THE GOLD FEVER.
In the April of 1862, Victoria, British Columbia, was slowly recovering from what her inhabitants described as a serious "set back."
From the position of a small Hudson Bay station she had suddenly risen in '58 to the importance of a city of 17,000 inhabitants, from which high estate she had fallen again with such rapidity, that in 1861 there were only 5000 left in her to mourn the golden days of the "Frazer River humbug."
In '48 the gold fever broke out in California, and for ten years, in the words of an eye-witness, 50,000 adventurers of every hue, language, and clime were drifting up and down the slopes of the Great Sierra, in search of gold, ready to rush this way or that at the first rumour of a fresh find.
In '58 California's neighbour, British Columbia, took the fever. The cry of "Gold, gold!" was raised upon the Frazer, and the wharves of San Francisco groaned beneath the burden of those who sought to take ship for this fresh Eldorado.
In a year most of these pilgrims had returned from the new shrine, poorer by one year of their short lives, beaten back by the grim canyons of the Frazer river, or cheated of their reward by those late floods, which kept the golden sands hidden from their view. In '58 and '59 the miner cursed Victoria as a city of hopes unfulfilled, and left her to dream on undisturbed of the greater days to come.
She looked as if, on this April day of '62, her dreams were of the fairest. The air, saturated with spring sunshine, was almost too soft and sweet to be wholesome for man. There was a languor in it which dulled the appetite for work; merely to live was happiness enough; effort seemed folly, and if a man could have been found with energy enough to pray, he would have prayed only that no change might come to him, that the gleam of the blue waters of the straits and the diamond brightness of the distant snow-peaks might remain his for ever, balanced by the soft green of the island pine-woods: that the hollow drumming of the mating grouse and the song of the meadow lark, and the hum of waking nature might continue to caress his ear, while only the scent of the fresh-sawn lumber suggested to him that labour was the lot of man.
And yet, in spite of this seeming dreaminess in nature, the old earth was busy fashioning new things out of the old, and the hearts of men all along the Pacific slope were waking and thrilling in answer to the new message of Mammon--"Gold! gold by the ton, to be had for the gathering in Cariboo!" The reports which had come down from Quesnel, of the fortunes made in '61 upon such creeks as Antler and Williams, had restored heart to the Victorians, and even to those Californian miners who still sojourned in their midst, so that quite half the people in the town, old residents as well as new-comers, were only waiting for the snows to melt, ere they rushed away to the mining district beyond the Bald Mountains.
But the snows tarry long in the high places of British Columbia, and the days went on in spite of the men and their desire, and bread had to be earned even in such an Elysium as Vancouver Island, with all the gold which a man could want, as folks said, within a few weeks' march of them; so that hands and brains were busy, in spite of the temptations of Hope and the spring sunshine. Moreover, there were dull dogs even then in Victoria, who believed more in the virtue of steady toil than in gold-mining up at Cariboo.
Thus it happened, then, that a big, yellow-headed axeman, and a ray of evening sunlight, looking in together through an open doorway upon Wharf Street, found a man within in his shirt sleeves, still busily engaged upon his daily task.
"Hullo, Corbett, how goes it? Come right in and take a smoke."
The voice, a cheery one with a genuine welcome in it, came from the inside of the house, and in answer the axeman heaved his great shoulder up from the door-post and loafed in.
In every movement of this man there was a suggestion of healthy weariness, that most luxurious and delightful sensation which comes over him who has used his muscles throughout the day in some one of those outdoor forms of labour which earn an appetite, even if they do not gain a fortune.
As he stood in the little room looking quizzically at his friend's work, Ned Corbett, in his old blue shirt and overalls, with the axe lying across one bare brown forearm, might have served an artist as a model for Labour; but the artist into whose studio he had come had no need for such models. There was no money in painting such subjects, and Steve Chance painted for dollars, and for dollars only. Round the room at the height of a man's shoulder was stretched a long, long strip of muslin (not canvas, canvas would cost six bits a picture), and this strip had been sized and washed over with colour. When Corbett entered, Chance had just slapped on the last patch of this preliminary coat of paint, so that now there was nothing more to be done until the morrow.
"Well, Steve, how many works of art have you knocked off to-day?" asked Corbett.
"Works of art be hanged!" replied his friend. "I've covered about twenty feet of muslin, and that at five dollars a picture isn't a bad day's work. What have you done?"
"Let me see, I've cut down a tree or two and earned an appetite, and--oh, yes, a couple of dollars to satisfy the same. Isn't that enough?"
"All depends upon the way you look at things. I call it fooling your time away."
"And I call this work of yours a waste of talent worse, fifty times worse, than my waste of time. Look at that thing, for instance;" and Ned pointed to a large canvas, bright with all the colours of the rainbow.
"That! Well, you needn't look as if the thing might bite, Ned. That is the new map of Ophir, a land brimming 'ophir'--forgive the joke--with coarse gold, and, what is more important, bonded by those immaculate knights of the curbstone, Messrs. Dewd and Cruickshank."
"An advertisement, is it? Well, it is ugly enough even for that. How much lower do you mean to drag your hapless art, you vandal? 'Auctioning pictures,' as you call it, is bad enough, but this is simple sign-painting!"
"Well, and why not, if sign-painting pays? You take my advice, Ned; get the 'sugar' first, the fame will come at its leisure. Sign-painting is honest anyway, and more remunerative than felling trees, you bet."
"That may be," replied the younger man, balancing his axe in his strong hands, "and more intellectual, I suppose; but, by George, there's a pleasure in every ringing blow with the axe, and the scent of the fresh pine-wood is sweeter than the smell of your oil-paints."
"Pot-paints, Ned, two bits a pot. We don't run to tube-paints in this outfit."
"Well, pot-paints if you like; but even so you are not making a fortune. We can't always sell those panoramas of yours, you know, even at a dollar a foot."
"That's your fault, Ned; you've no eye for the latent merits of my pictures, and therefore make a shocking mess of the auctioneer's department. However, I am not wedded to my art. If lumbering and painting don't pay, what do you say to real estate?" and as he spoke, Chance put his "fixins" together and proceeded to lock up the studio for the night.
"Real estate! Why, fifty per cent of the inhabitants of the Queen City are real estate agents professionally, and most of the others are amateurs. Be a little original, outside your art anyway, old fellow. I don't want anything to do with real estate, except in acre blocks beyond the city limits, and a jolly long way beyond at that!"
"Is that so?" asked a mellow voice from behind the last speaker. "Then, my dear sir, Messrs. Dewd and Cruickshank can fix you right away. What do you say to a little farm on the gorge, fairly swarming with game, and admirably suited for either stock raising or grain growing?"
"Viticulture, market-gardening, or a gentleman's park! Better go the whole hog at once, Cruickshank," laughed Chance, turning round to greet the new-comer, a dark, stout man with an unlit cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth.
"You must have your joke, Mr. Chance; but the farm is really a gem for all that, and with the certainty of a large advance in price this summer, a man could not do better than buy."
"What, is the farm better than a claim in Ophir?" laughed Chance.
"Ah, well, that is another matter!" said Cruickshank. "The farm is a gilt-edged investment. There is, of course, just a suspicion of speculation in all gold-mining operations, though I can't see where the risk is in such claims as those you mention. By the way, have you finished the map?"
"Yes, here it is," replied the artist, producing a roll from under his arm, and partly opening it to show it to his questioner. "I call it rather a neat thing in sign-boards, don't you? I know I've used up all my brightest colours upon it."
"Yes, it will do; and though I don't suppose Williams Creek is quite that colour," laughed Cruickshank, "I am happy to say that our reports are not over-coloured, even if our map is. Do you know the Duke of Kent, Mr. Corbett?"
"No. Who is the Duke of Kent? I'd no idea that we had any aristocrats out here."
"Oh, the duke's is only a fancy title; most titles are that way in the far west."
"My sentiments exactly, Colonel Cruickshank," replied Corbett; and anyone inclined to quarrel with him might have thought that Corbett dwelt just a thought too long upon the "colonel."
But Cruickshank was not inclined to quarrel with a man who stood six feet two, and girthed probably forty inches round the chest, and who was reported, moreover, to be master of quite a snug little sum in good English gold.
"The Duke of Kent has a claim alongside those which we bonded last fall, and he tells me that he has already refused a hundred thousand dollars for a half share in it."
"A hundred thousand dollars for a half share! Great Cæsar's ghost, why, you could buy half Victoria for the money!" cried Chance.
