The Man from the Bitter Roots Part 3

"Don't look down; look up; look acrost," Uncle Bill advised. "You're liable to bounce off this hill if you don't take care. h.e.l.lo," he said to himself, staring at the river which lay like a great, green snake at the base of the mountains, "must be some feller down there placerin'.

That's a new cabin, and there's a rocker--looks like."

"Gold?" Sprudell's eyes became a shade less infantile.

"Gold a-plenty; but it takes a lard can full to make a cent and there's no way to get water on the ground."

Uncle Bill stood conjecturing as to who it might be, as though it were of importance that he should know before he left. Interest in his neighbor and his neighbor's business is a strong characteristic of the miner and prospector in these, our United States, and Uncle Bill Griswold in this respect was no exception. It troubled him for hours that he could not guess who was placering below.

"Looks like it's gittin' ready for a storm," he said finally. "We'd better sift along. Foller clost to me and keep a-comin', for we don't want to get caught out 'way off from camp. We've stayed too long in the mountains for that matter, with the little grub that's left. We'll pull out to-morrow."

"Which way you going?" Sprudell asked plaintively.

"We gotta work our way around this mountain to that ridge." Uncle Bill shifted the meat to the other shoulder, and travelled along the steep side with the sure-footed swiftness of a venerable mountain goat.

Sprudell shut his trembling lips together and followed as best he could.

He was paying high, he felt, for the privilege of entertaining the Bartlesville Commercial Club with stories of his prowess. He doubted if he would get over the nervous strain in months, for, after all, Sprudell was fifty, and such experiences told. Never--never, he said to himself when a rolling rock started by his feet bounded from point to point to remind him how easily he could do the same, never would he take such chances again! It wasn't worth it. His life was too valuable. Inwardly he was furious that Uncle Bill should have brought him by such a way.

His heart turned over and lay down with a flop when he saw that person stop and heard him say:

"Here's kind of a bad place; you'd better let me take your gun."

Kind of a bad place! When he'd been frisking on the edge of eternity.

Uncle Bill waited near a bank of slide rock that extended from the mountain top to a third of the way down the side, after which it went off sheer.

"'Tain't no picnic, crossin' slide rock, but I reckon if I kin make it with a gun and half a sheep on my back you can make it empty-handed.

Step easy, and don't start it slippin' or you'll slide to kingdom come.

Watch me!"

Sprudell watched with all his eyes. The little old man, who boasted that he weighed only one hundred and thirty with his winter tallow on, skimmed the surface like a water spider, scarcely jarring loose a rock.

Sprudell knew that he could never get across like that. Fear would make him heavy-footed if nothing else.

"Hurry up!" the old man shouted impatiently. "We've no time to lose.

Dark's goin' to ketch us sure as shootin', and it's blowin' up plumb cold."

Sprudell nerved himself and started, stepping as gingerly as he could; but in spite of his best efforts his feet came down like pile drivers, disturbing rocks each time he moved.

Griswold watched him anxiously, and finally called:

"You're makin' more fuss than a cow elk! Step easy er you're goin' to start the whole darn works. Onct it gits to movin', half that bank'll go."

Sprudell was nearly a third of the way across when the shale began to move, slowly at first, with a gentle rattle, then faster. He gave a shout of terror and floundered, panic-stricken, where he stood.

The old man danced in frenzy:

"Job in your heels and run like h.e.l.l!"

But the ma.s.s had started, and was moving faster. Sprudell's feet went from under him, and he collapsed in a limp heap. Then he turned over and scrabbled madly with hands and feet for something that would hold.

Everything loosened at his touch and joined the sliding bank of shale.

He could as easily have stopped his progress down a steep slate roof.

"Oh, Lord! There goes my dude!" Uncle Bill wrung his hands and swore.

Sprudell felt faint, nauseated, and his neck seemed unable to hold his heavy head. He laid his cheek on the cold shale, and, with his arms and legs outstretched like a giant starfish, he weakly slid. His body, moving slower than the ma.s.s, acted as a kind of wedge, his head serving as a separator to divide the moving bank. He was conscious, too, of a curious sensation in his spine--a feeling as though some invisible power were pulling backward, backward until it hurt. He wanted to scream, to hear his own voice once more, but his vocal cords would not respond; he could not make a sound.

Griswold was shouting something; it did not matter what. He heard it faintly above the clatter of the rocks. He must be close to the edge now--Bartlesville--the Commercial Club--Abe Cone--and then Mr. Sprudell hit something with a b.u.mp! He had a sensation as of a hatpin--many hatpins--penetrating his tender flesh, but that was nothing compared to the fact that he had stopped, while the slide of shale was rushing by.

He was not dead! but he was too astonished and relieved to immediately wonder why.

Then he weakly raised his head and looked cautiously over his shoulder lest the slightest movement start him travelling again. What miracle had saved his life? The answer was before him. When he came down the slide in the fortunate att.i.tude of a clothespin, the Fates, who had other plans for him, it seemed, steered him for a small tree of the stout mountain mahogany, which has a way of pushing up in most surprising places.

"Don't move!" called Griswold. "I'll come and get ye!"

Unnecessary admonition. Although Sprudell was impaled on the thick, sharp thorns like a naturalist's captive b.u.t.terfly, he scarcely breathed, much less attempted to get up.

"Bill, I was near the gates," said Sprudell solemnly when Griswold, at no small risk to himself, had snaked him back to solid ground. "_Fortuna audaces juvat!_"

"If that's Siwash for 'close squeak,' it were; and," with an anxious glance at the ominous sky, "'tain't over."

IV

SELF-DEFENCE

When Bruce came out of the canon, where he had a wider view of the sky, he saw that wicked-looking clouds were piling thick upon one another in the northeast, and he wondered whether the month was the first of November or late October, as Slim insisted. They had lost track somehow, and of the day of the week they had not the faintest notion.

There was always the first big snowstorm to be counted on in the Bitter Root Mountains, after which it sometimes cleared and was open weather for weeks. But this was when it came early in September; the snow that fell now would in all probability lie until spring.

At any rate, there was wood to be cut, enough to last out a week's storm. But, first, Bruce told himself, he must clean up the rocker, else he would lose nearly the entire proceeds of his day's work. The gold was so light that much of it floated and went off with the water when the sand was wet again, after it had once dried upon the ap.r.o.n.

Bruce placed a gold pan at the end of the rocker, and, with a clean scrubbing brush, carefully worked the sand over the Brussels-carpet ap.r.o.n, pouring water into the grizzly the while.

"That trip up the canon cost me half a day's wages," he thought as he saw the thin yellow sc.u.m floating on the top of the pan.

Sitting on his heel by the river's edge, where he had made a quiet pool by building a breakwater of pebbles, he agitated and swirled the sand in the gold pan until only a small quant.i.ty remained, and while he watched carefully lest some of the precious specks and flakes which followed in a thick, yellow string behind the sand slip around the corners and over the edge, he also cast frequent glances at the peaks that became each moment more densely enveloped in the clouds.

"When she cuts loose she's going to be a twister," and he added grimly, as instinctively his eyes sought the saddleback or pa.s.s over which the ancient trail of the Sheep-eater Indians ran: "Those game hogs better pull their freight if they count on going out as they came in."

His fingers were numb when he stood up and shook the cold river water from them, turning now to look across for a sight of Slim.

"I've cut his share of wood all summer, so I guess there's no use quitting now. Turning pancakes is about the hardest work he's done since we landed on the bar. Oh, well"--he raised one big shoulder in a shrug of resignation--"we'll split this partnership when we get out of here.

By rights I ought to dig out now."

The chips flew as he swung the ax with blows that tested the tough oak handle. Bruce Burt was a giant in his strength, and as unconscious of the greatness of it as a bear. He could not remember that he had ever fully tried it. He never had lifted a weight when he had not known that, if necessary, he could lift a little more. His physique had fulfilled the promise of his st.u.r.dy youth, and he was as little aware that it, too, was remarkable as he was of the fact that men and women turned in admiration to look again at his dark, unsmiling face upon the rare occasions when he had walked the streets of the towns.

He was as splendid a specimen of his kind as Old Felix, as primitive nearly, and as shy. His tastes had led him into the wilderness, and he had followed the gold strikes and the rumors of gold strikes from Sonora, in Old Mexico, to the Siberian coast, on Behring Sea, in search of a new Klondike. He had lived hard, endured much in the adventurous life of which he seldom talked. His few intimates had been men like himself--the miners and prospectors who built their cabins in the fastnesses with Hope their one companion, to eat and sleep and work with. He was self-educated and well informed along such lines as his tastes led him. He read voraciously all that pertained to Nature, to her rocks and minerals, and he knew the habits of wild animals as he knew his own. Of the people and that vague place they called "the outside,"

he knew little or nothing.