The Golden Moccasins

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The Golden Moccasins

By Roy Norton

Author of “Justice in the Rough,” “Willow Creek” Stories,” Etc.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I.

AND the gold was red—red as blood—like as if the blood of them that had died for it on the long, long trail had stained it clean down into the frozen mud! And I had some of it in my hands—so! In these hands! And it ran between my fingers like little frozen drops of blood! And then I lost it, and I'll never find it again! Never!”

I heard a thin, cracked voice above me, and, leaning on my shovel, looked up to where sat an old man with hands held out, lifting them up and down, clawlike, with the palms upward, and fingers opened as if still scooping up and letting fall through them the streams of gold, red and hard, like frozen blood.

I had not seen him before. I did not know when he had come. His hair hung in long gray strands from under his mink cap, and the cap was so old that the fur was worn away to show the black, greasy skin beneath. His hair dropped to his shoulders, and covered his ears, and joined the straggling, white, unkempt beard that covered his face. His parka was too large for him, and had apparently been worn to the verge of uselessness. Now the sleeves were rolled up, to expose the skinny old arms, which were more like the scaly, attenuated legs of a bird than the members of a human body. His trousers were patched with anything that had come to hand until the original color was lost. His mukluks, the skin boots of the old Alaska, were patched, also, and frayed until they no longer protected his feet.

He did not notice me, but reached his withered hands downward, made an imaginary scoop between his feet, held them up again, and repeated:

“Gold! Red gold! Red as blood!”

He did not look at me until my curt “Hello!” aroused him, and then his hands; held themselves poised, and he shifted his bleached blue eyes toward me, and appeared to be trying to recall me to his recollection.

“I don't know you,” he said soberly.

“I don't suppose you do,” I answered. “I just came in. I'm from Cassiar.”

Some remnant of sanity seemed to control the faded eyes, and the withered hands dropped again to their normal position of rest.

“Cassiar? I used to work there. So you're no chechahco, eh? And I've been to Killisnu. Know Killisnu and old Bill Joyce, him they called Killisnuish? And Bevins, and Sinclair, and Chapman, and2” his voice trailed off into a list of inarticulate names, as his mind reverted to the past.

“That's old Bill Wilton. Touched he is, poor old cuss!” said a soft, growling voice behind me, and I turned to the man working with me, through whom I had come from Circle City, far up on the lazy stretches of the Yukon River.

He put a finger on his lips, and added: “Don't pay any attention to him. Get Cavanaugh to tell you about it when old Bill isn't around. Bill's got ears like a burro, and he's—well, he's sensitive.”

He resumed his shovel again, and I did likewise, knowing that the day was waning, and that we must try to get the last of the pay dump we had bought shoveled in before our scant supply of water, impounded in the dam above, had exhausted itself; but I thought of the little information my partner, Dan Hillyer, had vouchsafed me, and wondered at the strange old man who still sat above us on the bank, and still reached his hands down now and then, scooped up the dried gravel, and let it run through his fingers with that monotonous singsong of gold—“Red gold! Red as blood!”

I looked up in time to see a girl come behind him, and lay a gentle hand on his shoulder. My work was forgotten in the instant. My partner called to her, and lifted his hat, and she smiled at him gravely, and with friendliness. Then she leaped down the bank with nimble grace, and met him as, still holding his hat, he advanced.

“Why, Bessie,” he said, with his slow drawl, smiling at her, “you've grown to be a woman—all in a couple of years! And prettier'n ever. How are you, anyway?”

She laughed, and I noted that her lips were red, her teeth white and even, and that I was enchained by her eyes. They were like those one dreams of sometimes—eyes that are not quite plain in their message, but deep, and soft, and intelligent. Hers were tempered by some suggestion of lasting sadness, and I wondered if it had anything to do with the wreck of a man on the bank above; still sifting pebbles. I was to have this answered by Hillyer's introduction.

“Tom,” he said, turning to me, “this is Bessie Wilton. That's her daddy up there on the bank. Bess and me's been friends since the day she was born, and that's pretty close to twenty year ago, ain't it, Bess?”

She did not smile when she shook hands with me in acknowledging the introduction, but gave me a long, steady scrutiny, as if wondering who I was, and what my character. I felt the need to answer her unasked question, but was spared the trouble by Dan.

“Tom Amann's his full name,” he said, “and we hooked up together down in the Cassiar. He's from the Mother Lode mines, and is all right. He's an old friend of Cavanaugh's. Came on down here after I'd come ahead to see whether she was any good in this camp. Cassiar was petered out.”

“But you must have made something from it,” she said, addressing her remarks impersonally to both Dan and me, “or you couldn't have bought Markam's pay dump.”

I did not feel called upon to answer, or explain that the purchase had been a gamble, pure and simple, and that Markam, hurrying out to the States with gold from another claim, had made a mistake when he sold us this part of his winter's work; for we were cleaning up ten times as much as we had paid for it. My partner laughed, with his long-drawn, soft rumble, and his next words diverted her from the topic.

“How's the old man making it? Is he getting any better?”

Her face became more grave as she turned and looked at her father, on the bank.

“I don't know' she answered hesitatingly. “There are days at a time when he seems better, and says nothing of—of what he suffered. Then there are other days when he rambles on continually. Once, last spring, when the river broke and the green came out on the trees back on the hills, I was disturbed in the night. It was a sort of stealthy noise. I got up and looked in his part of the cabin. He was making a pack, and his old, mildewed pack straps were spread out on the floor, with the ragged old canvas laid over them, and he was laying bacon and beans, and baking powder and flour, in parcels on top of it. 'It's spring,' he said; 'it's spring, and I must be off. I'll find it for you this time, girl.' And it was all I could do to get him to postpone his trip. Sometimes I give up hope. Then again I have more courage, and think perhaps he will get well.”

She stopped speaking, and I saw that my partner's face was grave with sympathy, which she appeared to appreciate.

“But what are you doing?” he asked directly, and with the frontiersman's camaraderie which prompted him to speak of her financial affairs as if they were public.

“Oh, I am working for Mr. Cavanaugh,” she answered easily. “I'm in the trading post now; keep the books, when he will let me, read his books, which he always volunteers, and so—well—we get along. Only, sometimes, I get tired of it all.”

There was a slight note of rebellion in her voice and words, and I knew, in a flash, that, creature of the wilderness and the edge of the world as she was, she still had vague longings to pass out into that life whose tales of glamour and unrest had reached her here, more than a thousand miles from the nearest place that could be called civilized.

She turned away from us, calling back an invitation to Dan to come and visit her cabin, and wishing me a mere good-by, and spoke to her father, who obediently rose to his feet and followed her away toward the mouth of the creek, which poured its shallow waters into the Yukon.

We did not speak as we began shoveling in again, hurrying to make up for lost time, and the sun crept across until it was low in the west, lacing the broad river with threads of shifting gold, and permitting the purples of the long Arctic twilight to fasten themselves and grow upon the hills.

It was a familiar, brooding poem to me, this twilight of the North, for I had striven for gold in British Columbia and Alaska for three years, with varying success. Sometimes it had promised largely, and I had dreamed of what greater ventures I should assume when the spring dumps were cleaned, and at other times, hungry, cold, and trail-wearied, I had cursed the white pallor which had beckoned me with pale, illusive fingers, into its heartless depths, to whisper madness into my ears. But now it was summer, and I loved it.

Cassiar had not treated us ill. We had no fortune, but we had enough to move on, and to keep from owing the trader for supplies. We had enough to buy Markam's dump, and I had come down the river, in response to a letter from my partner of three years' time, on a real steamboat, which had churned around bars, perilously threaded the sloughs of the Yukon Flats, and dumped me, the night before, at Neucloviat, the new camp, that, so far, had promised more than it had yielded.

Dan had taken a cabin from another old sourdough we had known at Circle City, and who was going “outside” to pass a winter in a warmer climate—“to thaw out his bones,” he said.

“Well, she's dry again.” My partner's voice aroused me, and I looked at him where he stood at the head of our little string of sluice boxes, and then climbed up and saw that the stream was running so low and slow that it refused to pass the mud over the riffles. “Guess we'd better knock off. Let's go up and shut down the sluices, so that fool dam will fill up again. No use in tryin' to clean up with what water's left running in from the overflow.”

He threw his shovel on the bank, wiped his forehead with the back of his shirt sleeve, and we trudged up the creek beside our little ditch. At the top we noted that the creek was daily running lower, at an almost alarming rate, and discussed this as we retraced our steps and started along the pebbles of the river beach for the camp, which lay almost two, miles up the Yukon.

“She looks like business, all right, don't she?” Dan asked, waving his hand toward it as we came closer, after a long, silent tramp, in which each had been occupied with his own thoughts.

I studied the long range of high bank facing the river, which at that point was a full half mile broad. Here and there it rose into high cliffs, cut away into sheer lines by the ferocity of spring ravages of flood and ice. Across from the camp it stretched away into long, gradually ascending slopes, timbered in a heavy green. The camp itself was on a bench full sixty feet above the low-water mark, and, back of that again, the mountains climbed abruptly upward, clad in somber firs, and lightened by patches of silver birch, among which the evening shadows seemed lingering in a soft, hazy good night.

More than two hundred cabins were there, including the straggling row of dance halls, trading posts, “stores,” saloons, and “outfitters” which fronted the river as if inviting it to stop and view the grandeur of pioneerdom.

From some of the cabins, which scattered without pretense of Street back toward the hills behind, pale wreaths of blue smoke crawled lazily upward, and the ring of an ax as some miner, loafing for the summer, chopped barely wood enough for his evening meal, mingled with the soft cry of the waterfowl speeding here and there in quest of night feeding grounds.

In the strange, vibrant stillness of a summer's night on the arctic circle, all sounds were magnified. The “squawling” of a baby from the native village on the far side of the river, the bawling song of a boatman coming across, the barking of the Malemutes as they tore up and down the shingle beach in front of the native village, and the fierce crescendo of howls and growls when they engaged in a fight; the guttural cries of a squaw as she put an end to the altercation with a club, and drove the combatants, yelping, to the igloos of their owners; a bellow of laughter from the front of one of the rival trading posts where some man told a story that sounded as if meeting with the approval of his auditors.

Somehow, in its wild freedom, it was inspiriting, and I was glad to be alive, to be a part of it, and to forget that winter was coming again inexorably. But as I walked I thought of Elizabeth Wilton, and wondered why she was there; who she was; where she had gathered that cultivated speech; and what brought the sadness and longing to her eyes as she turned them on the man who reiterated the drone of gold that was red as blood!

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.

The lights of the kerosene lamps were dim and low when I strolled into Cavanaugh's that night. He was leaning across his rough wood desk, oilcloth covered, and totaling a column of figures. The lamp above him, the shadows behind, accentuated the whiteness of his hair, until it was rendered a halo of silver. The smell of the trading post was around him, from the damp, pungent odor of seal oil hanging from bladders in his loft, the acrid scent of furs, native cured, the sweet fragrance of sugar, freshly opened, the lower aromas of rice, and the salt smokiness of hams and bacon suspended from the rafters above. The shadows of light, playing across the lurid labels of canned vegetables and meats, and the gaudy prints which the Indians loved, and the strings of beads hanging to the shelf junctures, rendered them all a mellow setting, as they stared, harmonized, from the gloom.

“Hello,” he greeted me, lifting his head, and then, “Oh, it's you, is it, Tom Amann? Glad you dropped in. How do you like our camp? Looks like Circle used to two or three years ago, doesn't it?”

He drew away from the desk, and came back to the counter, where he threw his weight across it, leaning on his elbows, as if inviting conversation.

I studied his face as I answered with ordinary, courteous conversation. It was a strange face, full of strange complexities. It had the forehead of the student, and the thoughtful eyes of the student; yet its chin was aggressive, and the mouth clean-cut and decisive. It was that chin which must have brought him to Alaska full thirty years before, when to so venture was to make a greater essay than had been the reckless sailing of Columbus in quest of a new World.

I had heard tales of his past, that told of a fiery youth, of sudden brawls in Pacific coast camps, and of a flight after a fight when his enemy had lain white and still at his feet. Men reiterated that he was an Irish gentleman by birth, and spoke respectfully of his attainments. He was said to have known the shadows of Magdalen College in that glorious seat of learning. Oxford. And yet here he was, white and old, running a trading post that was as isolated as any in the world.

I was so absorbed in listening to his comments that I had almost forgotten my desire to know more of old Bill Wilton until he referred to it himself. It was when I suggested that I was keeping him from his bookkeeping. He laughed at that.

“Well, it really doesn't amount to much,” he said, “and can wait. I have a bookkeeper in my clerk, Bessie Wilton; but I must give her a lesson in Greek to-morrow, and so thought I would make it a trifle easier for her.”

I sustained a distinct emotion of surprise at his words, and wondered how far his educational efforts with the girl I had seen on the bank had led him. The idea of a girl so advanced in her studies as to be worrying over Greek verbs, in that most isolated spot of the wilderness, was incongruous. He must have read my thought, for again he laughed, with that low, musical, amused note.

“It has been rather a recreation of mine,” he said, “ever since she was a mere slip of a girl. She's never had a chance, and she was so bright, that I began it rather as an amusement, kept it up until I found that it was excellent mental training for myself, and, upon my word, she is a wonder!”

His voice betrayed considerable pride in his pupil. He swung his legs over the counter with such ease that his years were belied, and sat on the outer edge by my side.

“It must be something in the primitiveness of her surroundings,” he went on, “that makes her so intelligent. Nothing to distract her attention, you know. No fol-de-rols of civilization, no pink teas, pink parties, or pink young men to flirt with. Why, Tom, I believe that pupil of mine could pass with honor almost any university examination that might be put up to her. I know. I've a degree or two myself.”

It sounded almost like a boast, this pride in his pupil and his own education. The student was speaking again.

“It seems rather a pity that a man of your attainment should be buried here,” I blurted out, and for an instant he frowned and fixed his eyes on me harshly, as if satisfying himself whether or not I was impertinent; then, evidently deciding that my words veiled nothing suggestive, his face relaxed, and he gave something approaching a sigh.

“Perhaps,” he replied slowly. “But fate does for us all. Now, there's that girl. If fate had not thrust me into the out-of-the-way places, she might have grown up in the worst ignorance, and an intelligence would have been wasted. She might have reverted. The call of that eighth of Indian blood might have made itself heard, and lured her back to the barabaras.”

“Indian blood! An eighth Indian blood!” I exclaimed.

“Oh, I didn't think. I supposed you had heard the family history, and about poor old Bill. 'Red Gold Wilton,' some of the boys call him. Let's see! When you were in Circle, they were up the river with Prevost.”

“What about Wilton?” I asked eagerly. “I saw him to-day, and I was curious about him—about what brought him to that condition.”

For a moment Cavanaugh sat quietly, looking out through the door at the growing twilight, and I thought he was not going to gratify my curiosity; then he thrust his hand into the pocket of his mackinaw, pulled out a well-seasoned pipe, filled it with the black “sheepdip” of the North, and lighted it.

“Bill Wilton,” he said at last, “has gone through enough to have killed more than one man out of every ten. He was one of the handsomest men I ever saw when I first came into the North. That was thirty years ago. I had found a position with the old Hudson's Bay Company up on the Stewart, when he came there for supplies. I made up an outfit for him, and enjoyed watching him.”

Cavanaugh's voice had dropped to a reminiscent vein, and I settled myself to a more comfortable position.

“He stood at least six feet and an inch in his moccasins, had eyes like hot steel, and the grace of a jaguar. By heavens! I saw that man stand flat-footed, and, without any preliminary effort, or raising his hands, jump clear over a counter higher than this, just to stretch his muscles, apparently! His strength was prodigious. He could carry anything he could get on his back. He could outlast any native that ever lived on the trail, and go farther on snowshoes than any one I ever knew. His endurance was incredible. He was a wonderful man, and it was a joy to hear. him talk, because he enjoyed living. His voice wasn't like it is now. You've heard him?”

I nodded my head, recalling that cracked, quavering monologue of “Red gold.”

“His voice was big and round, and like—like—ever hear the big bell in Moscow? No? Well, it was like that, anyway. One of those voices that you could hear in your mind long after he had finished speaking. I've heard him come singing down the trail nearly a mile away, on a still evening, like this, and you can bet we all used to listen.”

Cavanaugh shook his head, and was silent for a moment, as if absorbed in his own memories. I was about to ask him a question, when of his own volition he resumed.

“I don't suppose you ever heard the story; but there is a legend, among the natives, dating back to I don't know how long ago, and certainly known to the old H. B. factors for more than a hundred years, that somewhere, far up in the North, there is a deposit of gold that is enormous. It is red, and the Indian sagas and tyunes will shudder when it is mentioned. They say it is accursed. I'm not superstitions; but there may be something in it. I don't know! There are lots of things in this existence, fourth dimension, perhaps, that men, puny and blunt of intelligence, may not comprehend. I'm less assertive and contradictory about those inexplicable manifestations than I used to be, thirty years ago, when I came in here, and believed that anything I couldn't explain, didn't exist!”

I was surprised at this evidence of mysticism, superstition, or whatever it might be classed, coming from his lips; but I held silence, waiting for him to continue.

“Probably Bill Wilton paid small attention to legend, although he must have heard of it,” he continued, “until after he married the daughter of old MacCulloch. Mac was the factor of the H. B. post, where I worked when I came in from—well, that doesn't matter. Mac had married a half-breed Cree klootch. Daughter of another H. B. factor, upcountry she was, and she might have been handsome when he met her; she wasn't when I got acquainted with her. Gone to fat, a screeching tongue, and he had to keep the post rum under lock and key. But she had a girl that was more Scotch than Cree. I'd have married her myself, if I could have done so, but Bill Wilton, with everything about him to command a woman's affection, got her. I couldn't blame her. He was Wilton the magnificent, with his big laugh, and his big voice, and his big strength.

“You can see what kind of a man he was when I tell you that on the day she promised to marry him he first went to old Mac, and told him that he was going to marry his daughter, then came directly to me, and put out his hand, and said: 'Sorry for you, Cavanaugh, but it's luck, and you're our best friend. Shake!' That was his way. And I danced at their wedding when the little missionary from Shebalath came up and performed the ceremony, and old MacCulloch broached a keg of brandy that had been in the post for fifty years.”

He knocked the ashes from his pipe, and, after rubbing it, with a ruminating attitude, on the tail of his mackinaw, slipped it back into his pocket, crossed one leg over the other, clasped the upraised knee with his hands, and again spoke.

“Bill had a couple of seasons of bad luck working the bars, which was about all the mining that was done in that part of the country at that time, and one day he came into the post, and sat and talked to me for a long time about his plans. He wanted to know if I had ever heard anything about the red gold. I laughed, and told him it was about as reliable a tale as any other that the natives told, and that probably it was about as true as the story of the first fire, and the first boat, and the intervention of the Great Spirit when the seven tribes went to war; but Wilton didn't laugh. I remember yet how he sat there, staring at the light through the crack of one of those big drum stoves, and smoking, and sometimes not winking his eyes for a long time, as if he Were absorbed in some dream.

“'The old woman,' he said, referring to Mac's wife, his mother-in-law, 'has been telling me about it, and I got into a native kashima coming down the trail the other night, and heard more of it from an old buck that wanted to be friendly. I believe there is such a ledge, and, Cavanaugh, I'm going to try to find it!'

“You may be sure I tried to talk him out of the notion; but you see the man had lived so long among the natives, had wandered over so many thousand miles of wilderness, was so unafraid, and so down on his luck, that he was ready to believe and to try anything. I don't think old MacCulloch was supersitious when it came to gold; but he, too, tried to dissuade Wilton, who grew more stubborn each day as he made his plans. He left his wife at the post, loaded up his dog sled, and slipped away into the North one brisk December morning, following some idea of his own, gathered probably from what he had gleaned from the native gossip.

“And the Indians? He offered all sorts of inducements to get one to go with him, because no man, no matter how brave he is, likes to pull out that way, alone. It gets on his nerves. But there wasn't an Indian could be induced to go with him for money or promise.

“I shan't forget the morning he left. The sky was cold and dusky, as it always is at that time of the year, when he straightened his dogs out and bade his wife good-by in front of the post. There was one withered old squaw there who looked like a native Witch of Endor, who abandoned her stolidity, shook her skinny, dirty old claws in the air, and told him he was going into the land of the accursed; that the end of his trail would lead him to the devil, and that God Almighty had set His seal on those barrens where the gold was supposed to be waiting, tempting and red.

“Wilton's wife cried a little, and weakened at the last, and clung to him, with her arms around his neck, out there under the cold morning dusk, and begged him to give it up; but he pulled her arms loose, tenderly but determined, and laughed, with that big, reckless, bell-like laugh of his, ran out to the handles of his sled, yelled 'Mush on!' to his leader, and tore away down the river's face, with the frosted snow skirling up behind him in a little cloud. He was a brave figure of a man as he turned, just before taking the bend, waved a good-by to us, and blew a kiss off his mittened fingers at his wife, who was clinging to her father's arm, with tears running like drops of ice down her cheeks.

“It was late in the spring when he came back. He staggered into the post one day, so lean, and thin, and bony. that one could scarcely recognize him, and fell across the steps of the storeroom where we were working. I ran over and picked him up where he had fallen inside.

“'Grub!' he croaked. 'I'm starving!'

“I got it for him, and ran across to tell his wife and old Mac that he was home again. It took him at least ten days to recover, he was so far gone. He had traveled so far that he had lost count of distances, and when his supplies ran out, ate his dogs, one at a time—ate his mukluks, boiled his fur parka, tried to eat the leather of his pack straps! And there was nothing but the iron nerve, and the iron body of Bill Wilton that brought him back alive.

“All the summer long he worked the bars and got poor pay. His strength came back, and once in a while he laughed; but he was not the same Bill Wilton. He worshiped his wife, and when she was around appeared to have a sort of content; but when she left him he would sit and brood, and there was a light in his eyes that wasn't nice to see; a something of a shadow, as if he had seen something, or his sufferings on that trip had branded his soul with a red iron—red as the gold he sought.