第4章 THE NIGHT-BORN(4)

Trefethan emptied his glass and called for another.

"Boys, do you know what that girl did? She was twenty-two.She had spent her life over the dish-pan and she knew no more about the world than I do of the fourth dimension, or the fifth.All roads led to her desire.No; she didn't head for the dance-halls.On the Alaskan Pan-handle it is preferable to travel by water.She went down to the beach.An Indian canoe was starting for Dyea--you know the kind, carved out of a single tree, narrow and deep and sixty feet long.She gave them a couple of dollars and got on board.

"'Romance?' she told me.'It was Romance from the jump.There were three families altogether in that canoe, and that crowded there wasn't room to turn around, with dogs and Indian babies sprawling over everything, and everybody dipping a paddle and making that canoe go.' And all around the great solemn mountains, and tangled drifts of clouds and sunshine.And oh, the silence! the great wonderful silence! And, once, the smoke of a hunter's camp, away off in the distance, trailing among the trees.It was like a picnic, a grand picnic, and I could see my dreams coming true, and I was ready for something to happen 'most any time.And it did.

"'And that first camp, on the island! And the boys spearing fish in the mouth of the creek, and the big deer one of the bucks shot just around the point.And there were flowers everywhere, and in back from the beach the grass was thick and lush and neck-high.And some of the girls went through this with me, and we climbed the hillside behind and picked berries and roots that tasted sour and were good to eat.And we came upon a big bear in the berries making his supper, and he said "Oof!" and ran away as scared as we were.And then the camp, and the camp smoke, and the smell of fresh venison cooking.It was beautiful.I was with the night-born at last, and I knew that was where I belonged.And for the first time in my life, it seemed to me, I went to bed happy that night, looking out under a corner of the canvas at the stars cut off black by a big shoulder of mountain, and listening to the night-noises, and knowing that the same thing would go on next day and forever and ever, for I wasn't going back.And I never did go back.'

"'Romance! I got it next day.We had to cross a big arm of the ocean--twelve or fifteen miles, at least; and it came on to blow when we were in the middle.That night I was along on shore, with one wolf-dog, and I was the only one left alive.'

"Picture it yourself," Trefethan broke off to say."The canoe was wrecked and lost, and everybody pounded to death on the rocks except her.She went ashore hanging on to a dog's tail, escaping the rocks and washing up on a tiny beach, the only one in miles.

"'Lucky for me it was the mainland,' she said.'So I headed right away back, through the woods and over the mountains and straight on anywhere.Seemed I was looking for something and knew I'd find it.I wasn't afraid.I was night-born, and the big timber couldn't kill me.And on the second day I found it.

I came upon a small clearing and a tumbledown cabin.Nobody had been there for years and years.The roof had fallen in.Rotted blankets lay in the bunks, and pots and pans were on the stove.

But that was not the most curious thing.Outside, along the edge of the trees, you can't guess what I found.The skeletons of eight horses, each tied to a tree.They had starved to death, I reckon, and left only little piles of bones scattered some here and there.And each horse had had a load on its back.

There the loads lay, in among the bones--painted canvas sacks, and inside moosehide sacks, and inside the moosehide sacks--what do you think?'"She stopped, reached under a comer of the bed among the spruce boughs, and pulled out a leather sack.She untied the mouth and ran out into my hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever seen--coarse gold, placer gold, some large dust, but mostly nuggets, and it was so fresh and rough that it scarcely showed signs of water-wash.

"'You say you're a mining engineer,' she said, 'and you know this country.Can you name a pay-creek that has the color of that gold!'

"I couldn't! There wasn't a trace of silver.It was almost pure, and I told her so.

"'You bet,' she said.'I sell that for nineteen dollars an ounce.You can't get over seventeen for Eldorado gold, and Minook gold don't fetch quite eighteen.Well, that was what Ifound among the bones--eight horse-loads of it, one hundred and fifty pounds to the load.'

"'A quarter of a million dollars!' I cried out.

"'That's what I reckoned it roughly,' she answered.'Talk about Romance! And me a slaving the way I had all the years, when as soon as I ventured out, inside three days, this was what happened.And what became of the men that mined all that gold?

Often and often I wonder about it.They left their horses, loaded and tied, and just disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving neither hide nor hair behind them.I never heard tell of them.Nobody knows anything about them.Well, being the night-born, I reckon I was their rightful heir.'

Trefethan stopped to light a cigar.

"Do you know what that girl did? She cached the gold, saving out thirty pounds, which she carried back to the coast.Then she signaled a passing canoe, made her way to Pat Healy's trading post at Dyea, outfitted, and went over Chilcoot Pass.