“Is he going to pay another?” I asked, startled, for this was news to me.
“He sure is. It’s already announced for October — that’s six weeks from now, and I happen to know that there isn’t money enough in our account to more than half meet it.”
“Then you — think—” I ventured.
“Look here, Guernsey,” said Garrity, reaching over and laying his hand on my knee. “I’ve come clean on this and I’ll go further. I know some other things that you’d like to know — things that would help you a lot in Washington. Isn’t there some chance for Cryder? Can’t we make him see that he’s in over his head and get a settlement before it’s too late. I can’t — I just can’t see that boy go over the road.”
There it was again — Dick Garrity with sentiment in his soul — the unknown quantity heretofore in that old swindler. Herbert Cryder, I decided, must be a regular fellow, and with the determination to visit him in the morning in my proper guise, I went to bed.
But in the morning Cryder had disappeared. Garrity was waiting for me, white of face, at the foot of the elevator shaft with the news. He had found a note on his desk, he said, instructing him to keep the office open as usual, and inclosing a check for $3,000 for expenses while he was gone.
“Where did he say he was going?” I demanded.
Garrity sighed as he produced the note.
“To visit the mine,” he said, and added plaintively: “Do you suppose the boy’s lost his mind entirely. You know and I know, Guernsey, there’s no more Hectopus mine than that elm over there in the park is a plum tree.”
III
I was rather glad of the change. The new development gave me a chance to get out into the open. Trailing men across wide stretches always was more in my line than trailing plots through the pages of ledgers and letter files. Dick helped me, both because he was afraid of me and anxious to save his boss from something he could not understand — and before noon I was aboard a train and speeding for Montreal.
No, I did not have any thought that he had fled to Canada to escape from me. He had no idea who I was and also, Canada is no safe refuge for evil-doing Americans. Maybe it was once, but not in my time. I had no notion why he had gone there except a suspicion that he might have a confederate on the other side of the border who would provide the funds for the October dividend.
But that wasn’t it. Cryder stayed in Montreal just long enough to catch the limited for the West Coast. The news of that rather staggered me and I missed the next train after him raising money enough to follow. You know we are not supposed to go outside the United States without a lot of red tape being unwound, but this Cryder fellow had sort of got my goat and I borrowed some coin from some Canadian officers I knew and went ahead with just a few cards of introduction from them instead of new credentials from Washington. We have to do that occasionally. If we make good, we are praised; if we get into a jam, we get fired.
Cryder was an easy man to follow on this trip, and I had plenty of leisure to enjoy my journey across the continent. I don’t mean that the young fellow was leaving any broad trail of empty bottles and twenty dollar tips along the right of way of the Canadian Pacific, but he was making himself known to every one he met and his scintillating personality was one to be remembered. All along I found that he had talked nothing but mines and mining and that he had made a trip up into Edmonton to look into the Fort Norman reports of gold and oil along the Mackenzie.
I almost missed him there and had to double back from Banff before I picked up his trail. I lost it again after I passed Field, B. C., on my second dash for the coast, and had to come back — carefully this time — before I found he had left the main highway at a little town called Hope, perched between the mountains and the Fraser River Canyon and struck off into the hills.
There is still gold along the Fraser. On the sand bars that ridge the rushing torrent every half mile or so, Chinamen can still be seen washing the sands of the river and turning “color” with almost every pan. But the best of them average only about two dollars a day and white men merely laugh as they pass them by. It doesn’t pay for grub, hardship and loneliness. But this was a great country once. Back in the 50’s Hope was a great outfitting point for a stampede of Americans who had failed to find fortunes at the first few turns of a shovel in the California rush, and chased the rainbow a thousand miles northward rather than return East empty handed.
There certainly is gold in the Fraser. Everyone could see that. But the tossing, heaving, rushing waters knew nothing of its value. Only on the sandbars could it he found and the rambunctious river tore these down over night and erected new ones every morning. Every miner knows that gold in rivers is washed down from the hills and for seventy years prospectors have been seeking the “mother lode” of the Fraser deposits.
Ten thousand hopeful men have crossed the hills from Hope to seek this treasure house of Nature. Herbert Cryder, I soon found out, had been the ten-thousand-and-first.
There was no concealment about his journey. He was easier to follow than a new yellow freight car. The guides who had taken him into the hills were already back in Hope when I arrived there, and perfectly willing to repeat their thirty-six hour journey with no questions asked. In fact, they volunteered the information that Cryder had bought an abanboned claim without even looking at it, and taken a crew of six men — fully equipped with grub and tools for placer work in with him. The head man of the pack train tapped his forehead and winked solemnly as he told me about it, but beyond that he was non-communicative. As for me, I walked down to the river and looked at the waters as they rushed through the canyon on their way to the sea, the snow-capped mountains from which the flood had tumbled and the ruined little town which still clung to its post between the railroad and the torrent, and pinched myself to retain the idea that I was an officer of the United States Government in pursuit of a criminal.
They had told me there was but one trail across the hills to Cryder’s claim, but apparently they did not know Cryder. Because, when we arrived at his camp, he was not there. “Gone back to the Fraser to spear salmon,” a disgusted Irish laborer informed me as he took a fresh grip on his shovel.
It was dusk then and I was tired out from unaccustomed pony travel over the rough trail. I was glad enough to accept the foreman’s offer of supper and a bed in his tent and put off any further investigation until morning. Tired as I was, the foreman and I talked together well into the night and long after he had begun snoring I lay awake thinking over the things he had told me. I could not believe them. As nearly as I dared I had called the man a liar and accused him of being in league with Cryder. He had refused to talk at all until I had shown him my American credentials — worthless in British Columbia, but he did not know that. Then I found myself facing again that strange loyalty and sentimentality in this rough mine-workman that I had found in Dick Garrity, soft-palmed swindler.
Could Cryder’s swindle be as far-reaching as this, I wondered. Could he possibly have enlisted and coached this man in three days and then brazenly left him here alone. I knew that Cryder had never been in the district before. I knew that McGuire, the foreman, was a native of Hope. I knew that all Cryder had done in the camp was to take a few snapshots after the men he had brought in had started digging and put up a sign he had had painted in Hope. The sign was non-committal. It was merely a white board with black lettering planted against the face of a huge cliff. “Hectopus Mine,” was all it said.
Two days later I was again walking the brink of the Fraser River Canyon. I was waiting for Cryder — reported somewhere in the neighborhood — and for a train. A hundred feet below me the same river boiled and swirled. It might have been the same water I had first seen, turning a corner and returning, so eternal was the tumult. It seemed as though the Fraser were composed of liquid hills and valleys, so firmly did the currents force the water into fantastic moulds.