Soapy

by Alan Sullivan

SOAPY

BY ALAN SULLIVAN

HE was an elderly man of about sixty, with narrow shoulders and narrow eyes, and he breathed hard as he looked down from a low ridge in the Caribou country at a creek that twisted out from the tangle of white peaks lifting in the west. There was something about it that took his fancy, so presently he plunged again into the bush and worked his way forward. An hour later he scooped up a panful of wet sand and began to rock it with a curious swaying motion.

Now, there be two chief things that lead men into the wilderness—love of the unknown and fear of the known. With Soapy Smith it was the latter. Winnipeg remembered him, as did Skagway, Dawson City, and Prince Rupert, and the manner of their remembrance was such that for thirty years he had kept moving by circuitous routes toward what he believed would be the one big strike of his life. The thing was bound to come. He was certain of that.

The contents of the pan were reduced to a few ounces before he drained off most of the water and tilted the thing very, very carefully till there appeared a long, black, pointed tail of material that finished with a string of coarse yellow. Soapy stiffened where he knelt, stared at this with wide-open eyes, then, taking the pan with him, scuttled back into the bush, where he squatted under a tree, while the blood climbed to his copper- coloured cheeks. He was still staring when the bushes parted across the creek, and a big, broad-shouldered young man strode to the water's edge, dumped a heavy pack with a grunt of relief, and looked upstream with intense and silent interest. Soapy shifted noiselessly behind a sheltering bush and lay flat.

What happened next happened quickly. The stranger seemed the better equipped, for he unstrapped a short shovel and immediately dug a small hole some two feet deep, from the bottom of which he scraped up a pailful of stuff, and began to rock. He was gazing incredulously at the result, when a rifle cracked close by, and the pan leaped from his grasp. Simultaneously, it seemed, he dived into the underbush like a rabbit. Followed utter silence, punctuated by two chuckles—one from Soapy, the other from Ragged River.

Evening drew on, with glory climbing the western peaks, but fear was abroad in the wilderness. Soapy, ignorant of the other man's arms, stirred not, and from across the creek came only the drumming of a cock partridge. The dusk was grey before there lifted a thin voice. It seemed advisable to find out what manner of man this might be.

"Hey, you!"

"Hey, yourself, you blackguard! Who are you?"

Soapy smiled. He was used to being called that, but hitherto had always been able to see who said it.

"Discoverer of this here creek. You're on Discovery Number One now. Get off it."

The opposing woods sent back a mocking laugh. "You're a liar! There is no post, but there will be in a minute."

With that sounded the quick strokes of an axe. In the next second Soapy was busy, too, chopping as he never had chopped before. The bush was noisy enough now, with humanity battling and invisible. Soapy gashed his leg in the half-light, cursed, and chopped on. They finished in the same instant, driving in each his post with quick, desperate blows. Soapy leaned on his axe, breathing hard, and knew that the other man was doing the same. Then, as his lungs filled, there came to him a sense of savage humour.

"Say, stranger, I guess we're partners."

A shadow moved across the creek. "Like hell we are!"

Soapy felt surprised and a little hurt. It was a perfectly fair offer, and he meant it. In fact, he was giving the thing away. He fingered the rifle, glancing along the barrel, and the shadow vanished. The man had good eyes, whatever else. Then he began to wonder whether the gravel was richer on the other side.

"What do you reckon this stuff runs, anyway?" He addressed a black spruce tree just opposite.

The spruce seemed to move ever so slightly. "My discovery goes about ten dollars to the pan, and I dn't reach bedrock." It was a big, deep voice that carried no audible resentment. "Have you quit shooting for to-night? I want to eat."

Soapy laughed outright, put down the rifle, and allowed that he had. Peace straddled Ragged River at that laugh, the axes sounded again, and two points of lights flickered into being. Soapy smelled coffee, the stranger smelled bacon, and between them the emerald water slid lisping to the foothills. Presently Soapy lit his pipe, and knew that the other man did the same. Under the ritual of smoke the shifty mind began to work with its accustomed smoothness.

"Say, you!"

There drifted back a contented grunt. No animosity now, but the solace of a full stomach and the benison of tobacco. They reflected comfort and a supreme indifference. Soapy experienced a touch of surprise, but felt in no way apologetic.

"What are you going to do to-morrow?" He flung this out to the ambient air. It was like talking into a gramophone, except that now the horn was the Rocky Mountains.

"I'm going to wring your neck, then get to work." There was no hatred here, either. Followed a metallic clicking, as though from the breech-block of a rifle.

Soapy grinned, for he knew it wasn't. He felt in the pan, and rubbed some of the coarse, yellow grains between his fingers. He realised that he could never leave this. He was thrilling to the touch of the stuff when the other man spoke.

"I reckon she runs better than ten dollars over here. What are you going to do to-morrow?"

"Oh, hell!" Soapy murmured to the fire, and knew now that he reached his limit. There had been man hunts for him in Alberta and the Yukon, but he had never hunted man himself. What killing lay to his debit was done out of impulse or fear. He robbed indiscriminately, like the wolverine, then put up a snarling and terrible defence. Perhaps the gravel on his side would also run over ten dollars.

"Say, pilgrim," he hazarded, "suppose we call this thing off, and stay where we are? Don't know but what there's enough for both of us."

The other man considered. If one was prepared to overlook a little impulsive shooting, the proposal was perfectly fair.

"What about my pan?" he demanded. "There's a hole in it."

This answer was so illuminating that Soapy plucked reflectively at his unkempt beard. Were the stranger a sourdough, he would know how to mend that pan. It almost made one regret so disinterested an offer. He concluded now that the clicking noise proceeded from a safety matchbox.

"Say, you come over here in the morning and get mine. I'll trade."

The stranger kicked his fire into life. He might not be a sourdough, but he wasn't nervous.

"What might be your name?"

"Name of Smith," responded Soapy. "Where do I stand?"

"Name of Burdock. Tell you what, you stay where you are, and when it's light, heave over that pan. Then you get mine. I stick to my claim, likewise you. How's that? And no shooting on either side so long as it lasts!"

Soapy stood motionless in the shadows. Perhaps the cheerful carelessness of the stranger surprised him. Perhaps he was armed, after all. Perhaps many things. When finally he spoke, it was not with the tones of an outcast.

"That goes. You get it."

They slept like tired pups, and slept the better because of the pay dirt beneath. That is the way of the wilderness, where is spilled at nightfall a tight-lidded slumber that bars the door to dreams. What use are dreams amongst the sentinel peaks?

At sunrise two pans sailed across Ragged River. Soapy repaired his neatly with a patch of birch bark on the under side, smeared with spruce gum that stuck like glue when the iron was heated. Whatever Burdock thought, he said nothing. In mid forenoon, and in response to the veiled suggestion that digging without a shovel was hell, that article was loaned for an hour and promptly returned. Otherwise there was no talk. They did exactly the same things, and came to the identical conclusion that here was as rich a patch as the Caribou country had yielded yet.

In the course of the next two days Soapy recognised that, though he was cleverer with a pan. Burdock was the more active—a matter of sixty years stacked up against thirty. Burdock did not wash gravel so clean, but got through a third more stuff. This was important, as they might run out of that strip at any moment, and hunt for the next. It was the first time Soapy had felt his age, and he hated it. That night, the moon being full, he slipped to the water's edge to put in a little overtime. At the second pan he heard a laugh.

"I love to see my dear old father work," trolled a bass voice.

He straightened, hurled a string of oaths across Ragged River, and slunk back to camp, his beard wagging angrily.

"The way some folks is brought up nowadays!" he exploded. And that night he didn't sleep at all.

A little later he made the pleasing discovery that while Burdock headed him in cool weather, he nearly caught up when the sun was at its hottest. Then Ragged Valley became a torrid basin, but his body, dried with the travail of the trail, had nothing to lose, while Burdock sweated and snatched half-hours of rest. By the end of the week the latter reckoned he had washed out two hundred ounces, worth three thousand dollars. Soapy was not far behind.

On Sunday they quit at midday. By this time trading and borrowing had slackened the tension, but trespass law remained. Soapy, lying under a tree close to the water, heaved across a plug of tobacco. Burdock was smoking but little now. One notices such things under such circumstances, and Soapy had a trained eye. Burdock lit up and nodded.

"'Bliged to you," he remarked impersonally.

"That's all right Say, where do you come from?"

"Janesville, Ohio. I quit farming last year."

Soapy rolled over on the other side. "Folks there now?"

"Mother and two sisters."

"Ain't got any old man, eh?"

"He sort of faded away when I blew in."

Soapy sucked at his pipe. "Sort of unfortunate."

The young man, willing enough to break the weight of silence that settled from the hills, allowed that it was—in one respect only. His father, for whom he retained a youthful contempt, had been no good, anyway, he stated. He could not remember having ever seen this relative—a matter in which he felt no regret.

"More of a skunk than an old man?" suggested Soapy amiably.

Burdock agreed. A sort of human skunk, he reflected, who ought to be skinned if his hide were worth anything.

"But it ain't," he concluded aloud.

"Ain't what?"

Burdock grinned, "Ain't worth thinking about. Where's your home paddock?"

Soapy made a gesture that included more—much more than the entire watershed of the Rockies. "Drop me most anywhere, and I'm contented"—he tossed a pebble into Ragged River—"for a while." The thought seemed to amuse him. "I don't take no stock in the East now," he added; "sort of shed my pin-feathers some time ago."

"Been in the Caribou long?"

Soapy considered this. The fact was, he had hustled into the Caribou country to get away from a suspected invitation to take a rest cure of two years in Vancouver as a guest of the Government. At least, that is what he reckoned the period would have been had he delayed a half-hour longer.

"I sort of wandered over here from the Peace River. Kind of queer, our hittin' this creek, so to speak, on both cheeks at once. Don't know but what it is the best thing I ever hit."

"Going back East when you get your pile?" asked Burdock dreamily. There was a girl in Janesville.

Soapy shook his head. "My folks would throw a fit, then they'd throw me out," he said truthfully "How do you suppose you'd feel if your old man was home when you got back?" he added, with a little lift in his voice.

"Like wringing his neck."

"Ain't that sort of takin' liberties with a skunk?" Soapy's tone were curiously quiet, as though the idea had opened up an entirely new range of vision.

"Not that kind."

"Skunks has their good points, and I don't believe that no old man—I don't care whose he is—acts so bad as his folks paint him."

But Burdock had apparently lost interest in his own family affairs. He regarded Soapy as a spark of humanity in the wilderness, which, even though moving across Ragged River, at least redeemed the place from utter loneliness. The sight of that lean, wiry figure made up in an odd way for the lack of other things, and he felt lonely when it was not visible. And Soapy, he believed, felt just the same.

Now, it happened that gold had been deposited in Ragged River about the time when the mammoth sported playfully over the Alberta prairies. It came from distant reefs far up in the mountains, reefs worn down by the prodigious feet of forgotten glaciers—a hundred yards thick. The glaciers departed with the mammoth, and the river dallied amongst those precious grains, rolling them seaward and tucking them away in holes and crannies with the fluctuating sweep of its emerald waters. So it came that there was neither rhyme nor reason in the varying value of either bank.

At the end of the second week Burdock ran out of pay dirt This did not take place suddenly, but was a gradual dwindling in the length and coarseness of the yellow tail that clung to the corner of his pan. He calculated that so far it was about a dead heat. And when the reality stared at him, or, rather, did not stare, he shot a glance across the river, where Soapy's actions revealed nothing but a tense and earnest devotion to business. It was evident that he was still in good stuff. The younger man was about to voice his disgust, when an invisible finger seemed to touch his lips. Suddenly Soapy gave a shout.

"Holy Mackinaw, but I've struck the original mint! Look at that, sonny!"

He picked something out of his pan and jerked it over. Burdock put up his hand, intercepting a thing the size of a filbert, and exceeding heavy. It was a two-ounce nugget.

"And that ain't the biggest, neither," chuckled Soapy. "Jest a sort of sample of my spring goods."

"I'm on the edge of the same stuff," lied Burdock cheerfully. "Great little piece of ground, ain't it?"

He received no further attention. The little man was down on his knees, picking things out of an irregular hole and tossing them into a small heap, singing all the time in a thin, high-pitched voice. The heap grew visibly as Burdock stared. This was no bluff. Presently he, too, stooped and hammered the nugget between two boulders till it lost all semblance to its original shape. Then he straightened up with a yell.

"Hey, Smith, catch this! It's a sort of small sister to the rest of 'em. Looks like the hand of Providence did some slick work on this here river."

Soapy caught it, and sent a larger one whizzing back. "Your sample's some out of date. Last year's goods, I reckon. Say, what 'll you take for that claim as she stands this minute?"

Burdock swallowed a lump in his throat, "I ain't selling. Don't happen that you're in the market?"

"Not on your life, son! Say, don't speak to me for a few days. I'm busy."

He worked like a beaver till dark, then put his hands to the small of his back with a groan. Burdock heard that groan, and learned shortly that Soapy reckoned he had cleaned up a thousand an hour for the last four hours, against which his rival had the one nugget last tossed across the creek. The latter cooked and ate in a kind of choking silence, and that, again, is the way of the wilderness. Enough is never enough. What the other fellow has determines one's own objective, and it was the irony of Ragged River that doubled on the man who dared not go back East, and halved on the one who ached to go. That night Burdock wondered how long it would take to cross the river by the falls, the mellow voice of which was audible in the moonlit distance.

Two days later Soapy's ground dropped back to its former value, and the frenzy left him. He allowed that it was no use getting excited over stuff that ran only five dollars a pan, especially when the stuff was three feet down; and that evening, being possessed of fifteen thousand dollars in dust and nuggets, peace and a full stomach, he began to send across Ragged River leading questions whether, now a rich man, he should not take his chance of a welcome from the folks at home. Never before had he such arguments to present as lay in a small canvas sack under the pile of brush that formed his bed.

"Seems to me," he said, after long meditation, " that things get sort of overlaid with other things, no matter how badly a feller felt about the first ones. I know I feel a darned sight better about my own folks now than I did when I come out here. I arrives in the West, so to speak, with a dark, brown taste in my mouth. It's most gone to-day. This here creek has sort of washed it out. What do you reckon, pilgrim?"

Burdock was disinclined to give comfort of any description. In the back of his head moved the hope that shortly, having acquired all the dust he could carry, Soapy would hit the trail for outside. The discovery post was there, just above high-water mark, but he didn't propose to leave that to be rooted up by the next prospector who happened along. And from this it will be observed that the lust for gold was but temporarily dammed in Burdock's blood, and promised soon to break loose.

"Seems to me like as if it was a question whether your folks wanted you or your dust, ain't it?"

Soapy reflected. "I calculate that maybe it is," he said slowly; "but if they sort of let on they was glad to see me, they'd be welcome to the dust, and no harm done."

Burdock allowed that circumstances altered cases, but did not put it exactly in that fashion.

"Your private life is your own funeral," he admitted thoughtfully, "and, not knowing, I can't say; but a skunk's a skunk, wherever you find him."

Soapy chewed this over in silence. There was no question but that the stranger had hit one truth. Still, there remained debatable ground he did not intend to surrender without a struggle.

"On the matter of skunks, I don't argue none. But what strikes me is that even a skunk might be a powerful help with fifteen thousand dollars to folks that ain't too particular. You kind of suggest I'd ought sooner to blow it in than hit the trail for home?"

"You know what you're going to, and I don't."

That was not quite another truth. Soapy did not exactly know, and it disturbed him greatly. Then his narrow eyes surveyed the broad-shouldered figure, and gave a secret smile. He knew that Burdock had been out of pay gravel for two days. The tenderfoot could not bluff a sourdough in this section of the Caribou country.

"You've sort of taken the edge off my little excursion. What do you reckon to do when you clean up here?"

"Light out for Janesville, lift the mortgage on the farm, and get married," said Burdock promptly, "That's what I came out for."

"Much of a mortgage?" Soapy's interest was almost painfully polite.

"Five thousand."

"Sort of—of inheritance?"

"You got it. I was born to it. Birthday present from my old man."

"And he jest hangs that round the neck of a unsuspectin' infant?" said Soapy disgustedly.

"Yep. That's the kind of skunk he was."

The shadows lengthened on the long flanks of the peaks, and a purple gloom climbed mysteriously from hidden valleys The undying sacrament of sunset was at hand. Conversation sagged and died amid the babble of emerald water. Burdock stared up the creek, wondering how far it was to the next patch of good gravel, then remembered that he had but ten days' grub left. He surveyed his rival out of the corner of a contemplative eye. Under present circumstances flour was worth ten dollars a pound, and he was prepared to pay it. But to Soapy it was worth more, and Burdock knew it. They had reached a point at which no scale of prices held good.

"Say, sonny, how long do you reckon you can stick it out? How's the chuck?" Soapy's voice was blandly impersonal.

"Got enough for the next two months, if I go easy."

The little man plucked at his beard. He had not smelled bacon across the creek for two days, than which there is nothing more eloquent in the wilderness. He pushed a finger into the yielding side of a sack, then shook his head.

"Seems queer, don't it? One don't pay any attention to the grub bag till a feller begins to get some dust together. Same with me. I got about two months' here. Then I guess I'll try and raft it down the Ragged. I can't tote more than a hundred and thirty, anyway."

Burdock felt choky. He had visions of this old reprobate gliding away on the lisping water, the wind in the dirty grey beard, and a fortune at his feet. The trouble was that, except for the hole in the pan, it had been a perfectly fair game. The first casual offer of partnership looked very good now. The right thing was to hustle out at once, get a partner of his own, hustle back, build a sluice and go at the job on a proper scale, when it would undoubtedly pay. Then something seemed to stir in the gravel beneath him, and beg not to be left. Instantly he felt that the woods were full of men, all heading for Ragged River.

At the end of another three days Soapy announced that his plans were changed. He had as much dust now as he would trust on any blasted raft. He quit washing, with the information that the ground was still richer than the Washington mint, blazed all the trees within fifty feet, cut a massive discovery post, and planted it beside the first hastily cut stake. The claim was visible to the next bend in the river. He paid no attention to Burdock, who worked silently in stuff that gave twenty cents a pan, punctuating his labours with exclamations as he unearthed imaginary nuggets. Periodically Soapy waved a fraternal hand. His camp was just behind a clump of spruce, from which he dragged the component parts of the raft. Then darkness came down like a cloak, and the sound of his axe died away.

Burdock slept little that night, being at war with himself and all creation. It was hard to watch what went on a hundred feet away, and would be harder to keep to his own ground when day broke. He reckoned on exactly the same law that, he assumed, fortified his rival—the law that brackets claim-jumping and murder. Being new to the game, he could not conceive that one side of Ragged River should be a mint and the other a closed deposit account. Again the difference between sourdough and tenderfoot. Towards daybreak he dropped off into a medley of comfortless dreams.

He woke with the sun in his face. The Caribou country seemed loaded with an oppressive silence. There was neither motion nor life on Discovery Number One, but the newly blazed trees gleamed white in the level rays. He sat, staring for a long time, then, stripping to his underclothes, waded into Ragged River.

Thirty feet out the freezing waters gripped his body, whirling him like a leaf downstream. He shouted with the deadly chill, and saw the wooded shore flashing past. Even while he struggled, it came to him that this was the beginning of punishment for claim-jumping. But Soapy's mint only called the louder, and he set his teeth. A hundred yards further on he caught at the top of a fallen cedar. The river did not tug so hard here, and, inch by inch, he made the bank.

He worked back, keeping out of sight of nobody in the underbrush, and stared at the discovery post from behind a tree. He experienced a nauseating sensation that he was now a potential and shortly would be an actual thief. He tried to spit this out, when suddenly, there arose the appalling possibility that perhaps Soapy had been bluffing, too. At that his throat became dry, and he stepped boldly forward.

Ten feet from the water the little man's diggings lay open, and, without stooping, Burdock caught a gleam of yellow. He breathed quickly, then dug his fingers in, rubbing the precious stuff between their horny tips. The glaciers had surpassed themselves here. He never knew that such gravel existed. It was now a matter of how long it would take Soapy to get back. There ought to be two clear weeks. He was reckoning what he could take out in that time when his eye fell on a pan. It was upside down, and revealed a neat birch-bark patch. He blinked at it, concluding finally that Soapy must have gone out of the placer mining profession for good—or else gone crazy. Evidence was in favour of the latter. To corroborate this, he examined the camp, where he found some forty pounds of bacon and flour, neatly tied in a sack, and swung from a tree to keep it from the marauding porcupine. That brought him up with a jolt. It meant only that Soapy reckoned to be back soon. Burdock, hungry for food, but hungrier still for gold, turned to the pan. Beneath it he found four small canvas bags, stuffed to the tightly tied neck with dust and nuggets. On top lay a folded scrap of dirty paper. He looked at this dizzily, and discerned a faintly legible scrawl, blacker where Soapy had licked the pencil:

"Skunks has their good points and all old men ain't so bad as their painted

"Yours.

"I dont remember jest how to spel your front name so stick it on the post yourself. That morgage was for a bad det of your unkels."