The Secret of the Reef Part 11

"At a desolate settlement in Arizona a number of years ago. The Southern Pacific had lately reached the coast, and I was traveling West without a ticket. When it was unavoidable I walked; but railroad hands were more sympathetic in those days, and I came most of the way from Omaha inside and sometimes underneath the freight cars. Down under them was a dusty position in the dry belts."

Glancing round from the pretty wooden house, which had been furnished without thought of cost, across the wide stretch of lawn, where a smart gardener was guiding a gasoline mower, Ruth found it hard to imagine her father stealing a ride on a freight train. But another thought struck her.

"Where was I then?" she asked.

"With your aunt, or perhaps you had just gone to school. I can't fix the exact time," Osborne answered unguardedly; and the girl was filled with a confused sense of love and grat.i.tude.

The school was expensive, and her mother's relatives were by no means rich, but she knew that her father had been the recipient of a small sum yearly under somebody's will. It looked as if he had turned it all over for her benefit while he faced stern poverty.

Ruth impulsively pulled her chair nearer to her father, and her cool little fingers closed over one of his big hands.

"I understand now," she said softly, "why there are lines on your forehead and you sometimes look worn. Your life must have been very hard."

"Oh, it had its brighter side," Osborne answered lightly. "Well, Clay was also engaged in beating his pa.s.sage, and I found him enjoying a long drink from the locomotive tank. We were confronted with the problem how to cross about a hundred miles of arid desert on a joint capital of two dollars. Clay got over the first difficulty by making a water-bag out of some railroad rubber sheeting which he borrowed, while I went round the settlement in search of provisions. I got some, though prices were ruinously high, and at midnight we hid beside the track, waiting for a freight train to pull out. The brakemen had a trick of looking round the cars before they made a start. Though the days were blazing hot, the nights were cold, and we s.h.i.+vered as we lay behind a clump of cacti near the wheels. A man almost trod on us as he ran along the line, but just afterward the engine bell rang, and Clay sprang up to push back one of the big sliding doors while I held the food and water. The runners were stiff, the train began to move; when he opened the door a few inches I had to trot; and by the time he could crawl through, it was too late for me to get up. Then, with a hazy recollection that he had a long way to go, I threw the food and water into the car."

"That was just like you!" Ruth exclaimed with a flush of pride.

"I imagine it was largely due to absence of mind. I felt very sorry for myself when I stood between the ties and watched the train vanish into the dark. What made it worse, was that of the joint two dollars only fifty cents was his."

"When did you meet him again?"

"Several years afterward in San Francisco. He seemed to be prospering, and my luck had not been good. Through him, I entered the service of the Alaska Commercial Company. That, of course, was before the Klond.y.k.e rush, and the A.C.C. ruled the frozen North."

"It was in Alaska that you were first fortunate, wasn't it? You have never told me much about the mine you found."

Osborne looked as if the recollection was unpleasant, but he saw that she was interested, and he generally indulged her. Though she believed in and was inclined to idealize him, Ruth was forced to admit that there was nothing in his appearance to suggest the miner. His light summer clothes were chosen with excellent taste, and there was a certain fastidiousness in his appearance and manners which was hardly in keeping with his adventurous past.

"Well," he said, "it was an unlucky mine from the beginning-and I was not the first to find it. I had been some years in the company's service when I was sent as agent to one of their factories. It was situated on a surf-beaten coast, with a lonely stretch of barrens and muskegs rolling away behind, and the climate was severe. There were no trees large enough to break the savage winds, and for six months the ground was covered deep with snow. A small bark came up once or twice a year, and my business was to trade with the Indians and the Russian half-breeds for furs. In winter we had only an hour or two's daylight, but I got books from San Francisco, and read them by the red-hot stove while the blizzards shook the factory. Even in those days, it was suspected that there was gold in Alaska; but the A.C.C. did not encourage prospecting, and the roughness of the country made it almost impossible for a stranger to traverse. Still, a few prospectors somehow made their way into it, and probably died, for they were seldom seen after their first appearance. I can recollect two or three, hard-bitten men who stayed a day or two with us and then vanished into the wilds.

"It was late in the fall when one arrived with two Aleut Indians in a skin canoe. I never learned where he came from nor how he got so far, for there was no communication with the North except by the company's vessels, but he told us he meant to locate a mine he had heard about and thought he could get back before winter set in. He went off with the Aleuts and a few provisions he bought, and that was the last we saw of him until the following summer. Then I made a journey inland to visit a tribe which had brought in no furs, and one night we made camp among a patch of willows. When we were gathering wood I saw that the larger bushes had been hacked down, and thought it had been done by a white man. The next morning we found an empty provision can of the kind we kept, and, later on, bits of charred sticks where a fire had been lighted. That led us to follow up the creek we had camped by; and presently we found the man who had made the fire."

"Dead!" Ruth exclaimed.

"He had been dead for months. All that was left was a clean-picked skeleton bleached by the snow and a few rags of clothes. The significant thing was that the breast-bone was cut through: sharply cleft, as if by an ax."

"How dreadful! You think the Indians killed the man?"

"It looked like it. There may have been a fight over the last of the provisions, which the Aleuts carried off, because I found very few cans and only one small empty flour-bag; but the tools indicated that it was the same man who had visited the factory. I had not even heard his name, and if he had any friends they never learned his fate; but he died rich."

"He had found the gold?" Ruth's eyes were large with excitement.

"Yes," said Osborne. "Not far away, where the creek had changed its bed, there was a shallow hole, part of it filled with ashes, but as the scrub was three or four miles off it was easy to imagine how the man must have worked carrying the half-dry brush to keep a big fire going."

"But why did he want a big fire?"

"To soften the ground. It never thaws deeper than a foot or two beneath the surface, and there were signs that the early winter had surprised him at work. It was obvious that he was a stubborn man, and meant to hold on until the last moment."

"Do you think his companions murdered him for the treasure?"

"No; in those days the Indians cared nothing for gold, though they might have killed the man for a silver fox's skin: furs were our currency. If there was a quarrel it probably began because he insisted on staying when winter was close at hand and the food almost done. For all that I couldn't find the gold he must have got, because there was plenty in the wash-dirt he had left-tiny rounded nuggets as well as grains. It was a rich alluvial pocket that a man could work with simple appliances, and I made up my mind to go back to Snowy Creek some day."

"But you were not alone! What about your companions?"

"I had two half-breeds with Russian blood in them; good trappers, but, except for that, with little more intelligence than the animals they hunted. Gold had no value to them; their highest ambition was to own a magazine rifle."

"But couldn't you have washed out some of the gold?"

"I got a small quant.i.ty; but I was the company's servant, and had its business to mind, and we had only provisions enough for the trip. The A.C.C. found the fur-trade more profitable than mining, and did not want its preserves invaded; and n.o.body suspected how rich the country really was. Anyway, soon after my return, I had a dispute with the chief factor and, fearing trouble, said nothing about my discovery. The office supported the fellow, and I left the A.C.C. with my secret and three or four hundred dollars."

"What did you do then?"

"I'm afraid an account of all my s.h.i.+fts and adventures would be monotonous. Sometimes I had two or three hundred dollars in hand, sometimes I had nothing but a suit of shabby clothes; but when things were at the worst some new chance always turned up, and I wandered about the Pacific slope until I fell in with Clay again."

"Then you didn't go to him when you left the A.C.C.?"

"No; he had done me one good turn, and I couldn't be continually asking favors." Osborne paused and his face turned graver. "Besides, there were respects in which we didn't agree; and in those days I had an independent mind."

"Haven't you now?"

"I've learned that it's sometimes wiser to reserve your opinions," said Osborne dryly. "You can best be independent when you have nothing, because it doesn't matter then whom you offend."

"Was Clay prosperous?" Ruth asked.

"He was getting known as a man who would have to be reckoned with; but he was short of money and was ready for a shot at anything that promised a few dollars. Clay never s.h.i.+rked a risk, but I believe he was honestly glad to see me, and in a moment of expansion I told him about the Snowy Creek mine and the gold that would be waiting for me when I could return."

"Ah! I was waiting until you came to that again. I felt its importance.

It was the mine that made you rich and surrounded me with a luxury I was half afraid of at the beginning, wasn't it?"

Miss Dexter came toward them along the terrace and Osborne smiled as he indicated her.

"Your aunt has always been inclined to disapprove of my doings, and I don't suppose she'd be interested in my prospecting experiences. We'll let them stand over till another day."

Ruth agreed, but she had a puzzling suspicion that her father was relieved by the interruption. When Miss Dexter joined them Ruth was forced to follow his lead and confine herself to general conversation.

This, however, did not keep her from thinking, and she wondered why her aunt, whose love for her she knew, had shown herself so hypercritical about her father. Caroline was narrow, but she was upright, and it seemed impossible that she could find any serious fault with him. For all that, Ruth wished that his connection with Clay were not quite so close. Clay was not a man of refinement or high principles, and, to do him justice, he did not pretend to be. Ruth had heard his business exploits mentioned with indignation and cynical amus.e.m.e.nt by men of different temperament. There were, she supposed, envious people who delighted to traduce successful men; but Clay was certainly not free from suspicion, and she would have preferred that her father had chosen a different a.s.sociate.

CHAPTER X-THE WRECK OF THE _KANAWHA_

Ruth had time to ponder her father's unfinished story, for a week elapsed before she could persuade him to continue it. Osborne was away for a few days, and when he came home his preoccupied manner suggested that he had business of importance on hand, and Ruth refrained from questioning him. The subject, however, had its fascination for the girl.

She had been too young to retain more than a hazy recollection of her father in his struggling days, and she had fallen into the way of thinking of him as the polished and prosperous gentleman whom she had rejoined after a long separation. Now it was difficult to readjust her ideas and picture him as a needy adventurer, taking strange risks and engaging in occupations of doubtful respectability. She was, she hoped, not hypercritical, but she found it hard to reconcile the two sharply contrasted sides of his character.

At last, one evening, when they strolled across the lawn as dusk was falling, she determinedly led up to the subject, regardless of the smile with which he evaded her first questions.

"I don't know why you should be so bent on hearing about the mine," he said. "On the whole, I'd rather forget the thing, because good luck never followed the gold that was taken from Snowy Creek. There seemed to be a curse upon it."

They sat down on a bench beneath a tall, ragged pine, and Osborne lighted a cigar.