The Sealed Valley. Footner Hulbert

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ paraphrase the description of a more famous vessel, she looked like a shoe-box on a shingle, with the addition atop the shoe-box of a lean-to pilot-house with nothing to lean to, and an attenuated smokestack. The stack was made of many lengths of kitchen stovepipe braced all round with a network of wires, which did not, however, quite smooth out the kinks in the joints. The whole thing had a decided inclination to the nor'east, but Wes' opined that it would do all right till it fell down.

      Ralph had not seen his mysterious visitor since she had left his office. Loitering among the others on the bank, he was reassured by a glimpse of her sitting in a dark corner within the deckhouse, her back turned to the shore. To Ralph's secret relief, Dan did not remark her there. Dan had an awkward faculty of putting two and two together, and a caustic sense of humour.

      Many of the old stories of the country were recounted for the benefit of the newcomers. "Ever hear tell of Tom Sadler?" said Captain Wes'. "Tom was the first white man who ever come up the Campbell Valley. Campbell hisself, when he discovered it, he only went downstream. It was mor'n fifty year ago, before the first Cariboo gold strike. In them days the city of Kimowin was no bigger than Fort Edward here. Tom Sadler was one of these here now rovin' fellers that can't rest easy among their own kind. He roved off up the Campbell Valley and was gone a whole year. The next summer he come back down the river, and capsized in the rapids just above Kimowin. They saw him from the settlement and pulled him out of the water more dead than alive. A living skellington he was at that. His canoe and his stuff was nachelly seen no more.

      "Well, he hung on for a couple of days, and then he up and chivvied out. But that ain't the end of the story. The story is about what he told when he was out of his head. Nobody believed what he said, but they tell it to this day for a good story. He went on all about a purty little valley he found in the mountains. All around it was high cliffs that you couldn't get up or down like the sides of a bowl-like. Bowl of the Mountains was what Tom called it. He said the only way you could get in or out was through a long cave under the mountains. A bear that he was after showed him the way in, or he never wouldn't have found it, being the mouth was all hid behind bushes and all.

      "Well, sirs, they say he said that little valley was as beautiful as Paradise; but that wa'n't all. In the middle of it were a little lake, different-coloured water from any on earth, green as a bottle-like, good water, too. Little streams come down from the mountains all around, and flowed through meadows of flowers into that lake, and Tom said the banks of all those little streams was yellow with gold, yellow with gold, sirs! Tom said he stayed there six months and washed two hundred pound of it. Them beside his bed laughed, him having nothing to show. If he'd been content with a hundred pounds, now, 'twould have sounded more reasonable. Well, they on'y laughed at Tom and buried him. And it's got to be a saying-like 'round Kimowin when a feller gets a bee in his bonnet, 'Oh he's found Bowl of the Mountains!' they say. But I ain't so sure there ain't something in it. I seen Tom's grave in the cemetery at Kimowin: 'Thomas Sadler, who bit July 9th, 1861.' I seen it myself carved on the stone. That ain't no hearsay."

      Finally about three o'clock, nobody else being disposed to "buy," although Wes' provided several good openings, the captain and the passengers made their final farewells and went aboard. The little Tewksbury backed out of the mud, and turned her nose upstream, with a heave and a snort at every stroke of the piston, and a great kick-up astern. The little group on the shore adjourned again to Maroney's for something to pick them up against the flat feeling that oppresses those who are left behind.

      On board the Tewksbury the white men gathered on the forward deck around the capstan, and continued their talk. There was Wes' Trickett, and Matthews, his engineer; Joe Mixer and Pete Staley, who were taking up an outfit to Gisborne portage to start a store, and Ralph. Meanwhile, the half-breed crew ran the boat. The warmth of the sun, the peace of the river, and the late potations at Maroney's joined to produce a lulling effect on the group. Conversation became fitful. Joe Mixer fell asleep with his back against the capstan.

      The Tewksbury was not exactly a river greyhound; six miles an hour was her rate, and since the current ran four, her net progress upstream was about two. On the bends of the river, where the deep water ran swiftly under the bank on the wide side of the arc, it was nip and tuck between the little Tewksbury and the river. No one on board expressed any impatience.

      "You got to go either forward or back," said Wes' philosophically, "and if you ain't goin' back you're bound to arrive some time."

      "Let her puff," said Pete Staley comfortably. "'Tain't comin' out of our lungs."

      Ralph was happy. The weight of weeks of boredom was lifted from his breast. After all, life was a sporting affair. He never tired of watching the moving brown flood spotted with foam, endlessly and serenely opposing their progress, ever yielding under the vessel's forefoot, without giving back. From the water he lifted his eyes to the clean, pine-clad hills, insolently planting themselves in the path of the river, and forcing it to go around. The afternoon sun was lavishly gilding the southerly slopes. Overhead the sky was an inverted bowl of palest turquoise. Ralph naturally kept these poetic comparisons to himself. Wes' Trickett, Matthews, Mixer, and Staley were a hard-headed, scornful, tobacco-chewing quartet.

      The deckhouse was a rough shanty with a wide sliding door at each side, and one in front. From where he sat near the capstan Ralph could see Nahnya within, sitting on a box by one of the side doors with her hands in her lap, and her eyes bent on the river. Her quiet and self-contained air stimulated his curiosity. He wondered what she was thinking about. The fact that she had forbidden him to approach her on the boat kept his desire to do so ever fresh. He cast around in his mind for some way to get around her prohibition. She had removed the ridiculous hat to her lap, and her bare head bound round with a thick, black braid of hair was wholly beautiful and graceful against the light.

      "Where did she get that proud look from?" thought Ralph. "All she needs is a diadem and an ermine cloak."

      Ralph was not the only man on board who had remarked the handsome passenger. By and by Joe Mixer woke up, and blinked at her sidewise from between his thick lids.

      "Good-looking gal, Joe," said Pete Staley.

      Joe grunted by way of affirmation.

      Joe Mixer was a well-known character up and down the Campbell. Outside he had been a butcher, they said, and had come North owing to an unpleasantness following upon his attempt to carve a piece of human meat. He was a factor in the little community of the river by reason of his bulk and the noise he made, but privately he was not regarded with much affection. In a rough, new society much is condoned through the fear of being thought self-righteous. The first commandment of the frontier is: Thou shalt not appear any better than thy neighbour. Hence Joe was accepted for one of the crowd, while stories were circulated behind his back of lingering butchering tendencies, of a dog he had tortured, of a native woman who had sought safety from him through a priest.

      "Who is she?" asked Staley.

      "Darned if I know," said Wes'. "She ain't any of the Cheval Noir crowd, that's sure, or from Campbell Lake neither. Says she's goin' to your dump at Gisborne."

      "She come down the river on a little raft early yesterday morning," said Matthews, the engineer. "Five o'clock it was, I guess. I come out on deck to take a look at the sky, and I seen her landing below Thomson's store there. Thinking nobody saw her, she pushed the raft off in the current."

      "They're a sly lot," said Staley. "A white man never can tell what they're up to."

      They continued to discuss Nahnya with a freedom that caused Ralph to grind his teeth. To avoid arousing their suspicions he was obliged to keep a smooth face, and to enter into the discussion. Up to this time Ralph had thought of these four as "good enough heads" and had drunk with them at Maroney's like everybody СКАЧАТЬ