Part 11

Once or twice I thought of taking a brand from the fire to light me round to the camp across the lake, that I might discover whether, indeed, both my friends were dead. But, as I turned over this thought of return in my mind, Canlan brought down his arms again from above his head where they had lain relaxed, and, opening his eyes, rolled on his side and looked up at me.

"Don't you do it," he said.

"Do what?" I inquired.

"What you was thinkin' of," he replied.

"And what was that?"

"You know," he said, thickly and grimly, "and I know. Two men alone in the mountains can't ever hide their thoughts from each other. Mind you that!"

"What was I thinking of doing, then?" I asked.

"That's all right," he said. "You can't bluff me."

"Well, what then?" I cried, irritated.

He sat up.

"You was thinkin' of goin' right off, right now. No, it wasn't to get in ahead of me at the Cabin Mine. I 'm beginnin' to guess that Apache Kid did n't let you know so much as that. But you was just feelin' so sick and sorry like that you thought o' gettin' up quiet and takin' my hoss there and----"

He was watching my face as he spoke, peering up at me and sniffing. With a kick he got the fire into a blaze, but without taking his eyes from me. Then, "No, you was n't thinkin' that, either," he said, in a voice as of disappointment that his power of mind-reading seemed at fault.

"Derned if I dew know what you was thinkin'," he acknowledged. "Oh, you 're deeper than most," he went on, "but I 'll get to know you yet. Yes, siree; I 'll see right through you yet."

He lay down after this vehement talk, as though exhausted, wiping the sweat from his brow where it gleamed in the little furrows of leathery skin. He was not a pretty man, I assure you.

A feeling as of pride came over me to think that this evil man was willing to take my word that I would not meddle him in his sleep, as I saw him close his eyes once more,--this time really asleep, I think.

But to attempt to return to Apache Kid's camp I now was assured in my mind would be a folly. At a merest movement of mine Canlan might awaken, and if he suspected that I entertained a hope of at least one of my late companions being alive, he might himself be shaken in his belief in the deadly accuracy of his aim.

I pictured him waking to find me stealing away to Apache's camp and stealthily following me up. I even pictured our arrival at the further shore--the still glowing fire, both my companions sitting up bleeding and dazed and trying to tend each other, Canlan marching up to them while they were still in that helpless predicament and blowing their brains from his Winchester's mouth. So I sat still where I was and eventually dozed a little myself, till morning came to the tree-tops and slipped down into the valley and glowed down from the sky, and then Canlan awoke fairly and stretched himself and yawned a deal and moaned, "God, God, God!"--three times.

And I thought to myself that this reptile of a man might well cry on God on waking that morning.

Neither he nor I, each for our own reasons, ate any breakfast. My belongings I allowed him to pack on his horse with his own, so that I might not be burdened with them, the chance of a tussle with Canlan being still in my mind. Then, after we had extinguished the fire, a thought came to me. It was when I saw that he was going to strike directly uphill through the forest that I scented an excuse to get back to my comrades. True, my hope that they lived was now pretty nigh at ebb, for I argued to myself that if life was in them, they would already have managed to follow us. Aye! I believed that either of them, supposing even that he could not stand, would have _crawled_ along our trail at the first light of day, bent upon vengeance; for I had learnt to know them both as desperate men--though to one of them, despite what I knew of his life, I had grown exceedingly attached.

"I 'll go back to our old camp," said I, "and bring along an axe if you are going right up that way. We may need it to clear a way for the horse."

He wheeled about.

"Say!" he said. "What are you so struck on goin' back to your camp for. Guess I 'll come with you and see jest what you want."

He looked me so keenly in the eye that I said at once, knowing that to object to his presence would be the worst attitude possible: "Come, then," and stepped out; but when he saw that I was not averse to his company he cried out:

"No, no. I have an axe here that will serve the turn if we need to do any cutting. But I reckon we won't need to use an axe none. It's up this here dry watercourse we go, and there won't be much clearin' wanted here."

It was now broad day, and as I turned to follow Canlan again I gave up my old friends for dead.

The man's short, broad back and childish legs, and the whole shape of him, seemed to combine to raise my gorge.

"I would be liker a man," I thought, "if I struck this reptile dead." And the thought was scarce come into my mind and must, I think, have been glittering in my eyes, when he flashed around on me his colourless face, and said he:

"Remember, I trust my life to you. I take it that you 've agreed to my offer of last night to go half shares on this. God knows you 'll have to look after me by nightfall, this blessed day--unless there 's maybe a tot o' drink in that cabin."

At the thought he absolutely screamed:

"A tot o' drink! A tot o' drink!" and away he went with a sign to me to follow, scrambling up the watercourse before his horse, which followed with plodding hoofs, head rising and falling doggedly, and long tail swishing left and right. I brought up the rear. And thus we climbed the greater part of the forenoon, with occasional rests to regain our wind, till at last we came out on the bald, shorn, last crest of the mountain.

Canlan marched the pony side on to the hill to breathe; and he himself, blowing the breath from him in gusts and sniffing a deal, pointed to the long, black hill-top stretching above us.

"A mountain o' mud," he said. "That's it right enough. Some folks thinks that everything that prospectors says they come across in the mountains is jest their demented imaginatings like; but I seen mountains o' mud before. There 's a terror of a one in the Crow's Nest Pass, away up the east Kootenai; and there's one in Colorado down to the Warm Springs country. You can feel it quiver under you when you walk on it--all same jelly. See--you see that black crest there? That's all mud. This here, where we are, is good enough earth though, all right, with rock into it. It's here that we turn now. Let me see----"

He took some fresh bearings, looking to the line of hills to the south-east. I thought I could pick out the notch at the summit, over there, through which Apache Kid, Donoghue, and I had come; and then he led off again--along the hill this time, his head jerking terribly, and his whole body indeed, so that now and again he leapt up in little hopping steps like one afflicted with St. Vitus' dance.

Up a rib of the mountain, as it might be called, he marched, I now walking level with him; for I must confess I was excited.

And then I saw at last what I had journeyed so painfully and paid so cruelly to see,--a little "shack," or cabin, of untrimmed logs of the colour of the earth in which it stood, there, just a stone's cast from us, between the rib on which we stood and the next rib that gave a sweeping contour to the hill and then broke off short, so that the mountain at that place went down in a sharp slope, climbed upon lower down by insignificant, scrubby trees. But there--there was the cabin, sure enough. There was our journey's end.

Canlan turned his ashen face to me, and his yellow eyeballs glittered.

"It looks as we were first," he said, his voice going up at the end into a wavering cry and his lips twitching convulsively.

*CHAPTER XIX*

_*Canlan Hears Voices*_

You should have seen the way in which Canlan approached that solitary, deserted cabin. One might have thought, to see him, that he fully expected to find it occupied.

"Hullo, the shack," he cried, leading his horse down from the rocky rib on which we had paused to view the goal of our journey. I noticed how the horse disapproved of this descent; standing with firm legs it clearly objected to Canlan's leading. The reins were over its head, and Canlan was a little way down the rib hauling on them, half-turned and cursing it vehemently. It could not have been the slope that troubled the animal, for that was trifling; but there it stood, dumbly rebellious, its neck stretched, but budge a foot it would not.

At last it consented to descend, but very gingerly feeling every step with doubtful forefeet, and craned neck still straining against Canlan. Even when he succeeded in coaxing and commanding it to the descent it seemed very doubtful about going out on the hollow toward the shack, and reminded me, in the way it walked there, of a hen as you may see one coming out of a barn when the rain takes off.

"What in thunder's wrong with you?" cried Canlan. "Come along, will you? Looks as if there was somebody, sure thing, in the shack. Hullo, the shack! Hullo, the cabin!" he hailed again.

"----the shack! Hullo, the cabin!" cried out the rib beyond, in an echo.

So Canlan advanced on the cabin, his rifle loose on his arm, right up to the door on which he knocked, and from the sound of the knocking I declare I had an idea that the place was tenanted.

He knocked again.

"Sounds as if there was somebody in here," he said, in a low, thick whisper, so that I thought he was afraid.

He knocked again, rat-tat-tat, and sniffed twice, and piped up in his wheezy voice: "Good day, sir; here's two pilgrims come for shelter."

It was at his third rap, louder, more forcible on the door, which was a very rough affair, being three tree-stems cleft down the centre and bound together with cross-pieces, as I surmised, on the inside,--just at the last dull knock of his knuckles that the door fell bodily inward, and a great flutter of dust arose inside the dark cabin.

"Anyone there?" he asked, and then stepped boldly in.

"Nobody here," he said, bringing down his rifle with a clatter. "One has to be careful approaching lonesome cabins far away from a settlement at all times."

Then suddenly he turned a puzzled face on me.

"Queer that, eh?"

"What?"

"Why, that there door. Propped up from the inside. If there was any kind of a smell here apart from jest the or'nary smell of a log shanty, I 'd be opining that that there number three o' this here _push_ that worked the mine---- Say!--" he broke off, "where in thunder is the prospect itself?"

And out he went of the mirk of the cabin, in a perfect twitter of nerves, and away across to the spur of which I told you.

There I saw him from the door (by which the pack-horse stood quiet now, the reins trailing) kick his foot several times in the earth. Then he turned to see if I observed him, and flicking off his hat waved it round his head and came posting back.

"There 's half a dozen logs flung across the shaft they sunk," said he, "and they're covered over with dirt, to hide it like. Let's get in first and see what's what inside."

There was no flooring to the cabin and at one end was a charred place on the ground. Canlan looked up at the low roof there and, stretching up his hands, groped a little and then removed a sort of hatch in the roof.

"This here," said he, "hes bin made fast from the inside too--jest like the door. Look in them bunks. Three bunks and nothin' but blankets. And over the floor the blankets is layin' too, hauled about."

The light from the hatch above was now streaming in.

"Them blankets is all chawed up," he said.

"Heavens!" I gasped. "Were they driven to that?"

"What devils me," he said, not replying to my remark but looking round the place with a kind of anxiety visible on his forehead, "is this here fixin' up from the inside. There's blankets, picks, shovels, all the outfit, and there's the windlass and tackle for the shaft-head. No," he said, recollecting my remark, "them blankets was n't chawed up by them. Rats has been in here--and thick. See all the sign o' them there?"

He pointed to the floor, but it was then that I observed, in a corner, after the fashion of a three-cornered cupboard, a rough shelving that had been made there. Every shelf, I saw, was heaped up with something,--but what? I stepped nearer and scrutinised.

"Look at all the bones here," I said.

Canlan was at my side on the very words.

"That's him!" he said, in a gasp of relief. "That's him. That's number three. That's him that stuck up the door and the smoke hole."

I turned on him, the unspoken question in my face, I have no doubt.

All the fear had departed from his face now as he snatched up a bone out of one of the shelves.

These bones, I should say, were all placed as neatly and systematically as you could wish, built up in stacks, and all clear and clean as though they had been bleached.

"This here was his forearm," said Canlan, his yellow eyeballs suddenly afire with a fearsome light; and he rapped me over the knuckles with a human elbow.

"Ain't it terrible?" he said.

"It is terrible," said I.

"Ah!" he cried. "But I don't mean what you mean; I mean ain't it terrible to think o' that?" and he pointed to the cupboard, "to think o' comin' to that--bein' picked clean like that--little bits o' you runnin' about all over them almighty hills inside the rats' bellies and your bones piled away to turn yellow in a spidery cupboard."

I stepped back from his grinning face.

"But how do these bones come there?" I said.

"It's the rats," he replied, "them mountain rats always pile away the bones o' everything they eat--make a reg'lar cache o' them; what for I dunno; but they do; that's all."

I stood then looking about the place, thinking of the end of that "number three," all the horror of his last hours in my mind; and as I was thus employed, with absent mien, suddenly Canlan laid his hand on my arm.

"What you lookin' that queer, strained ways for?" he whispered, putting his face within an inch of mine, so that I stepped back from the near presence of him. "That was a mighty queer look in your eyes right now. Say; do you know what you would make? You'd make an easy mark for me to mesmerise. You 'd make a fine medium, you would."

I looked at him more shrewdly now, thinking he was assuredly losing his last hold on reason; but he flung back a step from me.

"O! You think me mad?" he cried, and verily he looked mad then. "Eh? Not me. You don't think I can mesmerise you? I've mesmerised heaps--men too, let alone women," and he grinned in a very disgusting fashion. "Say! If we could only see a jack-rabbit from the door o' this shack, I 'd let you see what I could do. I 'd give you an example o' my powers. I can bring a jack-rabbit to me, supposin' he's lopin' along a hillside and sees me. I jest looks at him and _wills_ him to stop--and he stops. And then I wills him to come to me--and he comes. Mind once I was tellin' the boys at the Molly Magee about bein' able to do it and they put up the bets I could n't--thought I was jest bluffin' 'em, and I went right out o' the bunkhouse a little ways and fetched a chipmunk clean off a rock where he was settin' lookin' at us,--there were n't no jack-rabbits there,--fetched him right into my hand. And then a queer, mad feelin' come over me--I can't just tell you about it--I don't just exactly understand it myself. I closes my hand on that chipmunk and jest crushed him dead atween my fingers. And suthin' seemed kind o' relieved here then, in the front o' my head, right here. The boys never forgot that. They kind o' lay away off from me after that--did n't like it. Yes, I could mesmerise you."

He waved his hands suddenly before my eyes.

"Feel any peculiar sensation at that?" he said.

"Yes," said I.

"What like?" he asked.

"I feel that I 'll not let you do it again," said I.

"Scared like? Feel kind o' slippin' away?"

"No," I said quietly: "not scared one little bit. But I object to your waving your hands within an inch of my face. Any man of grit would n't allow it."

"Well, well, say no more. We 'd better be investigating this yere shack. God! If there was only a drink on the premises. I tell you _they 're_ comin' on again, and when they come on I 'm fearsome--I am."

He looked round the place again and then cried out in a voice of agony:

"Look here! I don't want to lose holt o' myself yet; perhaps a little bit of grub now might help me. I reckon I might be able to shove some down my neck as a dooty. You go and make up the fire outside, do."

He spoke this in a beseeching whine. To see the way the creature changed and veered about in his manner was interesting.

"We ain't goin' to sleep in here to-night, anyways, not for Jo, wi' them mountain rats comin' in on us. It'll take quite a while o' huntin' to get all their holes filled up. You go and make dinner. I could do a flapjack and a slice o' bacon, I think, with a bit o' a struggle and some resolution like."

Anything that might prevent me having a madman on my hands in that wilderness was not to be ignored, so I went out and ran down the slope to where the bushes climbed, and gathered fuel, a great armful, and so came back again and made up a fire.

Water was not so easy to find, but a muddy and boggy part of the hill led me to a spring, and I set to work on preparing food.

With all this coming and going I must have been busied quite half an hour before even getting the length of mixing the dough. Canlan, by that time, had got the windlass out and had lugged it across to the covered shaft beside the spur of outcropping rock that ran down parallel with the ridge in the lee of which I had lit the fire. He went back to the cabin and carried out the coil of rope, and had just got that length in his employ when I called him over for our meal; our evening meal it was, for, intent on our labours, we had not noticed how the sun was departing. All the vasty world of hollows below us was brimmed with darkness. All the peaks and the mountain ridges marching one upon the other into the shadowing east were lit, toward us, with the last light when Canlan sat down to force himself to eat. But I saw he had difficulty in swallowing. The jerking of face and hands, I also perceived, was increasing past ignoring. So too, presently became the fixed stare of his eye upon us as he sat with his hand frozen on a sudden half-way to his mouth.

"Listen! Don't you hear nuthin'?" he asked, hoarse and low.

"Nothing," said I.

"Ah! It's jest them fancies," said he, and fell silent.

Then again, with a strange, nervous twitch and truly awful eyes, he said in a whisper, "Say, tell me true? Did n't you hear suthin' right now?"

"I heard a coyote howl," I said.

"No, no; but somebody whispering?" he said. "Two or three people all huddling close somewhere and tellin' things about me. By gum! I won't have it! I dursent have it!" he said in a low scream--which is the best description of his voice then that I can give you.

I shuddered. He was a terrible companion to have here on this bleak, windy hillside, with the thin trees below us marching down in serried ranks to the thicker forest below, and the scarped peaks showing against the pale moon that hung in the sky awaiting the sun's going.

I shook my head.

"Sure?" he asked.

"Positive," said I.

He bent toward me and said in a small voice, "Keep your eye on me now. I ain't goin' to ask you another time, for I think when I speak they stop a-whispering; but I'll jest twitch up my thumb like this--see?--fer a signal to you when I hear 'em."

He sat hushed again; and then suddenly his eyes started and he raised his thumb, turning a face to me that glittered pale like lead.

"Now?" he gasped.

"Nothing," I said: "not a sound."

"Ah, but I spoke there," he said. "I ought n't to have spoken; that scared 'em; and they quit the whispering when they hear me."

He sat again quiet, his head on the side, listening, and I watching his hand, thinking it best to humour him and to try to convince him out of this lunacy.

But my blood ran chill as I sat, and his jaw fell suddenly in horror for a voice quavering and ghastly cried out from somewhere near by, "Mike Canlan! Mike Canlan! I see you, Mike Canlan!"

And a horrible burst of laughter that seemed to come from no earthly throat broke the silence, died away, and a long gust of wind whispered past us on the hill-crest.

It had been evident to me that though Canlan bade me hearken for the whispering voices that he himself did not actually believe in their existence. He had still sufficient sense left to know that the whispering was in his own fancy, the outcome of drink and of--I need not say his conscience, but--the knowledge that he had perpetrated some fearsome deeds in his day, deeds that it were better not to hear spoken in the sunlight or whispered in the dusk.

But this cry, out of the growing night, real and weird, so far from restoring equanimity to his mind appeared to unhinge his mental faculties wholly. His eyeballs started in their sockets; and there came the cry again:

"Mike Canlan! Mike Canlan! I 'm on your trail, Mike Canlan!"

As for myself, I had no superstitious fears after the first cry, though I must confess that at the first demented cry my heart stood still in a brief, savage terror. But I speedily told myself that none but a mortal voice cried then; though truly the voice was like no mortal voice I had ever heard.

It was otherwise with Canlan. Fear, abject fear, held him now and he turned his head all rigid like an automaton and, in a voice that sounded as though his tongue filled his mouth so that he could hardly speak, he mumbled: "It's him. It's Death!"

Aye, it was death; but not as Canlan imagined.

There was silence now, on the bleak, black hill, and though I had mastered the terror that gripped me on hearing the voice, the silence that followed was a thing more terrible, not to be borne without action.

Then suddenly the voice broke out afresh quite close and Canlan turned his head stiffly again and I also looked up whence the voice came--and there was the face of Larry Donoghue looking down on us from the rib of rocky hill under whose shelter we sat. There was a trickle of blood, or a scar--it was doubtful which--from his temple down his long, spare jaw to the corner of the loose mouth; the eyes stared down on us like the eyes of a dead man, blank and wide.

He stretched out his arms and gripped in the declivity of the hill with his fingers, crooked like talons, and pulled himself forward; but at that tug he lost his balance, lying on his belly as he was, and came down the slope, sliding on his face, the kerchief still about his head as I had seen him when I thought he had breathed his last.

In Canlan's mind there was no question but that this was Larry Donoghue's wraith. He tried to cry out and could not, gave one gulping gasp in his throat, and when Donoghue slid down the bank, as I have described, Canlan leapt to his feet and ran for it--ran without any intelligence, straight before him.