CHAPTER XVI

Camp’s Gulch

THE depot at Camp’s Gulch looked as if it were planted on the extreme end of civilization. A person seeing it for the first time might wonder why the railway had been made so far, or why, seeing that it had come so far, it had not been carried farther still.

It was fifteen miles from Bratley, the track following the windings of a valley which, always of sufficient width to allow room for river and rail, broadened in places until it was several miles wide, then narrowed again where the towering hills encroached upon the fertile lowlands.

Very rich were some of those hills in copper ore, veins of silver and gold being seen here and there among great masses of porphyry and granite; while heights of ironstone occurred here and there, that attracted thunderstorms and drew down the lightning, which split and shattered the great boulders as a mammoth battering-ram might have done.

The depot consisted of a water-tank, elevated on four posts, a log-hut divided into two rooms, which were telegraph-office, waiting-room, and everything else combined. Another log-hut, at a few yards’ distance, was the home of the station-master and his wife; and standing close beside the track was a big, strong, well-built shed with great double doors—a properly equipped storehouse, in fact, which often contained valuable merchandise.

Camp’s Gulch was a great base for supplies, and although it looked so desolate, and lay so solitary among the hills, those hills yet teemed with life of a strange, rough sort.

There were even little villages of picturesque wooden houses framed in straggling forests of bull-pines, tall larches, and Douglas firs, hidden away among the hills; and there were great holes and wide caverns in the precipitous sides of the high cliffs, where pockets of copper ore had been worked out by the miner’s pick.

It was to serve these isolated, out-of-sight places that the depot at Camp’s Gulch existed, and two trains every day, except Sunday, brought up stores and carried away minerals from the smelters higher up among the hills.

“I shall feel as if I am back on Blue Bird Ridge again,” Nell said to herself, with a first sensation of dismay, when she stepped out of the cars at Camp’s Gulch next morning and looked round upon her new surroundings.

Then she shivered a little, as she had done many times since the previous afternoon, when, standing by the side of the track at Bratley, she had heard that fretful voice exclaim, “Why, there’s Nell!” as the moving cars slid past.

The voice had belonged to Doss Umpey, of that she was quite sure, and, remembering the warning telegram, she was miserably uneasy about the matter. Having seen no one, it was plainly no business of hers to report the circumstance. But someone else would see him and his companions, if he had any, so it was only a question of time, perhaps very short time, before he would be under police supervision, maybe even in prison, for some law-breaking of the past which had but recently come to light.

The incident had spoiled all her pleasure at Gertrude’s arrival, but it had also the effect of dulling her pain about leaving Bratley. Indeed, she had been feverishly glad to get away, and could have wished that the distance had been a hundred miles instead of only fifteen, because then the chances of another encounter with Doss Umpey would have been so much lessened.

It was only the first look at Camp’s Gulch which dismayed her, for a turn round revealed the open door and pleasant, curtained windows of the house where she was to board with the station-master and his wife.

Then a white-haired old man, frail of aspect and with a most benevolent face, accosted her, bowing profoundly.

“Our new young lady, ain’t you, miss? Very glad to see you, I’m sure. Hope you’ll be happy up here. Trip, my name is—Joey Trip at your service—and marm indoors there is just spoiling for a sight of you.”

“I will run and speak to her at once, then,” Nell said, with a laugh; “but I will come back quickly, because I shall be wanted in the office.”

“The young man what’s been catching on here since Miss Irons got married week afore last goes back to Lytton in half an hour’s time. Marm says she’s just awful glad he’s going, for he’s that sickly she’s afraid he’ll take to his bed one of these days, and won’t get up again. It’s dreadful bad to be weakly; I hope you don’t have bad health,” the old man said, as he courteously waved Nell towards the door of the log house, before which a white-haired woman was standing. Then, as Nell moved towards her, he called out, “You’ll have to raise your voice a bit, miss, for marm is rather hard of hearing.”

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Trip was stone deaf, and when Nell had shouted to the utmost extent of her vocal powers without making herself heard, the old woman laid her wrinkled hand on Nell’s arm and whispered impressively—

“Try whispering, dear; and do it rather slowly.”

Nell did as she was bidden, and with complete success, which was to her a matter of rejoicing, for it would have been a fearful ordeal to be compelled to shout at the top of her voice every time she had a want to make known.

“Yes, I can hear that way; and I am very glad to see you. Come in, Miss Hamblyn, dear, and look at your room. The place is small, but it is clean and comfortable,” the old woman whispered back, as she led Nell into a cosy, spotless kitchen, and from there into an equally spotless bedroom.

“What a delightful place! I am sure that I am going to be ever so happy here!” exclaimed Nell, her heart warming to the frail old woman with the gentle, kindly face; then, stooping, she bestowed a hearty kiss and a warm hug upon her hostess, before hurrying away to the office to take over duty from the young man who had been acting as her deputy since the marriage of the former clerk had left the post vacant.

To her surprise she found that the deputy was no other than the boy Robertson who had been the inspector’s assistant when he came to Bratley.

The poor lad looked more delicate than ever, and thoroughly disgusted likewise.

“I never saw such a place as this is,” he grumbled to Nell, as she bustled about arranging matters in the office more to her own satisfaction. “It is not a telegraph operator they want here, but a heavy-goods porter. Why, I’ve had to lend a hand at loading wagons or unloading them nearly every day since I have been here, and what you, a girl, will do is more than I can imagine.”

Nell laughed. She was thinking of the snow-shoe incident; but she was not cruel enough to remind him that on a previous occasion she had shown herself very much his superior in the matter of achievement, and only remarked, in an easy tone—

“Oh, I guess I shall manage comfortably enough. I was brought up to do most things that came along; and Mr. Trip looks a nice, amiable old man.”

“He is a silly, futile old creature, and seems to regard himself quite on a level with a gentleman,” Robertson replied, in a pettish tone. Nell laughed again, understanding that the young man’s grievance lay in his not having been treated with what he deemed to be proper respect.

“It isn’t how other people treat us so much as how we treat ourselves that matters,” she said quietly, making a wry face at the dust and dirt on the instrument table, which threatened to leave ugly marks on her clean blouse.

“What do you mean?” he asked, with an offended air which would have made her laugh again but for the hollow cough which accompanied it, and that woke her pity instead.

“My father used to say that if we always respected ourselves, and were careful never to do anything we were ashamed of, other people would respect us too,” Nell said softly.

“It is about time I was going, I expect,” the boy remarked stiffly, and with his head held rather high. She did not even guess how acutely those words of hers had struck home.

Nell soon had to find that, although there was not so much telegraphy to be done at Camp’s Gulch as at Bratley, the post was decidedly not a sinecure.

Before the train had been gone half an hour, old Joey Trip came in gently apologetic to know if she could lend him a hand in moving some sacks in the big store.

Out went Nell with the brisk willingness which she always displayed in helping other people. But a brief ten minutes showed her that it was not she who helped Joey, so much as she who did the work with a little help from him.

He had no bodily strength, poor old fellow, although his spirit and energy were as great as ever. But Nell was strong, so she pushed, pulled, and hustled the bags into their place; then went off back to her office, leaving the old man quite happy in the belief that he had done all the work, with just a little help from the new young lady clerk.

The view from her office window showed a steep mountain-side with a white line of road peeping out here and there where the trees thinned out. This was the main road away from the depot; but there were others, some branching from this one, and others leading away on every side into the heart of the hilly wilderness.

It was a very lonely life upon which Nell had entered; she had no society at all, saving old Mrs. Trip and her husband. A few women did occasionally come to the depot from the mining villages, but they were a sorry-looking lot for the most part, and she felt no desire to have any acquaintance with them.

Nearly every night, when the depot work was over, Joey Trip would start off to the store in Camp’s Gulch Settlement, which was about three miles away, and he was rarely back much before midnight, when he came home primed with all the gossip of the mining-camps. He was a sociable old fellow, and loved nothing so much as gossiping with his neighbours; and the stories he had to tell Nell of the hardships endured by the miners often used to make her heart ache for the men who had to lose their health, and sometimes their lives, in their desperate efforts to wrest wealth from the hidden stores of the rugged mountain heights.

“It’s the food what kills most of ’em,” Joey used to say. “A good many of the poor fellows come out from England, and have been used to proper cooked food all their lives; but when they get up at the mines, and have to get along on hard tack and reesty bacon—that’s bacon gone wrong, you know—why, it ain’t long before they go wrong themselves, don’t you see?”

Nell did see, and very plainly too; but there seemed no way out of it, for an ordinary average woman would certainly not endure life in those lonely mining villages if she could get a chance of earning a living elsewhere.

One day, when Nell had been about six weeks in Camp’s Gulch, Joey Trip was talking enthusiastically of a successful American who had found a vein of copper so rich on the higher side of Donaldson’s ridge, that he was simply coining money.

“He spends it, too, like a gentleman; and it is drinks all round every night at the Settlement now, only I have to take mine in lemonade, because I’m too weak in the head to stand anything stronger,” Joey remarked, with a plaintive reflection on his infirmity which was irresistibly comic.

“It would be a good thing for the pockets of a great many of the miners if they also were weak in the head as you are,” said Nell, when she had done laughing; but she started and grew rather white at his next words.

“It would be a rather good thing for Mr. Brunsen, I make no doubt, for, poor young man, he drinks a terrible lot of one sort and another; but he is very good company, when he hasn’t had too much, leastways.”

“What Mr. Brunsen is that?” she asked brusquely, turning so that Joey Trip could not see her face, and moving bales of hessian and barrels of hard-tack biscuits with great energy.

She was helping him to stow away a lot of freight which had come up by the morning train, and was wearing a very big coarse apron which she had made herself for this kind of rough work, thus enabling her to render the old man valuable service without damaging her attire.

“Why, he’s just Mr. Brunsen, I suppose,” said Joey, with a cheerful cackle of laughter; “though the men at the Settlement call him Darling Dick when he treats them, and——Why, there he is over yonder, on the other side of the track, talking to a stranger!”

Nell gave one look at the two men who were talking at a little distance; then, with a half-articulate cry, she turned and fled out of the freight-shed by a small door in the rear, and, darting round the empty freight wagons, succeeded in reaching her office unnoticed by the two men, who were still talking, both of them now having their backs turned in her direction.

Her cheeks were burning and her heart was fluttering wildly, for in one of the men who stood talking she had recognized the stranger who had arrived at the Lone House in a state so near to utter collapse.

Very wretched she felt as she bent over the instrument table, dusting where no dust was to be seen. She had regarded that exhausted stranger as the most courteous and polished gentleman she had ever seen, so it came as a crushing blow to her that he was just a vulgar drunken fellow who would treat a low saloon rabble until they all became intoxicated together.

The sounder began its insistent call at that moment, and a message began to come through from Vancouver City regarding a consignment of copper. It was a long message, and was followed by one from New Westminster, both of them having reference to the same business.

As the telegraph wires went no farther than the rail, Nell had to take and send all messages from her office. But she never had to trouble about delivering them, as they were left until called for, like letters in a country store.

Half an hour later a man on horseback rode down from the smelter with a sheaf of messages to be sent off, and, as some of them would bring speedy answers, he lounged away an hour talking to Joey, and coming at intervals to stare at Nell through a pane of glass let in at the upper half of the office door.

She had made it a hard-and-fast rule to allow no one inside her office, and the miners, even the roughest of them, had speedily come to understand that this rule must on no account be infringed.

It was an unusually busy morning, and she had no time to think in the pauses of her work, which was perhaps a good thing, her thoughts being in a state of turmoil because of that incident of which Joey had told her, and which her own eyes had so unexpectedly confirmed when she looked from the open doors of the big shed and saw Dick Bronson standing on the opposite side of the railway track.

Unconsciously, she had made a hero of the stranger who had come to the Lone House, and she had credited him with almost every virtue under the sun. His face had looked good, his manners were refined, and to her he had been exceedingly gentle and courteous.

The rush of her work ended at noon; and the long hours of the spring afternoon were uninterrupted in their slumbrous quiet.

Mrs. Trip sat dozing in her spotless kitchen, with door and window both open. Joey sat on a log on the sunny side of the big shed, snoring peacefully. But Nell, in her little office, worked with feverish haste, sewing as diligently as if her life depended on the number of stitches she could make before supper-time.

Her thoughts were flying even faster than her fingers. Now that she had leisure to think and to plan she was settling many things, and one of them was that first and foremost came the necessity of at once returning to Mr. Bronson, or Brunsen, the case containing the thirty dollars and the portrait of the sweet-faced elderly lady, which she had found under the settle at the Lone House when she cleared up after the departure of the stranger.

But she did not wish him to know that she was in his immediate neighbourhood. He might recognize her if he came to the depot, but even this was doubtful, because she was altered so much in every way.

While she was meditating on how she could get the money to him without his getting any clue to her whereabouts, the sounder began its call, and was followed by the signal, “Gertrude talks.”

A smile quivered over Nell’s troubled face. Every day, when business was not pressing, they talked to each other over the wires; but this was the first time to-day that she had received a word from her friend.

“Mrs. Nichols wants you to come down Saturday night until Monday. Will you?”

Nell thought hard for a minute. Should she go? It would be delightful to see all her friends at Bratley. It would also be delightful to be away from Camp’s Gulch for a Sunday just now, when she so heartily desired to avoid any encounter with Mr. Brunsen. But the difficulty lay in the fact that she could not be back at Camp’s Gulch on Monday morning until twenty minutes after her day of work was supposed to begin, and twenty minutes to a telegraph operator sometimes makes a very great difference indeed.

Other clerks at the depot had gone away and risked being found out, Joey had told her; but this absence-without-leave idea did not commend itself to Nell, so, after considerable misgiving, she wired to Lytton to know if she might be away from her post for that first twenty minutes on Monday morning.

The answer came back, after some little delay, and was very satisfactory, in spite of its curt-brevity.

“Yes; once in every month.”

So Nell told Gertrude that she would certainly come down by the cars on Saturday evening; and even while she was sending the message a bright idea came to her: she would write a note to Mr. Brunsen, and send him back his money and the portrait from Bratley. She could then put Bratley at the top of her letter, and he would never dream of looking for her at Camp’s Gulch.

This plan soothed her considerably. She wrote a frosty little note, saying that she had found the case and its contents on the morning after he left her grandfather’s house on Blue Bird Ridge, and had been unable to return them to him before, owing to her ignorance of his address.

But she was dispirited and unlike herself for days afterwards. It is never an easy thing to readjust one’s likes and dislikes at a moment’s notice; and the shattering of Nell’s secret idol cost her many a bitter pang.