The Night-Born | Page 8

for something and knew I'd find it. I
wasn't afraid. I was night-born, and the big timber couldn't kill me. And
on the second day I found it. I came upon a small clearing and a
tumbledown cabin. Nobody had been there for years and years. The
roof had fallen in. Rotted blankets lay in the bunks, and pots and pans
were on the stove. But that was not the most curious thing. Outside,
along the edge of the trees, you can't guess what I found. The skeletons
of eight horses, each tied to a tree. They had starved to death, I reckon,
and left only little piles of bones scattered some here and there. And
each horse had had a load on its back. There the loads lay, in among the
bones--painted canvas sacks, and inside moosehide sacks, and inside
the moosehide sacks--what do you think?'"
She stopped, reached under a comer of the bed among the spruce

boughs, and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the mouth and ran out
into my hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever seen--coarse gold,
placer gold, some large dust, but mostly nuggets, and it was so fresh
and rough that it scarcely showed signs of water-wash.
"'You say you're a mining engineer,' she said, 'and you know this
country. Can you name a pay-creek that has the color of that gold!'
"I couldn't! There wasn't a trace of silver. It was almost pure, and I told
her so.
"'You bet,' she said. 'I sell that for nineteen dollars an ounce. You can't
get over seventeen for Eldorado gold, and Minook gold don't fetch
quite eighteen. Well, that was what I found among the bones--eight
horse-loads of it, one hundred and fifty pounds to the load.'
"'A quarter of a million dollars!' I cried out.
"'That's what I reckoned it roughly,' she answered. 'Talk about
Romance! And me a slaving the way I had all the years, when as soon
as I ventured out, inside three days, this was what happened. And what
became of the men that mined all that gold? Often and often I wonder
about it. They left their horses, loaded and tied, and just disappeared off
the face of the earth, leaving neither hide nor hair behind them. I never
heard tell of them. Nobody knows anything about them. Well, being the
night-born, I reckon I was their rightful heir.'
Trefethan stopped to light a cigar.
"Do you know what that girl did? She cached the gold, saving out thirty
pounds, which she carried back to the coast. Then she signaled a
passing canoe, made her way to Pat Healy's trading post at Dyea,
outfitted, and went over Chilcoot Pass. That was in '88--eight years
before the Klondike strike, and the Yukon was a howling wilderness.
She was afraid of the bucks, but she took two young squaws with her,
crossed the lakes, and went down the river and to all the early camps on
the Lower Yukon. She wandered several years over that country and
then on in to where I met her. Liked the looks of it, she said, seeing, in

her own words, 'a big bull caribou knee-deep in purple iris on the
valley-bottom.' She hooked up with the Indians, doctored them, gained
their confidence, and gradually took them in charge. She had only left
that country once, and then, with a bunch of the young bucks, she went
over Chilcoot, cleaned up her gold-cache, and brought it back with her.
"'And here I be, stranger,' she concluded her yarn, 'and here's the most
precious thing I own.'
"She pulled out a little pouch of buckskin, worn on her neck like a
locket, and opened it. And inside, wrapped in oiled silk, yellowed with
age and worn and thumbed, was the original scrap of newspaper
containing the quotation from Thoreau.
"'And are you happy . . . satisfied?' I asked her. 'With a quarter of a
million you wouldn't have to work down in the States. You must miss a
lot.'
"'Not much,' she answered. 'I wouldn't swop places with any woman
down in the States. These are my people; this is where I belong. But
there are times--and in her eyes smoldered up that hungry yearning I've
mentioned--'there are times when I wish most awful bad for that
Thoreau man to happen along.'
"'Why?' I asked.
"'So as I could marry him. I do get mighty lonesome at spells. I'm just a
woman--a real woman. I've heard tell of the other kind of women that
gallivanted off like me and did queer things--the sort that become
soldiers in armies, and sailors on ships. But those women are queer
themselves. They're more like men than women; they look like men
and they