Chapter 2

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 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 her 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.

"There might be somethin' good over yonder if 'twas looked into right," went on Uncle Bill easily, as he stood with the ball of his feet hanging over a precipice, staring speculatively. "But it'll be like to stay there for a while, with these young bucks doin' all their prospectin' around some sheet-iron stove. There's nobody around the camps these days that ain't afraid of work, of gittin' lost, of sleepin' out of their beds of nights. Prospectin' in underbrush and down timber is no cinch, but it never stopped me when I was a young feller around sixty or sixty-five." A dry, clicking sound as Sprudell swallowed made the old man look around. "Hey--what's the matter? Aire you dizzy?"

Dizzy! Sprudell felt he was going to die. If his shaking knees should suddenly give way beneath him he could see, by craning his neck slightly, the exact spot where he was going to land. His chest, plump and high like a woman's, rose and fell quickly with his hard breathing, and the barrel of his rifle where he clasped it was damp with nervous perspiration. His small mouth, with its full, red lips shaped like the traditional cupid's bow, was colorless, and there was abject terror in his infantile blue eyes. Yet superficially, T. Victor Sprudell was a brave figure--picturesque as the drawing for a gunpowder "ad," a man of fifty, yet excellently well preserved.

A plaid cap with a visor fore and aft matched his roomy knickerbockers, and canvas leggings encased his rounded calves. His hob-nailed shoes were the latest thing in "field boots," and his hunting coat was a credit to the sporting house that had turned it out. His cartridge belt was new and squeaky, and he had the last patents in waterproof match safes and skinning knives. That goneness at his stomach, and the strange sensations up and down his spine, seemed incongruous in such valorous trappings. But he had them unmistakably, and they kept him cringing close against the wall as though he had been glued.

It was not entirely the thought of standing there that paralyzed him; it was the thought of going on. If accidentally he should step on a rolling rock what a gap there would be in the social, financial, and political life of Bartlesville, Indiana! It was at this point in his vision of the things that _might_ happen to him that he had gulped.

"Don't look down; look up; look acrost," Uncle Bill advised. "You're liable to bounce off this hill if you don't take care. Hello," he said to himself, staring at the river which lay like a great, green snake at the base of the mountains, "must be some feller down there placerin'. That's a new cabin, and there's a rocker--looks like."

"Gold?" Sprudell's eyes became a shade less infantile.

"Gold a-plenty; but it takes a lard can full to make a cent and there's no way to get water on the ground."

Uncle Bill stood conjecturing as to who it might be, as though it were of importance that he should know before he left. Interest in his neighbor and his neighbor's business is a strong characteristic of the miner and prospector in these, our United States, and Uncle Bill Griswold in this respect was no exception. It troubled him for hours that he could not guess who was placering below.

"Looks like it's gittin' ready for a storm," he said finally. "We'd better sift along. Foller clost to me and keep a-comin', for we don't want to get caught out 'way off from camp. We've stayed too long in the mountains for that matter, with the little grub that's left. We'll pull out to-morrow."

"Which way you going?" Sprudell asked plaintively.

"We gotta work our way around this mountain to that ridge." Uncle Bill shifted the meat to the other shoulder, and travelled along the steep side with the sure-footed swiftness of a venerable mountain goat.

Sprudell shut his trembling lips together and followed as best he could. He was paying high, he felt, for the privilege of entertaining the Bartlesville Commercial Club with stories of his prowess. He doubted if he would get over the nervous strain in months, for, after all, Sprudell was fifty, and such experiences told. Never--never, he said to himself when a rolling rock started by his feet bounded from point to point to remind him how easily he could do the same, never would he take such chances again! It wasn't worth it. His life was too valuable. Inwardly he was furious that Uncle Bill should have brought him by such a way. His heart turned over and lay down with a flop when he saw that person stop and heard him say:

"Here's kind of a bad place; you'd better let me take your gun."

Kind of a bad place! When he'd been frisking on the edge of eternity.

Uncle Bill waited near a bank of slide rock that extended from the mountain top to a third of the way down the side, after which it went off sheer.

"'Tain't no picnic, crossin' slide rock, but I reckon if I kin make it with a gun and half a sheep on my back you can make it empty-handed. Step easy, and don't start it slippin' or you'll slide to kingdom come. Watch me!"

Sprudell watched with all his eyes. The little old man, who boasted that he weighed only one hundred and thirty with his winter tallow on, skimmed the surface like a water spider, scarcely jarring loose a rock. Sprudell knew that he could never get across like that. Fear would make him heavy-footed if nothing else.

"Hurry up!" the old man shouted impatiently. "We've no time to lose. Dark's goin' to ketch us sure as shootin', and it's blowin' up plumb cold."

Sprudell nerved himself and started, stepping as gingerly as he could; but in spite of his best efforts his feet came down like pile drivers, disturbing rocks each time he moved.

Griswold watched him anxiously, and finally called:

"You're makin' more fuss than a cow elk! Step easy er you're goin' to start the whole darn works. Onct it gits to movin', half that bank'll go."

Sprudell was nearly a third of the way across when the shale began to move, slowly at first, with a gentle rattle, then faster. He gave a shout of terror and floundered, panic-stricken, where he stood.

The old man danced in frenzy:

"Job in your heels and run like hell!"

But the mass had started, and was moving faster. Sprudell's feet went from under him, and he collapsed in a limp heap. Then he turned over and scrabbled madly with hands and feet for something that would hold. Everything loosened at his touch and joined the sliding bank of shale. He could as easily have stopped his progress down a steep slate roof.

"Oh, Lord! There goes my dude!" Uncle Bill wrung his hands and swore.

Sprudell felt faint, nauseated, and his neck seemed unable to hold his heavy head. He laid his cheek on the cold shale, and, with his arms and legs outstretched like a giant starfish, he weakly slid. His body, moving slower than the mass, acted as a kind of wedge, his head serving as a separator to divide the moving bank. He was conscious, too, of a curious sensation in his spine--a feeling as though some invisible power were pulling backward, backward until it hurt. He wanted to scream, to hear his own voice once more, but his vocal cords would not respond; he could not make a sound.

Griswold was shouting something; it did not matter what. He heard it faintly above the clatter of the rocks. He must be close to the edge now--Bartlesville--the Commercial Club--Abe Cone--and then Mr. Sprudell hit something with a bump! He had a sensation as of a hatpin--many hatpins--penetrating his tender flesh, but that was nothing compared to the fact that he had stopped, while the slide of shale was rushing by. He was not dead! but he was too astonished and relieved to immediately wonder why.

Then he weakly raised his head and looked cautiously over his shoulder lest the slightest movement start him travelling again. What miracle had saved his life? The answer was before him. When he came down the slide in the fortunate attitude of a clothespin, the Fates, who had other plans for him, it seemed, steered him for a small tree of the stout mountain mahogany, which has a way of pushing up in most surprising places.

"Don't move!" called Griswold. "I'll come and get ye!"

Unnecessary admonition. Although Sprudell was impaled on the thick, sharp thorns like a naturalist's captive butterfly, he scarcely breathed, much less attempted to get up.

"Bill, I was near the gates," said Sprudell solemnly when Griswold, at no small risk to himself, had snaked him back to solid ground. "_Fortuna audaces juvat!_"

"If that's Siwash for 'close squeak,' it were; and," with an anxious glance at the ominous sky, "'tain't over."

IV

SELF-DEFENCE

When Bruce came out of the cañon, where he had a wider view of the sky, he saw that wicked-looking clouds were piling thick upon one another in the northeast, and he wondered whether the month was the first of November or late October, as Slim insisted. They had lost track somehow, and of the day of the week they had not the faintest notion.

There was always the first big snowstorm to be counted on in the Bitter Root Mountains, after which it sometimes cleared and was open weather for weeks. But this was when it came early in September; the snow that fell now would in all probability lie until spring.

At any rate, there was wood to be cut, enough to last out a week's storm. But, first, Bruce told himself, he must clean up the rocker, else he would lose nearly the entire proceeds of his day's work. The gold was so light that much of it floated and went off with the water when the sand was wet again, after it had once dried upon the apron.

Bruce placed a gold pan at the end of the rocker, and, with a clean scrubbing brush, carefully worked the sand over the Brussels-carpet apron, pouring water into the grizzly the while.

"That trip up the cañon cost me half a day's wages," he thought as he saw the thin yellow scum floating on the top of the pan.

Sitting on his heel by the river's edge, where he had made a quiet pool by building a breakwater of pebbles, he agitated and swirled the sand in the gold pan until only a small quantity remained, and while he watched carefully lest some of the precious specks and flakes which followed in a thick, yellow string behind the sand slip around the corners and over the edge, he also cast frequent glances at the peaks that became each moment more densely enveloped in the clouds.

"When she cuts loose she's going to be a twister," and he added grimly, as instinctively his eyes sought the saddleback or pass over which the ancient trail of the Sheep-eater Indians ran: "Those game hogs better pull their freight if they count on going out as they came in."

His fingers were numb when he stood up and shook the cold river water from them, turning now to look across for a sight of Slim.

"I've cut his share of wood all summer, so I guess there's no use quitting now. Turning pancakes is about the hardest work he's done since we landed on the bar. Oh, well"--he raised one big shoulder in a shrug of resignation--"we'll split this partnership when we get out of here. By rights I ought to dig out now."