CHAPTER VIII.
THEIR FIRST "COLOURS."
"Lillooet at last!"
Steve Chance was the speaker, and as his eyes rested upon the Frazer,just visible from the first bluff which overlooks the Lillooet, hisspirits rose so that he almost shouted aloud for joy. There beneath him,only a short mile away, lay most of the things which he longed for: restafter labour, good food, and pleasant drinks. Steve's cravings may nothave been the cravings of an ideal artist's nature, but let those whowould cavil at them tramp for a week over stone-slides and throughalkaline dust, and then decide if these are not the natural longings ofan ordinary man.
To tell the whole truth, Steve had amused himself and his comradeRoberts for more than a mile by discussing what they would order to eatand drink when once they reached comparative civilization again. Eventhe hardest of men tire in time of bacon and beans and tea.
A "John Collins," a seductive fluid, taken in a long glass and sippedthrough a straw, was perhaps what Steve hankered after most; but therewere many other things which he longed for besides that most delectableof drinks, such for instance as a "full bath," a beefsteak, and cleansheets to follow.
Alas, poor Steve! There was the Frazer to wash in if he liked, and nodoubt he could have obtained something which called itself a steak atthe saloon, but a "John Collins" and clean sheets he was not likely toobtain west of Chicago.
Indeed, to this day long glasses and "drinketty drinks" are rare in thewild west; "drunketty drinks" out of short thick vulgar little tumblersbeing the order of the day. And apart from all this, Lillooet, thoughlarger in 1862 than it is to-day, was even then but a poor little town,a town consisting only of one long straggling street, which looked as ifit had lost its way on a great mud-bluff by the river. Benches of yellowmud and gray-green sage-brush rose above and around the "city," tierabove tier, until they lost themselves in the mountains which gatheredround, and deep down at the foot of the bluffs the Frazer roared along.
Since Chance had last seen the Frazer at Westminster its character hadconsiderably changed. There it was a dull heavy flood, at least half amile in breadth from bank to bank; here it was an angry torrent,roaring between steep overhanging banks, nowhere two hundred yardsapart. There the river ran by flat lands, and fields which men mightfarm; here the impending mountains hung threateningly above it. The mostdaring steamboat which had ever plied upon the Frazer had not comenearer to Lillooet than Lytton, and that was full forty miles downstream.
In one thing only the Frazer was unchanged. At Lillooet, as atWestminster, it was a sordid yellow river, with no sparkle in it, noblue backwaters, no shallows through which the pebbles shone like jewelsthrough liquid sunshine. And yet, artist though he was in a poortradesman-like fashion, Steve gazed on the Frazer with a rapture whichno other stream had ever awakened in him. At the portage between Setonand Anderson lakes he had passed a stream such as an angler dreams of inhis dusty chambers on a summer afternoon, but he had hardly wasted asecond glance upon it. Only trout lay there, great purple-spottedfellows, who would make the line vibrate like a harp string, and thrashthe water into foam, ere they allowed themselves to be basketed; but inthe Frazer, though the fish were only torpid, half-putrid salmon, thatwould not even take a fly, there was gold, and gold filled Steve's brainand eyes and heart just then to the exclusion of every other createdthing. All he wanted was gold, gold; and his spirits rose higher andhigher as he noted the flumes which ran along the river banks, and sawthe little groups of blue-shirted Chinamen who squatted by theirrockers, or shovelled the gravel into their ditches.
So keen, indeed, was Steve to be at work amongst his beloved "dirt,"that tired though he was, he persuaded Ned to come with him and wash ashovelful of it, whilst dinner was being prepared.
Right at the back of the town a little company of white men had dug deepinto the gravel of the beach, set their flumes, and turned on a somewhatscanty supply of water, and here Steve obtained his first "colours."
A tall old man who ran the mine lent him a shovel, and showed him whereto fill it with likely-looking dirt; taught him how to dip the edge ofhis shovel in the bucket, and slowly swill the water thus obtained roundand round, so as to wash away the big stones and the gravel which he didnot want.
The operation looks easier than it is, and at first Steve washed hisshovel cleaner than he meant to, in a very short time. By and by,however, he learnt the trick, and was rewarded by seeing a patch of finegravel left in the hollow of the shovel, with here and there a tiny rubyamongst it, and here and there an agate. The next washing took awayeverything except a sediment of fine black sand,--sand which will fly toa magnet, and is the constant associate and sure indication of gold.
Steve was going to give this another wash when old Pete stopped him."Steady, my lad, don't wash it all away; there it is, don't you see it!"and sure enough there it was, up by the point of the shovel, seven,eight--a dozen small red specks, things that you almost needed amicroscope to see, not half as beautiful as the little rubies or thepure white agates; but this was gold, and when the old miner, takingback his shovel, dipped it carelessly into the water of his flume,Chance felt for a moment a pang of indignation at seeing his first"colours" treated with such scant ceremony, although the twelve speckstogether were not, in all probability, worth a cent.
But the sight of the gold put new life into Chance and filled Phon'sveins with fever. One night at Lillooet, Steve said, was rest enough forhim; and most of that night he and Phon spent either down by the riveror in the saloon, watching the Chinese over their rockers, or listeningto the latest accounts from Cariboo. Men could earn good wages placermining at Lillooet in '62, even as they can now, but all who couldafford it were pushing on up stream to golden Cariboo. What was fivedollars a day, or ten, or even twenty for the matter of that, when othermen were digging out fortunes daily on Williams Creek and AntlerCunningham's, and the Cottonwood?
And in this matter Cruickshank humoured Steve's feverish impatience toget on. Here, as at Douglas, the gallant colonel showed a strangereluctance to mingle with his fellows, or at least with such of them ashad passed a season in the upper country, and even went so far as tocamp out a mile away from the town, to give the pack animals a betterchance of getting good feed, and to secure them, so he said, against alltemptations to stray up stream with somebody else. Horseflesh was dearat Lillooet in '62; and the colonel said that morals were lax, thoughwhy they should have been worse than at Westminster, Ned could notunderstand.
However, it suited him to go on, so he raised no objection toCruickshank's plans, more especially as the rest did not seem beneficialto his honest old chum, Roberts, who had been the centre of ahard-drinking, hard-swearing lot of mining men, ever since he arrivedat Lillooet. Whenever Ned came near, these men sunk their voices to awhisper, and once when Cruickshank came in sight, the scowl upon theirbrows grew so dark, and their mutterings so ominous, that the coloneltook the hint and vanished immediately. When Ned saw him next he was attheir trysting-place, a mile and a half from the saloon, and veryimpatient to be off,--so impatient, indeed, that he absolutely refusedto wait for Roberts, who, he "guessed," was drunk.
"Those old-timers are all the same when they get amongst pals, and asfor Roberts, we are deuced well rid of him, he is no use anyway," saidthe colonel.
This might very well be Cruickshank's opinion. It was not Ned's, and Nedhad a way of thinking and acting for himself, so without any waste ofwords he bade his comrades "drive ahead," whilst he turned back insearch of Roberts.
By some accident this worthy had not heard of the intended start, andwas, as Ned expected, as innocent of any intention to desert as he wasof drunkenness.
When Ned found him he was sitting in the barroom with a lot of his pals,and the conversation round him had grown loud and angry; indeed, as Nedentered, a rough, weather-beaten fellow in his shirt sleeves wasshouting at the top of his voice, "What the deuce is the good of allthis jaw? Lynch the bilk, that's what I say, and save trouble."
But
Ned's appearance put a stop to the proceedings, though an angrygrowl broke out when he was overheard to say that Cruickshank and Stevehad started half an hour ago, and that he himself had come back to lookfor old Roberts.
"Don't you go, Bob," urged one of his comrades; "them young Britishersare bound to stay by their packs, but you've no call to."
"Not you. You'll stay right here, if you ain't a born fool," urgedanother.
But Bob was not to be coaxed or bantered out of his determination tostay by his brother Salopian.
"No, lads," he retorted, "I ain't a born fool, and I ain't the sort togo back on a pal. If Corbett goes I'm going, though I don't pretend tobe over-keen on the job."
"Wal, if you will go, go and be hanged to you; only, Bob, keep your eyeskinned, and, I say, _shoot fust_ next time, _shoot fust_; now don't youforget it!" with which mysterious injunction Bob's big friend reeled upfrom the table (he was half-drunk already), shook hands, "liquored" oncemore, and left. He said he had some business to attend to down town; andas it was nearly noon, and he had done nothing but smoke and drink shortdrinks since breakfast-time, he was probably right in thinking that itwas time to attend to it.
Whilst this gentleman rolled away down the street with a fine freestride, requiring a good deal of sea-room, Ned and his friend had to puttheir best feet foremost (as the saying is) to make up for lost time.When you are walking fast over rough ground you have not much breathleft for conversation, and this, perhaps, and the roar of the sullenriver, accounts for the fact that the two men strode along in silence,neither of them alluding to the conversation just overheard in thesaloon, although the minds of both were running upon that subject, andNed noticed that the pistol which Roberts pulled out and examined asthey went along was a recent purchase.
"Hullo, you've got a new gun, Rob," he remarked. Everything with whichmen shoot is called a gun in British Columbia.
"Yes, it's one I bought at Lillooet. I hadn't got a good one with me."
"Well, I don't suppose you'll want it, now you have got it," repliedCorbett.
"Well, I don't know. I _might_ want it to shoot grouse with by the sideof the trail."
And the old fellow laid such an emphasis upon his last words andchuckled so grimly, that Ned half suspected that he had wetted hiswhistle once too often after all.
Gold, Gold, in Cariboo! A Story of Adventure in British Columbia Page 8