THE WHOOPERS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 129, 30 May 1908, Page 7

THE WHOOPERS.

BY OLIVE PHILLIPS^WOLLEY. (Author of "The Chicamon Stone," etc) "You don't seem to have inuen confidence in your province," said Lloyd Maurice, lighting another cigarette. "Why shouldn't I try my luiek at gold mining?" !"On the contrary, I believe very much in the province." - •. . "But not in mc I" "As a gold miner? 2J0." "But, man! I am not going to plunge. If this Rufus Slim can show such a Aiaj v m £vm I 'saquosap aq sb aSpai hundred pounds. What is that after all ? You fellows count by the thousand, and get frightened. It was all very well for Maurice to talk in that strain. His income was 50,000 a year, in good English pounds. "I cannot see why you, want to go mining. You came out to hunt- why not keep to that?" "I mean to. Kufus Slim says that the Omeneca is the best game country he ever put eyes on." I sniffed my contempt. '•Have you ever been through the Omeneca, Wentworth? Be honest." "No, I haven't. I never thought it worth my while." I fancy that Lloyd Maurice smiled, and that irritated mc. I was supposed to know the game districts of B.C. better than most people. "Oh, well, go if you must; but don't blame mc if you come to grief. If I were in your place, with your money—" "You would sit on it, I suppose." "No, but I should stick to things that I understood, and hire a strong man with big boots to lack anyone who dared to say 'Biz' in my presence." Maurice laughed good naturedly. "Don't be a bear, old chap. Come with us and keep mc out of scrapes, and complete your knowledge of 8.C." "Under Mr Slim? No, thank you. I don't know Omeneca, and I don't know Slim, and unless I'm very wide of the mark, don't want to." "Eight oh! You know your own business best. What about bed?" And we went. The next morning I was walking down Government-street with Maurice, buying the odds and ends which he thought necessary for his trip. The Seattle boat had just come in, and the streets showed for a moment a tinge of foreign colour; women in motorneer caps or bicycling bloomers, or any other Seattle abomination, and men who chewed and hung round the corners with the women, wondering what the deuce to do with their hands. Passing through this human spate, we almost ran into a lean, red-haired man wearing the city clothes of a prospector, which contrasted oddly with his cadaverous face. The man nodded to Maurice, and seemed half inclined to stop, and then, seeing mc, chnnged his mind and passed on. I turned to Maurice. "Yes, that is my man; that is Kufus Slim." It was on my lips to correct him, but I controlled myself, and held my peace. It might be better to think this matter out before I committed myself to any definite course of action. "A curious looking devil, isn't he?" persisted Maurice. "Do you remember the old Norse story of Glam, the fiend who used to ride the roof trees at night, and had a horrible staring in his eyeballs?" "I remember. Even Grettir could only kill him when the moonlight was- dimmed, and a cloud hid the eyes of himti Great Scott! how they haunt mc," and I shook myself, for though it was broad daylight, those glaring light blue eyes would not be forgotten. They meant more to mc than they did to Maurice. When I had first seen them they looked out of the head of a man who called himself Rube Sehl. That man I prosecuted for breaking open a -safe, the property of our company, and though he-was acquitted, against the weight of evidence as I thought at that time, he had found that most men took my view of the case, and he had left the camp. He had taken with him a weak fool, who was cook for our boys, and a good cook, too, but no man to go prospecting with Rube in No-Man's-land, when the snows were beginning to crawl down to the foot hills. Before leaving us, this man had drawn a very considerable sum of money, due for wages; and that'was the last I saw of him or of Rube Sehl. I went out before the ice closed the river, but I heard that Rube re-appeared, and spent the winter at the card tables . in Wrangel, where he "blew in" quite a lot of gold dust. The cook did not come out. Rube said that he had been drowned in trying to cross one of the northern rivers. Feeling lonesome without a comrade, Rube had given up the prospecting trip, and come out. I had my opinion about all these matters, but it is no good to look for a drowned man in the wild north, and who was to say whether the dust which Rube lost at the tables belonged to him or to the cook. It might even have come from that safe, which the court held had not been broken into by Rube Sehl. Thus you see that there was no definite charge to be preferred against the man with Glam's eyes, and yet you will understand that I hardly fancied him, and a Stick Indian to be hired by him, as sole companions for a man with fifty thousand a year in a country in which the law of the strongest is the only one that prevails. "Maurice," I said, when we sat at lunch, "I've changed my mind. I am going with you after all, if you will have mc." "Have you, old fellow. Why, it's the very best news I've had since I left the old country. We'll beat old man Rose, and bring-back a bigger head than that," and he pointed to a 76-inch moose head, which was the glory of our club, and the envy of every man who carried a rifle. I shook my head doubtfully. I did not expect to find moose such" as some men kill in Cook's Inlet, amongst the black pines of the Omeneca district, but —well, I was rather fond of Maurice, and I didn't like Glam's eyes. I do not intend to dwell upon the initial stages of that journey. It did not start well, and it did not end cheerfully. Slim at first threw obstacles in my way, and did his best quietly to get rid of mc; but eventually, finding that I had entirely forgotten him (an impression that I did my best to cultivate), he pocketed my dollars for a share in his Omeneca claim, and we made a start. Slim was a humorous dog, and I daresay would have made a sufficiently amusing comrade if neither he nor I had been acting a part. As it was, whenever we were not talking, I had an uncomfortable sensation that Glam's eyes were watching mc. I hated to see the man with an axe in his hand, or a rifle, and from the first wae on the look out for an "accident." Our rifle* wen of aeorec pv&st-*/

superfluous. impediments, .There might be gold in the! country, there certainly was not anygamei :.-■-■'-■•*.* ..■•;. The road we took .was in part that which some, of the .Klondikers' travelled by, andall along'the line of it we found saddles and' rifles; "the bones of : horses,' and. articles of camp outfit from Silvers,' eloquent of' the place from which, the travellers had started, aid the luck they had met with, on their way. V; ; ■ v ; But for two days we saw none of these things, nor any blaze upon the black pines which crowded each other so closely that they would have shut out the sunlight had there been any. - : As , it was a fine snow mist drifted through them incessantly; the chill of which was harder to endure than the dry cold of Manitoba, when the thermometer registers "20 below." But neither the cold nor the gloom were the worst of it. For days we had not seen the sun, or any horizon to look forward to; there was as far ac I could see no sign of a trail, and in spite of Slim's confidence, I knew that he had lost his way. It had been one of those day s when you realise the possibility of the extinction of life, and Maurice had been discussing a magazine article which he had road, about growing spots on the sun, with all the hideous possibilities of that time when the life-giving orb shall hang cold and cheerless in its place. Between us and the Canadian Pacific Railway were several hundred miles of snow spattered wilderness; before us hundreds of miles, each of which took us farther from man, and nearer to the Barren Grounds, and the Everlasting Ice. We were like ants creeping through a wheat field in the dark, and we felt that the earth was dead already at its extremities and that its awful paralysis was creeping further and further into the body of it, and into our own hearts. In sullen silence we made a camp, and sat round the spluttering logs watching the kettle boil, without a word. Have you ever sat up at night, long after everyone else has gone to bed until all the fires have gone put, and. the chairs begin to stretch themselves and creak; until, because of the want of anything to distract your attention, your mind has become abnormally alert, and from feeling lonely you gradually begin to wish that you were really alone. This is about as far as you can go in civilised places, but in Omeneca at night, you can go a good deal further than that. The spell of that black silence was upon us, and even the Indians felt it. Of course Indians seldom talk, but they move round the camp fire doing things, or sit smoking, with their beady v evea keenly alive to everything within ita range of their vision. But on this night, our Indian sat huddled up near the camp fire, his blanket drawn over his head, rigid and silent, and yet, as T felt, listening and waiting for something. What was it he expected and dared not see? Only our guide seemed awake, and the restlessness of his glaring eyeballs, and the nervous twitchings of those long lean hands, which kept clasping and unclasping themselves, stealing towards his rifle and then creeping away from it, only added to the horror of the night. At the risk of precipitating a crisis, I had almost made up my mind to get up and put Slim's rifle out of his reach, when suddenly from the deep gloom at the back of us came a "halloa" clear and distinct. At the sound of it every man round that camp fire svrang to his feet, except the Indian, who only shuddered and drew •his blanket closer round his headi . "What was that, Rufus?" asked Maurice of our guide, who stood with hands clenched and haggard face, staring with wolf's eyes across the firelight into the gloom beyond. "An owl may be," but as he spoke, and before he cculd shape his drawn lips into the semblance of a laugh, it came again "Halloa, Halloa!" the cry of a lost .man seeking guidance. . ... ."Shout back to him, Wentworth. It is some poor devil who has lost his way." But none of us shouted. We were old frontiersmen, and knew the cry, and shared, in spite of reason, in that superstition which asserts that those who seek or follow "the whoopers" will not live the year out. "Why don't you answer, Wentworth? What ie it?" But I could not explain. I cannot explain now. Like most men who have lived much on the frontier, I have heard that cry often, and the hollow axe strokes in the woods, and I have known men who have gone to seek the axe men, but I have never known one who followed them and lived the year out. "What is it? The cry of an owl?" No, I know th« owl's cry, and the cries of all. the birds of our northern woods, neither are the axe strokes made by the' beak of the great woodpecker. He sleeps o' nights; besides, as far as we had there were neither birds nor beasts in those desolate forests of black pine. The frontiersmen say that the spirit* of men lost beyond the border of the known—but what good is it to repeat their foolish legends? There are still many things men do-not understand, and cannot account for, and those strangely human cries in the woods at night are amongst them. We shuddered and sat still waiting, whilst the whooper seemed to circle about our fire, now coming near, now lost further in those sepulchral shades. After a time the cries died farther and farther away, and seeing that Slim had left his rifle by the fireside, I picked ii up, and putting it alongside my own, rolled my blanket round mc, I suppose, slept. The last I saw of Slim he was standing on the edge of the fire-lit circle, peering into the gloom whence the sounds came. Suddenly I was on my feet again, wide awake, with my ears tingling, and my heart beating furiously. A crash of sound had broken the stillness of the night, and the echoes of a rifle shot were still ringing hideously in the woods. That the "accident" had happened at last was my first thought, and as my hand reached for Slim's rifle and missed it from the place in which I had laid,it, my fear became a certainty. But, no, there was Maurice with white face listening like myself, and the shrouded figure of the Indian was still croucning over the fire. "What the devil can he be shooting at, at this time of night?" asked Maurice, but he got no reply, and we waited long and vainly for an explanation. When the dawn broke, we cooked our breakfast, and as the guide was still missing piled up a big fire, that the column of its smoke might show where the camp lay, and shouted for him till we were hoarse, although the sound of our own "halloas" brought back too vividly the horrors of the past night. But we received no answer, neither did the cracking of the brush herald the retufa of Slim. Then we made up out minds to follow Mc , * a rj&totantix ea»y matter v the

snow showed his 'trackT" clearly. " For ,the' first , time for "aVeefcj there was no snow mist drifting through the 1 trees, io sullen murkiness in,"the sfcy.V Instead -the-.'sun-.had hurij*r : every' twig -with dia-imbinlßj-th'e brtfeh crackled merrily iinder foot, and the. snow'was dry-and pow- ; dery. .;■ ■■ *. '■' •. -r^^' , \ -■■ "'- ■■•--..■ Nor' were the icicles' the-only things upon which the sun glinted. "Before we had gone a hundred-yards, a great dazzle of light upon the bole;of one of the pines arrested our attention, ■ Upon closer ■ inspection we found that this was-caused by. an ordinary tin plate, such as miners use* hi cairip. ' ! : ' "* *'-•. ; ;:>i . i>: This had been spiked to a tree, and whin one of us had* 1 dusted the snow off it,'we found' something scratched'upon it. ■ -■■■. : '-- : •'.' - * ,* ■Jβ hij My first impression was that Slim had left us a message, but that could not be, for the plate had obviously been spiked in its place for many, months, if not for years. Probably in the dark Slim had gone past the plate without seeing it. And yet the message, if not from him, concerned him. "Rube Sehl," it began, and for all it helped me s it might have ended there for the only other word was illegible. It was scrawled as if the hand that wrote it had lost its power. But it was strange that it should deal with Rube Sehl, when Rufus Slim had passed it not -five hours before. . However, I made light of the matter to my companion. He did not know that Rufus Slim had ever called himself Rube Sehl. and he was content with my surmise that some-poor devil lost in the woods had left this message for the world he never expected to see again. "What Maurice thought I do not know. Probably he connected the message with those cries we had heard in the night, but as we pushed on I was setting myself problems that I could not solve. Lost men did not begin their messages with their own name 3. That was how they ended them. If. the writer was riot Rube Sehl, what was'it that he was anxious to tell the world about our guide— so anxious that he had to write it with the last effort .of his waning strength, I could no find an answer for myself, but for all that the answer came almost immediately. > "Wentwortk, look! My God! • What is that?- - * Of course Maurice knew. The question only represented man's desire under certain circumstances to disbelieve his own eyes. No one wants to believe in 'death, but there it was in its most hideous aspect. Prone in the snow which -was flecked and spattered with scarlet stains lay Rufus Slim, motionless and uncaring, thougft Maurice started at him with eyes strained with a great horror, and the Indian looked ac one may look at a great terror he had expected to face. There was no surprise in his face, only a great fear. When we went , up to .the body, we found no life in it. The fingers were already stiffened by-the..frost, and the clothes frozen hard. Slim had been dead for hours; he had died when the rifle shot woke us, and the discharged rifle on which he lay, made the manner of bis death plain to us. He had tripped end fallen- whilst carrying his rifle at full cock, and the bullet of the Winchester had torn off the top of his head. • •..- .. But when we turned him over, and moved him for burial, we found, or some' of us thought that we found, more than this simple 'explanation, of this man's death. - What looked at first like the bleached root of a pine tree, had projected from the ground, and, catching in SlimS: mocassins, had thrown him. ■ .•*.,■ i . Those o£ you who have travelled in the woods know how a .comparatively small twig will sometimes catch in the point of your- skin shoes, and,' rising as your fo6t presses forward, throw you in' spite of every ejfort on your part to save yourself. --v It is an exasperatingly slow fall, but inevitable. I have wondered .since how much a man might know' and 'think, whilst such a twig threw him. J Not much I hope, for Slim'-s sake, for when I looked against the bleached thing which "dung to his mocassins, by owi» blood nearly froze in my veins. The white claw -was not a bleached pine root, bet the bonfes of a man's hand, and when we removed it we found the bones of the' foreaim still attached to it, and not, far below the snow the rest' of a human skeleton: A man, it seemed, had at some.time died here, and laid where he fell, until the beasts and the . elements had had their will of him, and then.the.'pine.needles and windjbroken boughs "and" the winter snows had covered him, all except that grasping hand, which "a strange coincidence" had set in the way of Rube Sehl's feet. As far as I could the skeleton was perfect hut for two things. There was a gaping crack in the skull, and. two tpes of the right foot were missing. It wais as if a voice spake in my ear,."The cook who went prospecting with Rube Sehl had lost two'toes -from frost bite.-" Three hours after we had buried these two by the whooper's camp, we-stumbled upon a blazed trail, and following it, came towards sundown to a bare patch where stood an- old brush house, and round it signs of a prolonged occupation by white men, but though the situation was convenient, and the hour late, Maurice would not stay there. ,< - I had no doubt then, and have none still, but a careful search would have been rewarded by the discovery of Slim's claim somewhere near the'hrueh but instead of looking for it, we followed another blazed trail, blazed one way only, which led us from the shelter to the mam Klondike trail. ..-."..• No doubt this was the way by which Slim intended us to come in. He had lost hie way, and been led other ways. For us, once we were on the Klondike trail, I think -we had no other desire than to strike the C.P. Railway, and man's land again as soon as possible.