CHAPTER XVA WAY OUT
THREE shivering, miserable mortals were we, as we stood there in our wet clothes contemplating the impassable rock which barred the way. Two badly scared mortals were Percy and I, as we turned instinctively to our leader for comfort.
“What’s to be done now, Jack?” asked the former, tucking his hands beneath his arms to warm them. “There’s no getting over this thing.”
Then did our captain come out strong. If ever I get into such a predicament again, give me a fellow like Jack for a leader. He knew better than we did the danger of the position in which his bad management—as he considered—had placed us; he was quite as much alarmed as we were at the plight in which we found ourselves; but, seeing that if he should giveway to his fears his two followers would instantly be plunged into the depths of despair, he assumed a cheerfulness he was far from feeling, and with an air of assurance which was most encouraging he answered Percy’s question as promptly and decisively as though, far from being taken by surprise, he had been thinking over the matter for a week beforehand. A very fine fellow was our captain; though he would be the first to laugh at me for saying so.
“This rock must be about thirty feet high,” said he, contemplating the obstruction in a calm, critical manner, as though it were some natural curiosity, “and, as you see, it fits down so closely there is no crawling under it. All we have to do, therefore, is to crawl over it.”
“That’s a good deal, though,” said Percy, brightening up a little, however, under the influence of Jack’s example. “How do you propose to do it? The rock leans over this way so much that we can’t possibly climb up it.”
“We’ll bring up a thirty-foot pole,” replied Jack, “lean it against the rock, and climb up that. Simple enough, eh? So, let us get back to camp at once. You two shall transfer our baggage to the cabin, because I think it quite probable that we shall have to stay here untilthe storm is over, and a roof will be a good thing in this snow, and while you are doing that I will go and cut the pole, which we will bring up at once, so that, even if we don’t get out to-day, we may have it ready when we want it.”
“But, Jack,” said Percy, “suppose we should not be able to bring the pole up here. What then? Shall we—shall we—?”
“Shall we have to stay here all winter?” I blurted out, unable any longer to keep down the momentous question we all of us had in our minds.
“Stay here all winter?” cried Jack—and he actually managed to scare up a laugh. “Not we! Why, Percy, where’s your American enterprise? Where’s your English bull-doggedness, Tom? Do you think we’ll give in at one failure? Not we, indeed! If we should be unable to get over this rock, why, then, we’ll just go up our ladder and walk home over the mountains. Give in! I should think not. We’re not babies; we’re men!”
That was a grand stroke of Jack’s: calling us men. I felt myself grow two inches immediately; and Percy, taking his hands from under his arms, and repressing his shivers as well as he could, straightened up and exclaimed:
“Go ahead, Jack! You lead; we’ll follow!”
“Come on, then!” cried our captain.
Back we went at once, up the waterway, through the pool, and down to the fort, where we picked up our blankets and carried them over to the cabin; after which Percy and I busied ourselves in transporting the rest of our baggage to the same haven, while Jack went off in search of a pole which should be at once sufficiently long and not too heavy.
The better part of an hour passed ere we were ready to set out again, by which time the snow had so increased in depth as to be up to our knees, making the task of carrying the heavy pole one of great labour. After innumerable pauses to rest and recover breath, and after a great deal of manœuvring to coax the awkward burden around the corners, we at length reached the pool. But there we encountered a new and unexpected obstacle. We were met in the face by a rush of wind, which was driving out of the mouth of the tunnel with force enough to make us stagger under our load. It had been perfectly calm down in the valley when we left it, and in the cleft in the rocks up which we had just come there was no air stirring, but judging from the blast which came out of the tunnel, weguessed that there must be a high wind sweeping over the hog-back above our heads.
“Stop!” cried Jack. “You fellows wait here, while I go through and see what it is like on the other side. From the look of things, I expect we have got to get back to the cabin at once.”
We “up-ended” the pole and leaned it against the rocks, so that it should not be buried in the snow, and then Jack, for the third time that day, waded into the pool. In a short time he came splashing back again, and reported, as we had expected, that there was a gale blowing on the other side of the valley-wall.
“It’s no use to think of going on at present,” said he; “the snow is drifting badly out there. We should only lose ourselves; and the result of that would probably be that we should freeze to death or die of exhaustion, tired as we are, and wet through as we have been all day. We must make our way down to the cabin again as fast as we can.”
We accordingly retraced our steps; and it was well we turned back when we did, or we might never have reached the little shanty at all. As we were about to enter, Jack stopped and held up his finger.
“Hark!” he cried. “Do you hear that booming noise? The wind in the pines. It will be down on us directly. Come in, and help me fasten the waggon-sheet over the doorway.”
Such a storm as that which burst upon us five minutes later I never saw before; and I shall be well content if I never see such another. The wind leaped upon us like a wild beast, and instantly the whole atmosphere seemed to go crazy. Our little, creaking cabin shook and trembled so that the mud “chinking” fell out upon the floor; several of the stones composing our chimney came tumbling into the fireplace; three or four times our door was dashed from its fastenings—when the room was filled with snow in an instant—and hard work we had to get it back again.
The fierceness of the wind, and the whirling, stifling, never-ceasing rush of the snow were enough to frighten the boldest. It was one of those storms which drive the range-cattle headlong before them for miles and miles, until the poor beasts give in, exhausted, and fall to the ground, never to get up again; one of those storms which, catching the solitary immigrant-waggon unprepared, pass on and leave it with itsoccupants—men, women, and children, perhaps—and the horses which pulled it, all stiff and dead together.
“This is a bad one, and no mistake,” said Jack, after one of our periodical struggles to replace our door. “It is fortunate for us that we have four stout walls and a roof to shelter us. If it was Squeaky who upset that rock into the passage up above, he did us a good turn in my opinion. If it had not been there to stop us, we should have been caught half-way down the mountain; and that, I expect, would have been the end of us. I don’t believe a man could live half an hour in this storm if he were exposed to its full force.”
All the rest of that day we sat still or walked restlessly up and down listening to the commotion outside, and all through the night we slept in fitful snatches, roused now and then when a blast of extra power burst in our door or sent crashing to the ground one of the trees on the slope close behind the cabin. It was an anxious night; nor did we get relief until midday next day, when the wind stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
Jack stepped to the doorway and removed the waggon-sheet.
The sky was clearing rapidly, the snow had ceased to fall. Except for a few drifts, the valley was swept clean, the mountain-tops were bare, and the branches of the trees, which before had bent under the weight of snow, had now shaken themselves free of their burden.
For a minute Jack stood in the doorway, silent, and frowning to himself, and then, “Come over and look at the pass,” said he, and set off across the valley.
The pass was gone—vanished! We could not tell even where it ought to be, so completely was it filled up, and such a maze of drifts of all shapes and sizes was there among the woods which bordered it. The entrance—supposing we had found the right place—was buried under fifty feet of snow.
I glanced at Jack, expecting to see him overwhelmed by this crowning misfortune. But not a bit of it. He merely nodded his head in the direction of the pass, and said: “No getting out that way seemingly. Let us go and look at the ladder.”
But that way, too, was barred. Nature seemed to have made a dead set at us. A freak of the wind had piled a great drift upon the top of the wall just above the ladder, where ithung like a combing wave, ready to fall at a touch to all appearance. Indeed, a large mass had already fallen, breaking the ladder in two.
Our case seemed to me to be pretty desperate, and from the concerned expression upon Percy’s face I guessed that he was of the same mind. But upon Jack this accumulation of difficulties, instead of casting him down, seemed to have the opposite effect; it aroused his fighting-spirit.
“Give in!” he cried, just as though someone had suggested it, and shaking his fist at the world in general. “Not if I know it! We’ll find, or force, a way out somewhere! You see,” he went on, addressing us, “some of these drifts are pretty sure to reach to the top of the wall somewhere, and as soon as the snow has settled a bit, and after the sun and frost have hardened the surface, we shall be able to get about, and then we’ll make an exploring expedition. All we can do at present is to go down to the cabin and make ourselves as comfortable as we can for a few days. It is no good trying to get out while the snow is soft, we should bury ourselves in the drifts.”
In spite of Jack’s heroic efforts to put a good face on the situation, I confess that I, at least, felt much inclined to despair of being able everto climb out of the old crater by means of the unstable drifts, while Percy, I have good reason to believe, felt much as I did about it.
How we should have scoffed at anyone who should have ventured to suggest that anything could possibly happen to make us forget, even for a moment, the pressing question of finding a way out of the valley! Yet such an event did actually occur; and no later than the next morning.
When I first described the Mushroom Rock I mentioned, it will be remembered, that the cap was split in two, and, that the pieces overhung the stalk in such a manner as to make it appear that a strong wind might blow them down. Appearances were deceitful, however, or the late storm would certainly have upset them. But where the blustering wind had failed, the sun and the frost, working in turns, succeeded. The crack dividing the cap was drifted full of snow, and this snow the sun next day reduced to a state of slush, the frost at night converting it in turn into ice. The lateral pressure thus brought to bear upon them by the ice was sufficient to move the pieces the quarter-inch or so necessary to destroy their balance, and when we looked out of the cabin door next morning,there were the two great rocks lying on their backs—one of them bridging the creek.
Percy and I walked over to look at them, and as we stood beside the fallen fragment which lay athwart the stream, our conversation—I forget why—turned upon the subject of the pot-holes and the gold button that Percy had found in one of them.
“That’s the hole,” said he, pitching a snowball into the water, “and I should like to know why that one should have had a nugget in it while the others had nothing but scales and grains.”
“What I should like to know,” said I, “is why we should find gold in the pot-holes and nowhere else. Is there a goose around here that goes about laying golden eggs and using these holes for nests? Perhaps she has been along again by this time and laid another in your pot-hole.”
“Highly probable,” replied Percy, ironically. “I’ll look.”
As he spoke he stepped over to the spot and looked down into the hole. To my great surprise he fell upon his knees, tucked up his sleeve, and plunged his hand into the water.
“Look here!” he exclaimed, holding out a yellow lump in his dripping fingers.
My imaginary goose had laid another egg; an egg three times as big as the last one too.
We were nonplussed this time. If the presence of gold in the pot-holes had been a puzzle to us before, what were we to think of the conjuring trick that Nature had played upon us now? Without a word—for, indeed, we had nothing to say—we hurried back to the cabin, outside which was Jack, busy chopping wood. To him Percy held out his hand just as he had done to me.
“Well, Percy,” cried the wood-chopper, straightening his back and stretching himself, “what have you found this time?”
“This,” replied Percy, briefly.
Jack dropped the axe and took the nugget.
“Where did it come from?” he asked, opening his eyes wide.
Percy told him.
“What!” he exclaimed. “You found it in the same pot-hole that we cleaned out a month ago? Well, that is the most astonishing thing I ever heard of. Where can it have come from?”
As he talked he kept turning the nugget over and over, examining it on every side, and presently, in a little crevice or fold, he espied a tinywhite streak. Taking out his pocket-knife he extracted a little of this white material and thoughtfully spread it upon the palm of his hand. It made a mark like white paint.
We two stood patiently waiting for him to offer some explanation of this mysterious “find,” when, with startling suddenness, he cast his knife upon the ground, slapped his leg, and burst into a great laugh; a laugh half of amusement and half of annoyance.
“Ho, ho, ho!” he went, stamping about and clutching his back hair as if he had been stung by a hornet. “Oh my, oh my, oh my! What a blundering dunderhead I must have been never to have guessed it before! Here, give me a hand with this pole, one of you,” picking up, as he spoke, the butt end of a dead pine-tree which formed part of our heap of fire-wood.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Percy, as he shouldered the little end.
“Show you that vein, I hope,” replied Jack. “Come on!”
Down we went to the stream, and there we reared the pole on end and leaned it against one piece of the prostrate cap, when Jack at once shinned up it and stepped upon the top of the rock. In half a minute he looked down,at us and said, in a rather excited tone of voice “Come up!”
Up went Percy, with me close behind him, and soon we were standing at our leader’s side.
“Look here!” said he.
About half the surface of the rock, originally its under side, was covered with a layer of reddish, clay-like material some two inches thick, across the middle of which ran a white streak about a span in width. Going down upon his knees, Jack pointed out to us little flakes and lumps of gold, showing in several places along the white streak.
“There is our gold-vein,” said he. “It has been lying under our noses, or, rather, above our heads, all this time. The gold we got out of the pot-holes with the help of the clay balls came out of the clay balls themselves. With our own stupid hands we put the gold into the pot-holes, and then ‘discovered’ it. Did ever such a thing happen before? And to think that I never suspected it! No wonder we couldn’t find the vein up in the mountain, when, just as likely as not, this rock rode on a glacier down from Alaska or Hudson’s Bay, or anywhere else you like, ages ago, when half this continent was covered with ice.”
“Then that nugget I found this morning,” said Percy, “tumbled into the water when the rock fell down.”
“Yes,” replied Jack. “And the water had not had time to wash it quite clean. It was the little scrap of clay left sticking to it that showed me where it came from.”
“I suppose this white streak probably runs across the other rocks as well,” said I.
“Probably. We’ll soon see.”
The three rocks lay close together, and being all about the same height there was no difficulty in stepping from one to the other. Each of them was traversed by the same white line, which, like the first one, showed scraps of gold in various places; one scrap, which I picked out with my knife, being as big as the top of my thumb.
At last, then, we had found that elusive gold-vein; a small one, indeed, but to all appearance a rich one; and having found it, we determined to make the most of it.
That day, and the next three days as well, we spent upon the top of the rock exposed to the full blast of the wintry wind—for the winter now seemed to have set in in earnest,—each with a sheath-knife cutting a trench alongthe line of the white streak, and carefully saving every scrap of the frozen clay thus laboriously collected. By the time the work was finished, we had accumulated some five hundred pounds of the precious stuff, which we carried to the cabin and there proceeded to wash, a double handful at a time, in the gold-pan; a slow and tedious undertaking.
Our reason for doing this work in the house was that the little creek had ceased to flow, being now frozen solid, and we were obliged in consequence to resort to melted snow for washing and drinking purposes. The iron pot was kept continuously upon the fire, and one of us was constantly engaged in bringing in shovels full of snow with which to feed it, in order to supply Jack’s insatiable demands for more water.
In the corner of the house we dug a hole two feet deep to serve as a sink, and in this corner sat Jack, hour after hour, with his feet planted on either side of the hole, washing “dirt” in the pan, pouring away the muddy water into the sink, and saving the precious residue of gold and black sand.
By the time all of the original five hundred pounds of clay had been washed, we foundourselves in possession of about a tenth of that amount of black sand, which was then all washed over again with the greatest care. At last Jack declared that he was afraid to wash it any more, for fear of losing some of the fine particles of gold; so our labour was concluded when the mass had been reduced to about thirty pounds’ weight, of which two-thirds, perhaps, was gold.
Percy and I were anxious to know what was the value of the little heap; but to make the calculation was beyond our power, for we had not the least idea of how many Troy ounces there might be in a pound Avoirdupois; and gold, of course, is sold by Troy weight.
Jack said he thought he could calculate it, and with a burnt stick he forthwith proceeded to work out the sum upon the waggon-sheet.
“In the first place,” said he, “there are twenty-nine thousand one hundred and sixty-six Troy ounces in a ton of two thousand pounds Avoirdupois.”
“How do you know?” asked Percy, promptly.
“Learnt it in a book on assaying,” replied Jack, with equal promptness.
“All right,” said Percy, “peg away, then.”
“We are supposing that we have twenty pounds of gold here,” Jack went on. “Twenty pounds is one-hundredth part of a ton. H-m—h-m! Two hundred and ninety-one ounces and a fraction Troy—say, two hundred and ninety. Multiply that by eighteen. Gold is reckoned at eighteen dollars an ounce up here in Montana, you know. There!” as he drew with his burnt stick a line beneath the total.
“Oh, get out!” exclaimed Percy, when he saw the figure. “You don’t mean to say that this little heap is worth five thousand two hundred and twenty dollars!”
“Something of the sort,” replied Jack. “Of course there is a great deal of guess-work about it, but I expect that my calculation is not far out. I shouldn’t wonder if this heap, and the gold we got out of the pot-holes, were to mount up to six thousand dollars, or even more.”
It was hard to believe that so small a heap could be worth so much; but Jack seemed to be pretty confident, and so we took his word for it, hoping he might turn out to be right.
That our treasure might be packed in handy form for travelling we applied our time that evening to making little bags of canvas cut from the waggon-sheet, and these having beenpacked tight and sewn up, they were put into other bags made of buckskin, having thongs of the same material attached with which to tie them to our belts.
“There,” said Jack, as he restored the needles and thread to the case, and the case itself to his pocket, “now we are ready to get out as soon as we can. We’ll try the drifts to-morrow. Those near the north end look most promising. We’ll try them first.”
But, as it happened, we had no occasion to try the drifts after all. Before we set out next morning, Percy suggested that it might be worth while to look into the cleft in the valley-wall through which the stream ran out.
“For,” said he, “if this creek here is frozen so solid, it may be that we can walk on the ice down the cañon, and if we can, that will be much the easiest way to travel, because then we can follow along the stream—which is sure to bring us out somewhere—instead of climbing over the mountains.”
“We’ll have a look,” said Jack. “But I doubt if we shall find it frozen; the water runs at such a tremendous pace.”
Jack was right. The water was not frozen; it was just as wild as ever. But we could walkover the top of it nevertheless. For at the very entrance of the cañon, the stream vanished into a tunnel of snow. The great storm had drifted the gorge half full. Resting upon the boulders which cumbered its bed lay a heavy mass of tightly-packed snow, roofing the stream from one end of the cañon to the other.
We might walk out of the valley whenever we chose!