The Gold Hunters - James Oliver Curwood (superbooks4u .TXT) 📗

replace the one he had broken, and not a stroke of the three pairs of arms was lost. Early in the morning a young moose allowed them to pass within a hundred yards of him. But no shot was fired, for to obtain the meat would have meant an hour's loss of time.

Two hours after the start the country again began taking on a sudden change. From east and west the wild mountain ridges closed in, and with each mile's progress the stream narrowed and grew swifter, until again it was running between chasm walls that rose black and silent over the adventurers' heads. Darker and gloomier became the break between the mountains. Far above, a thousand feet or more, dense forests of red pine flung their thick shadows over the edge of the chasm, in places almost completely shutting out the light of day. This was not like the other chasm. It was deeper and darker and more sullen. Under its walls the gloom was almost that of night. Its solitude was voiceless; not a bird fluttered or chirped among its rocks; the lowest of whispered words sounded with startling distinctness. Once Rod spoke aloud, and his voice rose and beat itself in the cavernous depths of the walls until it seemed as though he had shouted. Now they ceased paddling, and Mukoki steered. Noiselessly the current swept them on. In the twilight gloom Rod's face shone with singular whiteness. Mukoki and Wabigoon crouched like bronze silhouettes. It was as if some mysterious influence held them in its power, forbidding speech, holding their eyes in staring expectancy straight ahead, filling them with indefinable sensations that made their hearts beat faster and their blood tingle.

Softly, from far ahead, at last there came a murmur. It was like the first gentle whispering of an approaching wind, the soughing of a breath among the pines at the top of the chasm. But a wind among the trees rises, and then dies away, like a chord struck low and gently upon some soft-toned instrument. This whisper that came up the chasm remained. It grew no louder, and sometimes it almost faded away, until the straining ears of those who listened could barely detect it; but after a moment it was there again, as plainly as before. Little by little it became more distinct, until there were no longer intervals when it died away, and at last Wabigoon turned in the bow and faced his companions, and though he spoke no word there was the gleam of a great excitement in his eyes. Rod's heart beat like a drum. He, too, began to understand. That moaning, whispering sound floating up the chasm was not the wind, but the far-away rumble of the third waterfall!

Mukoki's voice broke the tense silence from behind.

"That the fall!"

Wabigoon replied in words scarcely louder than a whisper. There was no joyful shouting now, as there had been at the discovery of the second fall. Even Mukoki's voice was so low that the others could barely hear. Something between these chasm walls seemed to demand silence from them, and as the rumble of the cataract came more and more clearly to their ears they held their breath in voiceless anticipation. A few hundred yards ahead of them was the treasure which men long since dead had discovered more than half a century before; between the black mountain walls that so silently guarded that treasure there seemed to lurk the spirit presence of the three men who had died because of it. Here, somewhere very near, John Ball had been murdered, and Rod almost fancied that along the sandy edge of the chasm stream they might stumble on the footprints of the men whose skeletons they had discovered in the ancient cabin.

Mukoki uttered no sound as he guided the canoe ashore. Still without word, the three picked up their rifles and Wabigoon led the way along the edge of the stream. Soon it dashed a swift racing torrent between the rocks, and Rod and his companions knew that they were close upon the fall. A hundred yards or more and they saw the white mist of it leaping up before their eyes. Wabi began to run, his moccasined feet springing from stone to stone with the caution of a hunter approaching game, and Mukoki and Rod came close behind him.

They paused upon the edge of a great mass of rock with the spray of the plunging cataract rising in their faces. Breathless they gazed down. It was not a large fall. Wabi silently measured it at forty feet. But it added just that much more to the depth and the gloom of the chasm beyond, into which there seemed no way of descent. The rock walls rose sheer and black, with clumps of cedar and stunted pine growing at their feet. Farther on the space between the mountains became wider, and the river reached out on either side, frothing and beating itself into white fury in a chaos of slippery water-worn rocks.

Down there—somewhere—was the golden treasure they had come to seek, unless the map lied! Was it among those rocks, where the water dashed and fumed? Was it hidden in some gloomy cavern of the mountain sides, its trail concealed by the men who discovered it half an age ago? Would they find it, after all—would they find it?

A great gulp of excitement rose in Rod's throat, and he looked at
Wabigoon.

The Indian youth had stretched out an arm. His eyes were blazing, his whole attitude was one of tense emotion.

"There's the cabin," he cried, "the cabin built by John Ball and the two Frenchmen! See, over there among those cedars, almost hidden in that black shadow of the mountain! Great Scott, Muky—Rod—can't you see? Can't you see?"

CHAPTER XIV THE PAPER IN THE OLD TIN BOX

Slowly out of that mysterious gloom there grew a shape before Rod's eyes. At first it was only a shadow, then it might have been a rock, and then the gulp in his throat leaped out in a shout when he saw that Wabigoon's sharp eyes had in truth discovered the old cabin of the map. For what else could it be? What else but the wilderness home of the adventurers whose skeletons they had found, Peter Plante and Henri Langlois, and John Ball, the man whom these two had murdered?

Rod's joyous voice was like the touch of fire to Wabi's enthusiasm and in a moment the oppressive silence of their journey down the chasm was broken by the wild cheers which the young gold seekers sent echoing between the mountains. Grimacing and chuckling in his own curious way, Mukoki was already slipping along the edge of the rock, seeking some break by which he might reach the lower chasm. They were on the point of turning to the ascent of the mountain, along which they would have to go until they found such a break, when the old pathfinder directed the attention of his companions to the white top of a dead cedar stub projecting over the edge of the precipice.

"Go down that, mebby," he suggested, shrugging his shoulders to suggest that the experiment might be a dangerous one.

Rod looked over. The top of the stub was within easy reach, and the whole tree was entirely free of bark or limbs, a fact which in his present excitement did not strike him as especially unusual. Swinging his rifle strap over his shoulders he reached out, caught the slender apex of the stub, and before the others could offer a word of encouragement or warning was sliding down the wall of the rock into the chasm. Wabi was close behind him, and not waiting for Mukoki's descent the two boys hurried toward the cabin. Half-way to it Wabi stopped.

"This isn't fair. We've got to wait for Muky."

They looked back. Mukoki was not following. The old warrior was upon his knees at the base of the dead tree, as though he was searching for something among the rocks at its foot. Then he rose slowly, and rubbed his hands along the stub as high as he could reach. When he saw that Rod and Wabi were observing him he quickly came toward them, and Wabigoon, who was quick to notice any change in him, was confident that he had made a discovery of some kind.

"What have you found, Muky?"

"No so ver' much. Funny tree," grunted the Indian.

"Smooth as a fireman's brass pole," added Rod, seeing no significance in Mukoki's words. "Listen!"

He stopped so suddenly that Wabigoon bumped into him from behind.

"Did you hear that?"

"No."

For a few moments the three huddled close together in watchful silence. Mukoki was behind the boys or they would have seen that his rifle was ready to spring to his shoulder and that his black eyes were snapping with something not aroused by curiosity alone. The cabin was not more than twenty paces away. It was old, so old that Rod wondered how it had withstood the heavy storms of the last winter. A growth of saplings had found root in its rotting roof and the logs of which it was built were in the last stage of decay. There was no window, and where the door had once been there had grown a tree a foot in diameter, almost closing the narrow aperture through which the mysterious inhabitants had passed years before. A dozen paces, five paces from this door, and Mukoki's hand reached out and laid itself gently upon Wabi's shoulder. Rod saw the movement and stopped. A strange look had come into the old Indian's face, an expression in which there was incredulity and astonishment, as if he believed and yet doubted what his eyes beheld. Mutely he pointed to the tree growing before the door, and to the reddish, crumbling rot into which the logs had been turned by the passing of generations.

"Red pine," he said at last. "That cabin more'n' twent' t'ous'nd year old!"

There was an awesome ring in his voice. Rod understood, and clutched Wabi's arm. In an instant he thought of the other old cabin, in which they had found the skeletons. They had repaired that cabin and had passed the winter in it, and they knew that it had been built half a century or more before. But this cabin was beyond repair. To Rod it seemed as though centuries of time instead of decades had been at work on its timbers. Following close after Wabi he thrust his head through the door. Deep gloom shut out their vision. But as they looked, steadily inuring their eyes to the darkness within, the walls of the old cabin took form, and they saw that everywhere was vacancy. There was no ancient table, as in the other cabin they had discovered at the head of the first chasm, there were no signs of the life that had once existed, not even the remnants of a chair or a stool. The cabin was bare.

Foot by foot the two boys went around its walls. Mukoki took but a single glance inside and disappeared. Once alone he snapped down the safety of his rifle. Quickly, as if he feared interruption, he hurried around the old cabin, his eyes close to the earth. When Rod and Wabi returned to the door he was at the edge of the fall, crouching low among the rocks like an animal seeking a trail. Wabi pulled his companion back.

"Look!"

The old warrior rose, suddenly erect, and turned toward them, but the boys were hidden in the gloom. Then he hurried to the dead stub beside the chasm wall. Again he reached far up, rubbing his hand along its surface.

"I'm going to have a look at that tree!" whispered Wabi. "Something is puzzling Are you coming?"

He hurried across the rock-strewn opening, but Rod hung back. He could not understand his companions. For weeks and months they had planned to find this third waterfall. Visions of a great treasure had been constantly before their eyes, and now that they were here, with the gold perhaps under their very feet, both Mukoki and Wabigoon were more interested in a dead stub than in their search for it! His own heart was almost bursting with excitement. The very air which he breathed in the old cabin set his blood leaping with anticipation. Here those earlier adventurers had lived half a century or more ago. In it the life-blood of the murdered John Ball might have ebbed away. In this cabin the men whose skeletons he had found had slept, and planned, and measured their gold. And the gold! It was that and not the stub that interested Roderick Drew! Where was the lost treasure? Surely