Читать книгу The House of Cariboo and Other Tales from Arcadia - A. Paul Gardiner - Страница 10

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Into the Cariboo Mountains.

Four days distant from this camp, Cameron and his companion unloosed their mining kit for the first time. Nowhere had they found any evidences that human beings had ever before penetrated into this region. They climbed the steep mountain sides only to descend again through the darkest ravines. Unaccustomed to the points of the compass, they were obliged to watch their course by the sun. Each with his secret burning within his heart, they encountered bravely the difficulties of their task. Many times on this hazardous journey they were almost overcome by fatigue, and often saved from instant death over the side of some unseen precipice by only the margin of a step. Finally, as they emerged from the forest-clad mountains upon a slight plateau, they reached the first slate bottoms, which gave the well-nigh disheartened prospectors new courage, and the first view of the uninterrupted rays of the sun that they had encountered since their hunt through the wilderness. Here on this promontory, which sloped gently down westward to what seemed to be a dried-up water course, Andy and his companion built their miners’ cabin. Water they had discovered trickling down the face of a steep rock at one side of the site they had chosen for their home. And game they knew in the mountains was plentiful, for at their approach the flight of the wild fowl had shaken the overhanging branches of the evergreens and strange-looking animals scudded beneath the underbrush and sprang into hiding behind the rocks and boulders.

Here at the close of the day, standing before the door of their rudely-constructed hut, the two hopeful miners, already fast friends, silently watched the setting of the sun. Neither had told of the friends left at home; Andy had kept sacred within his heart the need, the incentive, which drove him forward facing the desperate chances of death by starvation or sickness, to discover the hidden treasures of this almost impenetrable region, and his companion was equally reticent as to his own counsels of the past. Willing to lead in the trail where almost certain death seemed ahead, he had proved himself many times in their short acquaintance a man of reckless daring. The look each encountered in the other’s eyes upon this eve, as they watched the sun go down behind the opposite hills, plainly said: “My secret is a sacred one; ask me nothing.”

On the morrow they were to begin their task of digging for the yellow nuggets, in the search for which thousands of others had gone into the same ranges, many to join the bandit gangs of roving miners, never again to return to their loved ones, others to sicken and die with the malignant fevers of camp life, and a few—a very few—to realize their dreams, and return again to their homes, bearing with them the shining golden nuggets, at the sight of which a new army of inspired prospectors would soon be started upon its way to repeat the same acts in the great drama entitled “The Hunt for Gold.”

And here we leave for the present, Andy and his youthful partner to dig for the elusive golden specks which had drawn them onward with a terrible fascination for thousands of miles. They are now securely hidden away in the mountain fastnesses where never a human voice nor the tread of man had yet fallen.