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Having in my time wandered over no small part ot the globe, and being now laid up in ordinary, it is my chief delight to toss over the sere and yellow leaves of my memory by the help of travelled visitoi-s. Such wayfarers are the most honoured and welcome guests of my old oak-panelled smoking-room, on whose walls hang many an antlei*ed trophy of the chase ; and many a weapon, from my own well-used Eng- lish guns to the " curst Malayan kreese " from Pcrak and Salangore, serves, if not to point a moral, at all events to invite or suggest many a tale. My old friend Captain P w\as here at the end of last year for a week's visit and the reversion, in the matter of plieasants, of ray more modern friends' leavings. Those young gentlemen are not satisfied with any- thing- less tlian twentv lirace a day to each gun, but we old stagers are not such epicures, — we who know what it is to shoot for our suppers, and to go hungry then. P 's best stories, I think, hail from the West ; though there are few of the parochial divisions of" this planet that would not furnish him witli a text. But he handles the West as if he loved it, as Izaak Walton bade us handle the frog. Ho is at home anywhere there : on the Prairies, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Panama. He had been, many years ago, a Government officer, magistrate, gold-escort captain or the like, in British Columbia. On the evening which I will take as an epoch to start Avith, our party con- sisted of a certain Chancery barrister, who shot well, drank fair, and had the sometimes provoking gift of summing up the merits of one of our tales of outland with a judicial neatness often not to be anticipated from their wild ingredients : the parson of the parish, who might sometimes, I fancy, have preferred whist, short or even long, to our everlasting travellers' tales : P and myself. Wo had been conversing on the subject of flies. Our remarks had been severe on those works of Nature, and devoid of any shade of Brah- minical charity. Their splendid im- pudence had been dealt with, and the barrister had even cited Mr. Ruskin ag.ainst them. The rector had re- minded us of the etymology of the title, "Beelzebub." I, for my part, though certainly against the graiu, had assumed the brief of devil's advo- cate, and pleaded that some doctors (names vinknown) had held that mos- quito bites (in quantity unknown) will act (^in circumstances not precisely stated) as a prophylactic against fever. " Although," said P , after moili- tatively filling up his long tumbler funl cramming a fresh charge of kanaster into his vast meerschaum, " althor.::)] flies once did help me to a little fortiuip (it was over seven thousand dollars) yet they must not call me as a witness to character. I'm dead against thorn: * La mart scuis phrase ' is my verdict.'' We waited, for indeed he was the) last speaker on the subject, and we were quartering the ground to llusli a story, or some subject to shoot ii story at. "Tlie best fellow, the very best ontl and away, of my acquaintance iu tliq French army — and in the CJriiueauj days and before that I knew many-l was Hector Cardec, a squadron-leaderl of ]\[acmahon's out there in the iiuidi in Algeria — as good a soldier amll comrade as ever slapped a sword liorael in scabbard. He was mighty (luiokl at pulling it out, too, by the saiuel token." We thought a story was to the fnifj An. Adventure in Carlloo. 183 , have 3ng, to P on the ks hat^ Nature, ■ Bvah- itUfl im- and the Buskin liad re- ■ of the ny payt, le grain, 'il's advo- e doctors that mos- LO^vn) will precisely c againrt after naedi- niibler ninl [ kanastov ' althou;;h btle f ortniip id dollars), s a witness vinst them ; verdict.'' ^e was tliel ct, and ^vel nd to llusbl to sboot a I 3ry best out lance in tk he Criwea" iew niany- idron-leiuler now, but none of us could think how the Hies were to come in. " Well," resumed he after some solemn puffs of liis calumet, "well, he died— of the bite of u bluebottle lly on the sands of i)Oulon:ie ! A queer fate for such a lire-eater ! Poor Hector! his bold soul must hiive made viie air shake over those meadows of asphodel yonder, wlien he icniiscd it, and com- mented tliei'e on it in his free fashion ! " And P — • — , in the character of Hector's rates f<(tccr, liere blow out so vast and indignant a volume of smoke that it seemed to pei'son and "i that hero's shade in in tlie very act of the utterances suggested. All this was very moving, but we clearly liad not yet Ihished the story ; and the barrister found voice for us by saying drily, ''Let us have the case for tlie Hies, such as it is — the seven thousand dollars," "We'., ' said P , "in the year 1S60, or thereabouts, I was taking the pay of our Sovereign Lady, and giving no small sliare of very hard work for it, in iier INlajesty's colony of IJritish Cohnubia. I was a justice of the peace, i\nd had somewhat indistinct and mul- tifarious duties connected with the maintenance of order generally, and of ilk' gold-escort in ])articular. In the lull of that year 1 was in the northern, luid in tliose days extreme, limits of the colony — at the Forks of Quesnelle, to speak by the the card — as an early winter began to whispei' hoarsely and frostily to the various mining-camps that it was time to be pulling up lliuue- boxes, and for prudent folk to be turn- ing their faces south. Meu who had done well began to think of the ameni- ties of the saloons and billiard-halls of Victoria ; if very well, they dreamed of even 'Frisco as a place of hybernation ; while men who had b(!en avoided l)y the in the iwnlB^^'^k wings of Fortune were fain to I „oldier ;\wiBl'^l"uce the prospect of taking the down sword lionieBroad only to re-measure its weary miles (luiokBiifter a long winter, against that of the saineBliibernating in the society of icicles and ntree-martius. to tho f"i'^ " ^^ ^^^^ money tlien to insure the lighty safe transport of ' dust ' from the mines to the lower country. Tlie smart red jackets of the gold-escort had to be paid for as smartly; nor, if the truth must be UM, was the security so pro- vided altogether equal to that of a Chubb's safe in a hank-cellar. The e>:Cort boys wore only men of mould. They could till a pit like other men ; and though there was never a serious attack in my time, we had plenty of alarms to sea.-.on our excursions with, and one abortive andjuscade. Many owners of 'dust' wouldn't trust it to the escort, and some didn't like the toll ; and so it came to pass that many a little dew trader, of furtive proclivities and frugal mind, would sneak down the forest-trails carrying his wealth himself, and make his way (ay, marry, and sometimes fail to make it !) in a hunted sort of fashion to the lower country. And many a stout CalifornLm with buckskin belt well Idled, or heavy saddle-bags, jwe- ferred his own insurance to that of 'the petticoat government' it was often his luigallant humour to rail against. Between these two sorts of wayfarer, the one lleeing like a part- I'idgeon the mountains, and the others in jovial Chaucerian sort of cavalcade, banded together for safety and good company, swaggering and rutlling through the jabueval woods, there were many grades of travellers. These fellows, however, stick to one's memory — gay with the glow of anticipated pleasures, pleasures to be all the sweeter by long and forced abstinence from them, comfortable iind secure with a fortunate season behind them, with the bravery of In'ight revolver- butts and scarlet shirts, in hard training from successfully ' bucking at the tiger ' of Nature in her most primitive form like men who had ])een warring with mammoth and mastodon and had come oif winners — these boys made bright pictures enough. If there was no soldierly clash of stirrup and scabbard, no jingle of consecrated romance, no feather and ilourish of war, vet the tin driuking-cup clinked 184 An Adventure in Cariboo. gallantly against frying pan oi- kettle as they rode, and these paladins of pelf wei'e, to do them bare justice, as full of tight as any soldiers who ever wore their country's colour. "Part of the way I happened (having a duty just then to be per- formed in a (juiot, uon-otficial way) to join such a pai ty as I have described going from the Forks of Quesnel!e down to Williams's Lake. These two points are some hundred and fifty miles apart, and thirty miles a day in the woods was very good travelling. Slow it was, but not monotonous. If there were a monotone, it was of the dark and sombre twilight of the con- stant ceiling of pines through which the sun and upper air reached us arrow-wise. Below, there was a variety of travel : here a wet bottom of mud, deep enough and thick enough to pull an animal's shoe off : there a big fallen tree aci'oss the trail, to be nego- tiated with cattle which could (ly as soon as jump ; and these would be relieved by a red-wood tract of cedars, with a slippery carpet of needles so clean, so sweet, and in all weathers so dry, that it used to seem a shame not to off saddle and camp then and there instead of leaving it. At times the road would climb over a hogsback, or divide, and the travellers would toil and struggle up hill, to emei'ge in time upon some bare scalp of mountain — granite, syenite, or mutainorphic rock — where tlio berberry or kinni-kinnick enamelled the white quartz with its scarlet berry and glossy leaf, or where the sole vegetation the snow-water had to trickle through was composed of peat and patches of moss-hag. There was no game, nothing to shoot at here ; unless, which Saint Hubert forbid ! foul murder were done upon the chipmunks, a friendly gracious little race of striped squirrels, who frisk and flirt, and play at hide-and- seek with the human traveller along the wayside trees, or upon the whisky- jacks, portentously tame birds in Prussian C(jlours of white and black, in size between a magpie and a wajj- t lil, who enjoy all the immunities of our robin, and will pes'ch on a man's knee while he is eating his dinner. No : there is nothing for the sports- man on these trails. What game there is listens to the freeborn accents of the white man, and shrinks deeper within the forest shades, and no traveller has leisure to seek it there. " Well, we got down in time to Williams's Lake, a broad va,lley with two ranches or farms, about a mile apart, where onions, at fifty cents apiece, and milk (those two anti - sccu'butic longings of tlie man of pork-and-beans) were to be obtaiuv d— a foretaste of the luxuries of the lower country. The houses were both well filled with guests, for other mining-districts were swelling the downward stream of travel. 1 will spare you a description of the manners and humours of these caravanserais, and go on to say that, having secured a tolerably pro- mising corner for my 1)lankets, I had rolled my.self up in them, with my saddle for a pillow, and was well in the first dreamless sleep of the tired man, when — it was only about ten o'clock — a galloping horse sud- denly pulled up outside, and loud cries — ' Oh, Williams ! you've got the judge there! We want the judge!' — waked me up. In that country it doesn't take much to open the weariest man's eyes, nor, on the other hand, is undue excitement fashionable among Anglo-Saxons; so, while the slight discrepancy between night -.nd day dress was being rapidly adjusted, the whole story was told in a few curt sentences to this effect. " At the other house a little ditli- culty had occui'red — a shooting scrape. The victim was not dead yet, but as the manner of it — a felon shot from behind — had alienated the sympathies of the boys, it had resulted in the offender being 'corralled ' and detained, and the judge, who was reported to be at the other ranche, being sent for. "The interior of the other house, which was soon reached, to eves fresh An Adventure in Cariboo. 185 luities of a inan'.s ; dinner. e sport s- me there •cents of s deeper and ni) b there, time to Hey with ibout a at tifty lose two of the were to of the ,ry. Tlie lied with I'icts were tveaiu of [escription inours of on to say irahly pro- ankets, I liem, with \ was well ?p of the jnly about lorse sud- and loud e got the le judge !' country it 18 weariest V hand, is ble among the slight .nd day justed, the I few curt little ditli- iug sci'ape. et, but as shot from ym pat hies ed in the d detained, eported to g sent for. her house, eves fresh into rooms and cavernous gloo? ; from the cool dark night presented a picture that I well remember. The large log-building was not divided p.assages, and the and abj'sses of its nocturnal condition made it seem vaster than it was. The chief light came from the fire of i)ine logs stacked endwise up the chimney ; and it flashed red upon a strange and numerous company. " There was, as a matter of course in the.se womanless lands, an ellicient and beautiful manliness in the atmo- sphere. Death ! What is death to dwindle, peak, and pine about? Still as little a thing to be frivolous, or cynical, or to bluster about. A fact of what we call life, like any other fact, but with tlie gravity of finality about it : one of the more em- j)hatic facts, and to be reckoned with as such, but no more. Such was the feeling that animated these men. Few of them, probably, had read ■' Hamlet," but his thought was their thought — ' If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now ; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.' And if the hard life at close with grips Nature brings about the same results as divine philosophy, who would not rather hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak ] " Before the fire, not unskilfully propped up, was the victim — a poor, weak, vicious-looking creatui'e. He had been shot througli the lungs, and was bleeding fast to death internallv. The murderer sat a little Avay ofi: with his back to the wall, fenced in by Ji long table. Opposite him sat two silent guards, one with his cocked revolver in his hand, the other with a similar weapon on the talde before him. Like the other's, his was no true miner's face. He looked a villain of the town, like the understrapper of a gambling hell ; not a villain of the open air at all. The crowd, who had been withheld from their sleep Ity this red business, welcomed my entrance with a grave silence. " ' Good evening, gentlemen, where is the owner of this house ] ' " He stepped forward and quietly said that the two men hid arrived together from the northern road on the evening before, and had rested at his house the wliole day ; tliat about nine that evening he observed them come in from outside together ; that they had a drink of whisky at his bar, and he now remembered that they seemed sulkily disposed to each other. They must have gone out again, for half-au- hour later he heard a pistol shot close outside, and, the door opening, the wounded man staggered in, and fell on the floor, bleeding freely at the mouth. It was found on examination that the siiot had entered the back and come out at the breast. The poor wretch was unable to say more than, ' Let— the — old — man — take — care! ' " To my re;iu(>st for furtlier evidence, a respectable-looking man, Joe Davis of Antler, de])oscd that lie was coming in from doing up his mule in the barn when he saw in the dusk two figures near the house door : he heard words of a])parent dispute, then the report and ilash of a pistol shot: then a man ran almost into his arms, whom he seized and disarmed of a dragoon re- volver (produced). The man sat there (pointing to the prisoner). '• I then approached the victim, for whom there was obviously no aid in surgery, and, having improved the position in which he lay a little, could get nothing from him but a faint answer, by sign and look, to the effect that the prisoner was the man who had shot him. " I then asked the prisoner, * What is your name 1 ' " ' James Connor.' "'Whereof?' " ' Shirt-tail Canon, Cariboo.' " ' Did you shoot this man 1 ' " ' That's for you to find out, if it's your business.' " ' Do you know his name 1 ' " Silence. ' James Connor, you are my prisoner in the Queen's name, on the charge of attempting to murder a -■^'S«t?rt",*"J" 186 An Adrenture in Cariboo. man here present, name unknown. You will be gool enon moment to bribe tch, then Vniericau • bags of I value, t T would hat never lot cease, he fourth ,'e 1 Avas firm grip -(whether •as liglit- curioujsly n our from ir old N., ■strict we y strange !onstal)les 'n. They )e within isk — who the law's They lore trails learned slejit for a break, oint when Hies into ry episode :)od result was now ■ut about a cheer- r that lie »u sight,' the West id is con- Lg it as a legitimate warrant for any extreme of anticipatory reprisal and defence ; but I never expected to see Connor again, and I blew his message out of the range of practical polities. " On my way down, some fifty miles from Williams's Lake, I encountered at a wayside house a face that was fami- liar, and presently remembered it as belonging to an elderly and feeblo- looking miner, who, in the first day or two of my acting as constable, had hovered about me in a diffident waj', as if desirous of speaking, and yet dis- appeared without any actual parley having taken place. The strange thing was, however, that he was now in the very teeth of winter, going up country ! He appeared still very shy, and Ave barely exchanged half a dozen woid'~ with each other till about eleven the next morning, to which hour I had waited to let the ice melt off the roads. We were sitting together in a sort of rude verandah that gathered the beams of the morning sun ; I looking over some notes, and ho dozing in the corner of the settle. I noticed with some compassion the deoj^ lines of his face, and idly woridered what strange matters might be read be- tween them, had any one the key to the cipher. The flies, the meanest sort of all, the common house-flies, were troublesome, and perhaps investi- gating also the strange matters writ in the poor deep wrinkles. He twitched and moaned pathetically ; and I, with the end of my long glove, assumed the humble negro function of frightening away the blue-tail flies to give him a little more of the sweet rest of unconsciousness. " Soon I was aware, though he never moved, that his weary gaze was fastened upon my proceedings. After a few seconds he spoke slowly : — ' Jedge, I take it mortal kind of you to lay out on me for that there stint : don't laff, but it seems to kinder mind me of my mother forty years ago. There's a pesky sight of flies in this here world. I mostly skeer 'em off myself — when they don't — bide I ' "There was an indescribable pathos in the old man's nasal draw4. He spoke as one who had got his death wound in his hoai't, as he went on : " ' I reckon you remember me in the crowd yonder, when you corralled that critter, Connor? J' had reasons to be grateful to you, jedge, and with my poor sister's son, I)ave Ci'ow (that was him as was shot by Connor), with him — God's mercy on him even !— out of my path, and Connor chained up in your iJritish calaboof^e, or, niiiy bo, hanged for good and for .all, I gues.sed the last of my troubles was over. I was wrong though. I was half in the mind to let on up yonder and tell what I had to do witli it nil ; but it seemer to kinder fix itself so's I'd better not — and I let out for the down trail, wall, not lighter — there ain't much lightness left me, I reckon, naow —but feelingi'd betternot meddle with the way things was fixed up for me. This yer was my second season in a creek, 'way over between Antler and Yaller Jacket. Last year 1 made a little under ten thousnnd dolhirs in coarse gold, much of it fossicked out in Australian fashion. I was too sad a man to be much I'aised by that or any- thing in this world ; but I cach'd half of it under the floor of my cabin, and tuk the rest down last winter. I wrote to America to Dave, a bad boy, but all of my blood then above the grass roots — nothin' left naow — nothin' ! I told Dave to come on and be a son to me. He came — sure he came. I wonder he spai-ed the money for that naow. We come up together last spring, and the luck held—both ways, jedge, the luck held. The gold panned out well, and Dave's ill-luck, in the shape of James Connor, rejoined him up here. I guess it was a sorry record bound them two boys in sech a tight cahoot together ; but T needn't reckon that over to you naow, if so be I knowed it all. I haven't been so much alone — I've not marched the most of my days to the sorrerful tune I hev — not to be able to read 188 An Adventure in Carihoo. men's hearts, you kin lay your bottom (lolliiv on tliat, jedge. Them men meant Dainhr ! — they meant it for weeks, and meant it for montlis. Seems to iiie now I've rakod some in, that money ain't so very much in this world as they make of it ; yet to a man who's bin powei'ful poor for sixty yeai', it liirures larijo when it seems like he'd lose it, and then — the nat'ral oonti-ayriness of human natur'! 1 worked and watched afrin them two wolves enough to eat a man's heart out. We shaied np evens three weeks agone, and let out together for Victory. You know what happened at "Williams's Lake, and you kin ])ut a meanin' to it now. Two days a^o I heard ( 'onnor was broke loose. He don't know whore the dust is buried, but he reckons putty straight that some is buried, and may I ' here the old man, to my aston- ishment, exjjloded a ti'ain of some six of the most terribly ingenious oaths I ever heard in Ih-itish (Jolumbia— ' if he does find it, and does keep it on this side of hell ! ' " We had some conversation about the hardships and dangers of the w' *-' L.f which he made light; and tL 'ter some simple allusion to my teuuc. sym2)athies with him as evinced by my keeping the Hies off him just before, he begged me with great ur- gency to see him again at a camping- place in Cariboo, which I should pass through in some eight or ten days on my last journey up. He said it was important, and promised to explain why when we should meet ; and so we parted for that time. " You will be pleased to suppoiie that these ten days have elapsed, and that I am back in the snow and sitting in a rude, df erted wayside cabin, with the old man again for companion. My horse has been coaxed within the cabin, too ; and the deep silence of the snow world lies on us as if we were the last survivors of an era. " * I told you, jedge, I wanted you to take some kinder statutory declaration, and to make some sorter inventory as would make an old man pass in liis chocks with some sorter peace of miml. I told you there was a bit of Cinnabai' prospectin' as nol)ody but me did know, or was like to know. 1 told you, jedge, that this was i\\\ last favour I reckoned to ask of livin' man, and now 1 beg and implor<' yon this very niglit to come. I know the trail as well as the riffles in my own Hume. Five miles, five hours, and a road (tlu! way I'll take you) lit for the Governor's lady.' " The weird fascination of the nian',s appeal borrowed nothing from his words, or even his manner in tlie ordinary sense ; but there was a mag netism in it that reminded me of old German l)allads, and that, at any rate gained his point. "That night's march over those mighty metamorphic i-ocks, througl that gigantic volcanic ruin now fiozc so stiff and cold, though I shall neve forget it, would reqiiire a Dante t^ sing and a Dorc to depict its awfu beauties. At last we reached tli claim. Tlie snow had clothed tin torn and riven banks and heapi of boulders, the ordinary ravages of] mining, with its smooth and pure outline ; and the cabin door, deftly and .speedily opened by the owner's familiar hand, let us into its neat and orderly precincts. Materials for light and lire were ready prepared for use, though we had antedated the matter by a whole winter, and having used them we sallied forth again to stable my horse in a somewhat distant shelter. On our return some coffee and crackers (biscuits, that is) lent a sense of fragrance and festivity to the little shanty ; but I was shocked to observe the weakness of the old man when be was thawed from the cold. He waived aside, however, all notice of this, and showed me how to supplement the scanty comforts of the lowest of three bunks with a nondescript collection of coverings, old sacks, and even planks and dry branches, till my future bed looked like a wood-pile into which I was to creep feet foremost. ^:?^4I^^