The Man from the Bitter Roots Page 2

  Bruce Burt lounged to the cabin door and looked after “Slim” Naudain as he went to the river. Then he stepped outside, stooping to avoid striking his head. He leaned his broad shoulder against the door jamb and watched “Slim” bail the leaky boat and untie it from the willows. While he filled and lighted his pipe, Bruce’s eyes followed his partner as he seated himself upon the rotten thwart and shoved into the river with home-made oars that were little more than paddles. The river caught him with the strength of a hundred eager hands, and whirled him, paddling like a madman, broadside to the current. It bore him swiftly to the roaring white rapids some fifty yards below, and the fire died in Bruce’s pipe as, breathless, he watched the bobbing boat.

  “Slim’ll cross in that water-coffin once too often,” he muttered, and Bruce himself was the best boatman the length of the dangerous river.

  There were times when he felt that he almost hated Slim Naudain, and this was one of them, yet fine lines of anxiety drew about his eyes as he watched the first lolling tongue of the rapids reach for the tiny boat. If it filled, Slim was gone, for no human being could swim in the roaring, white stretch where the great, green river reared, curled back, and broke into iridescent foam. The boat went out of sight, rose, bobbed for an instant on a crest, then disappeared.

  Bruce said finally, in relief:

  “He’s made it again.”

  He watched Slim make a noose in the painter, throw it over a bowlder, wipe the water from his rifle with his shirt sleeve, and start to scramble up the steep mountainside.

  “The runt of something good—that feller,” Bruce added, with somber eyes. “I ought to pull out of here. It’s no use, we can’t hit it off any more.”

  He closed the cabin door against thieving pack rats, and went down to the river, where his old-fashioned California rocker stood at the water’s edge. He started to work, still thinking of Slim.

  Invariably he injected the same comment into his speculations regarding his partner: “The runt of something good.” It was the “something good” in Slim, the ear-marks of good breeding, and the peculiar fascination of blue blood run riot, which had first attracted him in Meadows, the mountain town one hundred and fifty miles above. This prospecting trip had been Bruce’s own proposal, and he tried to remember this when the friction was greatest.

  Slim, however, had jumped at his suggestion that they build a barge and work the small sand bars along the river which were enriched with fine gold from some mysterious source above by each high water. They were to labor together and share and share alike. This was understood between them before they left Meadows, but the plan did not work out because Slim failed to do his part. Save for an occasional day of desultory work, he spent his time in the mountains, killing game for which they had no use, trapping animals whose pelts were worthless during the summer months. He seemed to kill for the pleasure he found in killing. Protests from Bruce were useless, and this wanton slaughter added day by day to the dislike he felt for his partner, to the resentment which now was ever smoldering in his heart.

  Bruce wondered often at his own self-control. He carried scars of knife and bullet which bore mute testimony to the fact that with his childhood he had not outgrown his quick and violent temper. In mining camps, from Mexico to the Stikine and Alaska in the North, he was known as a “scrapper,” with any weapon of his opponent’s choice.

  Perhaps it was because he could have throttled Slim with his thumb and finger, have shaken the life out of him with one hand, that Bruce forbore; perhaps it was because he saw in Slim’s erratic, surly moods a something not quite normal, a something which made him sometimes wonder if his partner was well balanced. At any rate, he bore his shirking, his insults, and his deliberate selfishness with a patience that would have made his old companions stare.

  The bar of sand and gravel upon which their cabin stood, and where Bruce now was working, was half a mile in width and a mile and a half or so in length. He had followed a pay streak into the bank, timbering the tunnel as he went, and he wheeled his dirt from this tunnel to his rocker in a crude wheelbarrow of his own make.

  He filled his gold pan from the wheelbarrow, and dumped it into the grizzly, taking from each pan the brightest-colored pebble he could find to place on the pile with others so that when the day’s work was done he could tell how many pans he had washed and so form some idea as to how the dirt was running per cubic yard.

  His dipper was a ten-pound lard can with a handle ingeniously attached, and as he dipped water from the river into the grizzly, the steady, mechanical motion of the rocker and dipper had the regularity of a machine. If he touched the dirt with so much as his finger tips he washed them carefully over the grizzly lest some tiny particle be lost. Bruce was as good a rocker as a Chinaman, and than that there is no higher praise.

  When the black sand began to coat the Brussels-carpet apron, Bruce stooped over the rocker frequently and looked at the shining yellow specks.

  “She’s looking fine to-day! She’s running five dollars to the cubic yard if she’s running a cent!” he ejaculated each time that he straightened up after an inspection of the sand, and the fire of hope and enthusiasm, which is close to the surface in every true miner and prospector, shone in his eyes. Sometimes he frowned at the rocker and expressed his disapproval aloud, for years in isolated places had given him the habit of loneliness, and he talked often to himself. “It hasn’t got slope enough, and I knew it when I was making it. I don’t believe I’m saving more than seventy per cent. I’ll tell you, hombre, grade is everything with this fine gold and heavy sand.”

  While he rocked he lifted his eyes and searched the sides of the mountains across the river. It seemed a trifle less lonely if occasionally he caught a glimpse of Slim, no bigger than an insect, crawling over the rocks and around the peaks. Yet each time that he saw him Bruce’s heavy black eyebrows came together in a troubled frown, for the sight reminded him of the increasing frequency of their quarrels.

  “If he hadn’t soldiered,” he muttered as he saw Slim climbing out of a gulch, “he could have had a good little grub-stake for winter. Winter’s going to come quick, the way the willows are turning black. Let it come. I’ve got to pull out, anyhow, as things are going. But”—his eyes kindled as he looked at the high bank into which his tunnel ran—“I certainly am getting into great dirt.”

  It was obvious that the sand bar where he was placering had once been the river bed, but when the mighty stream, in the course of centuries, cut into the mountain opposite it changed the channel, leaving bed rock and bowlders, which eventually were covered by sand and gravel deposited by the spring floods. In this deposit there was enough flour-gold to enable any good placer miner to make days’ wages by rocking the rich streaks along the bars and banks.

  This particular sand bar rose from a depth of five feet near the water’s edge to a height of two hundred feet or more against the mountain at the back. There was enough of it carrying fine gold to inflame the imagination of the most conservative and set the least speculative to calculating. A dozen times a day Bruce looked at it and said to himself:

  “If only there was some way of getting water on it!”

  For many miles on that side of the river there was no mountain stream to flume, no possibility of bringing it, even from a long distance, through a ditch, so the slow and laborious process he was employing seemed the only method of recovering the gold that was but an infinitesimal proportion of what he believed the big bar contained.

  While he worked, the sun came up warm, and then grew dim with a kind of haze.

  “A storm’s brewing,” he told himself. “The first big snow is long overdue, so we’ll get it right when it comes.”

  His friends, the kingfishers, who had lived all summer in a hole at the top of the bank, had long since gone, and the camp-robbers, who scolded him incessantly, sat silent in the tall pine trees near the cabin. He noticed that the eagle that nested in an inaccessible peak across the river swooped for home and sta
yed there. The redsides and the bull trout in the river would no longer bite, and he remembered now that the coyote who denned among the rocks well up the mountain had howled last night as if possessed: all signs of storm and winter.

  By noon a penetrating chill had crept into the air, and Bruce looked oftener across the river.

  “It’s just like him to stay out and sleep under a rock all night with a storm coming,” he told himself uneasily.

  This would be no new thing for Slim in one of his ugly moods, and ordinarily it did not matter, for he kept his pockets well filled with strips of jerked elk and venison, while in the rags of his heavy flannel shirt he seemed as impervious to cold as he was to heat.

  Chancing to glance over his shoulder and raise his eyes to the side of the mountain, which was separated from the one at the back of the bar by a cañon, a smile of pleasure suddenly lighted Bruce’s dark face, and he stopped rocking.

  “Old Felix and his family!” he chuckled. Whimsically he raised both arms aloft in a gesture of welcome. “Ha—they see me!”

  The band of mountain sheep picking their way down the rough side stopped short and looked.

  “It’s all of a month since they’ve been down for salt.” Then his face fell. “By George, we’re shy on salt!”

  He turned to his rocker, and the sheep started down again, with Old Felix in the lead, and behind him two yearlings, two ewes, and the spring lamb.

  Their visits were events in Bruce’s uneventful life. He felt as flattered by their confidence as one feels by the preference of a child. His liking for animals amounted to a passion, and he had been absurdly elated the first time he had enticed them to the salt, which he had placed on a flat rock not far from the cabin door. For the first few visits their soft black eyes, with their amber rims, had followed him timorously, and they were ready to run at any unusual movement. Then, one afternoon, they unexpectedly lay down in the soft dirt which banked the cabin, and he was so pleased that he chuckled softly to himself all the time they stayed.

  Now he laid down his dipper, and started toward the house.

  “I’ll just take a look, anyhow, and see how much there is.”

  He eyed uncertainly the small bag of table salt which he took from the soap-box cupboard nailed to the wall.

  “There isn’t much of it, that’s a fact. I guess they’ll have to wait.” He slammed the door of the improvised cupboard hard upon its leather hinges made of a boot-top, and turned away.

  “Aw, dog-gone it!” he cried, stopping short. “I haven’t got the heart to disappoint the poor little devils.” He turned back and took the salt.

  The sheep were just coming out of the cañon between the mountains when Bruce stepped through the cabin door. Old Felix stopped and stood like a statue—Old Felix, the Methuselah of the Bitter Roots, who wore the most magnificent pair of horns that ever grew on a mountain sheep. Solid and perfect they were, all of nineteen and three-quarters inches at the base and tapering to needle points. Of incredible weight and size, he carried them as lightly on his powerful neck as though they were but the shells of horns. Now, as he stood with his tremulous nozzle outstretched, sniffing, cautious, wily, old patriarch that he was, he made a picture which, often as Bruce had seen it, thrilled him through and through. Behind Old Felix were the frisking lamb and the mild-eyed ewes. They would not come any closer, but they did not run.

  “It wouldn’t have lasted but a few days longer anyhow,” Bruce murmured half apologetically as he divided the salt and spread it on the rock. He added: “I suppose Slim will be sore.”

  He returned to his work at the river, and the sheep licked the rock bare; then they lay down in leisurely fashion beside the cabin, their narrow jaws wagging ludicrously, their eyelids drooping sleepily, secure in their feeling that all was well.

  Bruce had thrust a cold biscuit in the pocket of his shirt, and this he crumbled for the little bush birds that twittered and chirped in the thicket of rosebushes which had pushed up through the rocks near the sand bank.

  They perked their heads and looked at him inquiringly when it was gone.

  “My Gawd, fellers,” he demanded humorously, “don’t you ever get filled up?”

  As he rocked he watched the water ouzel teetering on a rock in the river, joyously shaking from its back the spray which deluged it at intervals. Bruce observed.

  “I’d rather you’d be doing that than me, with the water as cold as it is and,” with a glance at the fast-clouding sky, “getting colder every minute.”

  The sheep sensed the approaching storm, and started up the gulch to their place of shelter under a protecting rim rock close to the peak.

  When they were no longer there to watch and think about, Bruce’s thoughts rambled from one subject to another, as do the minds of lonely persons.

  While the water and sand were flowing evenly over the apron he fell to wishing he had a potato. How long had it been—he threw back his head to calculate—how many weeks since he had looked a potato in the eye? Ha!—not a bad joke at that. He wished he might have said that aloud to some one. He never joked with Slim any more.

  He frowned a little as he bent over the grizzly and crushed a small lump between his thumb and finger. He wandered if there was clay coming into the pay streak. Clay gathered up the “colors” it touched like so much quicksilver. Dog-gone, if it wasn’t one thing it was another. If the tunnel wasn’t caving in, he struck a bowlder, and if there wasn’t a bowlder there was——

  “Bang! bang! Bang! bang!” Then a fusillade of shots. Bruce straightened up in astonishment and stared at the mountainside.

  “Boom! boom!” The shots were muffled. They were shooting in the cañon. Who was it? What was it? Suddenly he understood. The sheep! His sheep! They were killing Old Felix and the rest! Magnificent Old Felix—the placid ewes—the frisking lamb! What a bombardment! That wasn’t sport; ’twas slaughter!

  His dark skin reddened, and his eyes blazed in excitement. He flung the dipper from him and started toward the cabin on a run. They were killing tame sheep—sheep that he had taught to lose their fear of man. Then his footsteps slackened and he felt half sick as he remembered that the big-game season was open and he had no legal right to interfere.

  Bruce had not seen a human face save Slim’s since the end of May, and it now was late in October, but he had no desire to meet the hunters and hear them boast of their achievement. Heavy-hearted, he wondered which ones they got.

  The hunters must have come over the old trail of the Sheep-eater Indians—the one which wound along the backbone of the ridge. Rough going, that. They were camped up there, and they must have a big pack outfit, he reasoned, to get so far from supplies at this season of the year.

  He tried to work again, but found himself upset.

  “Dog-gone,” he said finally. “I’ll slip up the cañon and see what they’ve done. They may have left a wounded sheep for the cougars to finish—if they did I can pack it down.”

  Bruce climbed for an hour or more up the bowlder-choked cañon before his experienced eye saw signs of the hunters in two furrows where a pair of heels had plowed down a bank of dirt. The cañon, as he knew, ended abruptly in a perpendicular wall, and he soon saw that the frightened sheep must have run headlong into the trap. He found the prints of their tiny, flying hoofs, the indentations where the sharp points had dug deep as they leaped. Empty shells, more shells—they must have been bum shots—and then a drop of blood upon a rock. The drops came thicker, a stream of blood, and then the slaughter pen. They had been shot down against the wall without a single chance for their lives. The entire band, save Old Felix, had been exterminated. Their limp and still-bleeding carcasses, riddled and torn by soft-nosed bullets, lay among the rocks. Wanton slaughter it was, without even the excuse of the necessity of meat, since only a yearling’s hind quarters were gone. Not even the plea of killing for trophies could be offered, since the heads of the ewes were valueless.

  Bruce straightened the neck of a ewe as she lay with h
er head doubled under her. It hurt him to see her so. He looked into her dull, glazed eyes which had been so soft and bright as they had followed him at work a little more than an hour before. He ran his hand over a sheep’s white “blanket,” now red with blood, and stood staring down into the innocent face of the diminutive lamb.

  Then he raised his eyes in the direction in which he fancied the hunters had gone. They shone black and vindictive through the mist of tears which blinded him as he cried in a shaking voice:

  “You butchers! You game hogs! I hope you starve and freeze back there in the hills, as you deserve!”

  A snow cloud, drab, thick, sagging ominously, moved slowly from the northeast, and on a jutting point, sharply outlined against the sky, motionless as the rock beneath him, stood Old Felix, splendid, solitary, looking off across the sea of peaks in which he was alone.

  * * *

  III

  “The Game Butchers”

  “Ain’t this an awful world!” By this observation Uncle Bill Griswold, standing on a narrow shelf of rock, with the sheep’s hind quarters on his back, meant merely to convey the opinion that there was a great deal of it.

  The panting sportsman did not answer. T. Victor Sprudell was looking for some place to put his toe.

  “There’s a hundred square miles over there that I reckon there never was a white man’s foot on, and they say that the West has been went over with a fine-tooth comb. Wouldn’t it make you laugh?”

  Mr. Sprudell looked far from laughter as, by placing a foot directly in front of the other, he advanced a few inches at a time until he reached the side of his guide. It was an awful world, and the swift glance he had of it as he raised his eyes from the toes of his boots and looked off across the ocean of peaks gave him the feeling that he was about to fall over the edge of it. His pink, cherubic face turned saffron, and he shrank back against the wall. He had been in perilous places before, but this was the worst yet.