The Great Gold Rush Part 16

"Father Pat? Was he a Roman Catholic? The Roman clergy are not called 'parsons.'"

"No, sir; he weren't no Catholic; he was an Angle (Anglican)--and a pretty acute one, too. He was moseying along a trail down below one day, and was just turning off on a side-trail leading to a mining proposition up there, when three fellows met him, who were just naturally full of cussedness. 'How do?' says Father Pat. 'Where are you going?' says the fellows. 'I'm going up to the mine,' says Father Pat. 'No, you ain't,'

says the fellows. 'But I am,' says Father Pat. 'We don't want no d.a.m.ned parsons around here,' says the fellows. 'I can't help that,' says Father Pat, 'I'm going up the hill; and if you fellows want to quarrel over it, I'll take you one at a time and lick you.' And he did so. Now that's what I call a parson worth having."

"And which of the three were you?" asked John.

"Me! I was the second fellow that got licked; yes, since then I've always thought parsons worth looking into."

The time for departure came.

"Go easy for the first two or three miles, Parson; forty-five miles is a pretty good walk for any fellow who ain't an old-timer. You're making a mistake not waiting, for the dogs will be back here with the doctor, even if he has to stay a day or two with your partner; but if you're stuck on going, I guess I ain't got any string on you."

"Good-bye," said John, and clambered down the river-bank to the ice.

The day had been more than usually warm, the air unusually clear; the evening frost had come early.

As Berwick left White Horse it was seven, and already the crust had formed. He had food in his pockets, and the air brought him stimulation.

Anxiety steeled his muscles. Away he strode.

He pa.s.sed from the curving river, and came again to the frozen stretch of Lake Le Berge. The light of day was gone; the stars gleamed and danced, and shed their glamour over the hills. And what dignity they held! Greece had risen and gone to decay: Caesar had striven after his great ambition: Pharaoh had succeeded Pharaoh: while those hills had slept as they now were sleeping.

The influence of his environment closed upon John Berwick. The psychic force of the weird Northland was upon him. Through his mind pa.s.sed the orthodox story of creation; and, again and again, as he walked, he weighed the various arguments of the agnostic. He looked upon the limestone ma.s.ses to the east, and mused upon the ways of Nature, which caused the destruction of myriads of sh.e.l.l-fish to upbuild the marble of the palace. He pictured the diamond in the atomic theory of matter--a ma.s.s of pulsating atoms oscillating within magnetic bonds--even as the stars swing through s.p.a.ce, guided by the influence which is called gravitation. Was not this known movement of the heavenly bodies similar to the theoretic movement of the atom?

A feeling of apprehension grew in John Berwick; faster and faster he walked. Life's greatest problems had for years occupied his mind. He looked about him and into the heavens. Before his fevered eyes the stars s.h.i.+mmered and grew in shape: the earth beneath him dwindled and melted, till it was but a star and he felt its rush through s.p.a.ce. He realized the centrifugal force that would throw the world out of its...o...b..t; he felt the counteracting restraint; system joined to system, swinging, circling, driving; the universe grew about him; suns and stars were but atoms in a component whole; the whole formed into Presence--Love! G.o.d!

It came to him as a mighty magnificent discovery.

He must hurry to tell Frank Corte!

CHAPTER XVI

A STREAM OF HISTORY

"Good-bye, fellows, wish you all kinds of luck! I won't be long behind you."

"Good-bye," answered the four from the boat that glided out on the swift waters of Thirty-Mile River. In the bow stood Hugh Spencer, bandaged; at the oars were Bruce and Frank Corte; in the stern John Berwick, pale and weak from his late fever, was resting. A new light shone in his eyes; the lines of his face were softened. Anxieties which had been as a weight on his soul had been removed by that revealing walk, which had ended in catastrophe.

He had been found by the side of the trail some few hours after he had fallen in delirium. The legs of his trousers were worn at the knees; his flesh was cut through his struggling after he had fallen. His finger-tips were worn to the quick; his blood had stained the ice.

The doctor, returning, had been John's rescuer, and had placed him on the sleigh. Truly a good Samaritan, he had returned with the invalid to the foot of Le Berge.

Berwick's delirium was the climax of half-a-dozen years of mental strain. His old struggle as to whether he should make his vocation in the Church, as well as his almost hopeless pa.s.sion for Alice Peel, had, though even George Bruce barely suspected it, wrought upon him. Now the climax had come; and was pa.s.sed.

George, seeing this catastrophe, had guessed much; the doctor, trained in the study of humanity, had also guessed something. Hugh, Frank Corte, and Haskins only knew that John had played-out on the trail.

Spencer had told his companions there was nothing much in the first six miles of the river, but that afterwards "she is swift and crooked."

Sunken boulders were the chief danger, so he took his post in the bow to "read" the water ahead, and to direct the course, saying "Frank" or "George"--as he wished the one or the other to pull the harder.

After an hour the boat came to a point where the river takes a turn to the right, on rounding which the boat's pace increased. Looking over its side into the clear water, John saw the stones at the bottom flash by, and noted the scurrying greyling affrighted.

The boat swept by sunken boulders, or grazed the curving sh.o.r.es, but held its swift course without pause or incident. For four hours their rapid progress continued; then the current died away, and the boat floated upon the dead water that marks the junction of the Hootalinquia River with the Thirty Mile, henceforth to be called the Lewis, till Lewis is joined by the Pelly to become the Yukon.

Now that the necessity for vigilance was past, Hugh entertained his friends with reminiscences of his first trip there, and the story of the entrance of the gold-seekers to the Upper Yukon. They would soon be at Ca.s.siar Bar, and the mouth of the Big Salmon River. In 1881 miners had crossed the Pa.s.ses, and descended the lakes and rivers, to the mouth of the Big Salmon, which they ascended, and obtained gold by was.h.i.+ng the bars. Ca.s.siar Bar was not discovered till 1886, five years after the Big Salmon party had done their mining. The men who mined Ca.s.siar Bar had wintered here, and their cabin came in useful for others who "mushed out" over the ice to give word about Howard Franklin's discovery of coa.r.s.e gold on the Forty Mile, and to order more grub to be sent "up river" by the Alaska Commercial Company's steamer. In 1880 some fellows from Sitka had gone over, and prospected up the Hootalinquia; but they did not strike much; while the first white man over the Pa.s.ses looking for gold was George Holt, who found a few "colours" around Lake Bennett.

In 1873 Arthur Harper and a British Columbia outfit came up the Liard and over the Divide; but though they found "prospects" almost everywhere in the Yukon, they did not make a real strike, so they floated to the mouth of the Yukon and went to work for the Alaska Commercial Company.

Hugh thus told the history of Yukon--so far as the white man knows it.

Although the ice still clung along the river banks, the land was free of snow, and vegetable life was a.s.serting itself. The mosquito was very little behind the gra.s.s-shoot in realizing that summer was at hand, and that it had but a few short months in which to play its part!

It was because sleep on sh.o.r.e would be difficult, through the mosquitoes, that Hugh suggested their continuing the journey through the night. One watched and steered while the others slept. So Hugh, George, and Frank divided the night between them. John a.s.serted that the rest and change of scene had done him a world of good and that he was able to steer; but the others squashed his proposals.

"Heap dam dood! heap sick all same baby, he! he!" sn.i.g.g.e.red Frank Corte.

They had now dropped away from the great mountains, not a snow-topped peak was in sight; but the hills stretched majestically on either side of the river.

The routine of watches having been decided, the party settled down to silence at nine o'clock. Towards midnight John awoke. It was now merging upon the season of perpetual light, and the hills and the great river were weirdly visible. George was on watch, sitting on the thwart ahead of him, his back towards him.

The boat quietly, swiftly glided on. No effort was needed from the man at the look-out, save an occasional stroke to keep the head straight.

John glanced at his watch and saw the hour. The fact startled him, though he had schooled himself. In the lands where his previous existence had been pa.s.sed the haunts of men were always at this hour illuminated by artificial light and filled with--artificiality! Here was the opening of the months-long day; and reality--Reality, the Eternal Verities. In that wonderful silence he needs must think, and overhaul his spiritual condition. He could--and he would--take Holy Orders. He would first fight the issue in the goldfields, for, if he made money, that power would be useful. So he came to his decision; and at last he slept.

When he awoke the boat was hauled half-way up one of the Yukon's many islands, and breakfast was being cooked. The party had travelled one hundred miles in twenty-four hours; three days more would carry them to Dawson.

They re-embarked, and, as the same glorious weather prevailed, their expedition was very like a delightful picnic. In the regions of Tantalus b.u.t.tes the river took a number of great horseshoe bends, which induced Hugh to remark, "We do a lot of travelling here, without much progress."

Then came Five Finger Rapids, where four great pillars of conglomerate rock stood ranged across the river. The Yukon's waters were low; the season of freshets was not due until the snow in the mountains was melted and the sun had attacked the glaciers; so Hugh said the main or right-hand channel might be run.

"Run her right on the top of the crest," he ordered.

They approached the rapid, and the current slackened almost to dead water. They rowed the boat under the cliff to the right of the channel, and then shot out into the middle, directly on the crest. The current caught the little craft--there was a swish and swirl of water--she heaved, and was over the cataract into the dancing waters beyond.

The current remained swifter than it had been above the rapids, and the party was soon at Rink Rapids, four miles beyond Five Fingers. This rapid was more dangerous than that of the Five Fingers had been, owing to its being spread over a wide range of bottom and to the presence of numerous boulders: however, they shot the boat under the right bank and glided through in safety. There now remained uninterrupted, smooth water to Dawson.

They breakfasted at Fort Selkirk, situate on the left bank of the river, opposite the mouth of the large tributary, the Pelly.

Frank protested that a day's rest would do the party good, particularly a dance that night, for there was a squaws' camp near.

"You will get all the dancing you have money to pay for in Dawson," said Hugh.

As the party were again afloat, Hugh pointed across the river, and remarked,

"Back at that bunch of bush are the ruins of old Fort Selkirk, which Robert Campbell built for the Hudson Bay Company in the year 1849. In 1852 the Chilkats burned it down, because it was cutting off their trade with the savages hereabouts. You see, before the Hudson Bay fellows got in here, the Chilkats, who held the pa.s.ses to the sea, used to give inside Indians most nothing for their furs, and sell them at a big profit to the white traders on the coast. The Chilkats would not let the inside Indians out to the coast to trade for themselves. Well, when the Hudson Bay Company showed up, it broke up the cinch the Chilkats thought their own, and they came after the Company. The Indians then hereabouts, the wood Indians, got hold of the plans of the Chilkats and kept watch; but they let up for a few days, and the Chilkats came into the Fort and told the officers they had to get. It was a ground-hog case, so they just naturally got! Campbell found the local Indians and came back; but the Chilkats had cleaned out. The tea, tobacco, and sugar they took away with them, and what they couldn't take they cached. The Chilkats didn't offer to do murder, though they are up to most anything. One thing they took away with them was the Company's flag, which the Chilkats keep at Kluckwan, their village on the Chilkat River which lies in the valley just over the mountains west of Skagway. The Chilkats are very proud of their 'King George man' flag!

"It was on August 21 the Fort was seized, so Campbell had to do something right away quick, before the winter set in: so, after going down the Yukon to White River, where he met the remainder of his men, who had been to Fort Yukon and were coming back, he told them to go back down the river and winter at Fort Yukon, and he lit out up the Pelly and over the Divide to the Liard, and down the Liard to Fort Simpson. When he got there the Liard was running bank full of ice."

The next place that drew reminiscences from Hugh was the mouth of Stewart River. Here was a police-post with a few cabins.