Canim tossed a bone to the brute and got upon his feet. “Come, let us
begone. The sun is yet hot, but it will get no cooler.”
“And these white people, what are they like?” Li Wan made bold to ask.
“Like you and me,” he answered, “only they are less dark of skin. You will
be among them ere the day is dead.”
Canim lashed the sleeping-robe to his one-hundred-and-fifty-pound pack,
smeared his face with wet clay, and sat down to rest till Li Wan had
finished loading the dogs. Olo cringed at sight of the club in her hand, and
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gave no trouble when the bundle of forty pounds and odd was strapped
upon him. But Bash was aggrieved and truculent, and could not forbear to
whimper and snarl as he was forced to receive the burden. He bristled his
back and bared his teeth as she drew the straps tight, the while throwing
all the malignancy of his nature into the glances shot at her sideways and
backward. And Canim chuckled and said, “Did I not say he was once a
very great warrior?”
“These furs will bring a price,” he remarked as he adjusted his headstrap
and lifted his pack clear of the ground. “A big price. The white men pay
well for such goods, for they have no time to hunt and are soft to the cold.
Soon shall we feast, Li Wan, as you have feasted never in all the lives you
have lived before.”
She grunted acknowledgment and gratitude for her lord’s condescension,
slipped into the harness, and bent forward to the load.
“The next time I am born, I would be born a white man,” he added, and
swung off down the trail which dived into the gorge at his feet.
The dogs followed close at his heels, and Li Wan brought up the rear. But
her thoughts were far away, across the Ice Mountains to the east, to the
little corner of the earth where her childhood had been lived. Ever as a
child, she remembered, she had been looked upon as strange, as one with
an affliction. Truly she had dreamed awake and been scolded and beaten
for the remarkable visions she saw, till, after a time, she had outgrown
them. But not utterly. Though they troubled her no more waking, they
came to her in her sleep, grown woman that she was, and many a night of
nightmare was hers, filled with fluttering shapes, vague and meaningless.
The talk with Canim had excited her, and down all the twisted slant of the
divide she harked back to the mocking fantasies of her dreams.
“Let us take breath,” Canim said, when they had tapped midway the bed of
the main creek.
He rested his pack on a jutting rock, slipped the head-strap, and sat down.
Li Wan joined him, and the dogs sprawled panting on the ground beside
them. At their feet rippled the glacial drip of the hills, but it was muddy
and discolored, as if soiled by some commotion of the earth.
“Why is this?” Li Wan asked.
“Because of the white men who work in the ground. Listen!” He held up
his hand, and they heard the ring of pick and shovel, and the sound of
men’s voices. “They are made mad by gold, and work without ceasing that
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they may find it. Gold ? It is yellow and comes from the ground, and is
considered of great value. It is also a measure of price.”
But Li Wan’s roving eyes had called her attention from him. A few yards
below and partly screened by a clump of young spruce, the tiered logs of a
cabin rose to meet its overhanging roof of dirt. A thrill ran through her,
and all her dream-phantoms roused up and stirred about uneasily.
“Canim,” she whispered in an agony of apprehension. “Canim, what is
that?”
“The white man’s teepee, in which he eats and sleeps.”
She eyed it wistfully, grasping its virtues at a glance and thrilling again at
the unaccountable sensations it aroused. “It must be very warm in time of
frost,” she said aloud, though she felt that she must make strange sounds
with her lips.
She felt impelled to utter them, but did not, and the next instant Canim
said, “It is called a cabin.”
Her heart gave a great leap. The sounds! the very sounds! She looked
about her in sudden awe. How should she know that strange word before
ever she heard it? What could be the matter? And then with a shock, half
of fear and half of delight, she realized that for the first time in her life
there had been sanity and significance in the promptings of her dreams.
“Cabin,” she repeated to herself. “Cabin.” An incoherent flood of dreamstuff
welled up and up till her head was dizzy and her heart seemed
bursting. Shadows, and looming bulks of things, and unintelligible
associations fluttered and whirled about, and she strove vainly with her
consciousness to grasp and hold them. For she felt that there, in that welter
of memories, was the key of the mystery; could she but grasp and hold it,
all would be clear and plain—
O Canim! O Pow-Wah-Kaan! O shades and shadows, what was that?
She turned to Canim, speechless and trembling, the dream-stuff in mad,
overwhelming riot. She was sick and fainting, and could only listen to the
ravishing sounds which proceeded from the cabin in a wonderful rhythm.
“Hum, fiddle,” Canim vouchsafed.
But she did not hear him, for in the ecstasy she was experiencing, it
seemed at last that all things were coming clear. Now! now! she thought.
A sudden moisture swept into her eyes, and the tears trickled down her
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cheeks. The mystery was unlocking, but the faintness was overpowering
her. If only she could hold herself long enough! If only— but the
landscape bent and crumpled up, and the hills swayed back and forth
across the sky as she sprang upright and screamed, “Daddy! Daddy!” Then
the sun reeled, and darkness smote her, and she pitched forward limp and
headlong among the rocks.
Canim looked to see if her neck had been broken by the heavy pack,
grunted his satisfaction, and threw water upon her from the creek. She
came to slowly, with choking sobs, and sat up.
“It is not good, the hot sun on the head,” he ventured.
And she answered, “No, it is not good, and the pack bore upon me hard.”
“We shall camp early, so that you may sleep long and win strength,” he
said gently. “And if we go now, we shall be the quicker to bed.”
Li Wan said nothing, but tottered to her feet in obedience and stirred up
the dogs. She took the swing of his pace mechanically, and followed him
past the cabin, scarce daring to breathe. But no sounds issued forth, though
the door was open and smoke curling upward from the sheet-iron
stovepipe.
They came upon a man in the bend of the creek, white of skin and blue of
eye, and for a moment Li Wan saw the other man in the snow. But she saw
dimly, for she was weak and tired from what she had undergone. Still, she
looked at him curiously, and stopped with Canim to watch him at his
work. He was washing gravel in a large pan, with a circular, tilting
movement; and as they looked, giving a deft flirt, he flashed up the yellow
gold in a broad streak across the bottom of the pan.
“Very rich, this creek,” Canim told her, as they went on. “Sometime I will
find such a creek, and then I shall be a big man.”
Cabins and men grew more plentiful, till they came to where the main
portion of the creek was spread out before them. It was the scene of a vast
devastation. Everywhere the earth was torn and rent as though by a Titan’s
struggles. Where there were no upthrown mounds of gravel, great holes
and trenches yawned, and chasms where the thick rime of the earth had
been peeled to bed-rock. There was no worn channel for the creek, and its
waters, dammed up, diverted, flying through the air on giddy flumes,
trickling into sinks and low places, and raised by huge water-wheels, were
used and used again a thousand times. The hills had been stripped of their
trees, and their raw sides gored and perforated by great timber-slides and
prospect holes. And over all, like a monstrous race of ants, was flung an
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army of men—mud-covered, dirty, dishevelled men, who crawled in and
out of the holes of their digging, crept like big bugs along the flumes, and
toiled and sweated at the gravel-heaps which they kept in constant
unrest—men, as far as the eye could see, even to the rims of the hilltops,