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[288] 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[289] 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[290] 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[291] 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[292] 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.

[293]

“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.

[294]

“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.”

[295]

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.[296] 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[297] 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[298] 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,[299] 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.