Kars smoked on for some silent moments.
"You didn"t risk the river?" he inquired presently. "Just where were they working?"
"No. Charley him all get kill up dead by river. No bush. No nothing." He made a gesture that was unmistakable. Then he went on.
"Charley, him go up dis way." He pointed at the hill directly behind him. "Him go up--up. Much walk, oh, yes. Then Charley, him go down.
Plenty big piece. Heap down. So. Come by river. Much bush.
Charley, him go on. Quiet. Oh, yes. Quiet--much quiet. Then no bush any more. Big rock. High. Much high. Wide. Dis way." He spread his arms out to their full extent, indicating the gorge. "Water so."
He narrowed his hands together. "Squaws, him plenty much work by water. So."
Again the men smoked on in silence. Bill made no comment at all. He was looking to Kars. This was entirely Kars" affair.
Presently Kars looked round.
"Charley made good--very good," he said. "Charley good man."
Then he looked across at Bill. He was smiling, and the light of the fire made his smile queerly grim.
"That"s all I need, Bill," he said. "The rest I"ll do myself. I"m going to quit you for the time. Maybe I won"t join you till nearly morning. I can"t say. I want you to strike camp right away. Get on the move down to the river bank--above the gorge. Then follow it along for a few miles. Maybe ten. Then wait around, and keep an eye wide.
Then send Charley back to wait for me on the river bank--just above the gorge. Get that, Charley?" He turned to the Indian. "I need you to know just where Boss Bill is waiting, so you can guide me."
"Charley git him plenty. Charley him wait."
"Good. You get it, Bill?"
Bill nodded.
"Right. Then I"ll be moving."
CHAPTER XI
THE SECRET OF THE GORGE
Peigan Charley"s belief in his white boss"s lack of sanity was characteristic of Indian regard for the reckless. The reason, the driving power of his chief"s character was lost to his primitive mind.
The act was all he had power to judge by, and the act of voluntarily visiting the headquarters of the Bell River Indians said he was "crazy."
But Kars was by no means "crazy," nor anything like it. He had a definite purpose to fulfil, and, in consequence, all hazard was ignored. The man"s simple hardihood was the whole of him. He had been bred in the rough lap of the four winds at his father"s side. He would have smothered under the breath of caution.
He set out from the camp at the moment he had carefully selected. He set out alone, without a thought for the chances of disaster which the night might have for him. His eyes were alight with satisfaction, with antic.i.p.ation. Invincible determination inspired him as he faced the hill which had served the Indian earlier in the day. He moved off with a swing to his great body which said all that his lips had left unspoken of the confidence which at all times supported him in the battle with elemental forces.
When he left the camp the blackness of the night had given way to the jewel-studded velvet of a clearing sky. The spectre lights of the north were already dancing their sombre measure. There was no moon.
These things all possessed their significance for him.
The shadowy night light, however, only served him in the open, in the breaks in the deep woodlands he must thread. For the rest his woodcraft, even his instinct, must serve him. A general line of direction was in his mind. On that alone he must seriously depend.
His difficulties were tremendous. They must have been insurmountable for a man of lesser capacity. But the realization of difficulty was a sense he seemed to lack. It was sufficient that a task lay before him for the automatic effort to be forthcoming.
He climbed the hill through endless aisles of straight-limbed timber.
His gait was rapid. His deep, regular breathing spoke of an effort which cost him little. His muscles were as hard as the tree-trunks with which he frequently collided. And so he came to the barren crest where the fierce night wind bit deeply into the warm flesh.
He only paused for his bearings. The stars and the dancing lights yielded him the guidance he needed. He read these signs with the ease of an experienced mariner. Then, crushing his soft beaver cap low down over his ears, and b.u.t.toning his pea-jacket about his neck, he left the bitter, wind-swept hilltop and plunged down the terrific slope, at the far-off bottom of which lay the river, whose very name had cast a spell of terror over the hearts of the people of the northland.
Again he was swallowed up by the dark bowels of the woods, whose origin went back to the days before man trod the earth. And curiously enough a sensation of committing an intrusion stirred as the silence closed down about him. A dark wall always seemed to confront him, a wall upon which he was being precipitated.
The steep of the decline was at times terrific. There were moments of impact with trees which left him bruised and beaten. There were moments when projecting roots threatened to hurl him headlong to invisible depths. Each buffet, each stumble, however, only hardened his resolve. These things were powerless to deter him.
His descent of the approach to the gorge was a serious test. He felt thankful at least that his plans called for no reascent of the hill later. Twice he was precipitated into the bed of a spring "washout,"
and, sore and angry, he was forced to a blind scramble from the moist, soft bed.
Once he only escaped with his life by a margin the breadth of a hair.
On this occasion he recovered himself with a laugh of something like real amus.e.m.e.nt. But death had clutched at him with fierce intent. He had plunged headlong over the edge of a chasm, hewn in the hillside by a subsidence of the foundations some hundreds of feet below. Six feet from the brink his great body had been caught in the arms of a bushy tangle, which bent and crushed under his great weight in a perilous, almost hopeless fashion. But he clung to the attenuated branches that supported him and waited desperately for the further plunge below, which the yielding roots seemed to make inevitable.
But the waiting saved him. Had he struggled while the bush labored under the shock, maybe his antic.i.p.ations would have been fulfilled. As it was the roots definitely held, and, cautiously, he was able to haul himself up against the weed-grown wall of the precipice, and finally obtain a foot and hand hold in its soil. The rest was a matter of effort and nerve, and at last he clambered back to comparative safety.
So the journey went on with varying fortune, his blind groping and stumblings alternating with the starlit patches where the woods broke.
But it went on deliberately to the end with an inevitability which revealed the man.
At last he stood in the open with the frowning walls of the great gorge far above him, like a giant mouth agape in a desperate yawn. At his feet lay the river, flowing swiftly on to join the great Mackenzie in its northward rush to swell the field of polar ice.
Here, in the bowels of the great pit, he was no longer blinded by the darkness, for, in the three hours of infinite effort he had expended, the moon had risen, and its radiance shone down the length of the gorge like some dull yellow search-light. The wood-lined walls were lit till their conformation was vaguely discernible. The swift stream reflected the yellow rays on the crests of its surging ripples. Then, far in, beyond the mouth of the canyon, the long low foresh.o.r.e stood out almost plainly to his searching eyes.
His task was only at its beginning. He waited just sufficiently long to deliberate his next move. Then he set off, heading for the heart of the gorge itself.
It was a scene of deep interest for eyes backed by understanding.
A figure moved slowly about, searching here, probing there. It was a figure suggesting secret investigation without a sign of real secrecy in its movements.
The foresh.o.r.e of the river was wide, far wider than could have been believed from the heights above. It sloped gradually to the water"s edge, and the soil was loose, gravelly, with a consistency that was significant to the trained mind. But its greater interest lay in the signs of intense labor that stood out on every hand. Operations, crudely scientific, had been carried out to an extent that was almost staggering. Here, in the heart of a low cla.s.s Indian territory was the touch of the white man. It was more than a touch. It was the impress of his whole hand.
The foresh.o.r.e was honeycombed with shallow pits, sh.o.r.ed, and timbered with rough hewn timber. Against the mouth of each pit, and there were dozens of them, a great pile of soil stood up like a giant beehive, Some of these were in the process of formation. Some were completed, and looked to have stood thus for many months. Some were in the process of being demolished, and iron-wheeled trolleys on timbered pathways stood about them, with the tools of the laborers remaining just where they had been flung down when the day"s work was finished.
Each pit, each "dump" was narrowly scrutinized by the silent figure as it moved from point to point. Even the examination extended to touch.
Again and again the soil was handled in an effort to test its quality.
But the search extended beyond the "dumps" and pits. It revealed a cutting hewn out of the great wall of the gorge. It was hewn at a point well above the highest water level of the spring freshets. And it was approached by a well timbered roadway of split green logs.
The figure moved over to this, and, as it left the beehive "dumps," a second figure replaced it. But whereas the first made no secret of its movements, the second displayed all the furtive movements of the hunter.
The cutting further revealed the guidance of the master mind. It was occupied by a mountainous dump of the acc.u.mulated "dirt" from the foresh.o.r.e. It was built up, up, by a system of log pathways, till a rough estimate suggested the acc.u.mulation of thousands upon thousands of tons.
What was the purpose of this storage?
The question was answered by a glance in a fresh direction. Adjoining the cutting stood an iron winch. It was a man-power winch, but it worked an elevated cable trolley communicating with a trestle work fifty yards away.
Moving swiftly on towards the trestle work the man searched its length.
He peered up, far up the great hillside in the uncertain moonlight, seeking the limits of its trailing outline in that direction. But its ascent was gradual. It took the hill diagonally, and quickly lost itself round a bend in the narrow roadway which had been hewn out of the primordial forest.