Читать книгу The Treasure Trail - Frederick Niven - Страница 3

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POSSIBILITIES of quaint histories seem to lurk in the names of many of our Western mines. For example: the Crazy Jane, the Tip and Run, the Seven-up, the Good-enough. These names arouse our curiosity; we wish to know why they are so called. The Surprise Packet is obvious; the Eureka is stereotyped. The This Is It!—what about the This Is It!? It was sold the other day by its original owners to the Columbia and Oregon River Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company for two hundred thousand dollars. Some price! Some price in these days when the lease to “try out” a property is much more usual than a big figure for an outright purchase. But that is a financial side issue you may have seen in the stocks and shares columns of your daily paper, or in the Miner and Prospector if you subscribe to it. “The play’s the thing,” said a character in Shakespeare. Here the story is the thing, more than the bald dollar transaction; for this, in fact, is the story of the This Is It!

And to begin:

A mile north of Colvalli, Washington, an elderly man sat whittling a stick on his veranda, a black spaniel dog between his feet catching fleas. A parrot, in a large wicker cage hanging from the projecting roof, now and then called in a falsetto voice: “Miggles! Miggles!” paused, and then: “Marrr-garet! Whaur are ye?” it enquired.

This parrot the man, Scotty by name, Scot by nature, had brought from Ecuador, where he had prospected and found, and sold, a mine. The dog, Darkie by name, and darkie by hue, he had brought from West Australia where he had once dry-blown the sand for “colour.” But neither the land of Ecuador nor West Australia inveigled him. It sufficed him that he had seen them. This, where he was, was “God’s Country” to him. Yet he sat and crooned in a poignant tone:

“...oh! but I’m longing for my ain folk,

Though they be but lowly, puir, and plain folk:

I am far beyond the sea,

But my heart will ever be

At hame in dear auld Scotland, wi’ my ain folk!”

whom he had not seen for close on forty years.

“Did you call, father?” came a girl’s voice, following the tip-tap of her heels, and Margaret MacPherson stood in the doorway.

“It was the birrd!” said her father, Angus.

Then they both looked to north and saw a cloud of dust rising on the wagon-road that came winding toward them out of British Columbia, and twisted on south into Oregon, Nevada, California. Quick-stepping, bringing the cloud of dust nearer and making it seem to increase in volume, came a string of horses, in good condition. Ahead of the string was a large, heavy rider in big Stetson hat, scarfed and chapped. To rear was another man, a feather-weight, riding with his scarf over his mouth.

“Jock has the best o’t,” said Angus MacPherson. “He is ahead of the dust. Puir Piccolo in the rear maun be near chocking.”

“Why do you speak such broad Scots, father?” asked Margaret, laughing.

“It’s the mood of the moment,” her father answered. “In another mood I might remark” (his voice altered): “Say, Jack Tremaine is sure on velvet in the van; and if Piccolo ain’t hittin’ the grit at the tail-end of that there string of cayuses you can call me a bull-frog!” and then he crooned softly again:

“Though they be but lowly, puir, and plain folk:

I am far beyond the sea,

But my heart will ever be

At hame in dear auld Scotland, wi’ my ain folk!”

and whittled his stick.

“Where have they been, I wonder,” said Margaret. “I haven’t seen them around for a long time.”

“Didn’t you hear? They got a move on at last, as soon as the snow went, to go and see where that bunch of their horses had strayed to. They must have strayed a long way to judge by the time they’ve been gone searching for them.”

“Oh, but I’m longing for my ain folk,” remarked the parrot.

“Quit, quit!” Angus addressed it. “Cut that out. Forget it. This is God’s Country, where things happen. You’ll make me homesick, give me what they call nostalgia! We’ve quit that mood, Ecuador.”

“Search me!” said the parrot inconsequentially.

“That’s better,” muttered Angus.

The horses, making dusty procession across the near landscape, changed from quick-step to lope, and Jack Tremaine, in the lead, let them lope on, reined in and turned aside till the rider called Piccolo was level with him. There they sat in their high saddles, silhouetted against that dropping whirl of dust; and Margaret and Angus MacPherson looked at them as at figures in a play. Piccolo drew down the scarf from his mouth and expectorated in the way a man does after such employ. Then the riders saw them and waved their hats.

“How is it stacking up?” hailed the old Scot.

“Fine and dandy!” came Tremaine’s stentorian voice; and a little faint sound, like the bleat of a lamb in spring, the shouting voice of Piccolo (whose speaking voice, at times, was not unlike that of a finch up a tree) wavered to them:

“Fine and dandy!”

They rode aside to MacPherson’s house and dismounted, hats off to Margaret.

“Give them a drop of that buttermilk to clear the dust, Mauggie dear, Miggles I mean,” said Angus. “Hitch and ascend,” he added to the two men.

“We’ll carry a heap of dust on to your porch,” said Jack.

“Well, I can wash it for colour,” replied Angus lightly.

They sat down, and then Piccolo, the Welshman of the high voice (Piccolo, of course, was not his name but his soubriquet because of that voice. David Thomas was his name), said, or shrilled:

“It’s good to be home!”

“I guess,” said Angus. “I see your horses think so by the way they hit the grit once they knew they were near.”

“Gee,” said Jack, “some hunt they’ve given us.”

“Gone far?” enquired Angus.

“You betchar life,” said Tremaine. “They had kept moving north these two years. That big fire on the lower Monashee range three years ago cleared off the timber. They evidently just kept on a-going. The way the fire ran directed their course. Up north further it had gone toward the tops of the hills and left the valleys, so they just continued on, mounting up and straying from one grass pocket to another. Say, it’s a peculiar formation away up on the tops of these lower Monashees. To look up you’d think there was timber all along the crests; but there ain’t a crest. It is rolling land on top, grass turned to hay, meadows, water pools and rock-slides fanning into them from the higher peaks. Guess the horses wintered in the valleys where the forest had been cleaned out and grass grew, then moved on, following the snow, to these upland meadows. They wouldn’t even have to come down every two days for water, the way they do in some places, or as you see them do in dry-belts. Thank you, miss. This here buttermilk is sure a delectable beverage. There is a whole raft of good reasons to be brought forward for running a milch cow pasture.”

“Have you been far?” asked Margaret.

“Today?”

“No. The whole trip.”

“Oh, I guess eighty miles north of the Boundary in an air line and maybe a hundred and eighty by the windings of the trail.”

Piccolo, who was nervous or shy, sat dusting himself down with his hat, but was not satisfied that he was even then fit to sit there. So he rose, and walking to the veranda’s end drew off his chaps and hung them over the rail there. Returning to his chair he left his partner to talk social talk to Margaret and just sipped his thick buttermilk. His throat was full of dust. He murmured: “Pardon me!” and went again to the extreme end of the veranda to expectorate. Once more he came back and sat down and commenced to clear out a pocket.

It was the right-hand pocket of his coat. He took out the contents carefully, put them into the left-hand pocket, and then shook the right pocket inside-out over the porch edge. Jack Tremaine cast occasional glances toward him wondering why he thus busied himself; Margaret looked in the direction of these slightly twinkling glances of Jack’s, but paid no further heed to Piccolo; Angus absently surveyed him. Then suddenly his eyes were focussed keenly on the queer shy man. There was more than dust shaken from that pocket. There was a shower of little stones that woke the retired prospector up violently.

Said he: “What were you packing the rocks in your pocket for? Surely these splinters didn’t sift in from the hoofs of your cavalcade?”

“If I’d fallen into the water at a ford we had to make up there I’d have sunk I guess,” said Piccolo, and smiled. “And it would have been a cold sink too.”

Angus laughed lightly. He wanted to ask about the little pieces of rock again and wondered how to do so without showing that he thought them of value. The old secrecy of the discoverer of precious ore was upon him. It was obvious to him that Piccolo Thomas had not the slightest surmise of the possibilities of these little stones.

But Angus did not require to ask any further questions, leading or direct, for Piccolo returned to the subject.

“These little stones,” said he, giving his pocket a final flip and putting it straight again. “That was a long way off. We wanted to save ammunition, you see, and we wanted supper, and there were fool-hens clucking all round us in the woods. We might have waited till dusk and sneaked up and smoked some down; or we might have watched where they roosted and just crept up easily and grabbed the legs of one or two, and yanked them down; but we were awful hungry. It was cold, too. The snow ain’t all gone even in some of the lower valleys, patches still laying there where there’s a shadowed side. We had appetites all right. So I just filled my pocket with stones and went crawling along through the bush and knocked over a couple of these fool-hens for our supper. I got as near as ten feet and let fly twice and knocked over two with the first two shies.”

“Are they thick up there, then?”

“You bet. Clucking in the bush all round you.”

“I must go after them some time,” said Angus.

“Oh, they ain’t so thick south where the hills drop down. That was away north after we’d found the last bunch of horses. Jack stayed around to hold them while I went after the fool-hens. We must have been an awful way north then. We could see a lake, and I guess it couldn’t be any other than Flat-Bow Lake.”

“The fool-hens are thick up there, eh?” said Angus; and had any astute person been listening he would have known that MacPherson had no interest in fool-hens whatever.

“You bet. Up a bit. Say, it’s beautiful there now. In another two months, when the snow’s all off, it must look wonderful. It’s wonderful enough at present.”

“Uh-hu!” said Angus.

“Well, Piccolo,” interjected Jack, “I guess we got to spraddle our horses and move on again. Thanks for the refreshment, Miss MacPherson.”

They rose. Piccolo scuttled to the veranda end and shyly drew on his chaps. They stepped from the porch, mounted, and with a sweep of their hats to Margaret wheeled away and rode off, trailing a dual pennon of dust.

Angus watched them till a roll of the plain hid them. Margaret had gone indoors. He rose and descended to the ground in front of the porch, only his dog and Ecuador watching him, and picked up a handful of the stones dropped by Piccolo when clearing out his pocket. He felt the weight of them, playing them up and down in his palm like a boy at the game called, in Auld Scotland, “chuckie-stanes.” Then he drew a long trembling breath and expelled it.

“So!” he said. “Eighty miles north of the Boundary by air-line and maybe a hundred and eighty as the land lies.”

“Search me! Search me!” whooped Ecuador—and startled Angus, so greatly lost was he in a consideration of the galena in his hand.

“These,” he murmured to himself, “are what the prospectors of these parts call ‘spacamints.’”

When he returned to his seat on the porch he was much like Shakespeare’s Launcelot Gobbo who sat discussing with himself pros and cons as if he were two distinct characters, or like Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.

“One hundred and eighty miles north of the Boundary,” he mused, and also: “Are ye going to look for it yourself?”

“Among the open grass-land on the summit. Rock slides fan down into them,” he mused, and also: “Are ye going to tell Piccolo what these splinters of rock look like to you?”

“It is vague, but close enough for an old prospector,” he mused, and also: “It would be a fair thing to tell Piccolo anyhow.”

“Morally it is Piccolo’s,” he told himself, and replied to himself: “It’s nothing of the kind. He doesn’t know what he picked up.”

“You will make good through his ignorance,” something in him whispered, and something else exclaimed: “Precisely!”

“Search me!” shrieked the parrot.

Then there followed a long time during which the conflicting voices were too low down in him, ever so tenuous, fogged, to follow. They just whispered away in his subconsciousness—or unconsciousness, almost, to toy with words of the psychoanalysts. But the argument must have been going on. It bubbled up loud in Angus’s “inward ear” again. He made a gesture of impatience that astonished the dog prone at his feet, nose on paws, staring at nothing before it. It looked up startled. Said Angus to it:

“Look here, Darkie, it is fair rideeculous to suggest that Piccolo has the slightest claim to this. He picked up these stones to throw at fool-hens. They are, in his estimation, not specimens of silver-galena at all—no, not in the slightest sense. They are missiles. ‘Are,’ do I say? His claim is smaller than that. They were missiles—were, mark you, past tense—for to throw at fool-hens. They served their purpose to him. He killed his supper and his partner’s. These are the little stones cast away in the discard. Ye would be a fool to imagine he had any claim.” He rubbed a hand over his face and round to the back of his neck. “If no’ a fool ye would be quixotic,” he amended.

Then he took snuff, as was his way when perturbed, and sneezed.

“Now that’s the way the cards lie on the table, Mr. Angus MacPherson,” said he. “There is no call upon ye to say a word to Piccolo; but, being a quixotic sort of body, ye are doubtless going to do so.”

He sat back, almost contented; but only for a moment. He was a complex Scot, and anon added:

“Ye are a fraud. The truth is that ye are doubtful if ye have sufficient indication for to find the whereabouts unaided by yon Piccolo. Ye are trying to make yourself out quixotic when ye are only canny. Your righteousness is but filthy rags, as the Book says. Well, the upshot of this is that, whatever the reasons and arguments, I have a hunch, as they say in this country, that I am going to tell Piccolo.”

Ecuador threw up his head, ruffled his feathers, and laughed like a demon. Then he cried: “Miggles! Miggles! Mar-r-garet, whaur are ye?”

From the door Margaret answered: “What do you want, Polly?”

She had been in the doorway, then, thought her father. For how long? Had she been there while he examined the stones? He was very fond of Margaret, but he had a view of her sex—that its members should not be told of anything till it was done. That view amounted almost to superstition.

“Hullo!” he said. “I didn’t hear ye. Been there long?”

“I came out just now while you were—what’s the word, dad?—havering to the dog.”

“Oh! Ye did, did ye?” said he.

It struck him as highly probable that he had been talking aloud. He knew that to be a habit common to prospectors who have lived much alone—but it pleased him to consider that Margaret thought he had only been “havering to the dog.” That was satisfactory.