, and tied the canoe.

"A new hotel, by Jove!" he remarked, when upon gaining the level of the town a new two-story building blazoned with a huge sign its function as a hostelry. "Getting quite metropolitan in this neck of the woods.

Say, little person, do you think you can relish a square meal? Planked steak and lobster salad--huh? I wonder if they _could_ rustle a salad in this man's town? Say, do you know I'm just beginning to find out how hungry I am for the flesh-pots. What's the matter with a little variety?--as Lin MacLean said. Aren't you, hon?"

She was; frankly so. For long, monotonous months she had been struggling against just such cravings, impossible of realization, and therefore all the more tantalizing. She had been a year in the wilderness, and the wilderness had not only lost its glamour, but had become a thing to flee from. Even the rude motley of Hazleton was a welcome change. Here at least--on a minor scale, to be sure--was that which she craved, and to which she had been accustomed--life, stir, human activity, the very ant.i.thesis of the lonely mountain fastnesses.

She bestowed a glad pressure on her husband's arm as they walked up the street, Bill carrying the sack of gold perched carelessly on one shoulder.

"Say, their enterprise has gone the length of establishing a branch bank here, I see."

He called her attention to a square-fronted edifice, its new-boarded walls as yet guiltless of paint, except where a row of black letters set forth that it was the Bank of British North America.

"That's a good place to stow this bullion," he remarked. "I want to get it off my hands."

So to the bank they bent their steps. A solemn, horse-faced Englishman weighed the gold, and issued Bill a receipt, expressing a polite regret that lack of facility to determine its fineness prevented him from converting it into cash.

"That means a trip to Vancouver," Bill remarked outside. "Well, we can stand that."

From the bank they went to the hotel, registered, and were shown to a room. For the first time since the summit of the Klappan Range, where her tiny hand gla.s.s had suffered disaster, Hazel was permitted a clear view of herself in a mirror.

"I'm a perfect fright!" she mourned.

"Huh!" Bill grunted. "You're all right. Look at me."

The trail had dealt hardly with both, in the matter of their personal appearance. Tanned to an abiding brown, they were, and Hazel's one-time smooth face was spotted with fly bites and marked with certain scratches suffered in the brush as they skirted the Kispiox. Her hair had lost its sleek, glossy smoothness of arrangement. Her hands were reddened and rough. But chiefly she was concerned with the sad state of her apparel. She had come a matter of four hundred miles in the clothes on her back--and they bore unequivocal evidence of the journey.

"I'm a perfect fright," she repeated pettishly. "I don't wonder that people lapse into semi-barbarism in the backwoods. One's manners, morals, clothing, and complexion all suffer from too close contact with your beloved North, Bill."

"Thanks!" he returned shortly. "I suppose I'm a perfect fright, too.

Long hair, whiskers, grimy, calloused hands, and all the rest of it. A shave and a hair cut, a bath and a new suit of clothes will remedy that. But I'll be the same personality in every essential quality that I was when I sweated over the Klappan with a hundred pounds on my back."

"I hope so," she retorted. "I don't require the shave, thank goodness, but I certainly need a bath--and clothes. I wish I had the gray suit that's probably getting all moldy and moth-eaten at the Pine River cabin. I wonder if I can get anything fit to wear here?"

"Women live here," Bill returned quietly, "and I suppose the stores supply 'em with duds. Unlimber that bank roll of yours, and do some shopping."

She sat on the edge of the bed, regarding her reflection in the mirror with extreme disfavor. Bill fingered his thick stubble of a beard for a thoughtful minute. Then he sat down beside her.

"Wha's a mollah, hon?" he wheedled. "What makes you such a crosser patch all at once?"

"Oh, I don't know," she answered dolefully. "I'm tired and hungry, and I look a fright--and--oh, just everything."

"Tut, tut!" he remonstrated good-naturedly. "That's just mood again.

We're out of the woods, literally and figuratively. If you're hungry, let's go and see what we can make this hotel produce in the way of grub, before we do anything else."

"I wouldn't go into their dining-room looking like this for the world,"

she said decisively. "I didn't realize how dirty and shabby I was."

"All right; you go shopping, then," he proposed, "while I take these furs up to old Hack's place and turn them into money. Then we'll dress, and make this hotel feed us the best they've got. Cheer up.

Maybe it was tough on you to slice a year out of your life and leave it in a country where there's nothing but woods and eternal silence--but we've got around twenty thousand dollars to show for it, Hazel. And one can't get something for nothing. There's a price mark on it somewhere, always. We've got all our lives before us, little person, and a better chance for happiness than most folks have. Don't let little things throw you into the blues. Be my good little pal--and see if you can't make one of these stores dig up a white waist and a black skirt, like you had on the first time I saw you."

He kissed her, and went quickly out. And after a long time of sober staring at her image in the gla.s.s Hazel shook herself impatiently.

"I'm a silly, selfish, incompetent little beast," she whispered. "Bill ought to thump me, instead of being kind. I can't do anything, and I don't know much, and I'm a scarecrow for looks right now. And I started out to be a real partner."