The water ran so black and cold! It was gruesome to remember that but a minute before a man, a strong man, in the flush of life, had stood there, and then deliberately chosen it as his resting place! The stars shone as they had in that minute before, and the river's surface was as white, and off on the bank the lights of the cabins glowed, and the fire of the cabin that he had fitted for his bride burned higher and higher, as if it were a funeral pyre.
“He's gone, all right!” some one said, and we turned back toward the camp.
I tramped homeward after the moon had come up, thinking of the whole sordid tragedy. It did seem as if coincidence, or something else, had been at work. I could not share the superstition of the red gold. It was beyond reason that it should have played any part in this melodrama of the wilderness. And yet there it was!
Every one, so far as I knew, who had ever had anything to do with it had paid a price. Bill Wilton his reason, Pitkok his life, Sam Barstow, first his honesty and then his life; and the lure of it had led Marie Devinne, the silly little dance-hall girl, to marry him. Perhaps the moccasins had led Spider Riggs to her side, and her undoing. And Sam Barstow had driven them out to a lingering death, with the moccasins in their hands, then brooded over it, and been his own executioner.
I laughed at myself for fancying that the gold was the cause of it all as I went wearily up the trail, to be met by the dogs, to stumble into our cabin, and awaken Dan to tell him of the tragedy. I was ashamed of myself when I put the question to him, as he sat there in his bunk smoking and listening:
“Do you suppose there is anything in that story of the gold being cursed?”
“Cursed, nothing!” he rumbled. “I only wish I had some of it, and knew where it was. I'd take the curse off it. That's a squaw's yarn, and nothin' more.”
I pulled off my damp moccasins, and opened the ventilator in the roof. I was sick of the whole sordid sorrow, and of the camp itself. I was also jealous and discouraged, because Kentucky Smith, buoyant and lovable, appeared to have the lead in the good graces of the only girl I had ever loved. Yes, I admitted it! She was all there was in life to me, and I hungered for her, and wanted her more than I wanted anything, even life itself.
My last words, as I crawled into my bed, and pulled the fur robe up around my ears, were: “I shan't go to that camp again for a week.”
I fancied that I heard a soft chuckle from the bunk above mine.
“Well, I mean it!” I asserted angrily. But I was mistaken in my forecast, although not in my resolution.
It was the very next afternoon that I heard a cheerful voice from the trail that wound past our ever-growing and ever-worthless dump. It was that of Kentucky.
“Hey, Tom,” he shouted, “the mail's in. Windy Jim brought it down from Dawson. Come, go down with me?”
In that glorious excitement I forgot that I had said I should not return to Neucloviat for a whole seven days. The arrival of the first mail in six months was too much of a temptation. It meant letters from home, news from the vast outside world from which we were shut off by thousands of miles of forest and mountain, of ice-clad rivers and snow-bound plains.
Dan came up the windlass rope hand over hand, and shouted: “What's that? Did I hear the word 'Mail'?”
“You did,” was Kentucky's answer. “Some of the boys told me it came in this morning.”
“Then here goes,” Dan jubilated. “Up to the cabin for ours, to get on some dry moccasins and a fresh parka. come on up, Kentuck, and we'll all go down together.”
Before he had finished speaking, he was running up the path leading to the cabin on the shoulder of the hill, and we followed after. No one can appreciate the eagerness with which mail is greeted unless he has lived as we lived in those far-off days. The earth now has but few places where one could find such isolation. No one who has not so lived can understand that Presidential campaigns might be fought and new Presidents elected, installed, and in power, without the citizens knowing that he existed; that kings or queens might die and their successors step in to become public among the world's figureheads, without intelligent men being aware of their elevation; that earthquakes might destroy cities, and wars be waged and fought to the bitter end without patriots hearing, even vicariously, the thunder of the guns.