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CHAPTER XXVII
THE TROOPER’S STORY

“However, I put the best face I could on the matter and even tried to talk cheerfully to Nevins. But he would have none of my conversation and zig-zagged along on his snow shoes with his queer, swinging gait in the same silent way. It began to grow dusk, and I saw that we should never make the lake that night. I halted Nevins and told him so.

“He gave an odd kind of laugh.

“‘Not make it? Man alive. I’m going to make it’ he grated out in an odd, rasping sort of a voice.

“‘Don’t talk like a fool,’ said I. ‘Come, here’s a place under this ledge that’ll make a good camp, and bright and early we’ll hit the trail again.’

“He whipped round on me with blazing eyes. If ever a demon shone out of a man’s optics it blazed out of his.

“‘I’m going on, I tell you,’ he snarled, ‘and what’s more, you’re going with me.’

“I’ve been in some pretty tight places, but take my word for it, right then I began to think that I hadn’t begun to know what a tight corner was. I could see by the way that poor crazy Nevins gripped his rifle that he meant to have company on his night ‘mush,’ even if he had to shoot him to get it. I felt as if somebody had dropped a chunk of ice down my back.

“‘All right, Nevins,’ I said, ‘I’ll go along. Don’t get excited.’

“‘I’m not excited,’ he said. And then he added, ‘It’s only that they’ll get us if we don’t keep on going.’

“‘Who’s them?’ I inquired.

“‘Those things that have been following us,’ he whispered.

“Then he came quite close to me and caught my arm.

“‘They live back there up in the snow, and they’re trying to get me and take me back with them, but they won’t.’ He broke into a wild laugh that made my scalp tighten till I could almost feel my hat lift on my hair.

“‘Don’t talk nonsense, Nevins,’ I snapped. ‘We’re far ahead of them. They’ll never catch us now.’

“He looked sharply at me.

“‘You’re more of a fool than I thought you,’ he said contemptuously. ‘They’ve been following us all day. They’re close behind us now!’

“I confess that his manner was such that I jumped nervously and looked behind me as he spoke. Of course there was nothing there but the trail, and I told him so, but a contemptuous laugh was all that I got.

“Well, in the course of my career as a trooper I’ve handled some pretty bad characters and been into some tight places and faced some situations where things looked mighty bad, but I never felt such a feeling of real scare as I had at that moment. Having made this outburst, Nevins started off again. After a while, when it began to get dark, I determined to make a last try to check his crazy plan. I stopped dead.

“‘Here’s where I stop, Nevins,’ I said. ‘I’m dead beat.’

“He faced round like a wild man, and before I could lift a hand he had his rifle raised, and with the yell of a maniac he fired blindly in my direction. I felt the bullet fan my ear.

“‘What on earth are you trying to do, Nevins?’ I asked in as firm a voice as I could assume, but I’m afraid it was as wobbly as a dish of jelly. ‘Are you crazy?’

“‘Crazy!’ he echoed with a wild laugh. ‘It’s you that are crazy. Come on, follow me. I’ll save you from those creatures that are after us.’

“There was nothing to do but to obey. Up I got and started on again after Nevins, who went staggering along, edging from side to side of the trail like a dizzy man. I found myself wondering how it was all going to end. I’m pretty tough and hard to tire, but I felt almost all in, and Nevins, not nearly so strong as I was, must have been going solely on the unnatural strength lent him by his insanity.

“By and by it got dark, but Nevins kept on. He kept shouting back at me, and I’d answer him from time to time. I couldn’t let him go on alone, although I was almost dead. After a while his shouts grew less frequent and finally they died out altogether. I guessed what had probably happened. I thought that by and by if I kept on I would stumble over his body lying in the snow.

“For a long time I walked slowly, every minute expecting to come upon him, but he was nowhere on the trail. I don’t like to recall that night nor the next day when I went on staggering down the trail till I began to get crazy, too, and hear odd things and voices.

“If it hadn’t been that a party from the station out hunting found me I don’t like to think of what might have happened. I soon came round and told all I could about Nevins. A search party started out at once, but returned the next day empty-handed. They had found and then lost tracks of many snow shoes in the woods near the trail. We always suspected that Nevins had wandered off the trail when I missed him, been found dead by Blood Indians, robbed and buried in a drift… And that, boys, is one incident in the life of a trooper of the Mounted.”

“It’s a ghastly story,” shuddered Ralph, while the others looked grave and sober.

“Chum around with a bunch of troopers some time and you’ll hear stranger yarns than that,” said Trooper Carthew. “And,” he added thoughtfully, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, “the worst of it is, they are all true. There’s no need to do any fancy color work on ’em.”

Not long after, the trooper rose with the remark that he must “mush along.” The party intended moving on, too, so they rode with him till their trails parted. The last they saw of Trooper Carthew was his broad back as his horse surmounted a brow of the trail and disappeared. He turned in his saddle and waved, and then was gone.

It was a new experience to the boys and it was long before they forgot his story, but such men are met with frequently in the wild places. Real heroes, worthy of world recognition, die fighting a good fight, without hope of reward or praise beyond that bestowed by their mates.

CHAPTER XXVIII
AFTER MOUNTAIN GOATS

The two days following were unmarked by any special incident. Jimmie rode with the boys, becoming stronger and lighter-hearted every day. And yet they noticed a curious thing about the waif. Whenever the mysterious man was spoken of he grew somber and silent. It was as if some link existed between himself and this wanderer of the mountains. The boys put this down to the fact that possibly Jimmie felt that, like himself, this outcast of the hills was friendless and alone.

It was on the evening of the second day that they made camp beside one of those beautiful little lakes that nestle in the bosom of the mighty Rockies. Across the sheet of blue water the color of turquoise, a ridge rose steeply from the very water’s edge. The pines on it were thinner than usual, and appeared singularly free from underbrush. Far above the lake the smooth ascent broke off abruptly, and there appeared to be beyond it a rocky plateau intervening between it and the farther wall of rock and snow that piled upward till it seemed to brush the sky.

While they were making camp Persimmons was gazing about and suddenly he drew Ralph’s attention to some moving objects on the snow-covered crest above the plateau. Mountain Jim was appealed to and decided that the objects were mountain goats.

“A big herd of them, too,” he declared.

“Have a look through the binoculars,” urged Ralph, borrowing the professor’s glasses which he was far too busy with his rock specimens to use. Indeed, he hailed Ralph’s excited announcement with only mild interest, being at that moment entering in his note-book a voluminous account of his discovery of some metamorphic rock in a region where none was thought previously to exist.

The glasses revealed the objects as mountain goats beyond a doubt. They were big, white fellows with high, humped shoulders and delicate hind quarters and black hoofs and horns. They looked not unlike miniature bisons, although of course the resemblance was only superficial.

While they still gazed at the moving objects on the snow-capped ridge, Mountain Jim suddenly uttered a sharp exclamation.

“Look close now,” said he, “for you’ll see something worth looking at in a minute or two, or I miss my guess.”

The goats were at the summit of what appeared to be an absolutely precipitous rock wall. From where they watched it did not appear that a fly could have found foothold on its surface. The goats had paused. Ralph drew in a deep breath.

“Gracious! I do believe they are going to try to get down it,” he exclaimed.

“And that ain’t all,” declared Mountain Jim. “They’re going to succeed, too. Watch ’em.”

The leader of the goats gave a leap that must have been fully twenty feet to a ridge which was hardly perceptible even through the glasses. He stood poised there for a second and then made a breath-catching plunge off into space. The place on the ledge that he had just vacated was immediately occupied by one of his followers, while he himself found footing on nothing, so far as the boys could see. It was a thrilling performance to watch the goats as they made their way down that rock-face to the feeding grounds. Sometimes the leader would take a leap that would make the performance of a flying squirrel seem tame by comparison. And his followers, among them some ewes, were by no means behind him in feats of agility.

“I’ve seen ’em come down a gully that looked like a chimney with one side out,” said Mountain Jim as he watched. “Old hunters say that when they miss their footing they save their heads from being caved in by landing on their horns, but I don’t take any stock in that.”

“Don’t they ever miss their footing?” cried Ralph wonderingly.

“Well, I’ve traveled aroun’ these parts fer a good many years,” replied Jim judicially, “and I ain’t never found hair nor hide of a carcass killed that way, and no more I reckon did anybody else.”

Jim went on to describe to the boys how wise and cunning the mountain goats are, gifted with an intelligence far beyond that possessed by most wild creatures. He also related to them an anecdote concerning an ewe whom he had seen defend her kid from the attack of an eagle. The eagle had swooped down on the kid and knocked it head over heels. It was about to fix its talons into the fleecy coat and fly off to its eerie with the little creature, when the old mother became aware of what was going on. Like a thunderbolt she charged down on the eagle, which tried in vain to get away. But its own greediness proved its undoing, for its talons were tangled in the young goat’s coat and it could not rise, and the mother speedily tramped and butted it to death. While she was doing this some old rams looked on as if it were no concern of theirs. They seemed to know that the mother was quite able to fight her own battles.

“Think there’s any chance of our getting a shot at them?” asked young Ware, vibrant with excitement.

“Don’t see why not,” responded Mountain Jim. “It’s not a hard climb up there, and I reckon they’ll stay there till to-morrow anyhow, as there’s pasturage and grass on the plateau and they’re working down to it.”

The professor demurred at first at allowing the boys to go hunting the goats, but after Jim had promised to bring them back safe and sound he gave his consent. Early the next day, therefore, the party set out, leaving only Jimmie and the professor in camp. Jimmie had by this time become quite a valuable assistant to the scientist, and the quiet occupation of collecting specimens appeared to suit him far better than the more strenuous sports the rugged boys enjoyed.

For a couple of hours, after skirting the little lake, they climbed steadily. Up they went among, apparently, endless banks of climbing pines, and traversed strips of loose gravel here and there that sent clattering pebbles down the slope under their feet.

Then they left the last of the dwindling pine belt behind them and pushed along on a slope strewn with broken rock and debris that made walking arduous.

“Great sport this, hunting mountain goats, ain’t it, boys?” said Jim with a grin as the boys begged him to rest a while, for Jim appeared to be made of chilled steel and gristle when it came to climbing.

“I’m all right,” declared Harry Ware stoutly, although his panting sides and streaming face belied his words, “but how about lunch?”

“Yes, cantering crackers! I’m hungry as one of those lions that tried to gobble up Ralph,” declared Persimmons, who always had, as may have been noticed, an excellent appetite.

“Don’t be thinking of lunch yet,” admonished Jim. “You’re a fine bunch of hunters. The first thing we want to do is to get a crack at those goats, ain’t it? If we don’t keep on, they will.”

That settled the question of lunch, and after a brief rest they kept pushing on up the mountain side. A chill wind was now blowing from the vast snowfields, and the cool of it fanned their flushed cheeks refreshingly.

They reached a stretch of rocky ground made smooth and slippery by melting snow from the ridges above. The scrap broke off on the verge of an almost precipitous rift, in the depths of which a torrent roared. They stopped for a minute upon the dizzy ledge of rock and gazed down above battalions of somber trees upon the lake below. They could see the camp and the ponies, dwarfed to specks, moving about far beneath. Harry Ware and Percy Simmons shouted and waved their hats, but Jim instantly checked this.

“Are you hunting goats or out on a picnic,” he admonished the abashed boys.

“Huh! Not much of a picnic about this,” grunted Hardware in an audible aside.

“Cheer up, it will get worse before it gets better,” said Ralph with a laugh.

A short distance further on they came upon some green grass growing in a marshy spot, kept damp by the constant running of silvery threads of melted snow.

“Now look to your rifles,” warned Jim. “We’ll be using the shooting irons before long, or I miss my guess.”

They crept cautiously forward, taking advantage of every bit of cover they could find. They were above timber line now, and only a few scattered bits of brush or big rocks afforded them the hiding places they desired.

It was after they had been crouching behind a big rock for some minutes that Mountain Jim, who had just peered over the top, brought them to their feet with a whisper that electrified them.

“They’re coming,” he said, in a voice that was tense with a hunter’s excitement, “don’t move or make a sound, and they’ll come right on top of us.”

The wind was blowing from the goats toward the hunters, and the magnificent animals appeared to have no idea of what lay in store for them beyond the rocks where the boys crouched. There were twenty or more of the goats, including several bucks, great snow-white creatures of regal mien with splendid horns and coats. The boys were conscious of an almost painful excitement as they waited.

But Jim, like a good general, knew when to hold his fire. Peering through a crevice in the rocks he watched the advance of the stately creatures. They appeared in no hurry, and under the mighty snow-covered shoulder of the mountain they moved along serenely, cropping the grass and from time to time skipping about playfully.

“Now!” shouted Mountain Jim suddenly.

Like one lad the three boys leaped to their feet. Four rifles cracked and two of the goats sprang into the air and crashed down again dead. Both Harry Ware and Persimmons had missed their marks. The goats wheeled in wild confusion. They snorted and snorted and mah-h-hed in a terrified manner. With a whoop Percy Simmons dashed toward them, yelling at the top of his voice.

“Come back!” roared Jim frantically, but the boy was far too excited to heed him. He rushed after the fleeing goats at top speed, shouting like an Indian.

Suddenly one of the old bucks wheeled. The creature was as big as a small calf, and almost as powerful as an ox. It saw Percy and lowered its head.

“Gibbering gondolas! He’s coming for me!” exclaimed the boy, and so indeed the infuriated old buck was.

“Fire at him!” roared the others, seeing the boy’s predicament, but Persimmons could only stare stupidly at the great buck, as with lowered horns, it dashed toward him.

“Run! Shoot! Do something!” came from Jim in a volley of shouts.

“Look out!” roared Hardware, as if such a warning was necessary at all.

“Get out of his way!” cried Ralph.

CHAPTER XXIX
JIMMIE FINDS A FATHER

The goat itself simplified matters for the frightened boy. Its lowered head collided with his rotund form like a battering ram, and the next instant Persimmons described a graceful parabola above the snowfield. As for the goat, it dashed on, but came to a sudden halt as a shot cracked from Jim’s rifle and the bullet sped to its heart.

The boys, however, paid little attention to this at the time. Their minds were concentrated upon poor Persimmons’ predicament. The boy had been hurtled head foremost into a pile of snow and all that was visible of him were his two feet feebly waving in the air.

“Gracious, I hope he’s not badly hurt!” exclaimed Ralph, as he and the rest ran toward the snow bank.

Thanks to the soft snow, the lad was found to be uninjured, and after he had been hauled out, he sat down on a rock with a comically rueful expression on his face, and picked the snow out of his hair and eyes.

“What do you think you are, anyhow,” demanded Harry, “a bullfighter?”

“Ouch, don’t joke about it,” protested the boy. “I thought an express train had hit me. Wh-wh-what became of the buck?”

“There he lies yonder, dead as that rock, but I don’t see where you come in for any credit for killing him.”

“You don’t, eh? Didn’t I attract him this way so you could shoot him?” demanded the other youth indignantly. “I’ll tell you, fellows, shooting the chutes, the loop-the-loop and all of them can take a back seat. For pure unadulterated, blown-in-the-bottle excitement, give me a butt by a mountain goat. It’s like riding in an airship.”

“If you ever take another such ride it may prove your last one, young man,” spoke Mountain Jim severely.

“Yes; I wouldn’t advise you to get the habit,” commented Harry Ware.

Not long after, they watched Jim separate the fine heads of the three dead animals, and, as it proved, there was one for Harry Ware, after all. Mountain Jim had shot so many of the goats in his time that a head more or less meant nothing to him, and he gladly gave his to Harry when he saw the latter’s rather long face.

They took the choicest parts of the meat back to camp with them. Not all of a mountain goat is very good eating, some of the flesh being strong flavored and coarse, so that they had no more than they could easily carry amongst them. That night, as you may imagine, Persimmons “rode the goat” all over again amidst much laughter and applause, and the other young hunters told their stories till they all grew so sleepy that it was decided to turn in.

Three days of traveling amidst the big peaks followed, and they all helped the professor collect specimens to his heart’s content. His note books were soon bulging, and he declared that his trip had added much to the knowledge of the world concerning the Canadian Rockies.

One evening as they mounted a ridge, Mountain Jim paused and pointed down to the valley below them. Through it swept a great green ribbon of water amidst rocky, pine-clad slopes.

“That’s it,” declared Jim.

“What?” demanded Persimmons eagerly, not quite understanding.

“The Big Bend of the Columbia River,” was the rejoinder.

The party broke into a cheer. The end of one stage of their journey was at hand, for they were to return by a more civilized route. And yet they were half sorry, for they had enjoyed themselves to the full in those last days amidst the great silences.

It is at the Big Bend that the mighty Columbia turns after its erratic northeast course and starts its southern journey to the Pacific Ocean, which it enters near Portland, Oregon.

In the sunset light, which lay glowingly on the great peaks behind them, the heart of whose mysteries they had penetrated, they rode rapidly down the trail, sweeping up to the store in a grand manner. That night they had an elaborate supper and related some of their adventures to the store-keeper, a French Canadian, who, in turn, told many of his experiences. They were still talking when a man came in and announced himself as Bill Dawkins from “up the trail a ways.”

“I heard that one of your party is a doctor or suthin’ sim’lar,” he said, “and maybe he can do suth’in for a poor cuss that’s just been throwed from his horse and had his head busted, up the road a piece.”

“I am not a doctor, but I have some knowledge of medicine,” said the professor. “Where is the man?”

“In my cabin. I’ll take you to him.”

They all streamed out into the night and followed Bill Dawkins up the trail. It was not a great way and they were soon standing at the bedside of a well-built, but pitifully ragged-looking man. His head was bandaged, but enough of his face was visible to cause Ralph to give a great start as they saw him.

“It’s the mysterious man! The horse thief!” he cried, clutching Mountain Jim’s arm.

“Are you sure?”

“Certain.”

Jim turned to the man who had brought them.

“Is the horse that threw him outside?” he asked.

“Sure, pard’ner, right under the shed,” was the reply; “good-looking pony, too.”

Jim borrowed a lantern and he and Ralph went out. There was no question about it. One look was enough. It was the missing pony.

“Well, that’s what I call poetic justice,” said Jim.

“Hark!” cried Ralph suddenly. “What was that?”

“Somebody hollered,” declared Jim; “it came from the hut. Maybe that scallywag is dead.”

Ralph set off running. The cry had been in Jimmie’s voice. He had recognized it. What could have happened?

Inside the hut there was a strange scene. Jimmie was on his knees at the bedside of the wild-looking man and was crying out:

“Father! It’s me! Jimmie! Father, don’t you know me?”

But the man on the bed was delirious. He shouted incoherently.

“It’s silver! I tell you it’s silver! Jimmie? Who says Jimmie? Why, that’s my boy. But he’s dead, is Jimmie. Dead-dead-dead!”

The cracked voice broke off in a wail. Suddenly the delirious man thrust his hands into his pockets and drew out some fragments of rock.

“Scramble for it, you dogs!” he cried. “It’s silver! Jimmie’s dead and I don’t want it. But they’re after me, – after me yet!”

The professor picked up a bit of the rock.

“It’s rich in fine silver!” he exclaimed. “This man has found a mine somewhere.”

“Yes; but Jimmie called him ‘father.’ What does it all mean?” demanded Ralph.

“It must remain a puzzle for the present,” said the professor. “This man has been badly injured in his fall. I think he will live, but I can’t answer for it. Bill Dawkins’ partner has ridden off for a doctor. In the meantime. I’ll do what I can.”

Soon afterward the doctor arrived and they were all ordered from the room. It was then that Jimmie told his story to the curious group that surrounded him.

His father, whom he had so strangely recovered, had been cashier of a city bank many years before, when Jimmie was a baby. Before that he had followed the sea for a time, and sailor fashion, he had had tattooed on his arms his own initials, – H. R., Horace Ransom, – and the initials of Jimmie’s mother, – A. S., Anna Seagrim. There came a day when shortage was discovered in the bank and Jimmie’s father, wrongfully suspected, fled to Canada rather than face the chance of being convicted, as he knew that had happened to many another innocent man.

Beyond the fact that he had gone to the Canadian Rockies, then a wilder region even than they are to-day, Jimmie’s mother knew nothing. Time went on and it was found out that Horace Ransom was innocent, but he could not be found. Jimmie’s mother fell ill and died, but before she passed away she left a paper with her son describing the marks on his father’s arm and where he had last been heard of.

Jimmie was too young to understand what it all meant then. He was sent to an orphans’ home, but ran away as soon as he was old enough to make his escape. He drifted about, selling newspapers, performing with circuses and doing many other things, but all the time he clung to the precious bit of paper his mother had entrusted to him. Jimmie’s one ambition had been to find his father if he were alive, and to make him happy. He saved and scrimped and at last got money enough together for railroad fares back to the States for his father and himself. But he had, as we know, to make his way to the Rockies without financial assistance, traveling as best he could.

The boys’ stories of the wild man had worked on his imagination and a feeling that the man might be his father had come to possess him. But, of course, he had no proof of the matter till he knelt at the bedside of the raving man and saw the tattoo marks. Such, in brief, was Jimmie’s strange story.

With this, our party had to be content for the time being, and leaving Jimmie with the neighborhood doctor at Bill Dawkins’ hut, they went down the trail to pitch camp at the Big Bend. They decided to remain at this place at least until Jimmie’s new-found father was out of danger and his plans for the future were made.

Some days later Mr. Ransom rallied enough to talk haltingly, – and to Jimmie’s joy he talked rationally! The surgeon in attendance declared that, as is not altogether unusual, the sudden blow on the head had restored the man’s senses. He felt assured that some particularly severe experience during Mr. Ransom’s years of loneliness and hardship in the Rockies had deprived him temporarily of his mental poise, and that he had been subject to periods of wildness.

What the crucial strain was, no one could discover. He seemed very uncertain when questioned about his past and apparently was unable to relate one incident to another as he recalled them.

It was left for Jimmie, who could hardly be tempted to leave his father’s bedside, by day or night, to tell him of his early history and to piece together the later experiences as they fell from the injured man’s lips.

It seemed that Mr. Ransom had accidentally blundered upon the boys’ camp on one of his lone pilgrimages amidst the mountains, for doubtless he had searched only during his sane periods for gold or silver. The sound of boyish voices had evidently stirred memories of his own son, Jimmie, who he had realized must be a grown lad, although he had left him a baby in arms.

But the fear of being arrested for the crime of which, as he supposed, he still stood accused, always haunted him and had made him afraid of meeting the travelers from the States face to face. He had followed them at a distance, his half-crazed brain fascinated by them. In the terrible passage of the brulee his own pony had died under him, and the next night he had stampeded the travelers’ ponies and stolen one of them. In the same way, when necessity arose, he had stolen some of their provisions. He was still on their trail when the accident that restored to him his son, his senses and the knowledge of his complete clearance of suspicion of the bank shortage, had occurred to him.

But still he could not account for years of his past. Jimmie patiently went over with him the story of his long-ago flight and of his recent mining researches, but between the two experiences yawned a baffling hiatus.