The Man from the Bitter Roots. Caroline Lockhart
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 stayed 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