Overton recognized the pleading quality of the glance, and was filled with amazement by it. Witchery seemed to have touched the stranger when paralysis touched him, else he would not so quickly have changed from his suspicion of the girl into that mute pleading for her.
She was trying so hard to keep back the tears, and in the effort her jaws were set and her brows drawn together stormily. She looked to him as she had looked in the lodge of Akkomi.
“You don’t trust me,” she said at last; “that’s why you won’t help us. But you ought to, for I’ve never lied to you. If it’s because I’m in it that you won’t have anything to do with the mine, I’ll leave. I won’t bother you about that school. I won’t bother you about anything. I’ll help locate the place if – if Joe here is willing; and then you two can be partners, and I’ll be out of it, for I can trust you to take care of him, and see that the money does what it can for him. I can trust you if you can’t me. So you are the one to speak up. What is your answer?”
CHAPTER XII.
PARTNERS
“Well, I’ve been a ’hoodoo’ all my, life; and if I only lead some one into luck now – good luck – oh, wouldn’t I learn a sun-dance, and dance it!”
The world was two weeks older, and it was ’Tana who spoke; not the troubled ’Tana who had crouched beside the paralytic and cowered under her fear of Overton’s distrust, but a girl grown lighter-hearted by the help of work to be done – work in which she was for once to stand side by side with Overton himself, for his decision about the prospecting had been in her favor. He had “spoken up,” as she had asked him to do, and a curious three-cornered partnership had been arranged the next day; a very mysterious partnership, of which no word was told to any one. Only ’Tana suddenly decided that the schooling must wait a little longer. Lyster would have to make the trip to Helena without her; she was not feeling like it just then, and so forth.
Therefore, despite the very earnest arguments of Mr. Lyster, he did have to go alone. During all the journey, he was conscious of a quite unreasonable disappointment, an impatience with even Overton, for not enforcing his authority as guardian, and insisting that she at once commence the many studies in which she was sadly deficient.
But Overton had stood back and said nothing. Lyster did not understand it, and could not succeed in making either of them communicative.
“You’ll be back here in less than a month,” said Overton. “We will send her then, if she feels equal to it. In the meantime, we’ll take the best care we can of her here at the Ferry. I find I will have time to look after her a little until then. I have only one short trip to make up the river; so don’t get uneasy about her. She’ll be ready to go next run you make, sure.”
So Lyster wondered, dissatisfied, and went away. He was even a little more dissatisfied with his last memory of the girl – a vision of her bending over that unknown, helpless miner. His sympathies were with the man. He was most willing to assist, in a financial way, toward taking care of one so unfortunate. But the thing he was not willing to do was to see ’Tana devote herself without restraint to the welfare of a stranger – a man they knew nothing of – a fellow who, of course, could have no appreciation of the great luck he was in to have her constantly beside him. It was a clean waste of exceptionable sympathy; and a squaw, or some miner out of work, would do as well in this case.
He even offered to pay for a squaw, or for any masculine nurse; but the girl had very promptly suggested that he busy himself with his own duties, if he had any. She stated further that he had no control whatever over her actions, and she could not understand —
“I know I have none,” he retorted, with some impatience, and yet a good deal of fondness in his handsome eyes. “That is why I’m complaining. I wish I had. And if I had, wouldn’t I whisk you away from this uncouth life! I wonder if you will ever let me do so, Tana?”
“I think you’d better be packing your plunder,” she remarked, coolly. “If you don’t, you’ll keep the whole outfit waiting.”
And that was how they let even Lyster go away. Not a hint was he given of the all-engrossing plan that bound both ’Tana and Overton to the interests of the passive stranger, who looked at them with intelligence, but who could not speak.
Their partnership was a curious affair, and the arrangement for interests in it was conducted on the one side by nods or shakes of the head, while the other two offered suggestions, and asked questions, until a very clear understanding was arrived at.
Only one knotty discussion had arisen. Overton offered to give one month of time to the search, on condition that one half of the find, if there was any made, should belong to ’Tana, while the original finder should have the other half. He himself would give that much time to helping them out in a friendly way; but more than that he could not give, because of other duties.
To this the man Harris shook his head with all possible vigor, while ’Tana was quite as emphatic in an audible way. Harris desired that all shares be equal, and Overton count himself in for a third. ’Tana approved the plan, insisting that she would not accept an ounce of the dust if he did not. So Dan finally agreed and ended the discussion concerning the division of the gold they might never find.
“And don’t be so dead sure that the dirt will pan out well, even if we do find the place,” he said, warningly, to ’Tana. “Why, my girl, if the average of dust had been as high as my average of hope over strikes I’ve made myself, I would have been a billionaire long ago.”
“I never heard you talk of prospecting,” remarked ’Tana. “All the rest do here, and not you – how is that?”
“Oh, prospecting strikes one like a fever; sometimes a man recovers from it, or seems to for a while. I had the fever bad about two years ago – out in Nevada. Well, I left there. I sunk my stock of capital in a very big hole, and lost my enthusiasm for a while. Maybe I will find it again, drifting along the Kootenai; but as yet it has not struck me hard. From what I can gather, this fellow must simply have dropped on a nugget or little pocket, and something must have made him distrust his partner to such an extent that he kept the secret find to himself. So there evidently has been no testing of the soil, no move toward development. We may never find an ounce of metal, for such disappointments have been even where very large nuggets have been found. You must not expect too much of this search. Golden hope lets you down hard when you do fall with it.”
But, despite his warnings, he made arrangements for their river journey with all speed possible. The three of them were to go; and, as chaperon, Mrs. Huzzard was persuaded to join their queer “picnic” party, for that was the idea given abroad concerning their little trip to the north. It was to be a venture in the interests of Harris – supposedly the physical interests; though Captain Leek did remark, with decided emphasis, that it was the first time he ever knew of a man being sent out to live in the woods as a cure for paralysis.
But the preparations were made; even the fact that Mrs. Huzzard was seized with an unreasonable attack of rheumatism on the eve of departure did not deter them at all.
“Unless you need me to stay here and look after you, we’ll go just the same,” decided ’Tana. “A squaw won’t be much of a substitute for you; but she’ll be better than no one, and we’ll go.”
So the squaw was secured, through the agency of her husband, whom Overton knew, and who was to take their camp outfit up the river for them. This was one reason why Mrs. Huzzard, as she watched them depart, was a little thankful for the visitation of rheumatism.
Their camp was only a day old when ’Tana announced her willingness to dance if only good fortune would come to her.
It seemed a thing probable, for as Overton poured water slowly from a tin pan into the shallow little stream, there were left in the bottom of the pan, as the last sifting bit of soil was washed out, some tiny bits of yellow the size of a pin-head, and one as large as a grain of wheat.
’Tana gave a little ecstatic cry as she bent over it and touched the particles with her finger.
“Oh, Dan – it is the gold! – the real gold! and we are millionaires! – millionaires, and you would not believe it!”
He raised his finger warningly, and shook his head.
“Wait until we are millionaires before you commence to shout,” he advised. “It is a good show here – yes; but, after all, it may be only a chance washing from hills far enough away. Show them to Harris, though; he may be interested, though he appears to me very indifferent about the matter.”
“He don’t seem to care,” she agreed. “He just looks at us as though we were a couple of children he had found a new plaything for. But don’t you think he looks brighter?”
“Well, yes; the river trip has done him good, instead of the harm the Ferry folks prophesied. But you run along and show him the ’yellow,’ and don’t draw the squaw’s attention to it.”
The squaw was wrapped neck and heels in a blanket, although the day was one of the warmest of summer; and stretched asleep in the sun, she gave no heed to the quick, light step of the girl.
Neither did Harris, at whose tent door she lay. He must have thought it was the stoical, indifferent Indian, for he gave her a quick, startled glance as he heard her surprised “Oh!” at the door. Then she walked directly to him, lifted his right hand, and let go again. It fell on his knee in the old, helpless way.
“But you did raise it,” she said, accusingly. “I saw you as I came to the door. You stretched out your hand.”
He looked at her and nodded very slightly, then looked at his hand and appeared trying to lift it; but gave up, and shook his head sadly.
“You mean you moved it a little once, but can’t do it again?” she asked, and he nodded assent.
“Oh, well, that’s all right,” she continued, cheerfully. “You are sure to get along all right, now that you have commenced to manage your hands if ever so little. But just at first, when I saw you, I had a mighty queer notion come into my head. I thought you were getting over that stroke faster than you let us know. But I’m too suspicious, ain’t I? Maybe it’s a bad thing for folks to trust strangers too much in this world; but it is just as bad for a girl to grow up where she can’t trust any one. Don’t you think so?”
The man nodded. They had many conversations like that, and she had grown not to notice his lack of speech nearly so much as at first. He was so good a listener, and she had become so used to his face gradually gaining again expressive power, that she divined his wishes more readily than the others.
“But trusting don’t cut any figure in what I came to speak to you about,” she continued. “No ‘trust and hope on, brethren,’ about this, I guess,” and she held the grains of yellow metal before his eyes. “There it is – the gold! Dan found it in the little hollow where the spring is. Is that where you found it?”
He shook his head, but looked pleased at the show they had found.
“Was it bigger bundles of it than this you struck?”
He nodded assent.
“Bigger than this! Well, it must have been rich. These lumps are enough in size if they only turn out enough in number. Oh, how I wish you had put the very spot on that plan of the ground and the rivers! Still, I suppose you were right to be cautious. And if I hadn’t been on a lone trail through this country last spring, and got lost, and happened to notice the two little streams running into the river so close to each other, we might have had a year’s journey along the Kootenai before we could have found the particular little stream and followed the right one to its source. I think we are close on the trail now, Joe.”
He shook his head energetically when she called him Joe.
“Well, I forget,” she said. “You see, I’ve been thinking for months about finding Joe Hammond; and now that I’ve found you, I can’t get used to thinking you are Jim Harris. What’s the use of your changing your name, anyway? You did it so you could trail him, your partner, better. But what was the use, with him well and strong, and with devils back of him, and you alone and barely able to crawl? Your head was wrong, Joe – Jim, I mean. If you hadn’t been looney, you’d just have settled down and worked your claim, got rich, and then looked for your man.”
He shook his head impatiently, and looked at her with as much of a frown as his locked muscles would allow, and a very queer, hard smile about his eyes and mouth.
“Ah!” and ’Tana shivered a little; “don’t look like that, Joe. You wouldn’t get any Sunday-school prizes for a meek and lowly spirit if the manager saw you fix your face in that fashion. I guess I know how you felt. If you had just so much strength, and couldn’t hope for more, you wouldn’t waste it looking for gold while he was above ground. Now, ain’t I about right?”
He gave no assent, but smiled in a more kindly way at the shrewdness of her guess.
“You won’t own up, but I know I am right,” she said; “and the way I know it is because I think I’d feel just like that myself if some one hurt me bad. I wonder if girls often feel that way. I guess not. I know Ora Harrison, the doctor’s girl, don’t. She says her prayers every night, and asks God to let her enemies have good luck. U’m! I can’t do that.”
The man watched her as she sat silent for a little, looking out into the still, warm sunshine. The squaw slumbered on, and the girl stared across her, and her face grew sad and moody with some hard thought.
“It’s awful to hate,” she said, at last. “Don’t you think it is? – to hate so that you can’t breathe right when the person you hate comes near where you are – to be able to feel if he comes near, even when you don’t see or hear him, to feel a devil that rises up in your breast and makes you want to get a knife and cut – cut deep, until the blood you hate runs away from the face you hate, and leaves it white and cold. Ah! it’s bad, I reckon, to have some one hate you; but it’s a thousand times worse to hate back. It makes the prettiest day black when the devil tells you of the hate you must remember, and you can’t pray it away, and you can’t forget it, and you can’t help it! Oh, dear!”
She put her hands over her eyes and leaned her head against his hand. He felt her tears, but could not comfort her.
“You see, I know – how you felt,” she said, trying to speak steadily. “Girls shouldn’t know; girls should have love and good thoughts taught to them. I – I’ve dreamed dreams of what a girl’s life ought to be like; something like Ora’s home, where her mother kisses her and loves her, and her father kisses and loves them both. I went to their home once, and I never could go again. I was starving for the kind of home she has, and I knew I never would get it. That is the hardest part of it – to know, no matter how hard you try to be good, all your life, you can’t get back the good thoughts and the love that should have been yours when you were little – the good thoughts that would have kept hate from growing in your heart, until it is stronger than you are. Oh, it’s awful!”
The squaw, who did not understand English, but did understand tears, rolled over and peered out from her blanket at the girl who knelt there as at the feet of a confessor. But the girl did not see her; she still knelt there, almost whispering now.
“And the worst of it is, Joe, after they are dead – the ones you hate – then the devil in you commences to torment you by making you think of some good points among the bad ones; some little kind word that would have made the hate in your heart less if it had not been for your own terrible wickedness. And it gnaws and torments you just like a rat gnawing the heart out of a log for a nest. And hate is terrible! whether it is live hate, or dead, it is terrible. Maybe I won’t feel so bad now that I’ve said out loud to some one how I feel – how much harder my heart is than it ought to be. I couldn’t tell any one else. But you hate, too, you know. Maybe you know, too, that dead hate hurts worst – that it haunts like a ghost.”
She looked up at him, and saw again that queer, wise smile about his lips.
“You don’t believe he’s dead!” she said, and her face grew paler. “You think he’s still alive, and that is why you don’t want folks to use your old name. You are laying for him yet, and you so helpless you can’t move!”
The man only looked at her grimly. He would not deny; he would not assent.
“But you are wrong,” she persisted. “He is dead. The Indians told me so – Akkomi told me so. Would they lie to me? Joe, can’t you let the hate go by, now that he is dead – dead?”
But no motion answered her, though his eyes rested on her kindly enough. Then the squaw arose and slouched away to pick up firewood in the forest, and the girl arose, too, and touched his hand.
“Well, whether you can or not, I am glad I told you what I did. Maybe it won’t worry me so much now; for sometimes, just when I’m almost happy, the ghost of that bad hate seems to whisper, whisper, and there ain’t any more good times for me. I’m glad I told you. I would not have, though, if you could talk like other folks, but you can’t.”
She got him a drink of water, slipped their first find of the gold into his pocket, and then stood at the tent door, watching for Overton.
But he did not come, and after a little she picked up the pan again and started for the small stream where she had left him.
The man in the chair watched her go, and when she was out of sight, that right hand was again slowly raised from the chair.
“C – an’t I?” he whispered, in a strange, indistinct way. “Poor lit – tle girl! poor little – girl!”
CHAPTER XIII.
THE TRACK IN THE FOREST
Their camp was about a mile from the Kootenai River, and close to a stream of depth sufficient to carry a canoe; while, a little way north of their camp, a beautiful spring of clear water gurgled out from under a little bank, and added its portion to the larger stream that flowed eastward to the river.
There was a little peculiarity about the spring, which made it one to remember – or, rather, two to remember, for it was really a twin, and its sister stream slipped from the other side of the narrow ledge and ran north for a little way, and then turned to the east and emptied into the Kootenai, not a hundred yards from the stream into which its mate had run.
The two springs were not twenty feet apart, and lay direct north and south from each other. Then their wide curves, in opposite directions, left within their circle a tract of land like an island, for the streams bounded it entirely except for that narrow neck of rock and soil joining it to the bigger hills to the west.
It was in the vicinity of the two springs that the rude sketch of Harris bade them search; but more definite directions than that he had not given. He had marked a tree where the north stream joined the river; and finding that as a clew, they followed the stream to its source. When they reached the larger stream, navigable for a mile, they concluded to move their tents there, for no lovelier place could be found.
It was ’Tana and Overton who tramped over the lands where the streams lay, and did their own prospecting for location. He was surprised to find her knowledge of the land so accurate. The crude drawing was as a solved problem to her; she never once made a wrong turn.
“Well, I’ve thought over it a heap,” she said, when he commented on her clever ideas. “I saw that marked tree as we went down to the Ferry, and I remembered where it was; and the trail is not hard if you only get started on it right. It’s getting started right that counts – ain’t it, Dan?”
There seemed fewer barriers between them in the free, out-of-door life, where no third person’s views colored their own. They talked of Lyster, and missed him; yet Dan was conscious that if Lyster were with them, he would have come second instead of first in her confidences, and her friendly, appealing ways.
Whether he trusted her or not, she did not know. He had not asked a question as to how that survey of the land came to her; but he watched Harris sometimes when the girl paid him any little attention, and he could read only absolute trust in the man’s eyes.
Overton was not given to keen analysis of people or motives; a healthy unconcern pervaded his mind as to the affairs of most people. But sometimes the girl’s character, her peculiar knowledge, her mysterious past, touched him with a sense of strange confusion, yet in the midst of the confusion – the deepest of it – he had put all else aside when she appealed to him, and had followed her lead into the wilderness.
And as she ran from him with the particles of gold, and carried them, as he bade her, to Harris, he followed her with his gaze until she disappeared through the green wall of the bushes. Once he started to follow her, and then stopped, suddenly muttered something about a “cursed fool,” and flung himself face down in the tall grass.
“It’s got to end here,” he said, aloud, as men grow used to thinking when they live alone in the woods much. Then he raised himself on his elbows and looked over the little grassy dip of the land to where the stream from the hills sparkled in the warm sun; and then away beyond to where the evergreens raised their dark heads along the heights, looking like somber guardians keeping ward over the sunny valley of the twin springs. Over them all his gaze wandered, and then up into the deep forest above him – a forest unbroken from there to the swift Columbia.
The perfect harmony of it all must have oppressed him until he felt himself the one discordant note, for he closed his eyes with a sigh that was almost a groan.
“I’ll see it all again – often, I suppose,” he muttered; “but never quite as it is now – never, for it’s got to end. The little bits of gold I found are a warning of the changes to come here – that is the way it seems to me. Queer how a man will change his idea of life in a year or so! There have been times when I would have rejoiced over the prospect of wealth there is here; yet all I am actually conscious of is regret that everything must change – the place – the people – all where gold is king. Pshaw! what a fool I would seem to any one else if he knew. Yet – well, I have dreamed all my days of a sort of life where absolute happiness could be lived. Other men do the same, I suppose – yes, of course. I wonder if others also come in reach of it too late. I suppose so. Well, reasoning won’t change it. I marked out my own path – marked it out with as little thought as many another fool; but I’ve got to walk in it just the same, and cursing back don’t help luck. But I had to have a little pow-wow all alone and be sorry for myself, before turning my back on the man I’d like to be – and – the rest of my dreams that have come in sight for a little while but can never come nearer – There she comes again! I’m glad of it, for she will at least keep me from drifting into dreams alone.”
But she appeared to be dreaming a little herself. At any rate, the scene she had passed through in the tent left memories too dark with feeling to be quickly dispelled, and he noticed at once the change in her face, and the traces of tears left about her eyes.
“What has hurt you?” he asked.
She shook her head and said:
“Nothing.”
“Oh! So you leave here jolly enough, and run around to camp, and cry about nothing – do you?” he asked, with evident unbelief. “Were you crying for joy over those little grains of gold – or over your loneliness in being so far from the Ferry folks?”
She laughed at the mere idea of either – and laughter dispels tear traces so quickly from faces that are young. “Lonely!” she exclaimed: “lonely here? why, I feel a heap more satisfied here than down at the Ferry, where the whole place smelled like saw-mills and new lumber. I always had a grudge against saw-mills, for they spoil all the lovely woods. That is why I like all this,” and she made a sweep of her arm, embracing all the territory in sight; “for in here not a tree has been touched with an ax. Lonely here! Why, Dan, I’ve been so perfectly happy that I’m afraid – yes, I am. Didn’t you ever feel like that – just as if you were too happy to last, and you were afraid some trouble would come and end it all?”
But Overton stooped to lift the pick he had been using, and so turned his face away from her.
“Well, I’m glad you are not getting blue over lack of company,” he remarked; “for we have only commenced prospecting, you know, and it will be at least a week before we can hope to send for any one else to join us.”
“A week! Do you intend to send for other folks, then?” and her tone was one of regret. “Oh, it would be all different, then. My pretty camp would be spoiled for me if folks should come talking and whistling up our creek. Don’t let any one know so soon!”
“You don’t know what you are talking of,” he answered, a little roughly. “This is a business trip. We did not come up here just because we were looking for a pretty picture of a place to camp in.”
“Oh!” and surprise and dismay were in the exclamation. “Then you don’t care for it – you want other people just as soon as you find the rich streak where the gold is? Well” – and she looked again over their little chosen valley – “I almost hope you won’t find it very soon – not for several days. I would like to live just like this for a whole week. And I thought – I was so sure you liked it, too.”
“Oh, yes,” he answered, indifferently enough, evidently giving his whole attention to examining the soil he had commenced to dig up again, “I like the camp all right, but we can’t just stand around and admire it, if we want to accomplish what we came for. And see here, ’Tana,” he said, and for the first time he looked at her with a sort of unwillingness, “you must know that this gold is going to make a big change in things for you. You can’t live out in the woods with a couple of miners and an Indian squaw, after your fortune is made – don’t you see that? You must go to school, and live out in the world where your money will help you to – well, the right sort of society for a girl.”
“What is the use of having money if it don’t help you to live where you please?” she demanded. “I thought that was what money was for. I’d a heap rather stay poor here in the woods, with – with the folks I know, instead of going where I’ll have to buy friends with money. Don’t think I’d want the sort of friends who have to be baited with money, anyway.”
He stared at her helplessly. She was saying to him the things he had called himself a fool for thinking. But he could not call her a fool. He could only stifle an impatient groan, and wonder how he was to reason her into thinking as other girls would think of wealth and its advantages.
“Why were you so wild about finding the gold, if you care so little for the things it brings?” he demanded, and she pointed toward the tents.
“It was for him I thought at first – of how the money would, maybe, help to make him well – get him great doctors, and all that. The world had been rough on him – people had brought him trouble, and – and I thought, maybe, I could help clear it away. That was what I had in my mind at first.”
“You need things, too, don’t you? – not doctors, but education – books, beautiful things. You want pictures, statues, fine music, theaters – all such things. Well, the money will help you get them, and get people to enjoy them with you. I’ve heard you talk to Max about how you would like to live, and what you would like to see; and I think you can soon. But, ’Tana, you will live then where people will be more critical than we are here – ”
“More like Captain Leek?” she asked, with a deep wrinkle between her brows; “for if they are, I’ll stay here.”
“N – no; not like him; and yet they will think considerable of his sort of ideas, too,” he answered, blunderingly. “One thing sure is this: When your actual work here is over, you must go at once back to Mrs. Huzzard. It was necessary for you to come, else I wouldn’t have allowed it. But, little girl, when you get among those fine friends you are going to have, I don’t want them to think you had a guardian up here who didn’t take the first bit of civilized care of you. And that’s what they would think if I let you stay here, just as though you were a boy. So you see, ’Tana, I just felt I’d have to tell you plain that you would have to try and fit yourself to city ways of living. And when you are a millionairess, as you count on being, we three partners can’t keep on living in tents in the Kootenai woods.”
She pulled handfuls of the plumy grasses beside her, and stared sulkily ahead of her. Evidently it was a great deal for her to understand at once.
“Would they blame you —you for it, if they knew?” she asked at last.
“Yes, they would – if they knew,” he said, savagely; and turning away, he walked across the little grassy level to where the abrupt little wall or ledge commenced – the one from under which the springs flowed.
She thought he was simply out of patience with her. He was going to the woods – anywhere to be rid of her and her stupid ideas; and swift as a bird, she slipped after him.
“Then I’ll go, Dan,” she said reassuringly, catching his arm. “So don’t be vexed at me for being stubborn. Come! let me look for the gold with you, and then – then I’ll go when you say.”
“It’s a bargain,” he said, briefly, and drew his arm away. “And if we are going to do any more prospecting this evening, we had better begin.”
He stood facing her, with his back to the bank that was the first tiny step toward the mountain that rose dark and shadowy far above. He had walked along there before, looking with a miner’s attention to the lay of the land. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation, and a light of comprehension brightened his eyes.
“I’ve got a clew to it, sure, ’Tana!” he said, eagerly. “Do you know where we are standing? Well, if I don’t make a big mistake, a good-sized river once rolled along just where we are now. The little creek is all that’s left of it. This soil is all a comparatively recent deposit, and it and the gold dust in it have been washed down from the mountain. Which means that this little valley is only a gateway, and the dust we found is only a trail we are to follow up to the mine from which it came. Do you understand?”