Raw Gold: A Novel Read online

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  HICKS DREW HIS AND SLAPPED ME OVER THE HEAD WITH IT, EVEN AS MY FINGER CURLED ON THE TRIGGER.

  _Frontispiece. Page 161._]

  RAW GOLD

  A NOVEL

  BY

  BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR

  _Illustrations by_ CLARENCE H. ROWE

  G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

  Copyright, 1907, by STREET & SMITH

  Copyright, 1908, by G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY

  Issued June, 1908

  _Raw Gold_

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER PAGE

  I. The Long Arm of the Law 7

  II. A Reminiscent Hour 18

  III. Birds of Prey 30

  IV. A Tale Half Told 59

  V. Mounted Again 50

  VI. Stony Crossing 58

  VII. Thirty Days in Irons 69

  VIII. Lyn 85

  IX. An Idle Afternoon 103

  X. The Vanishing Act, and the Fruits Thereof 116

  XI. The Gentleman Who Rode in the Lead 130

  XII. We Lose Again 146

  XIII. Outlawed 163

  XIV. A Close Call 179

  XV. Piegan Takes a Hand 197

  XVI. In the Camp of the Enemy 214

  XVII. A Master-stroke of Villainy 226

  XVIII. Honor Among Thieves 240

  XIX. The Bison 251

  XX. The Mouth of Sage Creek 258

  XXI. An Elemental Ally 271

  XXII. Speechless Hicks 283

  XXIII. The Spoils of War 294

  XXIV. The Pipe of Peace 303

  ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE

  Hicks drew his and slapped me over the head with it, even as my finger curled on the trigger Frontispiece 161

  Bedded in the soft earth underneath lay the slim buckskin sacks 159

  "There's been too much blood shed over that wretched gold already. Let them have it" 212

  A war for the open road against an enemy whose only weapon was his unswerving bulk 256

  RAW GOLD.

  CHAPTER I.

  THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW.

  How many of us, I wonder, can look back over the misty, half-forgottenyears and not see a few that stand out clear and golden, sharp-cutagainst the sky-line of memory? Years that we wish we could live again,so that we might revel in every full-blooded hour. For we so seldom getthe proper focus on things until we look at them through the clarifyingtelescope of Time; and then one realizes with a pang that he can'tback-track into the past and take his old place in the passing show.

  Would we, if we could? It's an idle question, I know; wise men and mustyphilosophers say that regrets are foolish. But I speak for myself onlywhen I say that I would gladly wheedle old, gray-bearded _Tempus_ intomaking the wheels click backward till I could see again thebuffalo-herds darkening the green of Northwestern prairies. They and theblanket Indian have passed, and the cowpuncher and Texas longhorns thatreplaced them will soon be little more than a vivid memory. Already theman with the plow is tearing up the brown sod that was a stamping-groundfor each in turn; the wheat-fields have doomed the sage-brush, andtruck-farms line the rivers where the wild cattle and the elk came downto drink.

  It was a big life while it lasted--primitive, exhilarating, spiced withdangers that added zest to the game; the petty, sordid things of lifeonly came in on the iron trail. There was no place for them in the oldWest, the dead-and-gone West that will soon be forgotten.

  I expect nearly everybody between the Arctic Circle and the Isthmus ofPanama has heard more or less of the Northwest Mounted Police. They'rechanging with the years, like everything else in this one-time buffalocountry, but when Canada sent them out to keep law and order in aterritory that was a City of Refuge for a lot of tough people who hadplayed their string out south of the line, they were, as a dry oldcodger said about the Indian as a scalp-lifter, naturally fitted for thetask. And it was no light task, then, for six hundred men to keep thepeace on a thousand miles of frontier.

  It doesn't seem long ago, but it was in '74 that they filed down thegangway of a Missouri River boat, walking as straight and stiff as ifevery mother's son of them had a ramrod under his tunic, and out on arickety wharf that was groaning under the weight of a king's ransom inbaled buffalo-hides.

  "Huh!" old Piegan Smith grunted in my ear. "Look at 'em, with theirsolemn faces. There'll be heaps uh fun in the Cypress Hills country whenthey get t' runnin' the whisky-jacks out. Ain't they a queer-lookin'bunch?"

  They were a queer-looking lot to more than Piegan. Their uniforms fittedas if they had grown into them; scarlet jackets buttoned to the throat,black riding-breeches with a yellow stripe running down the outer seamof each leg, and funny little round caps like the lid of a bigbaking-powder can set on one side of their heads, held there by a narrowstrap that ran around the chin. But for all their comic-opera get-up,there was many a man that snickered at them that day in Benton wholearned later to dread the flash of a scarlet jacket on the distanthills.

  They didn't linger long at Benton, but got under way and marchedoverland to the Cypress Hills. On Battle Creek they built the firstpost, Fort Walsh, and though in time they located others, Walsh remainedheadquarters for the Northwest so long as buffalo-hunting and the Indiantrade endured. And Benton and Walsh were linked together by greatfreight-trails thereafter, for the Mounted Police supplies came up theMissouri and traveled by way of long bull-trains to their destination;there was no other way then; Canada was a wilderness, and Benton withits boats from St. Louis was the gateway to the whole Northwest.

  Two years from the time Fort Walsh was built the La Pere outfit sent meacross the line in charge of a bunch of saddle-horses the M. P.quartermaster had said he'd buy if they were good. I turned them overthe afternoon I reached Walsh, and inside of forty-eight hours I washeaded home with the sale-money--ten thousand dollars--in big bills, sothat I could strap it round my middle. I remember that on the hill southof the post the three of us, two horse-wranglers and myself, flipped adollar to see whether we kept to the Assiniboine trail or struck acrosscountry. It was a mighty simple transaction, but it produced somestartling results for me, that same coin-spinning. The eagle cameuppermost, and the eagle meant the open prairie for us. So we aimed forStony Crossing, and let our horses jog; there were three of us, wellmounted, and we had plenty of grub on a pack-horse; it seemed that ourhomeward trip should be a pleasant jaunt. It certainly never entered myhead that I sho
uld soon have ample opportunity to see how high the"Riders of the Plains" stacked up when they undertook to enforceCanadian law and keep intact the peace and dignity of the Crown.

  We had started early that morning, and by the time we thought of campingfor dinner we saw ahead of us what we could tell was a white man's camp.It wasn't far, so we kept on, and presently it developed that we hadaccidentally come upon old Piegan Smith. He was lying there ostensiblyresting his stock from the hard buffalo-running of the past winter, butI knew the old rascal's horses were more weary from a load of moonshinewhisky they had lately jerked into the heart of the territory. But hewas there, anyway, and half a dozen choice spirits with him, and whenwe'd said "Howdy" all around they proceeded to spring a keg of whisky onus.

  Now, the whole Northwest groaned beneath a cast-iron prohibition law atthat time, and for some years thereafter. No booze of any descriptionwas supposed to be sold in that portion of the Queen's domain. If yougot so thirsty you couldn't stand it any longer, you could petition thegoverning power of the Territory for what was known as a "permit," whichsame document granted you leave and license to have in your possessionone gallon of whisky. If you were a person of irreproachable character,and your humble petition reached his excellency when he was amiablydisposed, you might, in the course of a few weeks, get the desiredpermission--but, any way you figured it, whisky was hard to get, andwhen you got it it came mighty high.

  Naturally, that sort of thing didn't appeal to many of thehigh-stomached children of fortune who ranged up and down theTerritory--being nearly all Americans, born with the notion that it is awhite man's incontestable right to drink whatever he pleases whenever itpleases him. Consequently, every mother's son of them who knew howrustled a "worm," took up his post in some well-hidden coulee close tothe line, and inaugurated a small-sized distillery. Others, with lessskill but just as much ambition, delivered it in four-horse loads tothe traders, who in turn "boot-legged" it to whosoever would buy. Someof them got rich at it, too; which wasn't strange, when you considerthat everybody had a big thirst and plenty of money to gratify it. I'veseen barrels of moonshine whisky, so new and rank that two drinks of itwould make a jack-rabbit spit in a bull-dog's face, sold on the quietfor six and seven dollars a quart--and a twenty-dollar gold piece wassmall money for a gallon.

  All this, of course, was strictly against the peace and dignity of thepowers that were, and so the red-coated men rode the high divides withtheir eagle eye peeled for any one who looked like a whisky-runner. Andwhenever they did locate a man with the contraband in his possession,that gentleman was due to have his outfit confiscated and get a chanceto ponder the error of his ways in the seclusion of a Mounted Policeguardhouse if he didn't make an exceedingly fast getaway.

  We all took a drink when these buffalo-hunters produced the "red-eye."So far as the right or wrong of having contraband whisky was concerned,I don't think any one gave it a second thought. The patriarchal decreeof the government was a good deal of a joke on the plains,anyway--except when you were caught defying it! Then Piegan Smith setthe keg on the ground by the fire where everybody could help himself ashe took the notion, and I laid down by a wagon while dinner was beingcooked.

  After six weeks of hard saddle-work, it struck me just right to liethere in the shade with a cool breeze fanning my face, and before long Iwas headed smoothly for the Dreamland pastures. I hadn't dozed very longwhen somebody scattered my drowsiness with an angry yelp, and I raisedup on one elbow to see what was the trouble.

  Most of the hunters were bunched on one side of the fire, and they werelooking pretty sour at a thin, trim-looking Mounted Policeman who wasstanding with his back to me, holding the whisky-keg up to his nose. Alittle way off stood his horse, bridle-reins dragging, surveying thelittle group with his ears pricked up as if he, too, could smell thewhisky. The trooper sniffed a moment and set the keg down.

  "Gentlemen," he asked, in a soft, drawly voice that had a mightyfamiliar note that puzzled me, "have you a permit to have whisky in yourpossession?"

  Nobody said a word. There was really nothing they could say. He had themdead to rights, for it was smuggled whisky, and they knew that policemanwas simply asking as a matter of form, and that his next move would beto empty the refreshments on the ground; if they got rusty about it he_might_ haze the whole bunch of us into Fort Walsh--and that meant eachof us contributing a big, fat fine to the Queen's exchequer.

  "You know the law," he continued, in that same mild tone. "Where is yourauthority to have this stuff?"

  Then the clash almost came. If old Piegan Smith hadn't been sampling thecontents of that keg so industriously he would never have made a break.For a hot-tempered, lawless sort of an old reprobate, he had goodjudgment, which a man surely needed if he wanted to live out hisallotted span in the vicinity of the forty-ninth parallel those troubleddays. But he'd put enough of the fiery stuff under his belt to make himtouchy as a parlor-match, and when the trooper, getting no answer,flipped the keg over on its side and the whisky trickled out among thegrass-roots, Piegan forgot that he was in an alien land where the law isupheld to the last, least letter and the arm of it is long andunrelenting.

  "Here's my authority, yuh blasted runt," he yelled, and jerked hissix-shooter to a level with the policeman's breast. "Back off from thatkeg, or I'll hang your hide to dry on my wagon-wheel in a holy minute!"