It was an almost regular tube, in black lava stone, four feet wide, seven or eight in height, smooth as glass mostly. Invisible fissures, however, must have supplied sweet air, for it was not hard breathing in all the extent, nearer three quarters of a mile than a half on the straight. No human hand had fashioned it; one must presume that, in the days when Vulcan swayed over Neptune on the earth, a torrent of lava was rushing down the steeps, when, suddenly, an immense snowfall smothered the fiery river and chilled it into a casing of stone around a still molten interior. That inner flow had continued, and left the tubular crust intact.
The ground was a fine sand, heavy with iron, so that it did not rise far. At the end of this channel a star suddenly gleamed, welcome in the complete darkness, into which, assuredly, the bravest of men would have hesitated to follow a foe. It was the outer air again, filling a basin, rock-engirt to a great height. In this lonely spot there was not a scrap of moss, not one blade of grass, and no shrub, however hardy. The calcined "blossom rock" wore a yellow hue, streaked with red and black; but here and there rose separate boulders of quartz, disintegrated by time and rain and whirling winds, which danced these Titanic blocks like thistles, and squeezed out those dull misshapen lumps. Those lumps were gold, however; this was a "mother-source" one of those nests of Fortune for which the confirmed gold seeker quits home, family, wealth itself in other mines that content the less ravenous. Ridge traversed this placer no pleasure to him, lonely Man of the Mountain with a foot as reckless as those of the string of animals. The night was coming. He hurried them on into a second but short subterranean passage, with a couple of turnings, which finally opened into a cavern. At its far end a natural doorway afforded a view of the deep blue sky, where the brilliant stars seemed all of a sudden to be strewn. In those few moments the sun had gone down, and darkness come.
Ridge laid aside his gun, and started a fire, already laid, in a cavity of the grotto. The walls gleamed back the rising firelight; here amber studs in coal, there patches of mica-schist, varied gold and silver in hue.
After unpacking the animals, whose stores he carefully placed in caves, he sent them after the bell mare and the hunting horses, in through a channel to a sort of enclosed pasturage. Returning, he put some jerked meat down to broil, some roots to roast like so many potatoes, and added to the setting-out of a rude but hearty meal several of the delicacies brought in the train from Oregon. He was calmly smoking, reclining at great ease, with the air of one who felt he had earned the repose, lulled by the sweet murmur of underground streams, pouring out of ancient glaciers. The approach of footsteps made him glance round. The steps he knew to be Cherokee Bill's; so it was their being heavier than usual that alone roused him.
The half-breed was carrying a man over his shoulder with no more delicacy than if it had been a deer's carcase.
"Got him, Bill!" remarked Ridge.
"I should smile not to capture such a tenderfoot," was the rejoinder, as he flung his human prize upon the cavern floor.
CHAPTER IV
THE MAN WHO RAN RIGHT INTO TROUBLE
The prisoner of the Cherokee half-breed was in a forlorn state, more particularly as regarded apparel. Hardly suited for mountaineering at their best, his clothes were sorry rags, which an attempt at mending with bark fibre and rawhide had even rendered more lamentable. A horsehair lasso, of remarkable fineness and strength, was wound round and round him with a care which a Chinese would have envied. A handful of moss was the gag which nearly choked him, but his eyes were more full of rage than supplication, and they seemed to burn with enhanced indignation when he found the Indian was in concert with a white hunter.
Young Bill Williams flung his captive down on some dry rushes, and, laying aside his gun and the stranger's, which was broken, he sat down at the fire.
"It was a coyote," he remarked, scornfully. "But the Cherokee did not give him even time to yelp."
"Ah!" said Ridge, "I wonder you did not shoot him thar. Thar will always be plenty of that game on the prairie for the greenhorn hunter, I opine. It is all very well our discovering this country, but we don't want any raw Eastern fellows, with Boston dressing, discovering us!" Bill made no comment. He had pulled the soused bears' paws over to him, poured out some coffee from which the full aroma was extracted by a sudden chill at the height of its boiling with cold water and was thus beginning his meal.
The silence that fell was broken only by the champing of the two men as they repaid themselves for the travail since Monday. Each had a brandy flask, and their supplies included spirits, but neither drank anything but the sweet, pure water of the snow torrent. Ridge was naturally abstemious, the half-Cherokee sober from having seen the mischief wrought his mother's race by the firewater.
After the meal, the two smoked, and the white man faintly whistled a lively tune. Neither gave heed to the prisoner, who had ample leisure to gaze on the strange resort into which he had been unceremoniously conveyed.
The firelight illuminated the grotto; several gaps were outlets or storehouses; bales of furs, bundles of army and trade guns, kegs of powder, pigs of lead, packages of fancy goods used in Indian trading, harness, simple cooking utensils, these encumbered the place; but one could guess that they would form a barricade at emergency in case the enemy penetrated to this inmost hold. At first glance, and even at the leisure gaze of the prisoner, it seemed the den of a bandit.
"What did you bring him into the ranche for, chief?" inquired Ridge, in that pigeon-English of the Northwest, called the "Chinnook" dialect, though composed of Chinnook, Scotch, English, and Canadian-French, as well as hunters' English, to which confusing medley these two friends imparted still another zest by an infusion of Cherokee, Creole, French, and Spanish-American, for which good reason we forbear the sentences verbatim.
"Because," replied the other, "it was too dark to see the trail, and he must tell whether he is alone or the spy of a band. At all events, it doesn't look as if he had been in to the fort for his pay lately," added Bill, with a quiet fleeting smile, "and bought any clothes!"
"You are right. Loose him, and we'll try him. By the way, that's a beauty lariat, I can tell you."
Indeed, as before hinted, the lasso confining the captive was composed of selected horsehair, and toilsomely and deftly plaited.
"I was still on the scout," said Bill, whilst engaged undoing the bonds, rolling the man to and fro as suited his desires, "when suddenly a movement of a scrub pine half a pistol shot off made me bring my rifle to bear on it. I was just about to pull, when up pops my man, crying: 'Hold hard, or you're a dead Injun!' Me? It looked as if we were going to make our bullets kiss in midair, but I reckon I was a leetle the quicker, and while his ball whistled upon the top storeys of the sierra, mine cut his barrel in half, right there at the stock, which remained in his hand. So, as he staggered in surprise, I sprang on him, took off from his belt the lasso a real article, and no mistake! Worth a war pony! and girdled him like a papoose. Moreover, I wrapped my robe round his head, so that he should not see how we glide into the Rocky Mountain House, proprietors, Messrs. Ridge and Williams, and here he is dumped down."
The man was hardly able to stand when unbound. He wiped his mouth with the tattered sleeve of his old army overcoat, shook himself, and reeled round toward the fire, whither the half-breed had given him a gentle push.
The man was hardly able to stand when unbound. He wiped his mouth with the tattered sleeve of his old army overcoat, shook himself, and reeled round toward the fire, whither the half-breed had given him a gentle push.
"We don't often meet a white man away here," said Ridge, sitting up like a judge. "Let me have a good long look."
The firelight fell full upon him. Already, whilst waiting, the stranger had fortified himself: he was cold, calm, save for his lips curling in a mocking smile, though he very well saw that his confronters were his judges, and, possibly, executioners, if they determined on death.
He was a man about five and forty, rather tall, with legs "split up so far" as to be as good a walker almost as Ridge himself. He was the more gaunt from recent privations. His "weather skin" seemed newly assumed, and, seen in the town, he would have been taken for a schoolmaster of the Indian Reservations or a trader's bookkeeper.
"You are a white, an American, from the Eastern States," said Ridge, after a couple of minutes. "You are not a hunter or trapper, a gentleman sportsman, or a squaw man. What brings you out here up in the mountains?"
"You are a white, an American of these Western States," returned the other, quietly, "whence your right to pull me about and question me? If this Indian is on the land of his forefathers, I will pay him tribute as far as in my power. As for you, why stop my wandering? Have I sought to run against you? Have I done anything more than essay to defend my life when a firearm was levelled at my breast? State anything that gives you a right to deal with a citizen of the United States in the United States?"
"These are big words," replied Ridge, puzzled whether to be angry or amused, though there was no doubt that Cherokee Bill felt the first sentiment; "but I am not exchanging Fourth of July speeches with you, but asking questions."
"To answer? 'Spose I don't choose?"
"You'll be made to, I guess," rejoined the mountaineer, hotly.
"You mean you two will cut my throat in this den, or hang me in my own lasso! The latter will serve me right, as I took it at the cost of a life from the redskin who hurled me off my horse with the same. Well, suppose you do kill me, will you know more about me than you do now?"
"What! Killed an Indian for the rope?" said Ridge, turning to the Cherokee. "What breed?"
"Comanche!" said the latter, examining the lasso critically.
"The lasso is of Comanche make," went on the mountain man, severely frowning again. "And I'll swear your cheek has never been burnt south of the Platte."
"That's so. It was a 'foot Indian' who tried to kill me. I boast no knowledge of these gentry. That's one of his shoes. The other I wore to death on these cursed flinty hills."
"Crow!" cried the Half-breed, with a glance at the moccasin. "Mountain Crow! And a war shoe!"
"The Crows 'out,'" repeated Ridge, biting his lips. "You see, we are getting information, though you are so stingy. Come, as your news leads off so good, continue it. Who are you, I say? And what is your business where few of us who are regular trappers venture?"
"A trapper?"
"An honest trapper! What did you take us for? robbers and murderers?" said the hunter, indignantly.
"Well, I kind o' don't know," rejoined the stranger, with a significant glance at Cherokee Bill, whose savage eyes were not reassuring like the other's. "My name is no value out here, four thousand miles from my folks, I guess; but if you are a regular trapper "
"I am called the Old Man of the Mountain," said Ridge, sadly rather than proudly. "I am about the last of the old guard I fear one of the oldest men. I am Jim Ridge. That's the young man's best companion out here, that's called the Yager same name put on me, too, by the hearing of it; the Yager of the Yellowstone. When I handled that first in '42, I bent a trifle under the weight. Them was the grand, good old times! The sort of men we get now don't grade up with the brand that passed up to 1850. They don't hunt now they butcher. They don't trap they surround and slaughter. They'll be clearing out a beaver lake with a diving bell, next! I wonder! Yes, I am the Old Man, the Yager of the Yellowstones," he repeated, a little piqued at his fame falling on a dead ear "Injin or white, they all know this child."
The stranger seemed easier; but, unfortunately, the ghost of a smile on his wan features was assumed to be impudence.
"Answer, then," went on Ridge, testily, "for I don't want none of your blood on my knife, though it is itching to be in at your ribs."
"Nonsense. You are neither hasty nor bloodthirsty, Mr. Ridge. One question from me first, if you please "
Old Jim waved his hand disgustedly at this polite address, and the "Mistering."
"I just want to know if you know Mr. Brasher, of Varina?"
"Do I know 'Trading Jake?' Muchly; and ever so long. Those bales are for him," pointing to a stack against the walls.
"Then I have a message for you, Mr. Ridge," went on the prisoner, relieved entirely.
"A letter?"
"The letter is lost; I ate it up when a gang of Digger Indians played the joke of making me exchange a good outfit for these rags. Luckily, they thought it was a talisman, and that to cook me and eat me with that medicine paper in my gullet was an error, and so I got away, together with my gun. But I know the contents, and they are important, Mr. Brasher said."
"Fire away!" said Ridge, more and more thawed out towards the speaker.
"But first, some proof I am not being deceived."
"Hang the man!" laughed Jim, amused at being an unknown to one person in this world. "Show him my brand on those packs, Bill."
"'J. Ridge' hem! Well," said the captive, "this is the communication: 'The man they call Captain Kidd and a gang of border troublers slid out of town with tools, stores, and firearms galore, and I want the Old Man of the Mountain to know that they are bound for the Big Placer in the Yellowstone Region.' That is what I was to tell every regular hunter and trapper until Mr. Ridge heard of it."
"Oh, call me Jim! I am much obliged to Brasher. Well, stranger, you are too deep for me if this is a getup of your'n. Resarve your own secret, and meanwhile there's sage ile and snake grease for your bruises, and fire and meat and Injin 'taters; and you can have whiskey if your appetite calls that way. Fall on! As the soldiers say."
Then vacating the fireside, he drew aside with the Indian, and the two eyed the captive inquisitorially while he devoured the supper, which represented probably two or three meals he had missed.
"Drink free!" said Ridge, offering a horn cup. "You need fear nothing now. One who has shared the trapper's hospitality has to be a precious mean skunk to deserve kicking out."
"Nobody's going to say a word against your hospitality," retorted the stranger, sarcastically. "The feed's capital, and the liquor a reviver, for, though a temperance man, I need it as medicine, I can tell you. But the way the trapper introduces guests to his hospitality by shooting a welcome at him, trussing him up like a turkey, and tossing him down on the floor like a roll of carpet to be beaten, is not what a simple traveller from the Atlantic seaboard approves of."
"Stranger," said Ridge, sitting down on a buffalo skull stool covered luxuriously with furs which a Russian grand duchess might give her earrings to possess, "this is our home round here by all the rights the first discoverer and the constant defender may claim. My companyero was not to know with what intentions you were making yourself a neighbour. You may think yourself lucky that his shot did not pierce your brain or heart, and that he did not use the slipknot of your lariat to decorate the nearest larch with you. It is necessary that our mountain fort should be kept hid from everybody. Gentlemen like Mr. Brasher do not know it, sir. Tell me your name, show that you are no evildoer, and after you have rested you may equip yourself and go your way. We can trust to your being led out, hoodwinked as you were brought, to maintain our secret. So much I will do for Trading Jake's messenger. Anything else, stranger?"