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Title: Back to God's Country and Other Stories
Author: James Oliver Curwood
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Etext prepared by Dianne Bean, Prescott Valley, Arizona.
BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY AND OTHER STORIES
BY
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
CONTENTS
Back to God's Country
The Yellow-Back
The Fiddling Man
L'ange
The Case of Beauvais
The Other Man's Wife
The Strength of Men
The Match
The Honor of Her People
Bucky Severn
His First Penitent
Peter God
The Mouse
BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY
When Shan Tung, the long-cued Chinaman from Vancouver, started up the
Frazer River in the old days when the Telegraph Trail and the headwaters
of the Peace were the Meccas of half the gold-hunting population of
British Columbia, he did not foresee tragedy ahead of him. He was a
clever man, was Shan Tung, a cha-sukeed, a very devil in the collecting
of gold, and far-seeing. But he could not look forty years into the
future, and when Shan Tung set off into the north, that winter, he was in
reality touching fire to the end of a fuse that was to burn through four
decades before the explosion came.
With Shan Tung went Tao, a Great Dane. The Chinaman had picked him up
somewhere on the coast and had trained him as one trains a horse. Tao was
the biggest dog ever seen about the Height of Land, the most powerful,
and at times the most terrible. Of two things Shan Tung was enormously
proud in his silent and mysterious oriental way--of Tao, the dog, and of
his long, shining cue which fell to the crook of his knees when he let it
down. It had been the longest cue in Vancouver, and therefore it was the
longest cue in British Columbia. The cue and the dog formed the
combination which set the forty-year fuse of romance and tragedy burning.
Shan Tung started for the El Dorados early in the winter, and Tao alone
pulled his sledge and outfit. It was no more than an ordinary task for
the monstrous Great Dane, and Shan Tung subserviently but with hidden
triumph passed outfit after outfit exhausted by the way. He had reached
Copper Creek Camp, which was boiling and frothing with the excitement of
gold-maddened men, and was congratulating himself that he would soon be
at the camps west of the Peace, when the thing happened. A drunken
Irishman, filled with a grim and unfortunate sense of humor, spotted Shan
Tung's wonderful cue and coveted it. Wherefore there followed a bit of
excitement in which Shan Tung passed into his empyrean home with a bullet
through his heart, and the drunken Irishman was strung up for his misdeed
fifteen minutes later. Tao, the Great Dane, was taken by the leader of
the men who pulled on the rope. Tao's new master was a "drifter," and as
he drifted, his face was always set to the north, until at last a new
humor struck him and he turned eastward to the Mackenzie. As the seasons
passed, Tao found mates along the way and left a string of his progeny
behind him, and he had new masters, one after another, until he was grown
old and his muzzle was turning gray. And never did one of these masters
turn south with him. Always it was north, north with the white man first,
north with the Cree, and then wit h the Chippewayan, until in the end the
dog born in a Vancouver kennel died in an Eskimo igloo on the Great Bear.
But the breed of the Great Dane lived on. Here and there, as the years
passed, one would find among the Eskimo trace-dogs, a grizzled-haired,
powerful-jawed giant that was alien to the arctic stock, and in these
occasional aliens ran the blood of Tao, the Dane.
Forty years, more or less, after Shan Tung lost his life and his cue at
Copper Creek Camp, there was born on a firth of Coronation Gulf a dog who
was named Wapi, which means "the Walrus." Wapi, at full growth, was a
throwback of more than forty dog generations. He was nearly as large as
his forefather, Tao. His fangs were an inch in length, his great jaws
could crack the thigh-bone of a caribou, and from the beginning the hands
of men and the fangs of beasts were against him. Almost from the day of
his birth until this winter of his fourth year, life for Wapi had been an
unceasing fight for existence. He was maya-tisew--bad with the badness of
a devil. His reputation had gone from master to master and from igloo to
igloo; women and children were afraid of him, and men always spoke to him
with the club or the lash in their hands. He was hated and feared, and
yet because he could run down a barren-land caribou and kill it within a
mile, and would hold a big white bear at bay until the hunters came, he
was not sacrificed to this hate and fear. A hundred whips and clubs and a
hundred pairs of hands were against him between Cape Perry and the crown
of Franklin Bay--and the fangs of twice as many dogs.
The dogs were responsible. Quick-tempered, clannish with the savage
brotherhood of the wolves, treacherous, jealous of leadership, and with
the older instincts of the dog dead within them, their merciless feud
with what they regarded as an interloper of another breed put the devil
heart in Wapi. In all the gray and desolate sweep of his world he had no
friend. The heritage of Tao, his forefather, had fallen upon him, and he
was an alien in a land of strangers. As the dogs and the men and women
and children hated him, so he hated them. He hated the sight and smell of
the round-faced, blear-eyed creatures who were his master, yet he obeyed
them, sullenly, watchfully, with his lips wrinkled warningly over fangs
which had twice torn out the life of white bears. Twenty times he had
killed other dogs. He had fought them singly, and in pairs, and in packs.
His giant body bore the scars of a hundred wounds. He had been clubbed
until a part of his body was deformed and he traveled with a limp. He
kept to himself even in the mating season. And all this because Wapi, the
Walrus, forty years removed from the Great Dane of Vancouver, was a white
man's dog.
Stirring restlessly within him, sometimes coming to him in dreams and
sometimes in a great and unfulfilled yearning, Wapi felt vaguely the
strange call of his forefathers. It was impossible for him to understand.
It was impossible for him to know what it meant. And yet he did know that
somewhere there was something for which he was seeking and which he never
found. The desire and the questing came to him most compellingly in the
long winter filled with its eternal starlight, when the maddening yap,
yap, yap of the little white foxes, the barking of the dogs, and the
Eskimo chatter oppressed him like the voices of haunting ghosts. In these
long months, filled with the horror of the arctic night, the spirit of
Tao whispered within him that somewhere there was light and sun, that
somewhere there was warmth and flowers, and running streams, and voices
he could understand, and things he could love. And then Wapi would whine,
and perhaps the whine would bring him the blow of a club, or the lash of
a whip, or an Eskimo threat, or the menace of an Eskimo dog's snarl. Of
the latter Wapi was unafraid. With a snap of his jaws, he could break the
back of any other dog on Franklin Bay.
Such was Wapi, the Walrus, when for two sacks of flour, some tobacco, and
a bale of cloth he became the property of Blake, the uta-wawe-yinew, the
trader in seals, whalebone--and women. On this day Wapi's soul took its
flight back through the space of forty years. For Blake was white, which
is to say that at one time or another he had been white. His skin and his
appearance did not betray how black he had turned inside and Wapi's brute
soul cried out to him, telling him how he had waited and watched for this
master he knew would come, how he would fight for him, how he wanted to
lie down and put his great head on the white man's feet in token of his
fealty. But Wapi's bloodshot eyes and battle-scarred face failed to
reveal what was in him, and Blake--following the instructions of those
who should know--ruled him from the beginning with a club that was more
brutal than the club of the Eskimo.
For three months Wapi had been the property of Blake, and it was now the
dead of a long and sunless arctic night. Blake's cabin, built of ship
timber and veneered with blocks of ice, was built in the face of a deep
pit that sheltered it from wind and storm. To this cabin came the
Nanatalmutes from the east, and the Kogmollocks from the west, bartering
their furs and whalebone and seal-oil for the things Blake gave in
exchange, and adding women to their wares whenever Blake announced a
demand. The demand had been excellent this winter. Over in Darnley Bay,
thirty miles across the headland, was the whaler Harpoon frozen up for
the winter with a crew of thirty men, and straight out from the face of
his igloo cabin, less than a mile away, was the Flying Moon with a crew
of twenty more. It was Blake's business to wait and watch like a hawk for
such opportunities as there, and tonight--his watch pointed to the hour
of twelve, midnight--he was sitting in the light of a sputtering seal-oil
lamp adding up figures which told him that his winter, only half gone,
had already been an enormously profitable one.
"If the Mounted Police over at Herschel only knew," he chuckled. "Uppy,
if they did, they'd have an outfit after us in twenty-four hours."
Oopi, his Eskimo right-hand man, had learned to understand English, and
he nodded, his moon-face split by a wide and enigmatic grin. In his way,
"Uppy" was as clever as Shan Tung had been in his.
And Blake added, "We've sold every fur and every pound of bone and oil,
and we've forty Upisk wives to our credit at fifty dollars apiece."
Uppy's grin became larger, and his throat was filled with an exultant
rattle. In the matter of the Upisk wives he knew that he stood ace-high.
"Never," said Blake, "has our wife-by-the-month business been so good. If
it wasn't for Captain Rydal and his love-affair, we'd take a vacation and
go hunting."
He turned, facing the Eskimo, and the yellow flame of the lamp lit up his
face. It was the face of a remarkable man. A black beard concealed much
of its cruelty and its cunning, a beard as carefully Van-dycked as though
Blake sat in a professional chair two thousand miles south, but the beard
could not hide the almost inhuman hardness of the eyes. There was a
glittering light in them as he looked at the Eskimo. "Did you see her
today, Uppy? Of course you did. My Gawd, if a woman could ever tempt me,
she could! And Rydal is going to have her. Unless I miss my guess,
there's going to be money in it for us--a lot of it. The funny part of it
is, Rydal's got to get rid of her husband. And how's he going to do it,
Uppy? Eh? Answer me that. How's he going to do it?"
In a hole he had dug for himself in the drifted snow under a huge scarp
of ice a hundred yards from the igloo cabin lay Wapi. His bed was red
with the stain of blood, and a trail of blood led from the cabin to the
place where he had hidden himself. Not many hours ago, when by God's sun
it should have been day, he had turned at last on a teasing, snarling,
back-biting little kiskanuk of a dog and had killed it. And Blake and
Uppy had beaten him until he was almost dead.
It was not of the beating that Wapi was thinking as he lay in his wallow.
He was thinking of the fur-clad figure that had come between Blake's club
and his body, of the moment when for the first time in his life he had
seen the face of a white woman. She had stopped Blake's club. He had
heard her voice. She had bent over him, and she would have put her hand
on him if his master had not dragged her back with a cry of warning. She
had gone into the cabin then, and he had dragged himself away.
Since then a new and thrilling flame had burned in him. For a time his
senses had been dazed by his punishment, but now every instinct in him
was like a living wire. Slowly he pulled himself from his retreat and sat
down on his haunches. His gray muzzle was pointed to the sky. The same
stars were there, burning in cold, white points of flame as they had
burned week after week in the maddening monotony of the long nights near
the pole. They were like a million pitiless eyes, never blinking, always
watching, things of life and fire, and yet dead. And at those eyes, the
little white foxes yapped so incessantly that the sound of it drove men
mad. They were yapping now. They were never still. And with their yapping
came the droning, hissing monotone of the aurora, like the song of a vast
piece of mechanism in the still farther north. Toward this Wapi turned
his bruised and beaten head. Out there, just beyond the ghostly pale of
vision, was the ship. Fifty times he had slunk out and around it,
cautiously as the foxes themselves. He had caught its smells and its
sounds; he had come near enough to hear the voices of men, and those
voices were like the voice of Blake, his master. Therefore, he had never
gone nearer.
There was a change in him now. His big pads fell noiselessly as he slunk
back to the cabin and sniffed for a scent in the snow. He found it. It
was the trail of the white woman. His blood tingled again, as it had
tingled when her face bent over him and her hand reached out, and in his
soul there rose up the ghost of Tao to whip him on. He followed the
woman's footprints slowly, stopping now and then to listen, and each
moment the spirit in him grew more insistent, and he whined up at the
stars. At last he saw the ship, a wraithlike thing in its piled-up bed of
ice, and he stopped. This was his dead-line. He had never gone nearer.
But tonight--if any one period could be called night--he went on.
It was the hour of sleep, and there was no sound aboard. The foxes, never
tiring of their infuriating sport, were yapping at the ship. They barked
faster and louder when they caught the scent of Wapi, and as he
approached, they drifted farther away. The scent of the woman's trail led
up the wide bridge of ice, and Wapi followed this as he would have
followed a road, until he found himself all at once on the deck of the
Flying Moon. For a space he was startled. His long fangs bared themselves
at the shadows cast by the stars. Then he saw ahead of him a narrow
ribbon of yellow light. Toward this Wapi sniffed out, step by step, the
footprints of the woman. When he stopped again, his muzzle was at the
narrow crack through which came the glimmer of light.
It was the door of a deck-house veneered like an igloo with snow and ice
to protect it from cold and wind. It was, perhaps, half an inch ajar, and
through that aperture Wapi drank the warm, sweet perfume of the woman.
With it he caught also the smell of a man. But in him the woman scent
submerged all else. Overwhelmed by it, he stood trembling, not daring to
move, every inch of him thrilled by a vast and mysterious yearning. He
was no longer Wapi, the Walrus; Wapi, the Killer. Tao was there. And it
may be that the spirit of Shan Tung was there. For after forty years the
change had come, and Wapi, as he stood at the woman's door, was just
dog,--a white man's dog--again the dog of the Vancouver kennel--the dog
of a white man's world.
He thrust open the door with his nose. He slunk in, so silently that he
was not heard. The cabin was lighted. In a bed lay a white-faced,
hollow-cheeked man--awake. On a low stool at his side sat a woman. The
light of the lamp hanging from above warmed with gold fires the thick and
radiant mass of her hair. She was leaning over the sick man. One slim,
white hand was stroking his face gently, and she was speaking to him in a
voice so sweet and soft that it stirred like wonderful music in Wapi's
warped and beaten soul. And then, with a great sigh, he flopped down, an
abject slave, on the edge of her dress.
With a startled cry the woman turned. For a moment she stared at the
great beast wide-eyed, then there came slowly into her face recognition
and understanding. "Why, it's the dog Blake whipped so terribly," she
gasped. "Peter, it's--it's Wapi!" For the first time Wapi felt the caress
of a woman's hand, soft, gentle, pitying, and out of him there came a
wimpering sound that was almost a sob.
"It's the dog--he whipped," she repeated, and, then, if Wapi could have
understood, he would have noted the tense pallor of her lovely face and
the look of a great fear that was away back in the staring blue depths of
her eyes.
From his pillow Peter Keith had seen the look of fear and the paleness of
her cheeks, but he was a long way from guessing the truth. Yet he thought
he knew. For days--yes, for weeks--there had been that growing fear in
her eyes. He had seen her mighty fight to hide it from him. And he
thought he understood.
"I know it has been a terrible winter for you, dear," he had said to her
many times. "But you mustn't worry so much about me. I'll be on my feet
again--soon." He had always emphasized that. "I'll be on my feet again
soon!"
Once, in the breaking terror of her heart, she had almost told him the
truth. Afterward she had thanked God for giving her the strength to keep
it back. It was day--for they spoke in terms of day and night--when
Rydal, half drunk, had dragged her into his cabin, and she had fought him
until her hair was down about her in tangled confusion--and she had told
Peter that it was the wind. After that, instead of evading him, she had
played Rydal with her wits, while praying to God for help. It was
impossible to tell Peter. He had aged steadily and terribly in the last
two weeks. His eyes were sunken into deep pits. His blond hair was
turning gray over the temples. His cheeks were hollowed, and there was a
different sort of luster in his eyes. He looked fifty instead of
thirty-five. Her heart bled in its agony. She loved Peter with a
wonderful love.
The truth! If she told him that! She could see Peter rising up out of his
bed like a ghost. It would kill him. If he could have seen Rydal--only an
hour before--stopping her out on the deck, taking her in his arms, and
kissing her until his drunken breath and his beard sickened her! And if
he could have heard what Rydal had said! She shuddered. And suddenly she
dropped down on her knees beside Wapi and took his great head in her
arms, unafraid of him--and glad that he had come.
Then she turned to Peter. "I'm going ashore to see Blake again--now," she
said. "Wapi will go with me, and I won't be afraid. I insist that I am
right, so please don't object any more, Peter dear."
She bent over and kissed him, and then in spite of his protest, put on
her fur coat and hood, and stood for a moment smiling down at him. The
fear was gone out of her eyes now. It was impossible for him not to smile
at her loveliness. He had always been proud of that. He reached up a thin
hand and plucked tenderly at the shining little tendrils of gold that
crept out from under her hood.
"I wish you wouldn't, dear," he pleaded.
How pathetically white, and thin, and weak he was! She kissed him again
and turned quickly to hide the mist in her eyes. At the door she blew him
a kiss from the tip of her big fur mitten, and as she went out she heard
him say in the thin, strange voice that was so unlike the old Peter:
"Don't be long, Dolores."
She stood silently for a few moments to make sure that no one would see
her. Then she moved swiftly to the ice bridge and out into the
star-lighted ghostliness of the night. Wapi followed close behind her,
and dropping a hand to her side she called softly to him. In an instant
Wapi's muzzle was against her mitten, and his great body quivered with
joy at her direct speech to him. She saw the response in his red eyes and
stopped to stroke him with both mittened hands, and over and over again
she spoke his name. "Wapi--Wapi--Wapi." He whined. She could feel him
under her touch as if alive with an electrical force. Her eyes shone. In
the white starlight there was a new emotion in her face. She had found a
friend, the one friend she and Peter had, and it made her braver.
At no time had she actually been afraid--for herself. It was for Peter.
And she was not afraid now. Her cheeks flushed with exertion and her
breath came quickly as she neared Blake's cabin. Twice she had made
excuses to go ashore--just because she was curious, she had said--and she
believed that she had measured up Blake pretty well. It was a case in
which her woman's intuition had failed her miserably. She was amazed that
such a man had marooned himself voluntarily on the arctic coast. She did
not, of course, understand his business--entirely. She thought him simply
a trader. And he was unlike any man aboard ship. By his carefully clipped
beard, his calm, cold manner of speech, and the unusual correctness with
which he used his words she was convinced that at some time or another he
had been part of what she mentally thought of as "an entirely different
environment."
She was right. There was a time when London and New York would have given
much to lay their hands on the man who now called himself Blake.
Dolores, excited by the conviction that Blake would help her when he
heard her story, still did not lose her caution. Rydal had given her
another twenty-four hours, and that was all. In those twenty-four hours
she must fight out their salvation, her own and Peter's. If Blake should
fail--
Fifty paces from his cabin she stopped, slipped the big fur mitten from
her right hand and unbuttoned her coat so that she could quickly and
easily reach an inside pocket in which was Peter's revolver. She smiled
just a bit grimly, as her fingers touched the cold steel. It was to be
her last resort. And she was thinking in that flash of the days "back
home" when she was counted the best revolver shot at the Piping Rock. She
could beat Peter, and Peter was good. Her fingers twined a bit fondly
about the pearl-handled thing in her pocket. The last resort--and from
the first it had given her courage to keep the truth from Peter!
She knocked at the heavy door of the igloo cabin. Blake was still up, and
when he opened it, he stared at her in wide-eyed amazement. Wapi hung
outside when Dolores entered, and the door closed. "I know you think it
strange for me to come at this hour," she apologized, "but in this
terrible gloom I've lost all count of hours. They have no significance
for me any more. And I wanted to see you--alone."
She emphasized the word. And as she spoke, she loosened her coat and
threw back her hood, so that the glow of the lamp lit up the ruffled mass
of gold the hood had covered. She sat down without waiting for an
invitation, and Blake sat down opposite her with a narrow table between
them. Her face was flushed with cold and wind as she looked at him. Her
eyes were blue with the blue of a steady flame, and they met his own
squarely. She was not nervous. Nor was she afraid.
"Perhaps you can guess--why I have come?" she asked.
He was appraising her almost startling beauty with the lamp glow flooding
down on her. For a moment he hesitated; then he nodded, looking at her
steadily. "Yes, I think I know," he said quietly. "It's Captain Rydal. In
fact, I'm quite positive. It's an unusual situation, you know. Have I
guessed correctly?"
She nodded, drawing in her breath quickly and leaning a little toward
him, wondering how much he knew and how he had come by it.
"A very unusual situation," he repeated. "There's nothing in the world
that makes beasts out of men--most men--more quickly than an arctic
night, Mrs. Keith. And they're all beasts out there--now--all except your
husband, and he is contented because he possesses the one white woman
aboard ship. It's putting it brutally plain, but it's the truth, isn't
it? For the time being they're beasts, every man of the twenty, and
you--pardon me!--are very beautiful. Rydal wants you, and the fact that
your husband is dying--"
"He is not dying," she interrupted him fiercely. "He shall not die! If he
did--"
"Do you love him?" There was no insult in Blake's quiet voice. He asked
the question as if much depended on the answer, as if he must assure
himself of that fact.
"Love him--my Peter? Yes!"
She leaned forward eagerly, gripping her hands in front of him on the
table. She spoke swiftly, as if she must convince him before he asked her
another question. Blake's eyes did not change. They had not changed for
an instant. They were hard, and cold, and searching, unwarmed by her
beauty, by the luster of her shining hair, by the touch of her breath as
it came to him over the table.
"I have gone everywhere with him--everywhere," she began. "Peter writes
books, you know, and we have gone into all sorts of places. We love
it--both of us--this adventuring. We have been all through the country
down there," she swept a hand to the south, "on dog sledges, in canoes,
with snowshoes, and pack-trains. Then we hit on the idea of coming north
on a whaler. You know, of course, Captain Rydal planned to return this
autumn. The crew was rough, but we expected that. We expected to put up
with a lot. But even before the ice shut us in, before this terrible
night came, Rydal insulted me. I didn't dare tell Peter. I thought I
could handle Rydal, that I could keep him in his place, and I knew that
if I told Peter, he would kill the beast. And then the ice--and this
night--" She choked.
Blake's eyes, gimleting to her soul, were shot with a sudden fire as he,
too, leaned a little over the table. But his voice was unemotional as
rock. It merely stated a fact. "That's why Captain Rydal allowed himself
to be frozen in," he said. "He had plenty of time to get into the open
channels, Mrs. Keith. But he wanted you. And to get you he knew he would
have to lay over. And if he laid over, he knew that he would get you, for
many things may happen in an arctic night. It shows the depth of the
man's feelings, doesn't it? He is sacrificing a great deal to possess
you, losing a great deal of time, and money, and all that. And when your
husband dies--"
Her clenched little fist struck the table. "He won't die, I tell you! Why
do you say that?"
"Because--Rydal says he is going to die."
"Rydal--lies. Peter had a fall, and it hurt his spine so that his legs
are paralyzed. But I know what it is. If he could get away from that ship
and could have a doctor, he would be well again in two or three months."
"But Rydal says he is going to die."
There was no mistaking the significance of Blake's words this time. Her
eyes filled with sudden horror. Then they flashed with the blue fire
again. "So--he has told you? Well, he told me the same thing today. He
didn't intend to, of course. But he was half mad, and he had been
drinking. He has given me twenty-four hours."
"In which to--surrender?"
There was no need to reply.
For the first time Blake smiled. There was something in that smile that
made her flesh creep. "Twenty-four hours is a short time," he said, "and
in this matter, Mrs. Keith, I think that you will find Captain Rydal a
man of his word. No need to ask you why you don't appeal to the crew!
Useless! But you have hope that I can help you? Is that it?"
Her heart throbbed. "That is why I have come to you, Mr. Blake. You told
me today that Fort Confidence is only a hundred and fifty miles away and
that a Northwest Mounted Police garrison is there this winter--with a
doctor. Will you help me?"
"A hundred and fifty miles, in this country, at this time of the year, is
a long distance, Mrs. Keith," reflected Blake, looking into her eyes with
a steadiness that at any other time would have been embarrassing. "It
means the McFarlane, the Lacs Delesse, and the Arctic Barren. For a
hundred miles there isn't a stick of timber. If a storm came--no man or
dog could live. It is different from the coast. Here there is shelter
everywhere." He spoke slowly, and he was thinking swiftly. "It would take
five days at thirty miles a day. And the chances are that your husband
would not stand it. One hundred and twenty hours at fifty degrees below
zero, and no fire until the fourth day. He would die."
"It would be better--for if we stay--" she stopped, unclenching her hands
slowly.
"What?" he asked.
"I shall kill Captain Rydal," she declared. "It is the only thing I can
do. Will you force me to do that, or will you help me? You have sledges
and many dogs, and we will pay. And I have judged you to be--a man."
He rose from the table, and for a moment his face was turned from her.
"You probably do not understand my position, Mrs. Keith," he said, pacing
slowly back and forth and chuckling inwardly at the shock he was about to
give her. "You see, my livelihood depends on such men as Captain Rydal. I
have already done a big business with him in bone, oil, pelts--and Eskimo
women."
Without looking at her he heard the horrified intake of her breath. It
gave him a pleasing sort of thrill, and he turned, smiling, to look into
her dead-white face. Her eyes had changed. There was no longer hope or
entreaty in them. They were simply pools of blue flame. And she, too,
rose to her feet.
"Then--I can expect--no help--from you."
"I didn't say that, Mrs. Keith. It shocks you to know that I am
responsible. But up here, you must understand the code of ethics is a
great deal different from yours. We figure that what I have done for
Rydal and his crew keeps sane men from going mad during the long months
of darkness. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to help you--and Peter.
I think I shall. But you must give me a little time in which to consider
the matter--say an hour or so. I understand that whatever is to be done
must be done quickly. If I make up my mind to take you to Fort
Confidence, we shall start within two or three hours. I shall bring you
word aboard ship. So you might return and prepare yourself and Peter for
a probable emergency."
She went out dumbly into the night, Blake seeing her to the door and
closing it after her. He was courteous in his icy way but did not offer
to escort her back to the ship. She was glad. Her heart was choking her
with hope and fear. She had measured him differently this time. And she
was afraid. She had caught a glimpse that had taken her beyond the man,
to the monster. It made her shudder. And yet what did it matter, if Blake
helped them?
She had forgotten Wapi. Now she found him again close at her side, and
she dropped a hand to his big head as she hurried back through the pallid
gloom. She spoke to him, crying out with sobbing breath what she had not
dared to reveal to Blake. For Wapi the long night had ceased to be a hell
of ghastly emptiness, and to her voice and the touch of her hand he
responded with a whine that was the whine of a white man's dog. They had
traveled two-thirds of the distance to the ship when he stopped in his
tracks and sniffed the wind that was coming from shore. A second time he
did this, and a third, and the third time Dolores turned with him and
faced the direction from which they had come. A low growl rose in Wapi's
throat, a snarl of menace with a note of warning in it.
"What is it, Wapi?" whispered Dolores. She heard his long fangs click,
and under her hand she felt his body grow tense. "What is it?" she
repeated.
A thrill, a suspicion, shot into her heart as they went on. A fourth time
Wapi faced the shore and growled before they reached the ship. Like
shadows they went up over the ice bridge. Dolores did not enter the cabin
but drew Wapi behind it so they could not be seen. Ten minutes, fifteen,
and suddenly she caught her breath and fell down on her knees beside
Wapi, putting her arms about his gaunt shoulders. "Be quiet," she
whispered. "Be quiet."
Up out of the night came a dark and grotesque shadow. It paused below the
bridge, then it came on silently and passed almost without sound toward
the captain's quarters. It was Blake. Dolores' heart was choking her. Her
arms clutched Wapi, whispering for him to be quiet, to be quiet. Blake
disappeared, and she rose to her feet. She had come of fighting stock.
Peter was proud of that. "You slim wonderful little thing!" he had said
to her more than once. "You've a heart in that pretty body of yours like
the general's!" The general was her father, and a fighter. She thought of
Peter's words now, and the fighting blood leaped through her veins. It
was for Peter more than herself that she was going to fight now.
She made Wapi understand that he must remain where he was. Then she
followed after Blake, followed until her ears were close to the door
behind which she could already hear Blake and Rydal talking.
Ten minutes later she returned to Wapi. Under her hood her face was as
white as the whitest star in the sky. She stood for many minutes close to
the dog, gathering her courage, marshaling her strength, preparing
herself to face Peter. He must not suspect until the last moment. She
thanked God that Wapi had caught the taint of Blake in the air, and she
was conscious of offering a prayer that God might help her and Peter.
Peter gave a cry of pleasure when the door opened and Dolores entered. He
saw Wapi crowding in, and laughed. "Pals already! I guess I needn't have
been afraid for you. What a giant of a dog!"
The instant she appeared, Dolores forced upon herself an appearance of
joyous excitement. She flung off her coat and ran to Peter, hugging his
head against her as she told him swiftly what they were going to do. Fort
Confidence was only one hundred and fifty miles away, and a garrison of
police and a doctor were there. Five days on a sledge! That was all. And
she had persuaded Blake, the trader, to help them. They would start now,
as soon as she got him ready and Blake came. She must hurry. And she was
wildly and gloriously happy, she told him. In a little while they would
be at least on the outer edge of this horrible night, and he would be in
a doctor's hands.
She was holding Peter's head so that he could not see her face, and by
the time she jumped up and he did see it, there was nothing in it to
betray the truth or the fact that she was acting a lie. First she began
to dress Peter for the trail. Every instant gave her more courage. This
helpless, sunken-cheeked man with the hair graying over his temples was
Peter, her Peter, the Peter who had watched over her, and sheltered her,
and fought for her ever since she had known him, and now had come her
chance to fight for him. The thought filled her with a wonderful
exultation. It flushed her cheeks, and put a glory into her eyes, and
made her voice tremble. How wonderful it was to love a man as she loved
Peter! It was impossible for her to see the contrast they made--Peter
with his scrubby beard, his sunken cheeks, his emaciation, and she with
her radiant, golden beauty. She was ablaze with the desire to fight. And
how proud of her Peter would be when it was all over!
She finished dressing him and began putting things in their big dunnage
sack. Her lips tightened as she made this preparation. Finally she came
to a box of revolver cartridges and emptied them into one of the pockets
of her under-jacket. Wapi flattened out near the door, watched every
movement she made.
When the dunnage sack was filled, she returned to Peter. "Won't it be a
joke on Captain Rydal!" she exulted. "You see, we aren't gong to let him
know anything about it." She appeared not to observe Peter's surprise.
"You know how I hate him, Peter dear," she went on. "He is a beast. But
Mr. Blake has done a great deal of trading with him, and he doesn't want
Captain Rydal to know the part he is taking in getting us away. Not that
Rydal would miss us, you know! I don't think he cares very much whether
you live or die, Peter, and that's why I hate him. But we must humor Mr.
Blake. He doesn't want him to know."
"Odd," mused Peter. "It's sort of--sneaking away."
His eyes had in them a searching question which Dolores tried not to see
and which she was glad he did not put into words. If she could only fool
him another hour--just one more hour.
It was less than that--half an hour after she had finished the dunnage
sack--when they heard footsteps crunching outside and then a knock at the
door. Wapi answered with a snarl, and when Dolores opened the door and
Blake entered, his eyes fell first of all on the dog.
"Attached himself, eh?" he greeted, turning his quiet, unemotional smile
on Peter. "First white woman he has ever seen, and I guess the case is
hopeless. Mrs. Keith may have him."
He turned to her. "Are you ready?"
She nodded and pointed to the dunnage sack. Then she put on her fur coat
and hood and helped Peter sit up on the edge of the bed while Blake
opened the door again and made a low signal. Instantly Uppy and another
Eskimo came in. Blake led with the sack, and the two Eskimos carried
Peter. Dolores followed last, with the fingers of one little hand gripped
about the revolver in her pocket. Wapi hugged so close to her that she
could feel his body.
On the ice was a sledge without dogs. Peter was bundled on this, and the
Eskimos pulled him. Blake was still in the lead. Twenty minutes after
leaving the ship they pulled up beside his cabin.
There were two teams ready for the trail, one of six dogs, and another of
five, each watched over by an Eskimo. The visor of Dolores' hood kept
Blake from seeing how sharply she took in the situation. Under it her
eyes were ablaze. Her bare hand gripped her revolver, and if Peter could
have heard the beating of her heart, he would have gasped. But she was
cool, for all that. Swiftly and accurately she appraised Blake's
preparations. She observed that in the six-dog team, in spite of its
numerical superiority, the animals were more powerful than those in the
five-dog team. The Eskimos placed Peter on the six-dog sledge, and
Dolores helped to wrap him up warmly in the bearskins. Their dunnage sack
was tied on at Peter's feet. Not until then did she seem to notice the
five-dog sledge. She smiled at Blake. "We must be sure that in our
excitement we haven't forgotten something," she said, going over what was
on the sledge. "This is a tent, and here are plenty of warm
bearskins--and--and--" She looked up at Blake, who was watching her
silently. "If there is no timber for so long, Mr. Blake, shouldn't we
have a big bundle of kindling? And surely we should have meat for the
dogs!"
Blake stared at her and then turned sharply on Uppy with a rattle of
Eskimo. Uppy and one of the companions made their exit instantly and in
great haste.
"The fools!" he apologized. "One has to watch them like children, Mrs.
Keith. Pardon me while I help them."
She waited until he followed Uppy into the cabin. Then, with the
remaining Eskimo staring at her in wonderment, she carried an extra
bearskin, the small tent, and a narwhal grub-sack to Peter's sledge. It
was another five minutes before Blake and the two Eskimos reappeared with
a bag of fish and a big bundle of ship-timber kindlings. Dolores stood
with a mittened hand on Peter's shoulder, and bending down, she
whispered:
"Peter, if you love me, don't mind what I'm going to say now. Don't move,
for everything is going to be all right, and if you should try to get up
or roll off the sledge, it would be so much harder for me. I haven't even
told you why we're going to Port Confidence. Now you'll know!"
She straightened up to face Blake. She had chosen her position, and Blake
was standing clear and unshadowed in the starlight half a dozen paces
from her. She had thrust her hood back a little, inspired by her feminine
instinct to let him see her contempt for him.
"You beast!"
The words hissed hot and furious from her lips, and in that same instant
Blake found himself staring straight into the unquivering muzzle of her
revolver.
"You beast!" she repeated. "I ought to kill you. I ought to shoot you
down where you stand, for you are a cur and a coward. I know what you
have planned. I followed you when you went to Rydal's cabin a little
while ago, and I heard everything that passed between you. Listen, Peter,
and I'll tell you what these brutes were going to do with us. You were to
go with the six-dog team and I with the five, and out on the barrens we
were to become separated, you to go on and be killed when you we're a
proper distance away, and I to be brought back--to Rydal. Do you
understand, Peter dear? Isn't it splendid that we should have forced on
us like this such wonderful material for a story!"
She was gloriously unafraid now. A paean of triumph rang in her voice,
triumph, contempt, and utter fearlessness. Her mittened hand pressed on
Peter's shoulder, and before the weapon in her other hand Blake stood as
if turned into stone.
"You don't know," she said, speaking to him directly, "how near I am to
killing you. I think I shall shoot unless you have the meat and kindlings
put on Peter's sledge immediately and give Uppy instructions--in
English--to drive us to Fort Confidence. Peter and I will both go with
the six-dog sledge. Give the instructions quickly, Mr. Blake!"
Blake, recovering from the shock she had given him, flashed back at her
his cool and cynical smile. In spite of being caught in an unpleasant
lie, he admired this golden-haired, blue-eyed slip of a woman for the
colossal bluff she was playing. "Personally, I'm sorry," he said, "but I
couldn't help it. Rydal--"
"I am sure, unless you give the instructions quickly, that I shall
shoot," she interrupted him. Her voice was so quiet that Peter was
amazed. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Keith. But--"
A flash of fire blinded him, and with the flash Blake staggered back with
a cry of pain and stood swaying unsteadily in the starlight, clutching
with one hand at an arm which hung limp and useless at his side.
"That time, I broke your arm," said Dolores, with scarcely more
excitement than if she had made a bull's-eye on the Piping Rock range.
"If I fire again, I am quite positive that I shall kill you!"
The Eskimos had not moved. They were like three lifeless, staring
gargoyles. For another second or two Blake stood clutching at his arm.
Then he said,
"Uppy, put the dog meat and the kindlings on the big sledge--and drive
like hell for Fort Confidence!" And then, before she could stop him, he
followed up his words swiftly and furiously in Eskimo.
"Stop!"
She almost shrieked the one word of warning, and with it a second shot
burned its way through the flesh of Blake's shoulder and he went down.
The revolver turned on Uppy, and instantly he was electrified into life.
Thirty seconds later, at the head of the team, he was leading the way out
into the chaotic gloom of the night. Hovering over Peter, riding with her
hand on the gee-bar of the sledge, Dolores looked back to see Blake
staggering to his feet. He shouted after them, and what he said was in
Uppy's tongue. And this time she could not stop him.
She had forgotten Wapi. But as the night swallowed them up, she still
looked back, and through the gloom she saw a shadow coming swiftly. In a
few moments Wapi was running at the tail of the sledge. Then she leaned
over Peter and encircled his shoulders with her furry arms.
"We're off!" she cried, a breaking note of gladness in her voice. "We're
off! And, Peter dear, wasn't it perfectly thrilling!"
A few minutes later she called upon Uppy to stop the team. Then she faced
him, close to Peter, with the revolver in her hand.
"Uppy," she demanded, speaking slowly and distinctly, "what was it Blake
said to you?"
For a moment Uppy made as if to feign stupidity. The revolver covered a
spot half-way between his narrow-slit eyes.
"I shall shoot--"
Uppy gave a choking gasp. "He said--no take trail For' Con'dence--go
wrong--he come soon get you."
"Yes, he said just that." She picked her words even more slowly. "Uppy,
listen to me. If you let them come up with us--unless you get us to Fort
Confidence--I will kill you. Do you understand?"
She poked her revolver a foot nearer, and Uppy nodded emphatically. She
smiled. It was almost funny to see Uppy's understanding liven up at the
point of the gun, and she felt a thrill that tingled to her finger-tips.
The little devils of adventure were wide-awake in her, and, smiling at
Uppy, she told him to hold up the end of his driving whip. He obeyed. The
revolver flashed, and a muffled yell came from him as he felt the shock
of the bullet as it struck fairly against the butt of his whip. In the
same instant there came a snarling deep-throated growl from Wapi. From
the sledge Peter gave a cry of warning. Uppy shrank back, and Dolores
cried out sharply and put herself swiftly between Wapi and the Eskimo.
The huge dog, ready to spring, slunk back to the end of the sledge at the
command of her voice. She patted his big head before she got on the
sledge behind Peter.
There was no indecision in the manner of Uppy'S going now. He struck out
swift and straight for the pale constellation of stars that hung over
Fort Confidence. It was splendid traveling. The surface of the arctic
plain was frozen solid. What little wind there was came from behind them,
and the dogs were big and fresh. Uppy ran briskly, snapping the lash of
his whip and la-looing to the dogs in the manner of the Eskimo driver.
Dolores did not wait for Peter's demand for a further explanation of
their running away and her remarkable words to Blake. She told him. She
omitted, for the sake of Peter's peace of mind, the physical insults she
had suffered at Captain Rydal's hands. She did not tell him that Rydal
had forced her into his arms a few hours before and kissed her. What she
did reveal made Peter's arms and shoulders grow tense and he groaned in
his helplessness.
"If you'd only told me!" he protested. Dolores laughed triumphantly, with
her arm about his shoulder. "I knew my dear old Peter too well for that,"
she exulted. "If I had told you, what a pretty mess we'd be in now,
Peter! You would have insisted on calling Captain Rydal into our cabin
and shooting him from the bed--and then where would we have been? Don't
you think I'm handling it pretty well, Peter dear?"
Peter's reply was smothered against her hooded cheek.
He began to question her more directly now, and with his ability to grasp
at the significance of things he pointed out quickly the tremendous
hazard of their position. There were many more dogs and other sledges at
Blake's place, and it was utterly inconceivable that Blake and Captain
Rydal would permit them to reach Fort Confidence without making every
effort in their power to stop them. Once they succeeded in placing
certain facts in the hands of the Mounted Police, both Rydal and Blake
would be done for. He impressed this uncomfortable truth on Dolores and
suggested that if she could have smuggled a rifle along in the dunnage
sack it would have helped matters considerably. For Rydal and Blake would
not hesitate at shooting. For them it must be either capture or
kill--death for him, anyway, for he was the one factor not wanted in the
equation. He summed up their chances and their danger calmly and
pointedly, as he always looked at troubling things. And Dolores felt her
heart sinking within her. After all, she had not handled the situation
any too well. She almost wished she had killed Rydal herself and called
it self-defense. At least she had been criminally negligent in not
smuggling along a rifle.
"But we'll beat them out," she argued hopefully. "We've got a splendid
team, Peter, and I'll take off my coat and run behind the sledge as much
as I can. Uppy won't dare play a trick on us now, for he knows that if I
should miss him, Wapi would tear the life out of him at a word from me.
We'll win out, Peter dear. See if we don't!"
Peter hugged his thoughts to himself. He did not tell her that Blake and
Rydal would pursue with a ten- or twelve-dog team, and that there was
almost no chance at all of a straight get-away. Instead, he pulled her
head down and kissed her.
To Wapi there had come at last a response to the great yearning that was
in him. Instinct, summer and winter, had drawn him south, had turned him
always in that direction, filled with the uneasiness of the mysterious
something that was calling to him through the years of forty generations
of his kind. And now he was going south. He sensed the fact that this
journey would not end at the edge of the Arctic plain and that he was not
to hunt caribou or bear. His mental formulae necessitated no process of
reasoning. They were simple and to the point His world had suddenly
divided itself into two parts; one contained the woman, and the other his
old masters and slavery. And the woman stood against these masters. They
were her enemies as well as his own. Experience had taught him the power
and the significance of firearms, just as it had made him understand the
uses for which spears, and harpoons, and whips were made. He had seen the
woman shoot Blake, and he had seen her ready to shoot at Uppy. Therefore
he understood that they were enemies and that all associated with them
were enemies. At a word from her he was ready to spring ahead and tear
the life out of the Eskimo driver and even out of the dogs that were
pulling the sledge. It did not take him long to comprehend that the man
on the sledge was a part of the woman.
He hung well back, twenty or thirty paces behind the sledge, and unless
Peter or the woman called to him, or the sledge stopped for some reason,
he seldom came nearer.
It took only a word from Dolores to bring him to her side.
Hour after hour the journey continued. The plain was level as a floor,
and at intervals Dolores would run in the trail that the load might be
lightened and the dogs might make better time. It was then that Peter
watched Uppy with the revolver, and it was also in these
intervals--running close beside the woman--that the blood in Wapi's veins
was fired with a riotous joy.
For three hours there was almost no slackening in Uppy's speed. The
fourth and fifth were slower. In the sixth and seventh the pace began to
tell. And the plain was no longer hard and level, swept like a floor by
the polar winds. Rolling undulations grew into ridges of snow and ice; in
places the dogs dragged the sledge over thin crusts that broke under the
runners; fields of drift snow, fine as shot, lay in their way; and in the
eighth hour Uppy stopped the lagging dogs and held up his two hands in
the mute signal of the Eskimo that they could go no farther without a
rest.
Wapi dropped on his belly and watched. His eyes followed Uppy
suspiciously as he strung up the tent on its whalebone supports to keep
the bite of the wind from the sledge on which Dolores sat at Peter's
feet. Then Uppy built a fire of kindlings, and scraped up a pot of ice
for tea-water. After that, while the water was heating, he gave each of
the trace dogs a frozen fish. Dolores herself picked out one of the
largest and tossed it to Wapi. Then she sat down again and began to talk
to Peter, bundled up in his furs. After a time they ate, and drank hot
tea, and after he had devoured a chunk of raw meat the size of his two
fists, Uppy rolled himself in his sleeping bag near the dogs. A little at
a time Wapi dragged himself nearer until his head lay on Dolores' coat.
After that there was a long silence broken only by the low voices of the
woman and the man, and the heavy breathing of the tired dogs. Wapi
himself dozed off, but never for long. Then Dolores nodded, and her head
drooped until it found a pillow on Peter's shoulder. Gently Peter drew a
bearskin about her, and for a long time sat wide-awake, guarding Uppy and
baring his ears at intervals to listen. A dozen times he saw Wapi's
bloodshot eyes looking at him, and twice he put out a hand to the dog's
head and spoke to him in a whisper.
Even Peter's eyes were filmed by a growing drowsiness when Wapi drew
silently away and slunk suspiciously into the night. There was no yapping
foxes here, forty miles from the coast. An almost appalling silence hung
under the white stars, a silence broken only by the low and distant
moaning the wind always makes on the barrens. Wapi listened to it, and he
sniffed with his gray muzzle turned to the north. And then he whined. Had
Dolores or Peter seen him or heard the note in his throat, they, too,
would have stared back over the trail they had traveled. For something
was coming to Wapi. Faint, elusive, and indefinable breath in the air, he
smelled it in one moment, and the next it was gone. For many minutes he
stood undecided, and then he returned to the sledge, his spine bristling
and a growl in his throat.
Wide-eyed and staring, Peter was looking back. "What is it, Wapi?"
His voice aroused Dolores. She sat up with a start. The growl had grown
into a snarl in Wapi's throat.
"I think they are coming," said Peter calmly. "You'd better rouse Uppy.
He hasn't moved in the last two hours."
Something that was like a sob came from Dolores' lips as she stood up.
"They're not coming," she whispered. "They've stopped--and they're
building a fire!"
Not more than a third of a mile away a point of yellow flame flared up in
the night.
"Give me the revolver, Peter."
Peter gave it to her without a word. She went to Uppy, and at the touch
of her foot he was out of his sleeping-bag, his moon-face staring at her.
She pointed back to the fire. Her face was dead white. The revolver was
pointed straight at Uppy's heart.
"If they come up with us, Uppy--you die!"
The Eskimo's narrow eyes widened. There was murder in this white woman's
face, in the steadiness of her hand, and in her voice. If they came up
with them--he would die! Swiftly he gathered up his sleeping-bag and
placed it on the sledge. Then he roused the dogs, tangled in their
traces. They rose to their feet, sleepy and ill-humored. One of them
snapped at his hand. Another snarled viciously as he untwisted a trace.
Then one of the yawning brutes caught the new smell in the air, the smell
that Wapi had gathered when it was a mile farther off. He sniffed. He sat
back on his haunches and sent forth a yelping howl to his comrades in the
other team. In ten seconds the other five were howling with him, and
scarcely had the tumult burst from their throats when there came a
response from the fire half a mile away.
"My God!" gasped Peter, under his breath.
Dolores sprang to the gee-bar, and Uppy lashed his long whip until it
cracked like a repeating rifle over the pack. The dogs responded and sped
through the night. Behind them the pandemonium of dog voices in the other
camp had ceased. Men had leaped into life. Fifteen dogs were
straightening in the tandem trace of a single sledge.
Dolores laughed, a sobbing, broken laugh, that in itself was a cry of
despair. "Peter, if they come up with us, what shall we do?"
"If they overtake us," said Peter, "give me the revolver. It is fully
loaded?"
"I have cartridges--"
For the first time she remembered that she had not filled the three empty
chambers. Crooking her arm under the gee-bar, she fumbled in her pocket.
The dogs, refreshed by their sleep and urged by Uppy's whip, were tearing
off the first mile at a great speed. The trail ahead of them was level
and hard again. Uppy knew they were on the edge of the big barren of the
Lacs Delesse, and he cracked his whip just as the off runner of the
sledge struck a hidden snow-blister. There was a sudden lurch, and in a
vicious up-shoot of the gee-bar the revolver was knocked from Dolores'
hand--and was gone. A shriek rose to her lips, but she stifled it before
it was given voice. Until this minute she had not felt the terror of
utter hopelessness upon her. Now it made her faint. The revolver had not
only given her hope, but also a steadfast faith in herself. From the
beginning she had made up her mind how she would use it in the end, even
though a few moments before she had asked Peter what they would do.
Crumpled down on the sledge, she clung to Peter, and suddenly the
inspiration came to her not to let him know what had happened. Her arms
tightened about his shoulders, and she looked ahead over the backs of the
wolfish pack, shivering as she thought of what Uppy would do could he
guess her loss. But he was running now for his life, driven on by his
fear of her unerring marksmanship--and Wapi. She looked over her
shoulder. Wapi was there, a huge gray shadow twenty paces behind. And she
thought she heard a shout!
Peter was speaking to her. "Blake's dogs are tired," he was saying. "They
were just about to camp, and ours have had a rest. Perhaps--"
"We shall beat them!" she interrupted him. "See how fast we are going,
Peter! It is splendid!"
A rifle-shot sounded behind them. It was not far away, and involuntarily
she clutched him tighter. Peter reached up a hand.
"Give me the revolver, Dolores."
"No," she protested. "They are not going to overtake us."
"You must give me the revolver," he insisted.
"Peter, I can't. You understand, I can't. I must keep the revolver."
She looked back again. There was no doubt now. Their pursuers were
drawing nearer. She heard a voice, the la-looing of running Eskimos, a
faint shout which she knew was a white man's shout--and another rifle
shot. Wapi was running nearer. He was almost at the tail of the sledge,
and his red eyes were fixed on her as he ran.
"Wapi!" she cried. "Wapi!"
His jaws dropped agape. She could hear his panting response to her voice.
A third shot--over their heads sped a strange droning sound.
"Wapi," she almost screamed, "go back! Sick 'em, Wapi--sick 'em--sick
'em--sick 'em!" She flung out her arms, driving him back, repeating the
words over and over again. She leaned over the edge of the sledge,
clinging to the gee-bar. "Go back, Wapi! Sick 'em--sick 'em--sick 'em!"
As if in response to her wild exhortation, there came a sudden yelping
outcry from the team behind. It was close upon them now. Another ten
minutes.
And then she saw that Wapi was dropping behind. Quickly he was swallowed
up in the starlit chaos of the night.
"Peter," she cried, sobbingly. "Peter!"
Listening to the retreating sound of the sledge, Wapi stood a silent
shadow in the trail. Then he turned and faced the north. He heard the
other sound now, and ahead of it the wind brought him a smell, the smell
of things he hated. For many years something had been fighting itself
toward understanding within him, and the yelping of dogs and the taint in
the air of creatures who had been his slave-masters narrowed his instinct
to the one vital point. Again it was not a process of reason but the
cumulative effect of things that had happened, and were happening. He had
scented menace when first he had given warning of the nearness of
pursuers, and this menace was no longer an elusive and unseizable thing
that had merely stirred the fires of his hatred. It was now a near and
physical fact. He had tried to run away from it--with the woman--but it
had followed and was overtaking him, and the yelping dogs were
challenging him to fight as they had challenged him from the day he was
old enough to take his own part. And now he had something to fight for.
His intelligence gripped the fact that one sledge was running away from
the other, and that the sledge which was running away was his sledge--and
that for his sledge he must fight.
He waited, almost squarely in the trail. There was no longer the
slinking, club-driven attitude of a creature at bay in the manner in
which he stood in the path of his enemies. He had risen out of his
serfdom. The stinging slash of the whip and his dread of it were gone.
Standing there in the starlight with his magnificent head thrown up and
the muscles of his huge body like corded steel, the passing spirit of
Shan Tung would have taken him for Tao, the Great Dane. He was not
excited--and yet he was filled with a mighty desire--more than that, a
tremendous purpose. The yelping excitement of the oncoming Eskimo dogs no
longer urged him to turn aside to avoid their insolent bluster, as he
would have turned aside yesterday or the day before. The voices of his
old masters no longer sent him slinking out of their way, a growl in his
throat and his body sagging with humiliation and the rage of his slavery.
He stood like a rock, his broad chest facing them squarely, and when he
saw the shadows of them racing up out of the star-mist an eighth of a
mile away, it was not a growl but a whine that rose in his throat, a
whine of low and repressed eagerness, of a great yearning about to be
fulfilled. Two hundred yards--a hundred--eighty--not until the dogs were
less than fifty from him did he move. And then, like a rock hurled by a
mighty force, he was at them.
He met the onrushing weight of the pack breast to breast. There was no
warning. Neither men nor dogs had seen the waiting shadow. The crash sent
the lead-dog back with Wapi's great fangs in his throat, and in an
instant the fourteen dogs behind had piled over them, tangled in their
traces, yelping and snarling and biting, while over them round-faced,
hooded men shouted shrilly and struck with their whips, and from the
sledge a white man sprang with a rifle in his hands. It was Rydal. Under
the mass of dogs Wapi, the Walrus, heard nothing of the shouts of men. He
was fighting. He was fighting as he had never fought before in all the
days of his life. The fierce little Eskimo dogs had smelled him, and they
knew their enemy. The lead-dog was dead. A second Wapi had disemboweled
with a single slash of his inch-long fangs. He was buried now. But his
jaws met flesh and bone, and out of the squirming mass there rose fearful
cries of agony that mingled hideously with the bawling of men and the
snarling and yelping of beasts that had not yet felt Wapi's fangs. Three
and four at a time they were at him. He felt the wolfish slash of their
teeth in his flesh. In him the sense of pain was gone. His jaws closed on
a foreleg, and it snapped like a stick. His teeth sank like ivory knives
into the groin of a brute that had torn a hole in his side, and a
smothered death-howl rose out of the heap. A fang pierced his eye. Even
then no cry came from Wapi, the Walrus. He heaved upward with his giant
body. He found another throat, and it was then that he rose above the
pack, shaking the life from his victim as a terrier would have shaken a
rat. For the first time the Eskimos saw him, and out of their
superstitious souls strange cries found utterance as they sprang back and
shrieked out to Rydal that it was a devil and not a beast that had waited
for them in the trail. Rydal threw up his rifle. The shot came. It burned
a crease in Wapi's shoulder and tore a hole as big as a man's fist in the
breast of a dog about to spring upon him f rom behind. Again he was down,
and Rydal dropped his rifle, and snatched a whip from the hand of an
Eskimo. Shouting and cursing, he lashed the pack, and in a moment he saw
a huge, open-jawed shadow rise up on the far side and start off into the
open starlight. He sprang back to his rifle. Twice he fired at the
retreating shadow before it disappeared. And the Eskimo dogs made no
movement to follow. Five of the fifteen were dead. The remaining ten,
torn and bleeding--three of them with legs that dragged in the bloody
snow--gathered in a whipped and whimpering group. And the Eskimos,
shivering in their fear of this devil that had entered into the body of
Wapi, the Walrus, failed to respond to Rydal's command when he pointed to
the red trail that ran out under the stars.
At Fort Confidence, one hundred and fifty miles to the south, there was
day--day that was like cold, gray dawn, the day one finds just beyond the
edge of the Arctic night, in which the sun hangs like a pale lantern over
the far southern horizon. In a log-built room that faced this bit of
glorious red glow lay Peter, bolstered up in his bed so that he could see
it until it faded from the sky. There was a new light in his face, and
there was something of the old Peter back in his eyes. Watching the final
glow with him was Dolores. It was their second day.
Into this world, in the twilight that was falling swiftly as they watched
the setting of the sun, came Wapi, the Walrus. Blinded in the eye, gaunt
with hunger and exhaustion, covered with wounds, and with his great heart
almost ready to die, he came at last to the river across which lay the
barracks. His vision was nearly gone, but under his nose he could still
smell faintly the trail he was following until the last. It led him
across the river. And in darkness it brought him to a door.
After a little the door opened, and with its opening came at last the
fulfilment of the promise of his dreams--hope, happiness, things to live
for in a new, a white-man's world. For Wapi, the Walrus, forty years
removed from Tao of Vancouver, had at last come home.
THE YELLOW-BACK
Above God's Lake, where the Bent Arrow runs red as pale blood under its
crust of ice, Reese Beaudin heard of the dog auction that was to take
place at Post Lac Bain three days later. It was in the cabin of Joe
Delesse, a trapper, who lived at Lac Bain during the summer, and trapped
the fox and the lynx sixty miles farther north in this month of February.
"Diantre, but I tell you it is to be the greatest sale of dogs that has
ever happened at Lac Bain!" said Delesse. "To this Wakao they are coming
from all the four directions. There will be a hundred dogs, huskies, and
malamutes, and Mackenzie hounds, and mongrels from the south, and I
should not wonder if some of the little Eskimo devils were brought from
the north to be sold as breeders. Surely you will not miss it, my
friend?"
"I am going by way of Post Lac Bain," replied Reese Beaudin equivocally.
But his mind was not on the sale of dogs. From his pipe he puffed out
thick clouds of smoke, and his eyes narrowed until they seemed like coals
peering out of cracks; and he said, in his quiet, soft voice:
"Do you know of a man named Jacques Dupont, m'sieu?"
Joe Delesse tried to peer through the cloud of smoke at Reese Beaudin's
face.
"Yes, I know him. Does he happen to be a friend of yours?"
Reese laughed softly.
"I have heard of him. They say that he is a devil. To the west I was told
that he can whip any man between Hudson's Bay and the Great Bear, that he
is a beast in man-shape, and that he will surely be at the big sale at
Lac Bain."
On his knees the huge hands of Joe Delesse clenched slowly, gripping in
their imaginary clutch a hated thing.
"Oui, I know him," he said. "I know also--Elise--his wife. See!"
He thrust suddenly his two huge knotted hands through the smoke that
drifted between him and the stranger who had sought the shelter of his
cabin that night.
"See--I am a man full-grown, m'sieu--a man--and yet I am afraid of him!
That is how much of a devil and a beast in man-shape he is."
Again Reese Beaudin laughed in his low, soft voice.
"And his wife, mon ami? Is she afraid of him?"
He had stopped smoking. Joe Delesse saw his face. The stranger's eyes
made him look twice and think twice.
"You have known her--sometime?"
"Yes, a long time ago. "We were children together. And I have heard all
has not gone well with her. Is it so?"
"Does it go well when a dove is mated to a vulture, m'sieu?"
"I have also heard that she grew up to be very beautiful," said Reese
Beaudin, "and that Jacques Dupont killed a man for her. If that is so--"
"It is not so," interrupted Delesse. "He drove another man away--no, not
a man, but a yellow-livered coward who had no more fight in him than a
porcupine without quills! And yet she says he was not a coward. She has
always said, even to Dupont, that it was the way le Bon Dieu made him,
and that because he was made that way he was greater than all other men
in the North Country. How do I know? Because, m'sieu, I am Elise Dupont's
cousin."
Delesse wondered why Reese Beaudin's eyes were glowing like living coals.
"And yet--again, it is only rumor I have heard--they say this man,
whoever he was, did actually run away, like a dog that had been whipped
and was afraid to return to its kennel."
"Pst!" Joe Delesse flung his great arms wide. "Like that--he was gone.
And no one ever saw him again, or heard of him again. But I know that she
knew--my cousin, Elise. What word it was he left for her at the last she
has always kept in her own heart, mon Dieu, and what a wonderful thing he
had to fight for! You knew the child. But the woman--non? She was like an
angel. Her eyes, when you looked into them--hat can I say, m'sieu? They
made you forget. And I have seen her hair, unbound, black and glossy as
the velvet side of a sable, covering her to the hips. And two years ago I
saw Jacques Dupont's hands in that hair, and he was dragging her by it--"
Something snapped. It was a muscle in Reese Beaudin's arm. He had
stiffened like iron.
"And you let him do that!"
Joe Delesse shrugged his shoulders. It was a shrug of hopelessness, of
disgust.
"For the third time I interfered, and for the third time Jacques Dupont
beat me until I was nearer dead than alive. And since then I have made it
none of my business. It was, after all, the fault of the man who ran
away. You see, m'sieu, it was like this: Dupont was mad for her, and this
man who ran away--the Yellow-back--wanted her, and Elise loved the
Yellow-back. This Yellow-back was twenty-three or four, and he read
books, and played a fiddle and drew strange pictures--and was weak in the
heart when it came to a fight. But Elise loved him. She loved him for
those very things that made him a fool and a weakling, m'sieu, the books
and the fiddle and the pictures; and she stood up with the courage for
them both. And she would have married him, too, and would have fought for
him with a club if it had come to that, when the thing happened that made
him run away. It was at the midsummer carnival, when all the trappers and
their wives and children were at Lac Bain. And Dupont followed the
Yellow-back about like a dog. He taunted him, he insulted him, he got
down on his knees and offered to fight him without getting on his feet;
and there, before the very eyes of Elise, he washed the Yellow-back's
face in the grease of one of the roasted caribou! And the Yellow-back was
a man! Yes, a grown man! And it was then that Jacques Dupont shouted out
his challenge to all that crowd. He would fight the Yellow-back. He would
fight him with his right arm tied behind his back! And before Elise and
the Yellow-back, and all that crowd, friends tied his arm so that it was
like a piece of wood behind him, and it was his right arm, his fighting
arm, the better half of him that was gone. And even then the Yellow-back
was as white as the paper he drew pictures on. Ventre saint gris, but
then was his chance to have killed Jacques Dupont! Half a man could have
done it. Did he, m'sieu? No, he did not. With his one arm and his one
hand Jacques Dupont whipped that Yellow-back, and he would have killed
him if Elise had not rushed in to sav e the Yellow-back's purple face
from going dead black. And that night the Yellow-back slunk away. Shame?
Yes. From that night he was ashamed to show his face ever again at Lac
Bain. And no one knows where he went. No one--except Elise. And her
secret is in her own breast."
"And after that?" questioned Reese Beaudin, in a voice that was scarcely
above a whisper.
"I cannot understand," said Joe Delesse. "It was strange, m'sieu, very
strange. I know that Elise, even after that coward ran away, still loved
him. And yet--well, something happened. I overheard a terrible quarrel
one day between Jan Thiebout, father of Elise, and Jacques Dupont. After
that Thiebout was very much afraid of Dupont. I have my own suspicion.
Now that Thiebout is dead it is not wrong for me to say what it is. I
think Thiebout killed the halfbreed Bedore who was found dead on his
trap-line five years ago. There was a feud between them. And Dupont,
discovering Thiebout's secret--well, you can understand how easy it would
be after that, m'sieu. Thiebout's winter trapping was in that Burntwood
country, fifty miles from neighbor to neighbor, and very soon after
Bedore's death Jacques Dupont became Thiebout's partner. I know that
Elise was forced to marry him. That was four years ago. The next year old
Thiebout died, and in all that time not once has Elise been to Post Lac
Bain!"
"Like the Yellow-back--she never returned," breathed Reese Beaudin.
"Never. And now--it is strange--"
"What is strange, Joe Delesse?"
"That for the first time in all these years she is going to Lac Bain--to
the dog sale."
Reese Beaudin's face was again hidden in the smoke of his pipe. Through
it his voice came.
"It is a cold night, M'sieu Delesse. Hear the wind howl!"
"Yes, it is cold--so cold the foxes will not run. My traps and
poison-baits will need no tending tomorrow."
"Unless you dig them out of the drifts."
"I will stay in the cabin."
"What! You are not going to Lac Bain!"
"I doubt it."
"Even though Elise, your cousin, is to be there?"
"I have no stomach for it, m'sieu. Nor would you were you in my boots,
and did you know why he is going. Par les mille cornes d'u diable, I
cannot whip him but I can kill him--and if I went--and the thing happens
which I guess is going to happen--"
"Qui? Surely you will tell me--"
"Yes, I will tell you. Jacques Dupont knows that Elise has never stopped
loving the Yellow-back. I do not believe she has ever tried to hide it
from him. Why should she? And there is a rumor, m'sieu, that the
Yellow-back will be at the Lac Bain dog sale."
Reese Beaudin rose slowly to his feet, and yawned in that smoke-filled
cabin.
"And if the Yellow-back should turn the tables, Joe Delesse, think of
what a fine thing you will miss," he said.
Joe Delesse also rose, with a contemptuous laugh.
"That fiddler, that picture-drawer, that book-reader--Pouff! You are
tired, m'sieu, that is your bunk."
Reese Beaudin held out a hand. The bulk of the two stood out in the
lamp-glow, and Joe Delesse was so much the bigger man that his hand was
half again the size of Reese Beaudin's. They gripped. And then a strange
look went over the face of Joe Delesse. A cry came from out of his beard.
His mouth grew twisted. His knees doubled slowly under him, and in the
space of ten seconds his huge bulk was kneeling on the floor, while Reese
Beaudin looked at him, smiling.
"Has Jacques Dupont a greater grip than that, Joe Delesse?" he asked in a
voice that was so soft it was almost a woman's.
"Mon Dieu!" gasped Delesse. He staggered to his feet, clutching his
crushed hand. "M'sieu--"
Reese Beaudin put his hands to the other's shoulders, smiling, friendly.
"I will apologize, I will explain, mon ami," he said. "But first, you
must tell me the name of that Yellow-back who ran away years ago. Do you
remember it?"
"Oui, but what has that to do with my crushed hand? The Yellow-back's
name was Reese Beaudin--"
"And I am Reese Beaudin," laughed the other gently.
On that day--the day of Wakoa, the dog sale--seven fat caribou were
roasting on great spits at Post Lac Bain, and under them were seven fires
burning red and hot of seasoned birch, and around the seven fires were
seven groups of men who slowly turned the roasting carcasses.
It was the Big Day of the mid-winter festival, and Post Lac Bain, with a
population of twenty in times of quiet, was a seething wilderness
metropolis of two hundred excited souls and twice as many dogs. From all
directions they had come, from north and south and east and west; from
near and from far, from the Barrens, from the swamps, from the farther
forests, from river and lake and hidden trail--a few white men, mostly
French; half-breeds and 'breeds, Chippewans, and Crees, and here and
there a strange, dark-visaged little interloper from the north with his
strain of Eskimo blood. Foregathered were all the breeds and creeds and
fashions of the wilderness.
Over all this, pervading the air like an incense, stirring the desire of
man and beast, floated the aroma of the roasting caribou. The feast-hour
was at hand. With cries that rose above the last words of a wild song the
seven groups of men rushed to seven pairs of props and tore them away.
The great carcasses swayed in mid-air, bent slowly over their spits, and
then crashed into the snow fifteen feet from the fire. About each carcass
five men with razor-sharp knives ripped off hunks of the roasted flesh
and passed them into eager hands of the hungry multitude. First came the
women and children, and last the men.
On this there peered forth from a window in the factor's house the darkly
bearded, smiling face of Reese Beaudin.
"I have seen him three times, wandering about in the crowd, seeking
someone," he said. "Bien, he shall find that someone very soon!"
In the face of McDougall, the factor, was a strange look. For he had
listened to a strange story, and there was still something of shock and
amazement and disbelief in his eyes.
"Reese Beaudin, it is hard for me to believe."
"And yet you shall find that it is true," smiled Reese.
"He will kill you. He is a monster--a giant!"
"I shall die hard," replied Reese.
He turned from the window again, and took from the table a violin wrapped
in buckskin, and softly he played one of their old love songs. It was not
much more than a whisper, and yet it was filled with a joyous exultation.
He laid the violin down when he was finished, and laughed, and filled his
pipe, and lighted it.
"It is good for a man's soul to know that a woman loves him, and has been
true," he said. "Mon pere, will you tell me again what she said? It is
strength for me--and I must soon be going."
McDougall repeated, as if under a strain from which he could not free
himself:
"She came to me late last night, unknown to Dupont. She had received your
message, and knew you were coming. And I tell you again that I saw
something in her eyes which makes me afraid! She told me, then, that her
father killed Bedore in a quarrel, and that she married Dupont to save
him from the law--and kneeling there, with her hand on the cross at her
breast, she swore that each day of her life she has let Dupont know that
she hates him, and that she loves you, and that some day Reese Beaudin
would return to avenge her. Yes, she told him that--I know it by what I
saw in her eyes. With that cross clutched in her fingers she swore that
she had suffered torture and shame, and that never a word of it had she
whispered to a living soul, that she might turn the passion of Jacques
Dupont's black heart into a great hatred. And today--Jacques Dupont will
kill you!"
"I shall die hard," Reese repeated again.
He tucked the violin in its buckskin covering under his arm. From the
table he took his cap and placed it on his head.
In a last effort McDougall sprang from his chair and caught the other's
arm.
"Reese Beaudin--you are going to your death! As factor of Lac Bain--agent
of justice under power of the Police--I forbid it!"
"So-o-o-o," spoke Reese Beaudin gently. "Mon pere--"
He unbuttoned his coat, which had remained buttoned. Under the coat was a
heavy shirt; and the shirt he opened, smiling into the factor's eyes, and
McDougall's face froze, and the breath was cut short on his lips.
"That!" he gasped.
Reese Beaudin nodded.
Then he opened the door and went out.
Joe Delesse had been watching the factor's house, and he worked his way
slowly along the edge of the feasters so that he might casually come into
the path of Reese Beaudin. And there was one other man who also had
watched, and who came in the same direction. He was a stranger, tall,
closely hooded, his mustached face an Indian bronze. No one had ever seen
him at Lac Bain before, yet in the excitement of the carnival the fact
passed without conjecture or significance. And from the cabin of Henri
Paquette another pair of eyes saw Reese Beaudin, and Mother Paquette
heard a sob that in itself was a prayer.
In and out among the devourers of caribou-flesh, scanning the groups and
the ones and the twos and the threes, passed Jacques Dupont, and with him
walked his friend, one-eyed Layonne. Layonne was a big man, but Dupont
was taller by half a head. The brutishness of his face was hidden under a
coarse red beard; but the devil in him glowered from his deep-set,
inhuman eyes; it walked in his gait, in the hulk of his great shoulders,
in the gorilla-like slouch of his hips. His huge hands hung partly
clenched at his sides. His breath was heavy with whisky that Layonne
himself had smuggled in, and in his heart was black murder.
"He has not come!" he cried for the twentieth time. "He has not come!"
He moved on, and Reese Beaudin--ten feet away--turned and smiled at Joe
Delesse with triumph in his eyes. He moved nearer.
"Did I not tell you he would not find in me that narrow-shouldered,
smooth-faced stripling of five years ago?" he asked. "N'est-ce pas,
friend Delesse?"
The face of Joe Delesse was heavy with a somber fear.
"His fist is like a wood-sledge, m'sieu."
"So it was years ago."
"His forearm is as big as the calf of your leg."
"Oui, friend Delesse, it is the forearm of a giant."
"He is half again your weight."
"Or more, friend Delesse."
"He will kill you! As the great God lives, he will kill you!"
"I shall die hard," repeated Reese Beaudin for the third time that day.
Joe Delesse turned slowly, doggedly. His voice rumbled.
"The sale is about to begin, m'sieu. See!"
A man had mounted the log platform raised to the height of a man's
shoulders at the far end of the clearing. It was Henri Paquette, master
of the day's ceremonies, and appointed auctioneer of the great wakao. A
man of many tongues was Paquette. To his lips he raised a great megaphone
of birchbark, and sonorously his call rang out--in French, in Cree, in
Chippewan, and the packed throng about the caribou-fires heaved like a
living billow, and to a man and a woman and a child it moved toward the
appointed place.
"The time has come," said Reese Beaudin. "And all Lac Bain shall see!"
Behind them--watching, always watching--followed the bronze-faced
stranger in his close-drawn hood.
For an hour the men of Lac Bain gathered close-wedged about the log
platform on which stood Henri Paquette and his Indian helper. Behind the
men were the women and children, and through the cordon there ran a
babiche-roped pathway along which the dogs were brought.
The platform was twenty feet square, with the floor side of the logs hewn
flat, and there was no lack of space for the gesticulation and wild
pantomime of Paquette. In one hand he held a notebook, and in the other a
pencil. In the notebook the sales of twenty dogs were already tabulated,
and the prices paid.
Anxiously, Reese Beaudin was waiting. Each time that a new dog came up he
looked at Joe Delesse, but, as yet Joe had failed to give the signal.
On the platform the Indian was holding two malamutes in leash now and
Paquette was crying, in a well simulated fit of great fury:
"What, you cheap kimootisks, will you let this pair of malamutes go for
seven mink and a cross fox. Are you men? Are you poverty-stricken? Are
you blind? A breed dog and a male giant for seven mink and a cross fox?
Non, I will buy them myself first, and kill them, and use their flesh for
dog-feed, and their hides for fools' caps! I will--"
"Twelve mink and a Number Two Cross," came a voice out of the crowd.
"Twelve mink and a Number One," shouted another.
"A little better--a little better!" wailed Paquette. "You are waking up,
but slowly--mon Dieu, so slowly! Twelve mink and--"
A voice rose in Cree:
"Nesi-tu-now-unisk!"
Paquette gave a triumphant yell.
"The Indian beats you! The Indian from Little Neck Lake--an Indian beats
the white man! He offers twenty beaver--prime skins! And beaver are
wanted in Paris now. They're wanted in London. Beaver and gold--they are
the same! But they are the price of one dog alone. Shall they both go at
that? Shall the Indian have them for twenty beaver--twenty beaver that
may be taken from a single house in a day--while it has taken these
malamutes two and a half years to grow? I say, you cheap kimootisks--"
And then an amazing thing happened. It was like a bomb falling in that
crowded throng of wondering and amazed forest people.
It was the closely hooded stranger who spoke.
"I will give a hundred dollars cash," he said.
A look of annoyance crossed Reese Beaudin's face.
He was close to the bronze-faced stranger, and edged nearer.
"Let the Indian have them," he said in a low voice. "It is Meewe. I knew
him years ago. He has carried me on his back. He taught me first to draw
pictures."
"But they are powerful dogs," objected the stranger. "My team needs
them."
The Cree had risen higher out of the crowd. One arm rose above his head.
He was an Indian who had seen fifty years of the forests, and his face
was the face of an Egyptian.
"Nesi-tu-now Nesoo-sap umisk!" he proclaimed.
Henri Paquette hopped excitedly, and faced the stranger.
"Twenty-two beaver," he challenged. "Twenty-two--"
"Let Meewe have them," replied the hooded stranger.
Three minutes later a single dog was pulled up on the log platform. He
was a magnificent beast, and a rumble of approval ran through the crowd.
The face of Joe Delesse was gray. He wet his lips. Reese Beaudin,
watching him, knew that the time had come. And Joe Delesse, seeing no way
of escape, whispered:
"It is her dog, m'sieu. It is Parka--and Dupont sells him today to show
her that he is master."
Already Paquette was advertising the virtues of Parka when Reese Beaudin,
in a single leap, mounted the log platform, and stood beside him.
"Wait!" he cried.
There fell a silence, and Reese said, loud enough for all to hear:
"M'sieu Paquette, I ask the privilege of examining this dog that I want
to buy."
At last he straightened, and all who faced him saw the smiling sneer on
his lips.
"Who is it that offers this worthless cur for sale?" Lac Bain heard him
say. "P-s-s-st--it is a woman's dog! It is not worth bidding for!"
"You lie!" Dupont's voice rose in a savage roar. His huge shoulders
bulked over those about him. He crowded to the edge of the platform. "You
lie!"
"He is a woman's dog," repeated Reese Beaudin without excitement, yet so
clearly that every ear heard. "He is a woman's pet, and M'sieu Dupont
most surely does lie if he denies it!"
So far as memory went back no man at Lac Bain that day had ever heard
another man give Jacques Dupont the lie. A thrill swept those who heard
and understood. There was a great silence, in that silence men near him
heard the choking rage in Dupont's great chest. He was staring
up--straight up into the smiling face of Reese Beaudin; and in that
moment he saw beyond the glossy black beard, and amazement and unbelief
held him still. In the next, Reese Beaudin had the violin in his hands.
He flung off the buckskin, and in a flash the instrument was at his
shoulder.
"See! I will play, and the woman's pet shall sing!"
And once more, after five years, Lac Bain listened to the magic of Reese
Beaudin's violin. And it was Elise's old love song that he played. He
played it, smiling down into the eyes of a monster whose face was turning
from red to black; yet he did not play it to the end, nor a quarter of
it, for suddenly a voice shouted:
"It is Reese Beaudin--come back!"
Joe Delesse, paralyzed, speechless, could have sworn it was the hooded
stranger who shouted; and then he remembered, and flung up his great
arms, and bellowed:
"Oui--by the Saints, it is Reese Beaudin--Reese Beaudin come back!"
Suddenly as it had begun the playing ceased, and Henri Paquette found
himself with the violin in his hands. Reese Beaudin turned, facing them
all, the wintry sun glowing in his beard, his eyes smiling, his head
high--unfraid now, more fearless than any other man that had ever set
foot in Lac Bain. And McDougall, with his arm touching Elise's hair, felt
the wild and throbbing pulse of her body. This day--this hour--this
minute in which she stood still, inbreathing--had confirmed her belief in
Reese Beaudin. As she had dreamed, so had he risen. First of all the men
in the world he stood there now, just as he had been first in the days
when she had loved his dreams, his music, and his pictures. To her he was
the old god, more splendid,--for he had risen above fear, and he was
facing Dupont now with that strange quiet smile on his lips. And then,
all at once, her soul broke its fetters, and over the women's heads she
reached out her arms, and all there heard her voice in its triumph, its
joy, its fear.
"Reese! Reese--my sakeakun!"
Over the heads of all the forest people she called him beloved! Like the
fang of an adder the word stung Dupont's brain. And like fire touched to
powder, swiftly as lightning illumines the sky, the glory of it blazed in
Reese Beaudin's face. And all that were there heard him clearly:
"I am Reese Beaudin. I am the Yellow-back. I have returned to meet a man
you all know--Jacques Dupont. He is a monkey-man--a whipper of boys, a
stealer of women, a cheat, a coward, a thing so foul the crows will not
touch him when he dies--"
There was a roar. It was not the roar of a man, but of a beast--and
Jacques Dupont was on the platform!
Quick as Dupont's movement had been it was no swifter than that of the
closely-hooded stranger. He was as tall as Dupont, and about him there
was an air of authority and command.
"Wait," he said, and placed a hand on Dupont's heaving chest. His smile
was cold as ice. Never had Dupont seen eyes so like the pale blue of
steel.
"M'sieu Dupont, you are about to avenge a great insult. It must be done
fairly. If you have weapons, throw them away. I will search this--this
Reese Beaudin, as he calls himself! And if there is to be a fight, let it
be a good one. Strip yourself to that great garment you have on, friend
Dupont. See, our friend--this Reese Beaudin--is already stripping!"
He was unbuttoning the giant's heavy Hudson's Bay coat. He pulled it off,
and drew Dupont's knife from its sheath. Paquette, like a stunned cat
that had recovered its ninth life, was scrambling from the platform. The
Indian was already gone. And Reese Beaudin had tossed his coat to Joe
Delesse, and with it his cap. His heavy shirt was closely buttoned; and
not only was it buttoned, Delesse observed, but also was it carefully
pinned. And even now, facing that monster who would soon be at him, Reese
Beaudin was smiling.
For a moment the closely hooded stranger stood between them, and Jacques
Dupont crouched himself for his vengeance. Never to the people of Lac
Bain had he looked more terrible. He was the gorilla-fighter, the beast
fighter, the fighter who fights as the wolf, the bear and the
cat--crushing out life, breaking bones, twisting, snapping, inundating
and destroying with his great weight and his monstrous strength. He was a
hundred pounds heavier than Reese Beaudin. On his stooping shoulders he
could carry a tree. With his giant hands he could snap a two-inch
sapling. With one hand alone he had set a bear-trap. And with that mighty
strength he fought as the cave-man fought. It was his boast there was no
trick of the Chippewan, the Cree, the Eskimo or the forest man that he
did not know. And yet Reese Beaudin stood calmly, waiting for him, and
smiling!
In another moment the hooded stranger was gone, and there was none
between them.
"A long time I have waited for this, m'sieu," said Reese, for Dupont's
ears alone. "Five years is a long time. And my Elise still loves me."
Still more like a gorilla Jacques Dupont crept upon him. His face was
twisted by a rage to which he could no longer give voice. Hatred and
jealousy robbed his eyes of the last spark of the thing that was human.
His great hands were hooked, like an eagle's talons. His lips were drawn
back, like a beast's. Through his red beard yellow fangs were bared.
And Reese Beaudin no longer smiled. He laughed!
"Until I went away and met real men, I never knew what a pig of a man you
were, M'sieu Dupont," he taunted amiably, as though speaking in jest to a
friend. "You remind me of an aged and over-fat porcupine with his big
paunch and crooked arms. What horror must it have been for my Elise to
have lived in sight of such a beast as you!"
With a bellow Dupont was at him. And swifter than eyes had ever seen man
move at Lac Bain before, Reese Beaudin was out of his way, and behind
him; and then, as the giant caught himself at the edge of the platform,
and turned, he received a blow that sounded like the broadside of a
paddle striking water. Reese Beaudin had struck him with the flat of his
unclenched hand!
A murmur of incredulity rose out of the crowd. To the forest man such a
blow was the deadliest of insults. It was calling him an Iskwao--a
woman--a weakling--a thing too contemptible to harden one's fist against.
But the murmur died in an instant. For Reese Beaudin, making as if to
step back, shot suddenly forward--straight through the giant's crooked
arms--and it was his fist this time that landed squarely between the eyes
of Dupont. The monster's head went back, his great body wavered, and then
suddenly he plunged backward off the platform and fell with a crash to
the ground.
A yell went up from the hooded stranger. Joe Delesse split his throat.
The crowd drowned Reese Beaudin's voice. But above it all rose a woman's
voice shrieking forth a name.
And then Jacques Dupont was on the platform again. In the moments that
followed one could almost hear his neighbor's heart beat. Nearer and
still nearer to each other drew the two men. And now Dupont crouched
still more, and Joe Delesse held his breath. He noticed that Reese
Beaudin was standing almost on the tips of his toes--that each instant he
seemed prepared, like a runner, for sudden flight. Five feet--four--and
Dupont leapt in, his huge arms swinging like the limb of a tree, and his
weight following with crushing force behind his blow. For an instant it
seemed as though Reese Beaudin had stood to meet that fatal rush, but in
that same instant--so swiftly that only the hooded stranger knew what had
happened--he was out of the way, and his left arm seemed to shoot
downward, and then up, and then his right straight out, and then again
his left arm downward, and up--and it was the third blow, all swift as
lightning, that brought a yell from the hooded stranger. For though none
but the stranger had seen it, Jacques Dupont's head snapped back--and all
saw the fourth blow that sent him reeling like a man struck by a club.
There was no sound now. A mental and a vocal paralysis seized upon the
inhabitants of Lac Bain. Never had they seen fighting like this fighting
of Reese Beaudin. Until now had they lived to see the science of the
sawdust ring pitted against the brute force of Brobdingnagian, of Antaeus
and Goliath. For Reese Beaudin's fighting was a fighting without tricks
that they could see. He used his fists, and his fists alone. He was like
a dancing man. And suddenly, in the midst of the miracle, they saw
Jacques Dupont go down. And the second miracle was that Reese Beaudin did
not leap on him when he had fallen. He stood back a little, balancing
himself in that queer fashion on the balls and toes of his feet. But no
sooner was Dupont up than Reese Beaudin was in again, with the swiftness
of a cat, and they could hear the blows, like solid shots, and Dupont's
arms waved like tree-tops, and a second time he was off the platform.
He was staggering when he rose. The blood ran in streams from his mouth
and nose. His beard dripped with it. His yellow teeth were caved in.
This time he did not leap upon the platform--he clambered back to it, and
the hooded stranger gave him a lift which a few minutes before Dupont
would have resented as an insult.
"Ah, it has come," said the stranger to Delesse.
"He is the best close-in fighter in all--"
He did not finish.
"I could kill you now--kill you with a single blow," said Reese Beaudin
in a moment when the giant stood swaying. "But there is a greater
punishment in store for you, and so I shall let you live!"
And now Reese Beaudin was facing that part of the crowd where the woman
he loved was standing. He was breathing deeply. But he was not winded.
His eyes were black as night, his hair wind-blown. He looked straight
over the heads between him and she whom Dupont had stolen from him.
Reese Beaudin raised his arms, and where there had been a murmur of
voices there was now silence.
For the first time the stranger threw back his hood. He was unbuttoning
his heavy coat.
And Joe Delesse, looking up, saw that Reese Beaudin was making a mighty
effort to quiet a strange excitement within his breast. And then there
was a rending of cloth and of buttons and of pins as in one swift
movement he tore the shirt from his own breast--exposing to the eyes of
Lac Bain blood-red in the glow of the winter sun, the crimson badge of
the Royal Northwest Mounted Police!
And above the gasp that swept the multitude, above the strange cry of the
woman, his voice rose:
"I am Reese Beaudin, the Yellow-back. I am Reese Beaudin, who ran away. I
am Reese Beaudin,--Sergeant in His Majesty's Royal Northwest Mounted
Police, and in the name of the law I arrest Jacques Dupont for the murder
of Francois Bedore, who was killed on his trap-line five years ago!
Fitzgerald--"
The hooded stranger leaped upon the platform. His heavy coat fell off.
Tall and grim he stood in the scarlet jacket of the Police. Steel clinked
in his hands. And Jacques Dupont, terror in his heart, was trying to see
as he groped to his knees. The steel snapped over his wrists.
And then he heard a voice close over him. It was the voice of Reese
Beaudin.
"And this is your final punishment, Jacques Dupont--to be hanged by the
neck until you are dead. For Bedore was not dead when Elise's father left
him after their fight on the trap-line. It was you who saw the fight, and
finished the killing, and laid the crime on Elise's father. Mukoki, the
Indian, saw you. It is my day, Dupont, and I have waited long--"
The rest Dupont did not hear. For up from the crowd there went a mighty
roar. And through it a woman was making her way with outreaching
arms--and behind her followed the factor of Lac Bain.
THE FIDDLING MAN
Breault's cough was not pleasant to hear. A cough possesses manifold and
almost unclassifiable diversities. But there is only one cough when a man
has a bullet through his lungs and is measuring his life by minutes,
perhaps seconds. Yet Breault, even as he coughed the red stain from his
lips, was not afraid. Many times he had found himself in the presence of
death, and long ago it had ceased to frighten him. Some day he had
expected to come under the black shadow of it himself--not in a quiet and
peaceful way, but all at once, with a shock. And the time had come. He
knew that he was dying; and he was calm. More than that--in dying he was
achieving a triumph. The red-hot death-sting in his lung had given birth
to a frightful thought in his sickening brain. The day of his great
opportunity was at hand. The hour--the minute.
A last flush of the pale afternoon sun lighted up his black-bearded face
as his eyes turned, with their new inspiration, to his sledge. It was a
face that one would remember--not pleasantly, perhaps, but as a fixture
in a shifting memory of things; a face strong with a brute strength,
implacable in its hard lines, emotionless almost, and beyond that, a
mystery.
It was the best known face in all that part of the northland which
reaches up from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca and westward to Fond du
Lac and the Wholdais country. For ten years Breault had made that trip
twice a year with the northern mails. In all its reaches there was not a
cabin he did not know, a face he had not seen, or a name he could not
speak; yet there was not a man, woman, or child who welcomed him except
for what he brought. But the government had found its faith in him
justified. The police at their lonely outposts had come to regard his
comings and goings as dependable as day and night. They blessed him for
his punctuality, and not one of them missed him when he was gone. A
strange man was Breault.
With his back against a tree, where he had propped himself after the
first shock of the bullet in his lung, he took a last look at life with a
passionless imperturbability. If there was any emotion at all in his face
it was one of vindictiveness--an emotion roused by an intense and
terrible hatred that in this hour saw the fulfilment of its vengeance.
Few men nursed a hatred as Breault had nursed his. And it gave him
strength now, when another man would have died.
He measured the distance between himself and the sledge. It was, perhaps,
a dozen paces. The dogs were still standing, tangled a little in their
traces,--eight of them,--wide-chested, thin at the groins, a wolfish
horde, built for endurance and speed. On the sledge was a quarter of a
ton of his Majesty's mail. Toward this Breault began to creep slowly and
with great pain. A hand inside of him seemed crushing the fiber of his
lung, so that the blood oozed out of his mouth. When he reached the
sledge there were many red patches in the snow behind him. He opened with
considerable difficulty a small dunnage sack, and after fumbling a bit
took there-from a pencil attached to a long red string, and a soiled
envelope.
For the first time a change came upon his countenance--a ghastly smile.
And above his hissing breath, that gushed between his lips with the sound
of air pumped through the fine mesh of a colander, there rose a still
more ghastly croak of exultation and of triumph. Laboriously he wrote. A
few words, and the pencil dropped from his stiffening fingers into the
snow. Around his neck he wore a long red scarf held together by a big
brass pin, and to this pin he fastened securely the envelope.
This much done,--the mystery of his death solved for those who might some
day find him,--the ordinary man would have contented himself by yielding
up life's struggle with as little more physical difficulty as possible.
Breault was not ordinary. He was, in his one way, efficiency incarnate.
He made space for himself on the sledge, and laid himself out in that
space with great care, first taking pains to fasten about his thighs two
babiche thongs that were employed at times to steady his freight. Then he
ran his left arm through one of the loops of the stout mail-chest. By
taking these precautions he was fairly secure in the belief that after he
was dead and frozen stiff no amount of rough trailing by the dogs could
roll him from the sledge.
In this conjecture he was right. When the starved and exhausted malamutes
dragged their silent burden into the Northwest Mounted Police outpost
barracks at Crooked Bow twenty-four hours later, an ax and a sapling bar
were required to pry Francois Breault from his bier. Previous to this
process, however, Sergeant Fitzgerald, in charge at the outpost, took
possession of the soiled envelope pinned to Breault's red scarf. The
information it bore was simple, and yet exceedingly definite. Few men in
dying as Breault had died could have made the matter easier for the
police.
On the envelope he had written:
Jan Thoreau shot me and left me for dead. Have just strength to write
this--no more.
Francois Breault.
It was epic--a colossal monument to this man, thought Sergeant
Fitzgerald, as they pried the frozen body loose.
To Corporal Blake fell the unpleasant task of going after Jan Thoreau.
Unpleasant, because Breault's starved huskies and frozen body brought
with them the worst storm of the winter. In the face of this storm Blake
set out, with the Sergeant's last admonition in his ears:
"Don't come back, Blake, until you've got him, dead or alive."
That is a simple and efficacious formula in the rank and file of the
Royal Northwest Mounted Police. It has made volumes of stirring history,
because it means a great deal and has been lived up to. Twice before, the
words had been uttered to Blake--in extreme cases. The first time they
had taken him for six months into the Barren Lands between Hudson's Bay
and the Great Slave--and he came back with his man; the second time he
was gone for nearly a year along the rim of the Arctic--and from there
also he came back with his man. Blake was of that sort. A bull-dog, a
Nemesis when he was once on the trail, and--like most men of that
kind--without a conscience. In the Blue Books of the service he was
credited with arduous patrols and unusual exploits. "Put Blake on the
trail" meant something, and "He is one of our best men" was a firmly
established conviction at departmental headquarters.
Only one man knew Blake as Blake actually lived under his skin--and that
was Blake himself. He hunted men and ran them down without mercy--not
because he loved the law, but for the reason that he had in him the
inherited instincts of the hound. This comparison, if quite true, is none
the less unfair to the hound. A hound is a good dog at heart.
In the January storm it may be that the vengeful spirit of Francois
Breault set out in company with Corporal Blake to witness the
consummation of his vengeance. That first night, as he sat close to his
fire in the shelter of a thick spruce timber, Blake felt the unusual and
disturbing sensation of a presence somewhere near him. The storm was at
its height. He had passed through many storms, but to-night there seemed
to be an uncannily concentrated fury in its beating and wailing over the
roofs of the forests.
He was physically comfortable. The spruce trees were so dense that the
storm did not reach him, and fortune favored him with a good fire and
plenty of fuel. But the sensation oppressed him. He could not keep away
from him his mental vision of Breault as he had helped to pry him from
the sledge--his frozen features, the stiffened fingers, the curious twist
of the icy lips that had been almost a grin.
Blake was not superstitious. He was too much a man of iron for that. His
soul had lost the plasticity of imagination. But he could not forget
Breault's lips as they had seemed to grin up at him. There was a reason
for it. On his last trip down, Breault had said to him, with that same
half-grin on his face:
"M'sieu, some day you may go after my murderer, and when you do, Francois
Breault will go with you."
That was three months ago. Blake measured the time back as he sucked at
his pipe, and at the same time he looked at the shadowy and half-lost
forms of his dogs, curled up for the night in the outer rim of firelight.
Over the tree-tops a sudden blast of wind howled. It was like a monster
voice. Blake rose to his feet and rolled upon the fire the big night log
he had dragged in, and to this he added, with the woodman's craft of long
experience, lengths of green timber, so arranged that they would hold
fire until morning. Then he went into his silk service tent and buried
himself in his sleeping-bag.
For a long time he did not sleep. He listened to the crackle of the fire.
Again and again he heard that monster voice moaning and shrieking over
the forest. Never had the rage of storm filled him with the uneasiness of
to-night. At last the mystery of it was solved for him. The wind came and
went each time in a great moaning, half shrieking sound:
B-r-r-r-r--e-e-e-e--aw-w-w-w!
It was like a shock to him; and yet, he was not a superstitious man. No,
he was not that. He would have staked his life on it. But it was not
pleasant to hear a dead man's name shrieked over one's head by the wind.
Under the cover of his sleeping-bag flap Corporal Blake laughed. Funny
things were always happening, he tried to tell himself. And this was a
mighty good joke. Breault wasn't so slow, after all. He had given his
promise, and he was keeping it; for, if it wasn't really Breault's voice
up there in the wind, multiplied a thousand times, it was a good
imitation of it. Again Corporal Blake laughed--a laugh as unpleasant as
the cough that had come from Breault's bullet-punctured lung. He fell
asleep after a time; but even sleep could not drive from him the clinging
obsession of the thought that strange things were to happen in this
taking of Jan Thoreau.
With the gray dawn there was nothing to mark the passing of the storm
except freshly fallen snow, and Blake was on the trail before it was
light enough to see a hundred yards ahead. There was a defiance and a
contempt of last night in the crack of his long caribou-gut whip and the
halloo of his voice as he urged on his dogs. Breault's voice in the wind?
Bah! Only a fool would have thought that. Therefore he was a fool. And
Jan Thoreau--it would be like taking a child. There would be no
happenings to report--merely an arrest, a quick return journey, an affair
altogether too ordinary to be interesting. Perhaps it was all on account
of the hearty supper of caribou liver he had eaten. He was fond of liver,
and once or twice before it had played him tricks.
He began to wonder if he would find Jan Thoreau at home. He remembered
Jan quite vividly. The Indians called him Kitoochikun because he played a
fiddle. Blake, the Iron Man, disliked him because of that fiddle. Jan was
never without it, on the trail or off. The Fiddling Man, he called him
contemptuously--a baby, a woman; not fit for the big north. Tall and
slim, with blond hair in spite of his French blood and name, a quiet and
unexcitable face, and an air that Blake called "damned superiority." He
wondered how the Fiddling Man had ever screwed up nerve enough to kill
Breault. Undoubtedly there had been no fight. A quick and treacherous
shot, no doubt. That was like a man who played a fiddle. POOF! He had no
more respect for him than if he dressed in woman's clothing.
And he DID have a wife, this Jan Thoreau. They lived a good twenty miles
off the north-and-south trail, on an island in the middle of Black Bear
Lake. He had never seen the wife. A poor sort of woman, he made up his
mind, that would marry a fiddler. Probably a half-breed; maybe an Indian.
Anyway, he had no sympathy for her. Without a doubt, it was the woman who
did the trapping and cut the wood. Any man who would tote a fiddle around
on his back--
Corporal Blake traveled fast, and it was afternoon of the second day when
he came to the dense spruce forest that shut in Black Bear Lake. Here
something happened to change his plans somewhat. He met an Indian he
knew--an Indian who, for two or three good reasons that stuck in the back
of his head, dared not lie to him; and this tribesman, coming straight
from the Thoreau cabin, told him that Jan was not at home, but had gone
on a three-day trip to see the French missioner who lived on one of the
lower Wholdaia waterways.
Blake was keen on strategem. With him, man-hunting was like a game of
chess; and after he had questioned the Indian for a quarter of an hour he
saw his opportunity. Pastamoo, the Cree, was made a part of his Majesty's
service on the spot, with the promise of torture and speedy execution if
he proved himself a traitor.
Blake turned over to him his dogs and sledge, his provisions, and his
tent, and commanded him to camp in the heart of a cedar swamp a few miles
back, with the information that he would return for his outfit at some
time in the indefinite future. He might be gone a day or a week. When he
had seen Pastamoo off, he continued his journey toward the cabin, in the
hope that Jan Thoreau's wife was either an Indian or a fool. He was too
old a hand at his game to be taken in by the story that had been told to
the Cree.
Jan had not gone to the French missioner's. A murderer's trail would not
be given away like that. Of course the wife knew. And Corporal Blake
desired no better string to a criminal than the faith of a wife. Wives
were easy if handled right, and they had put the finishing touch to more
than one of his great successes.
At the edge of the lake he fell back on his old trick--hunger,
exhaustion, a sprained leg. It was not more than a quarter of a mile
across the snow-covered ice of the lake to the thin spiral of smoke that
he saw rising above the thick balsams on the island. Five times in that
distance he fell upon his face; he crawled like a man about to die. He
performed an arduous task, a devilish task, and when at last he reached
the balsams he cursed his luck until he was red in the face. No one had
seen him. That quarter-mile of labor was lost, its finesse a failure. But
he kept up the play, and staggered weakly through the sheltering balsams
to the cabin. His artifice had no shame, even when played on women; and
he fell heavily against the door, beat upon it with his fist; and slipped
down into the snow, where he lay with his head bowed, as if his last
strength was gone.
He heard movement inside, quick steps--and then the door opened. He did
not look up for a moment. That would have been crude. When he did raise
his head, it was very slowly, with a look of anguish in his face. And
then--he stared. His body all at once grew tense, and the counterfeit
pain in his eyes died out like a flash in this most astounding moment of
his life. Man of iron though he was, steeled to the core against the
weaknesses of sudden emotions, it was impossible for him to restrain the
gasp of amazement that rose to his lips.
In that stifled cry Jan Thoreau's wife heard the supplication of a dying
man. She did not catch, back of it, the note of a startled beast. She was
herself startled, frightened for a moment by the unexpectedness of it
all.
And Blake stared. This--the fiddler's wife! She was clutching in her hand
a brush with which she had been arranging her hair. The hair, jet black,
was wonderful. Her eyes were still more wonderful to Blake. She was not
an Indian--not a half-breed--and beautiful. The loveliest face he had
ever visioned, sleeping or awake, was looking down at him.
With a second gasp, he remembered himself, and his body sagged, and the
amazed stare went out of his eyes as he allowed his head to fall a
little. In this movement his cap fell off. In another moment she was at
his side, kneeling in the snow and bending over him.
"You are hurt, m'sieu!"
Her hair fell upon him, smothering his neck and shoulders. The perfume of
it was like the delicate scent of a rare flower in his nostrils. A
strange thrill swept through him. He did not try to analyze it in those
few astonishing moments. It was beyond his comprehension, even had he
tried. He was ignorant of the finer fundamentals of life, and of the
great truth that the case-hardened nature of a man, like the body of an
athlete, crumbles fastest under sudden and unexpected change and strain.
He regained his feet slowly and stupidly, assisted by Marie. They climbed
the one step to the door. As he sank back heavily on the cot, in the room
they entered, a thick tress of her hair fell softly upon his face. He
closed his eyes for a space. When he opened them, Marie was bending over
the stove.
And SHE was Thoreau's wife! The instant he had looked up into her face,
he had forgotten the fiddler; but he remembered him now as he watched the
woman, who stood with her back toward him. She was as slim as a reed. Her
hair fell to her hips. He drew a deep breath. Unconsciously he clenched
his hands. SHE--the fiddler's wife! The thought repeated itself again and
again. Jan Thoreau, MURDERER, and this woman--HIS WIFE.
She returned in a moment with hot tea, and he drank with subtle hypocrisy
from the cup she held to his lips.
"Sprained my leg," he said then, remembering his old part, and replying
to the questioning anxiety in her eyes. "Dogs ran away and left me, and I
got here just by chance. A little more and--"
He smiled grimly, and as he sank back he gave a sharp cry. He had
practised that cry in more than one cabin, and along with it a convulsion
of his features to emphasize the impression he labored to make.
"I'm afraid--I'll be a trouble to you," he apologized. "It's not broken;
but it's bad, and I won't be able to move--soon. Is Jan at home?"
"No, m'sieu; he is away."
"Away," repeated Blake disappointedly. "Perhaps sometime he has told you
about me," he added with sudden hopefulness. "I am John Duval."
"M'sieu--DUVAL!"
Marie's eyes, looking down at him, became all at once great pools of
glowing light. Her lips parted. She leaned toward him, her slim hands
clasped suddenly to her breast.
"M'sieu Duval--who nursed him through the smallpox?" she cried, her voice
trembling. "M'sieu Duval--who saved my Jan's life!"
Blake had looked up his facts at headquarters. He knew what Duval, the
Barren Land trapper, had once upon a time done for Jan.
"Yes; I am John Duval," said. "And so--you see--I am sorry that Jan is
away."
"But he is coming back soon--in a few days," exclaimed Marie. "You shall
stay, m'sieu! You will wait for him? Yes?"
"This leg--" began Blake. He cut himself short with a grimace. "Yes, I'll
stay. I guess I'll have to."
Marie had changed at the mention of Duval's name. With the glow in her
eyes had come a flush into her cheeks, and Blake could see the strange
little quiver at her throat as she looked at him. But she did not see
Blake so much as what lay beyond him--Duval's lonely cabin away up on the
edge of the Great Barren, the hours of darkness and agony through which
Jan had passed, and the magnificent comradeship of this man who had now
dragged himself to their own cabin, half dead.
Many times Jan had told her the story of that terrible winter when Duval
had nursed him like a woman, and had almost given up his life as a
sacrifice. And this--THIS--was Duval? She bent over him again as he lay
on the cot, her eyes shining like stars in the growing dusk. In that dusk
she was unconscious of the fact that his fingers had found a long tress
of her hair and were clutching it passionately. Remembering Duval as Jan
had enshrined him in her heart, she said:
"I have prayed many times that the great God might thank you, m'sieu."
He raised a hand. For an instant it touched her soft, warm cheek and
caressed her hair. Marie did not shrink--yes, that would have been an
insult. Even Jan would have said that. For was not this Duval, to whom
she owed all the happiness in her life--Duval, more than brother to Jan
Thoreau, her husband?
"And you--are Marie?" said Blake.
"Yes, m'sieu, I am Marie."
A joyous note trembled in her voice as she drew back from the cot. He
could hear her swiftly braiding her hair before she struck a match to
light the oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. After that, through partly
closed eyes, he watched her as she prepared their supper. Occasionally,
when she turned toward him as if to speak, he feigned a desire to sleep.
It was a catlike watchfulness, filled with his old cunning. In his face
there was no sign to betray its hideous significance. Outwardly he had
regained his iron-like impassiveness; but in his body and his brain every
nerve and fiber was consumed by a monstrous desire--a desire for this
woman, the murderer's wife. It was as strange and as sudden as the death
that had come to Francois Breault.
The moment he had looked up into her face in the doorway, it had
overwhelmed him. And now even the sound of her footsteps on the floor
filled him with an exquisite exultation. It was more than exultation. It
was a feeling of POSSESSION.
In the hollow of his hand he--Blake, the man-hunter--held the fate of
this woman. She was the Fiddler's wife--and the Fiddler was a murderer.
Marie heard the sudden deep breath that forced itself from his lips, a
gasp that would have been a cry of triumph if he had given it voice.
"You are in pain, m'sieu," she exclaimed, turning toward him quickly.
"A little," he said, smiling at her. "Will you help me to sit up, Marie?"
He saw ahead of him another and more thrilling game than the man-hunt
now. And Marie, unsuspicious, put her arms about the shoulders of the
Pharisee and helped him to rise. They ate their supper with a narrow
table between them. If there had been a doubt in Blake's mind before
that, the half hour in which she sat facing him dispelled it utterly. At
first the amazing beauty of Thoreau's wife had impinged itself upon his
senses with something of a shock. But he was cool now. He was again
master of his old cunning. Pitilessly and without conscience, he was
marshaling the crafty forces of his brute nature for this new and more
thrilling fight--the fight for a woman.
That in representing the Law he was pledged to virtue as well as order
had never entered into his code of life. To him the Law was force--power.
It had exalted him. It had forged an iron mask over the face of his
savagery. And it was the savage that was dominant in him now. He saw in
Marie's dark eyes a great love--love for a murderer.
It was not his thought that he might alienate that. For that look, turned
upon himself, he would have sacrificed his whole world as it had
previously existed. He was scheming beyond that impossibility, measuring
her even as he called himself Duval, counting--not his chances of
success, but the length of time it would take him to succeed.
He had never failed. A man had never beaten him. A woman had never
tricked him. And he granted no possibility of failure now. But--HOW? That
was the question that writhed and twisted itself in his brain even as he
smiled at her over the table and told her of the black days of Jan's
sickness up on the edge of the Barren.
And then it came to him--all at once. Marie did not see. She did not
FEEL. She had no suspicion of this loyal friend of her husband's.
Blake's heart pounded triumphant. He hobbled back to the cot, leaning on
Marie slim shoulder; and as he hobbled he told her how he had helped Jan
into his cabin in just this same way, and how at the end Jan had
collapsed--just as he collapsed when he came to the cot. He pulled Marie
down with him--accidentally. His lips touched her head. He laughed.
For a few moments he was like a drunken man in his new joy. Willingly he
would have gambled his life on his chance of winning. But confidence
displaced none of his cunning. He rubbed his hands and said:
"Gawd, but won't it be a surprise for Jan? I told him that some day I'd
come. I told him!"
It would be a tremendous joke--this surprise he had in store for Jan. He
chuckled over it again and again as Marie went about her work; and
Marie's face flushed and her eyes were bright and she laughed softly at
this great love which Duval betrayed for her husband. No; even the loss
of his dogs and his outfit couldn't spoil his pleasure! Why should it? He
could get other dogs and another outfit--but it had been three years
since he had seen Jan Thoreau! When Marie had finished her work he put
his hand suddenly to his eyes and said:
"Peste! but last night's storm must have hurt my eyes. The light blinds
them, ma cheri. Will you put it out, and sit down near me, so that I can
see you as you talk, and tell me all that has happened to Jan Thoreau
since that winter three years ago?"
She put out the light, and threw open the door of the box-stove. In the
dim firelight she sat on a stool beside Blake's cot. Her faith in him was
like that of a child. She was twenty-two. Blake was fifteen years older.
She felt the immense superiority of his age.
This man, you must understand, had been more than a brother to Jan. He
had been a father. He had risked his life. He had saved him from death.
And Marie, as she sat at his side, did not think of him as a young
man--thirty-seven. She talked to him as she might have talked to an elder
brother of Jan's, and with something like the same reverence in her
voice.
It was unfortunate--for her--that Jan had loved Duval, and that he had
never tired of telling her about him. And now, when Blake's caution
warned him to lie no more about the days of plague in Duval's cabin, she
told him--as he had asked her--about herself and Jan; how they had lived
during the last three years, the important things that had happened to
them, and what they were looking forward to. He caught the low note of
happiness that ran through her voice; and with a laugh, a laugh that
sounded real and wholesome, he put out his hand in the darkness--for the
fire had burned itself low--and stroked her hair. She did not shrink from
the caress. He was happy because THEY were happy. That was her thought!
And Blake did not go too far.
She went on, telling Jan's life away, betraying him In her happiness,
crucifying him in her faith. Blake knew that she was telling the truth.
She did not know that Jan had killed Francois Breault, and she believed
that he would surely return--in three days. And the way he had left her
that morning! Yes, she confided even that to this big brother of Jan, her
cheeks flushing hotly in the darkness--how he had hated to go, and held
her a long time in his arms before he tore himself away.
Had he taken his fiddle along with him? Yes--always that. Next to herself
he loved his violin. Oo-oo--no, no--she was not jealous of the violin!
Blake laughed--such a big, healthy, happy laugh, with an odd tremble in
it. He stroked her hair again, and his fingers lay for an instant against
her warm cheek.
And then, quite casually, he played his second big card.
"A man was found dead on the trail yesterday," he said. "Some one killed
him. He had a bullet through his lung. He was the mail-runner, Francois
Breault."
It was then, when he said that Breault had been murdered, that Blake's
hand touched Marie's cheek and fell to her shoulder. It was too dark in
the cabin to see. But under his hand he felt her grow suddenly rigid, and
for a moment or two she seemed to stop breathing. In the gloom Blake's
lips were smiling. He had struck, and he needed no light to see the
effect.
"Francois--Breault!" he heard her breathe at last, as if she was fighting
to keep something from choking her. "Francois Breault--dead--killed by
someone--"
She rose slowly. His eyes followed her, a shadow in the gloom as she
moved toward the stove. He heard her strike a match, and when she turned
toward him again in the light of the oil-lamp, her face was pale and her
eyes were big and staring. He swung himself to the edge of the cot, his
pulse beating with the savage thrill of the inquisitor. Yet he knew that
it was not quite time for him to disclose himself--not quite. He did not
dread the moment when he would rise and tell her that he was not injured,
and that he was not M'sieu Duval, but Corporal Blake of the Royal Mounted
Police. He was eager for that moment. But he waited--discreetly. When the
trap was sprung there would be no escape.
"You are sure--it was Francois Breault?" she said at last.
He nodded.
"Yes, the mail-runner. You knew him?"
She had moved to the table, and her hand was gripping the edge of it. For
a space she did not answer him, but seemed to be looking somewhere
through the cabin walls--a long way off. Ferret-like, he was watching
her, and saw his opportunity. How splendidly fate was playing his way!
He rose to his feet and hobbled painfully to her, a splendid hypocrite, a
magnificent dissembler. He seized her hand and held it in both his own.
It was small and soft, but strangely cold.
"Ma cheri--my dear child--what makes you look like that? What has the
death of Francois Breault to do with you--you and Jan?"
It was the voice of a friend, a brother, low, sympathetic, filled just
enough with anxiety. Only last winter, in just that way, it had won the
confidence and roused the hope of Pierrot's wife, over on the Athabasca.
In the summer that followed they hanged Pierrot. Gently Blake spoke the
words again. Marie's lips trembled. Her great eyes were looking at
him--straight into his soul, it seemed.
"You may tell me, ma cheri," he encouraged, barely above a whisper. "I am
Duval. And Jan--I love Jan."
He drew her back toward the cot, dragging his limb painfully, and seated
her again upon the stool. He sat beside her, still holding her hand,
patting it, encouraging her. The color was coming back into Marie's
cheeks. Her lips were growing full and red again, and suddenly she gave a
trembling little laugh as she looked up into Blake's face. His presence
began to dispel the terror that had possessed her all at once.
"Tell me, Marie."
He saw the shudder that passed through her slim shoulders.
"They had a fight--here--in this cabin--three days ago," she confessed.
"It must have been--the day--he was killed."
Blake knew the wild thought that was in her heart as she watched him. The
muscles of his jaws tightened. His shoulders grew tense. He looked over
her head as if he, too, saw something beyond the cabin walls. It was
Marie's hand that gripped his now, and her voice, panting almost, was
filled with an agonized protest.
"No, no, no--it was not Jan," she moaned. "It was not Jan who killed
him!"
"Hush!" said Blake.
He looked about him as if there was a chance that someone might hear the
fatal words she had spoken. It was a splendid bit of acting, almost
unconscious, and tremendously effective. The expression in his face
stabbed to her heart like a cold knife. Convulsively her fingers clutched
more tightly at his hands. He might as well have spoken the words: "It
was Jan, then, who killed Francois Breault!"
Instead of that he said:
"You must tell me everything, Marie. How did it happen? Why did they
fight? And why has Jan gone away so soon after the killing? For Jan's
sake, you must tell me--everything."
He waited. It seemed to him that he could hear the fighting struggle in
Marie's breast. Then she began, brokenly, a little at a time, now and
then barely whispering the story. It was a woman's story, and she told it
like a woman, from the beginning. Perhaps at one time the rivalry between
Jan Thoreau and Francois Breault, and their struggle for her love, had
made her heart beat faster and her cheeks flush warm with a woman's pride
of conquest, even though she had loved one and had hated the other. None
of that pride was in her voice now, except when she spoke of Jan.
"Yes--like that--children together--we grew up," she confided. "It was
down there at Wollaston Post, in the heart of the big forests, and when I
was a baby it was Jan who carried me about on his shoulders. Oui, even
then he played the violin. I loved it. I loved Jan--always. Later, when I
was seventeen, Francois Breault came."
She was trembling.
"Jan has told me a little about those days," lied Blake. "Tell me the
rest, Marie."
"I--I knew I was going to be Jan's wife," she went on, the hands she had
withdrawn from his twisting nervously in her lap. "We both knew. And
yet--he had not spoken--he had not been definite. Oo-oo, do you
understand, M'sieu Duval? It was my fault at the beginning! Francois
Breault loved me. And so--I played with him--only a little, m'sieu!--to
frighten Jan into the thought that he might lose me. I did not know what
I was doing. No--no; I didn't understand.
"Jan and I were married, and on the day Jan saw the missioner--a week
before we were made man and wife--Francois Beault came in from the trail
to see me, and I confessed to him, and asked his forgiveness. We were
alone. And he--Francois Breault--was like a madman."
She was panting. Her hands were clenched. "If Jan hadn't heard my cries,
and come just in time--" she breathed.
Her blazing eyes looked up into Blake's face. He understood, and nodded.
"And it was like that--again--three days ago," she continued. "I hadn't
seen Breault in two years--two years ago down at Wollaston Post. And he
was mad. Yes, he must have been mad when he came three days ago. I don't
know that he came so much for me as it was to kill Jan, He said it was
Jan. Ugh, and it was here--in the cabin--that they fought!"
"And Jan--punished him," said Blake in a low voice.
Again the convulsive shudder swept through Marie's shoulders.
"It was strange--what happened, m'sieu. I was going to shoot. Yes, I
would have shot him when the chance came. But all at once Francois
Breault sprang back to the door, and he cried: 'Jan Thoreau, I am
mad--mad! Great God, what have I done?' Yes, he said that, m'sieu, those
very words--and then he was gone."
"And that same day--a little later--Jan went away from the cabin, and was
gone a long time," whispered Blake. "Was it not so, Marie?"
"Yes; he went to his trap-line, m'sieu."
For the first time Blake made a movement. He took her face boldly between
his two hands, and turned it so that her staring eyes were looking
straight into his own. Every fiber in his body was trembling with the
thrill of his monstrous triumph. "My dear little girl, I must tell you
the truth," he said. "Your husband, Jan, did not go to his trap-line
three days ago. He followed Francois Breault, and killed him. And I am
not John Duval. I am Corporal Blake of the Mounted Police, and I have
come to get Jan, that he may be hanged by the neck until he is dead for
his crime. I came for that. But I have changed my mind. I have seen you,
and for you I would give even a murderer his life. Do you understand? For
YOU--YOU--YOU--"
And then came the grand finale, just as he had planned it. His words had
stupefied her. She made no movement, no sound--only her great eyes seemed
alive. And suddenly he swept her into his arms with the wild passion of a
beast. How long she lay against his breast, his arms crushing her, his
hot lips on her face, she did not know.
The world had grown suddenly dark. But in that darkness she heard his
voice; and what it was saying roused her at last from the deadliness of
her stupor. She strained against him, and with a wild cry broke from his
arms, and staggered across the cabin floor to the door of her bedroom.
Blake did not pursue her. He let the darkness of that room shut her in.
He had told her--and she understood.
He shrugged his shoulders as he rose to his feet. Quite calmly, in spite
of the wild rush of blood through his body, he went to the cabin door,
opened it, and looked out into the night. It was full of stars, and
quiet.
It was quiet in that inner room, too--so quiet that one might fancy he
could hear the beating of a heart. Marie had flung herself in the
farthest corner, beyond the bed. And there her hand had touched
something. It was cold--the chill of steel. She could almost have
screamed, in the mighty reaction that swept through her like an electric
shock. But her lips were dumb and her hand clutched tighter at the cold
thing.
She drew it toward her inch by inch, and leveled it across the bed. It
was Jan's goose-gun, loaded with buck-shot. There was a single metallic
click as she drew the hammer back. In the doorway, looking at the stars,
Blake did not hear.
Marie waited. She was not reasoning things now, except that in the outer
room there was a serpent that she must kill. She would kill him as he
came between her and the light; then she would follow over Jan's trail,
overtake him somewhere, and they would flee together. Of that much she
thought ahead. But chiefly her mind, her eyes, her brain, her whole
being, were concentrated on the twelve-inch opening between the bedroom
door and the outer room. The serpent would soon appear there. And then--
She heard the cabin door close, and Blake's footsteps approaching. Her
body did not tremble now. Her forefinger was steady on the trigger. She
held her breath--and waited. Blake came to the deadline and stopped. She
could see one arm and a part of his shoulder. But that was not enough.
Another half step--six inches--four even, and she would fire. Her heart
pounded like a tiny hammer in her breast.
And then the very life in her body seemed to stand still. The cabin door
had opened suddenly, and someone had entered. In that moment she would
have fired, for she knew that it must be Jan who had returned. But Blake
had moved. And now, with her finger on the trigger, she heard his cry of
amazement:
"Sergeant Fitzgerald!"
"Yes. Put up your gun, Corporal. Have you got Jan Thoreau?"
"He--is gone."
"That is lucky for us." It was the stranger's voice, filled with a great
relief. "I have traveled fast to overtake you. Matao, the half-breed, was
stabbed in a quarrel soon after you left; and before he died he confessed
to killing Breault. The evidence is conclusive. Ugh, but this fire is
good! Anybody at home?"
"Yes," said Blake slowly. "Mrs. Thoreau--is--at home."
L'ANGE
She stood in the doorway of a log cabin that was overgrown with woodvine
and mellow with the dull red glow of the climbing bakneesh, with the
warmth of the late summer sun falling upon her bare head. Cummins' shout
had brought her to the door when we were still half a rifle shot down the
river; a second shout, close to shore, brought her running down toward
me. In that first view that I had of her, I called her beautiful. It was
chiefly, I believe, because of her splendid hair. John Cummins' shout of
homecoming had caught her with it undone, and she greeted us with the
dark and lustrous masses of it sweeping about her shoulders and down to
her hips. That is, she greeted Cummins, for he had been gone for nearly a
month. I busied myself with the canoe for that first half minute or so.
Then it was that I received my introduction and for the first time
touched the hand of Melisse Cummins, the Florence Nightingale of several
thousand square miles of northern wilderness. I saw, then, that what I
had at first taken for our own hothouse variety of beauty was a different
thing entirely, a type that would have disappointed many because of its
strength and firmness. Her hair was a glory, brown and soft. No woman
could have criticized its loveliness. But the flush that I had seen in
her face, flower-like at a short distance, was a tan that was almost a
man's tan. Her eyes were of a deep blue and as clear as the sky; but in
them, too, there was a strength that was not altogether feminine. There
was strength in her face, strength in the poise of her firm neck,
strength in every movement of her limbs and body. When she spoke, it was
in a voice which, like her hair, was adorable. I had never heard a
sweeter voice, and her firm mouth was all at once not only gentle and
womanly, but almost girlishly pretty.
I could understand, now, why Melisse Cummins was the heroine of a hundred
true tales of the wilderness, and I could understand as well why there
was scarcely a cabin or an Indian hut in that ten thousand square miles
of wilderness in which she had not, at one time or another, been spoken
of as "L'ange Meleese." And yet, unlike that other "angel" of flesh and
blood, Florence Nightingale, the story of Melisse Cummins and her work
will live and die with her in that little cabin two hundred miles
straight north of civilization. No, that is wrong. For the wilderness
will remember. It will remember, as it has remembered Father Duchene and
the Missioner of Lac Bain and the heroic days of the early voyageurs. A
hundred "Meleeses" will bear her memory in name--for all who speak her
name call her "Meleese," and not Melisse.
The wilderness itself may never forget, as it has never forgotten
beautiful Jeanne D'Arcambal, who lived and died on the shore of the great
bay more than one hundred and sixty years ago. It will never forget the
great heart this woman has given to her "people" from the days of
girlhood; it will not forget the thousand perils she faced to seek out
the sick, the plague-stricken and the starving; in old age there will
still be those who will remember the first prayers to the real God that
she taught them in childhood; and children still to come, in cabin, tepee
and hut, will live to bless the memory of L'ange Meleese, who made
possible for them a new birthright and who in the wild places lived to
the full measure and glory of the Golden Rule.
To find Meleese Cummins and her home in the wilderness, one must start at
Le Pas as the last outpost of civilization and strike northward through
the long Pelican Lake waterways to Reindeer Lake. Nearly forty miles up
the east shore of the lake, the adventurer will come to the mouth of the
Gray Loon--narrow and silent stream that winds under overhanging
forests--and after that a two-hours' journey in a canoe will bring one to
the Cummins' cabin.
It is set in a clearing, with the thick spruce and balsam and cedar
hemming it in, and a tall ridge capped with golden birch rising behind
it. In that clearing John Cummins raises a little fruit and a few
vegetables during the summer months; but it is chiefly given up to three
or four huge plots of scarlet moose-flowers, a garden of Labrador tea,
and wild flowering plants and vines of half a dozen varieties. And where
the radiant moose-flowers grow thickest, screened from the view of the
cabin by a few cedars and balsams, are the rough wooden slabs that mark
seven graves. Six of them are the graves of children--little ones who
died deep in the wilderness and whose tiny bodies Meleese Cummins could
not leave to the savage and pitiless loneliness of the forests, but whom
she has brought together that they might have company in what she calls
her, "Little Garden of God."
Those little graves tell the story of Meleese--the woman who, all heart
and soul, has buried her own one little babe in that garden of flowers.
One of the slabs marks the grave of an Indian baby, whose little dead
body Meleese Cummins carried to her cabin in her own strong arms from
twenty miles back in the forest, when the temperature was fifty degrees
below zero. Another of them, a baby boy, a French half-breed and his wife
brought down from fifty miles up the Reindeer and begged "L'ange Meleese"
to let it rest with the others, where "it might not be lonely and would
not be frightened by the howl of the wolves." It was a wild and half
Indian mother who said that!
It was almost twenty years ago that the romance began in the lives of
John and Meleese Cummins. Meleese was then ten years old; and she still
remembers as vividly as though they were but memories of yesterday the
fears and wild tales of that one terrible winter when the "Red
Terror"--the smallpox--swept in a pitiless plague of death throughout the
northern wilderness. It was then that there came down from the north, one
bitter cold day, a ragged and half-starved boy, whose mother and father
had died of the plague in a little cabin fifty miles away, and who from
the day he staggered into the home of Henry Janesse, became Meleese's
playmate and chum. This boy was John Cummins.
When Janesse moved to Fort Churchill, where Meleese might learn more in
the way of reading and writing and books than her parents could teach
her, John Cummins went with her. He went with them to Nelson House, and
from there to Split Lake, where Janesse died. From that time, at the age
of eighteen, he became the head and support of the home. When he was
twenty and Meleese eighteen, the two were married by a missioner from
Nelson House. The following autumn the young wife's mother died, and that
winter Meleese began her remarkable work among her "people."
In their little cabin on the Gray Loon, one will hear John Cummins say
but little about himself; but there is a glow in his eyes and a flush in
his cheeks as he tells of that first day he came home from a three-days
journey over a long trap line to find his home cold and fireless, and a
note written by Meleese telling him that she had gone with a
twelve-year-old boy who had brought her word through twenty miles of
forest that his mother was dying. That first "case" was more terrible for
John Cummins than for his wife, for it turned out to be smallpox, and for
six weeks Meleese would allow him to come no nearer than the edge of the
clearing' in which the pest-ridden cabin stood. First the mother, and
then the boy, she nursed back to life, locking the door against the two
husbands, who built themselves a shack in the edge of the forest. Half a
dozen times Meleese Cummins has gone through ordeals like that unscathed.
Once it was to nurse a young Indian mother through the dread disease, and
again she went into a French trapper's cabin where husband, wife and
daughter were all sick with the malady. At these times, when the "call"
came to Meleese from a far cabin or tepee, John Cummins would give up the
duties of his trap line to accompany her, and would pitch his tent or
make him a shack close by, where he could watch over her, hunt food for
the afflicted people and keep up the stack of needed firewood and water.
But there were times when the "calls" came during the husband's absence,
and, if they were urgent, Meleese went alone, trusting to her own
splendid strength and courage. A half-breed woman came to her one day, in
the dead of winter, from twenty miles across the lake. Her husband had
frozen one of his feet, and the "frost malady" would kill him, she said,
unless he had help. Scarcely knowing what she could do in such a case,
Meleese left a note for her husband, and on snowshoes the two heroic
women set off across the wind-swept and unsheltered lake, with the
thermometer fifty degrees below zero. It was a terrible venture, but the
two won out. When Meleese saw the frozen man, she knew that there was but
one thing to do, and with all the courage of her splendid heart she
amputated his foot. The torture of that terrible hour no one will ever
know. But when John Cummins returned to his home and, wild with fear,
followed across the lake, he scarcely recognized the Meleese who flung
herself sobbing into his arms when he found her. For two weeks after that
Meleese herself was sick. Thus, through the course of years, it came
about that it was, indeed, a stranger in the land who had not heard her
name. During the summer months Meleese's work, in place of duty, was a
pleasure. With her husband she made canoe journeys for fifty miles about
her home, hearing with her the teachings of cleanliness, of health and of
God. She was the first to hold to her own loving breast many little
children who came into their wild and desolate inheritance of life. She
was the first to teach a hundred childish lips to say "Now I lay me down
to sleep," and more than one woman she made to see the clear and starry
way to brighter life.
Far up on Reindeer Lake, close to the shore, there is a towering
"lob-stick tree"--which is a tall spruce or cedar lopped of all its
branches to the very crest, which is trimmed in the form of a plume. A
tree thus shriven and trimmed is the Cree cenotaph to one held in almost
spiritual reverence, and the tree far up on Reindeer Lake is one of the
half dozen or more "lob-sticks" dedicated to Meleese. Six weeks Meleese
and John Cummins spent in an Indian camp at this point, and when at last
the two bade their primitive friends good-bye and left for home, the
little Indian children and the women followed their canoe along the edge
of a stream and flung handfuls of flowers after them.
Of what Meleese Cummins and her husband know of the great outside world,
or of what they do not know, it is wisest to leave unsaid. Details have
often marred a picture. They are children of the wilderness, born of that
wilderness, bred of it, and life of it--a beating and palpitating part of
a world which few can understand. I doubt if one or the other has ever
heard of a William Shakespeare or a Tennyson, for it has not been in my
mind or desire to ask; but they do know the human heart as it beats and
throbs in a land that is desolation and loneliness, where poetry runs not
in lines and meters, but in the bloom of the wild flower, the rush of the
rapid, the thunder of the waterfall and the murmuring of the wind in the
spruce tops; where drama exists not in the epic lines of literature, but
in the hunt cry of the wolf, the death dirges of the storms that wail
down from the Barrens, and in the strange cries that rise up out of the
silent forests, where for a half of each year life is that endless strife
that leaves behind only those whom we term the survival of the fittest.
THE CASE OF BEAUVAIS
Madness? Perhaps. And yet if it was madness. . . .
But strange things happen up there, gentlemen. I have found it sometimes
hard to define that word. There are so many kinds of madness, so many
ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that
what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little
reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us--but
when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and
we go insane.
But I will tell you the story. That is what you want to hear, and you
expect that it will be prejudiced--that I will either deliberately
attempt to protect and prolong a human life, or shorten and destroy it. I
shall do neither, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted Police. I have a faith
in you that is in its way an unbounded as my faith in God. I have looked
up to you in all my life in the wilderness as the heart of chivalry and
the soul of honor and fairness to all men. Pathfinders, men of iron,
guardians of people and spaces of which civilization knows but little, I
have taught my children of the forests to honor, obey and to trust you.
And so I shall tell you the story without prejudice, with the gratitude
of a missioner who has lived his life for forty years in the wilderness,
gentlemen.
I am a Catholic. It is four hundred miles straight north by dog-sledge or
snowshoe to my cabin, and this is the first time in nineteen years that I
have been down to the edge of the big world which I remember now as
little more than a dream. But up there I knew that my duty lay, just at
the edge of the Big Barren. See! My hands are knotted like the snarl of a
tree. The glare of your lights hurts my eyes. I traveled to-day in the
middle of your street because my moccasined feet stumbled on the
smoothness of your walks. People stared, and some of them laughed.
Forty years I have lived in another world. You--and especially you
gentlemen who have trailed in the Patrols of the north--know what that
world is. As it shapes different hands, as it trains different feet, as
it gives to us different eyes, so also it has bred into my forest
children hearts and souls that may be a little different, and a code of
right and wrong that too frequently has had no court of law to guide it.
So judge fairly, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted Police! Understand, if
you can.
It was a terrible winter--that winter of Le Mort Rouge. So far down as
men and children now living will remember, it will be called by my people
the winter of Famine and Red Death. Starvation, gentlemen--and the
smallpox. People died like--what shall I say? It is not easy to describe
a thing like that. They died in tepees. They died in shacks. They died on
the trail. From late December until March I said my prayers over the
dead. You are wondering what all this has to do with my story; why it
matters that the caribou had migrated in vast herds to the westward, and
there was no food; why it matters that there were famine and plague in
the great unknown land, and that people were dying and our world going
through a cataclysm. My backwoods eyes can see your thought. What has all
this to do with Joseph Brecht? What has it to do with Andre Beauvais? Why
does this little forest priest take up so much time in telling so little?
you ask. And because it has its place--because it has its meaning--I ask
you for permission to tell my story in my own way. For these sufferings,
this hunger and pestilence and death, had a strange and terrible effect
on many human creatures that were left alive when spring came. It was
like a great storm that had swept through a forest of tall trees. A storm
of suffering that left heads bowed, shoulders bent, and minds gone. Yes,
GONE!
Since that winter of Le Mort Rouge I know of eyes into which the life of
laughter will never come again; I know of strong men who became as little
children; I have seen faces that were fair with youth shrivel into
age--and my people call it noot' akutawin keskwawin--the cold and hungry
madness. May God help Andre Beauvais!
I will tell the story now.
It was in June. The last of the mush-snows had gone early, nearly a
fortnight before, and the waters were free from ice, when word was
brought to me that Father Boget was dying at Old Fort Reliance. Father
Boget was twenty years older than I, and I called him mon pere. He was a
father to me in our earlier years. I made haste to reach him that I might
hold his hand before he died, if that was possible. And you, Sergeant
McVeigh, who have spent years in that country of the Great Slave, know
what a race with death from Christie Bay to Old Fort Eeliance would be.
To follow the broken and twisted waters of the Great Slave would mean two
hundred miles, while to cut straight across the land by smaller streams
and lakelets meant less than seventy. But on your maps that space of
seventy miles is a blank. You have in it no streams and no larger waters.
You know little of it. But I can tell you, for I have been though it. It
is a Lost Hell. It is a vast country in which berry bushes grow
abundantly, but on which there are no berries, where there are forests
and swamps, but not a living creature to inhabit them; a country of water
in which there are no fish, of air in which there are no birds, of plants
without flowers--a reeking, stinking country of brimstone, a hell. In
your Blue Books you have called it the Sulphur Country. And this country,
as you draw a line from Christie Bay to Old Fort Reliance, is straight
between. Mon pere was dying, and my time was short. I decided to venture
it--cut across that Sulphur Country, and I sought for a man to accompany
me. I could find none. To the Indian it was the land of Wetikoo--the
Devil Country; to the Breeds it was filled with horror. Forty miles
distant there was a man I knew would go, a white man. But to reach him
would lose me three days, and I was about to set out alone when the
stranger came. He was, indeed, a strange man. When he came to what I
called my chateau, from nowhere, going nowhere, I hardly knew whether to
call him young or old. But I made my guess. That terrib le winter had
branded him. When I asked him his name, he said:
"I am a wanderer, and in wandering I have lost my name. Call me M'sieu."
I found this was a long speech for him, that his tongue was tied by a
horrible silence. When I told him where I was going, and described the
country I was going through, and that I wanted a man, he merely nodded
that he would accompany me.
We started in a canoe, and I placed him ahead of me so that I could make
out, if I could, something of what he was. His hair was dark. His beard
was dark. His eyes were sunken but strangely clear. They puzzled me. They
were always questing. Always seeking. And always expecting, it seemed to
me. A man of unfathomable mystery, of unutterable tragedy, of a silence
that was almost inhuman. Was he mad? I ask you, gentlemen--was he mad?
And I leave the answer to you. To me he was good. When I told him what
mon pere had been to me, and that I wanted to reach him before he died,
he spoke no word of hope or sympathy--but worked until his muscles
cracked. We ate together, we drank together, we slept side by side--and
it was like eating and drinking and sleeping with a sphinx which some
strange miracle had endowed with life.
The second day we entered the Sulphur Country. The stink of it was in our
nostrils that second night we camped. The moon rose, and we saw it as if
through the fumes of a yellow smoke. Far behind us we heard a wolf howl,
and it was the last sound of life. With the dawn we went on. We passed
through broad, low morasses out of which rose the sulphurous fogs. In
many places the water we touched with our hands was hot; in other places
the forests we paddled through were so dense they were almost tropical.
And lifeless. Still, with the stillness of death for thousands and
perhaps tens of thousands of years. The food we ate seemed saturated with
the vileness of sulphur; it seeped into our water-bags; it turned us to
the color of saffron; it was terrible, frightening, inconceivable. And
still we went on by compass, and M'sieu showed no fear--even less,
gentlemen, than did I.
And then, on the third day--in the heart of this diseased and horrible
region--we made a discovery that drew a strange cry even from those
mysteriously silent lips of M'sieu.
It was the print of a naked human foot in a bar of mud.
How it came there, why it was there, and why if was a naked foot I
suppose were the first thoughts that leaped into our startled minds. What
man could live in these infernal regions? WAS it a man, or was it the
footprint of some primeval ape, a monstrous survival of the centuries?
The trail led through a steaming slough in which the mud and water were
tepid and which grew rank with yellow reeds and thick grasses--grasses
that were almost flesh-like, it seemed to me, as if swollen and about to
burst from some dreadful disease, Perhaps your scientists can tell why
sulphur has this effect on vegetation. It is so; there was sulphur in the
very wood we burned. Through those reeds and grasses we soon found where
a narrow trail was beaten, and then we came to a rise of land sheltered
in timber, a sort of hill in that flat world, and on the crest of this
hill we found a cabin.
Yes, a cabin; a cabin built roughly of logs, and it was yellow with
sulphur, as if painted. We went inside and we found there the man whom
you know as Joseph Brecht. I did not look at M'sieu when he first rose
before us, but I heard a great gasp from his throat behind me. And I
think I stood as if life had suddenly gone out of me. Joseph Brecht was
half naked. His feet were bare. He looked like a wild man, with his uncut
hair--a wild man except that his face was smooth. Curious that a man
would shave there! And not so odd, perhaps, when one knows how a beard
gathers sulphur. He had risen from a cot on which there was a bed of
boughs, and in the light that came in through the open door he looked
terribly emaciated, with the skin drawn tightly over his cheek bones. It
was he who spoke first.
"I am glad you have come," he said, his eyes staring wildly. "I guess I
am dying. Some water, please. There is a spring back of the cabin."
Quite sanely he spoke, and yet the words were scarcely out of his mouth
when he fell back upon the cot, his eyes rolling in the top of his head,
his mouth agape, his breath coming in great panting gasps. It was a
strange sickness. I will not trouble you with all the details. You are
anxious for the story--the tragedy--which alone will count with you
gentlemen of the law. It came out in his fever, and in the fits of sanity
into which he at times succeeded in rousing himself. His name, he said,
was Joseph Brecht. For two years he had lived in that sulphur hell. He
had, by accident, found the spring of fresh, sweet water trickling out of
the hill--another miracle for which I have not tried to account; he built
his cabin; for two years he had gone with his canoe to the shore of the
great Slave, forty miles distant, for the food he ate. But WHY was he
here? That was the story that came bit by bit, half in his fever, half in
his sanity. I will tell it in my own words. He was a Government man,
mapping out the last timber lines along the edge of the Great Barren,
when he first met Andre Beauvais and his wife, Marie. An accident took
him to their cabin, a sprained leg. Andre was a fox-hunter, and it was
when he was coming home from one of his trips that he found Joseph Brecht
helpless in the deep snow, and carried him on his shoulders to his cabin.
Ah, gentlemen, it was the old story--the story old as time. In his sanity
he told us about Marie, I hovering over him closely, M'sieu sitting back
in the shadows. She was like some wonderful wildflower, French, a little
Indian. He told us how her long black hair would stream in a shining
cascade, soft as the breast of a swan, to her knees and below; how it
would hang again in two great, lustrous braids, and how her eyes were
limpid pools that set his soul afire, and how her slim, beautiful body
filled him with a monstrous desire. She must have been beautiful. And her
husband, Andre Beauvais, worshipped her, and the ground she trod on. And
he had the faith in her that a mother has in her child. It was a sublime
love, and Joseph Brecht told us about it as he lay there, dying, as he
supposed. In that faith of his Andre went unsuspectingly to his
trap-lines and his poison-trails, and Marie and Joseph were for many
hours at a time alone, sometimes for a day, sometimes for two days, and
occasionally for three, for even after his limb had regained its strength
Joseph feigned that it was bad. It was a hard fight, he said--a hard
fight for him to win her; but win her he did, utterly, absolutely, heart,
body and soul. Remember, he was from the South, with all its power of
language, all its tricks of love, all its furtiveness of argument, a
strong man with a strong mind--and she had lived all her life in the
wilderness. She was no match for him. She surrendered. He told us how,
after that, he would unbind her wonderful hair and pillow his face in it;
how he lived in a heaven of transport, how utterly she gave herself to
him in those times when Andre, was away.
Did he love her?
Yes, in that mad passion of the brute. But not as you and I might love a
woman, gentlemen. Not as Andre loved her. Whether she had a heart or a
soul it did not matter. His eyes were blind with an insensate joy when he
shrouded himself in her wonderful hair. To see the wild color painting
her face like a flower filled his veins with fire. The beauty of her, the
touch of her, the mad beat of her heart against him made him like a
drunken man in his triumph. Love? Yes, the love of the brute! He
prolonged his stay. He had no idea of taking her with him. When the time
came, he would go. Day after day, week after week he put it off, feigning
that the bone of his leg was affected, and Andre Beauvais treated him
like a brother. He told us all this as he lay there in his cabin in that
sulphur hell. I am a man of God, and I do not lie.
Is there need to tell you that Andre discovered them? Yes, he found
them--and with that wonderful hair of hers so closely about them that he
was still bound in the tresses when the discovery came.
Andre had come in exhausted, and unexpectedly. There was a terrible
fight, and in spite of his exhaustion he would have killed Joseph Brecht
if at the last moment the latter had not drawn his revolver. After all is
said and done, gentlemen, can a woman love but once? Joseph Brecht fired.
In that infinitesimal moment between the leveling of the gun and the
firing of the shot Marie Beauvais found answer to that question. Who was
it she loved? She sprang to her husband's breast, sheltering him with the
body that had been disloyal to its soul, and she died there--with a
bullet through her heart.
Joseph Brecht told us how, in the horror of his work--and possessed now
by a terrible fear--he ran from the cabin and fled for his life. And
Andre Beauvais must have remained with his dead. For it was many hours
later before he took up the trail of the man whom he made solemn oath to
his God to kill. Like a hunted hare, Joseph Brecht eluded him, and it was
weeks before the fox-trapper came upon him. Andre Beauvais scorned to
kill him from ambush. He wanted to choke his life out slowly, with his
two hands, and he attacked him openly and fairly.
And in that cabin--gasping for breath, dying as he thought, Joseph Brecht
said to us: "It was one or the other. He had the best of me. I drew my
revolver again--and killed him, killed Andre Beauvais, as I had killed
his wife, Marie!"
Here in the South Joseph Brecht might not have been a bad man, gentlemen.
In every man's heart there is a devil, but we do not know the man as bad
until the devil is roused. And passion, the mad passion for a woman, had
roused him. Now that it had made twice a murderer of him the devil slunk
back into his hiding, and the man who had once been the clean-living,
red-blooded Joseph Brecht was only a husk without a heart, slinking from
place to place in the evasion of justice. For you men of the Royal
Mounted Police were on his trail. You would have caught him, but you did
not think of seeking for him in the Sulphur Hell. For two years he had
lived there, and when he finished his story he was sitting on the edge of
the cot, quite sane, gentlemen.
And for the first time M'sieu, my comrade, spoke.
"Let us bring up the dunnage from the canoe, mon pere."
He led the way out of the cabin, and I followed. We were fifty steps away
when he stopped suddenly.
"Ah," he said, "I have forgotten something. I will overtake you."
He turned back to the cabin, and I went on to the canoe.
He did not join me. When I returned with my burden, M'sieu appeared at
the door. He amazed me, startled me, I will say, gentlemen. I could not
imagine such a change as I saw in him--that man of horrible silence, of
grim, dark mystery. He was smiling; his white teeth shone; his voice was
the voice of another man. He seemed to me ten years younger as he stood
there, and as I dropped my load and went in he was laughing, and his hand
was laid pleasantly on my shoulder.
Across the cot, with his head stretched down to the floor, his eyes
bulging and his jaws agape, lay Joseph Brecht. I sprang to him. He was
dead. And then I SAW Gentlemen, he had been choked to death!
"He made one leetle meestake, mon pere. Andre Beauvais did not die. I am
Andre Beauvais."
That is all, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted. May the Law have mercy!
THE OTHER MAN'S WIFE
Thornton wasn't the sort of man in whom you'd expect to find the devil
lurking. He was big, blond, and broad-shouldered. When I first saw him I
thought he was an Englishman. That was at the post at Lac la Biche, six
hundred miles north of civilization. Scotty and I had been doing some
exploration work for the government, and for more than six months we
hadn't seen a real white man who looked like home.
We came in late at night, and the factor gave us a room in his house.
When we looked out of our window in the morning, we saw a little shack
about a hundred feet away, and in front of that shack was Thornton, only
half dressed, stretching himself in the sun, and LAUGHING. There wasn't
anything to laugh at, but we could see his teeth shining white, and he
grinned every minute while he went through a sort of setting-up exercise.
When you begin to analyze a man, there is always some one human trait
that rises above all others, and that laugh was Thornton's. Even the
wolfish sledge-dogs at the post would wag their tails when they heard it.
We soon established friendly relations, but I could not get very far
beyond the laugh. Indeed, Thornton was a mystery. DeBar, the factor, said
that he had dropped into the post six months before, with a pack on his
back and a rifle over his shoulder. He had no business, apparently. He
was not a propectory and it was only now and then that he used his rifle,
and then only to shoot at marks.
One thing puzzled DeBar more than all else. Thornton worked like three
men about the post, cutting winter fire-wood, helping to catch and clean
the tons of whitefish which were stored away for the dogs in the
company's ice-houses, and doing other things without end. For this he
refused all payment except his rations.
Scotty continued eastward to Churchill, and for seven weeks I bunked with
Thornton in the shack. At the end of those seven weeks I knew little more
about Thornton than at the beginning. I never had a closer or more
congenial chum, and yet in his conversation he never got beyond the big
woods, the mountains, and the tangled swamps. He was educated and a
gentleman, and I knew that in spite of his brown face and arms, his hard
muscles and splendid health, he was three-quarters tenderfoot. But he
loved the wilderness.
"I never knew what life could hold for a man until I came up here," he
said to me one day, his gray eyes dancing in the light of a glorious
sunset.
"I'm ten years younger than I was two years ago."
"You've been two years in the north?"
"A year and ten months," he replied.
Something brought to my lips the words that I had forced back a score of
times.
"What brought you up here, Thornton?"
"Two things," he said quietly, "a woman--and a scoundrel."
He said no more, and I did not press the matter. There was a strange
tremble in his voice, something that I took to be a note of sadness; but
when he turned from the sunset to me his eyes were filled with a yet
stranger joy, and his big boyish laugh rang out with such wholesome
infectiousness that I laughed with him, in spite of myself.
That night, in our shack, he produced a tightly bound bundle of letters
about six inches thick, scattered them out before him on the table, and
began reading them at random, while I sat bolstered back in my bunk,
smoking and watching him. He was a curious study. Every little while I'd
hear him chuckling and rumbling, his teeth agleam, and between these
times he'd grow serious. Once I saw tears rolling down his cheeks.
He puzzled me; and the more he puzzled me, the better I liked him. Every
night for a week he spent an hour or two reading those letters over and
over again. I had a dozen opportunities to see that they were a woman's
letters: but he never offered a word of explanation.
With the approach of September, I made preparations to leave for the
south, by way of Moose Factory and the Albany.
"Why not go the shorter way--by the Reindeer Lake water route to Prince
Albert?" asked Thornton. "If you'll do that, I'll go with you."
His proposition delighted me, and we began planning for our trip. From
that hour there came a curious change in Thornton. It was as if he had
come into contact with some mysterious dynamo that had charged him with a
strange nervous energy. We were two days in getting our stuff ready, and
the night between he did not go to bed at all, but sat up reading the
letters, smoking, and then reading over again what he had read half a
hundred times before.
I was pretty well hardened, but during the first week of our canoe trip
he nearly had me bushed a dozen times. He insisted on getting away before
dawn, laughing, singing, and talking, and urged on the pace until sunset.
I don't believe that he slept two hours a night. Often, when I woke up,
I'd see him walking back and forth in the moonlight, humming softly to
himself. There was almost a touch of madness in it all; but I knew that
Thornton was sane.
One night--our fourteenth down--I awoke a little after midnight, and as
usual looked about for Thornton. It was glorious night. There was a full
moon over us, and with the lake at our feet, and the spruce and balsam
forest on each side of us, the whole scene struck me as one of the most
beautiful I had ever looked upon.
When I came out of our tent, Thornton was not in sight. Away across the
lake I heard a moose calling. Back of me an owl hooted softly, and from
miles away I could hear faintly the howling of a wolf. The night sounds
were broken by my own startled cry as I felt a hand fall, without
warning, upon my shoulder. It was Thornton. I had never seen his face as
it looked just then.
"Isn't it beautiful--glorious?" he cried softly.
"It's wonderful!" I said. "You won't see this down there, Thornton!"
"Nor hear those sounds," he replied, his hand tightening on my arm.
"We're pretty close to God up here, aren't we? She'll like it--I'll bring
her back!"
"She!" He looked at me, his teeth shining in that wonderful silent laugh.
"I'm going to tell you about it," he said. "I can't keep it in any
longer. Let's go down by the lake."
We walked down and seated ourselves on the edge of a big rock.
"I told you that I came up here because of a woman--and a man," continued
Thornton. "Well, I did. The man and woman were husband and wife, and I--"
He interrupted himself with one of his chuckling laughs. There was
something in it that made me shudder.
"No use to tell you that I loved her," he went on. "I worshipped her. She
was my life. And I believe she loved me as much. I might have added that
there was a third thing that drove me up here--what remained of the rag
end of a man's honor."
"I begin to understand," I said, as he paused. "You came up here to get
away from the woman. But this woman--her husband--"
For the first time since I had known him I saw a flash of anger leap into
Thornton's face. He struck his hand against the rock.
"Her husband was a scoundrel, a brute, who came home from his club drunk,
a cheap money-spender, a man who wasn't fit to wipe the mud from her
little feet, much less call her wife! He ought to have been shot. I can
see it, now; and--well, I might as well tell you. I'm going back to her!"
"You are?" I cried. "Has she got a divorce? Is her husband still living?"
"No, she hasn't got a divorce, and her husband is still living; but for
all that, we've arranged it. Those were her letters I've been reading,
and she'll be at Prince Albert waiting for me on the 15th--three days
from now. We shall be a little late, and that's why I'm hustling so. I've
kept away from her for two years, but I can't do it any longer--and she
says that if I do she'll kill herself. So there you have it. She's the
sweetest, most beautiful girl in the whole world--eyes the color of those
blue flowers you have up here, brown hair, and--but you've got to see her
when we reach Prince Albert. You won't blame me for doing all this,
then!"
I had nothing to say. At my silence he turned toward me suddenly, with
that happy smile of his, and said again:
"I tell you that you won't blame me when you see her. You'll envy me, and
you'll call me a confounded fool for staying away so long. It has been
terribly hard for both of us. I'll wager that she's no sleepier than I am
to-night, just from knowing that I'm hurrying to her."
"You're pretty confident," I could not help sneering. "I don't believe
I'd wager much on such a woman. To be frank with you, Thornton, I don't
care to meet her, so I'll decline your invitation. I've a little wife of
my own, as true as steel, and I'd rather keep out of an affair like this.
You understand?"
"Perfectly," said Thornton, and there was not the slightest ill-humor in
his voice. "You--you think I am a cur?"
"If you have stolen another man's wife--yes."
"And the woman?"
"If she is betraying her husband, she is no better than you."
Thornton rose and stretched his long arms above his head.
"Isn't the moon glorious?" he cried exultantly. "She has never seen a
moon like that. She has never seen a world like this. Do you know what
we're going to do? We'll come up here and build a cabin, and--and she'll
know what a real man is at last! She deserves it. And we'll have you up
to visit us--you and your wife--two months out of each year. But
then"--he turned and laughed squarely into my face--"you probably won't
want your wife to know her."
"Probably not," I said, not without embarrassment.
"I don't blame you," he exclaimed, and before I could draw back he had
caught my hand and was shaking it hard in his own. "Let's be friends a
little longer, old man," he went on. "I know you'll change your mind
about the little girl and me when we reach Prince Albert."
I didn't go to sleep again that night; and the half-dozen days that
followed were unpleasant enough--for me, at least. In spite of my own
coolness toward him, there was absolutely no change in Thornton. Not once
did he make any further allusion to what he had told me.
As we drew near to our journey's end, his enthusiasm and good spirits
increased. He had the bow end of the canoe, and I had abundant
opportunity of watching him. It was impossible not to like him, even
after I knew his story.
We reached Prince Albert on a Sunday, after three days' travel in a
buckboard. When we drove up in front of the hotel, there was just one
person on the long veranda looking out over the Saskatchewan. It was a
woman, reading a book.
As he saw her, I heard a great breath heave up inside Thornton's chest.
The woman looked up, stared for a moment, and then dropped her book with
a welcoming cry such as I had never heard before in my life. She sprang
down the steps, and Thornton leaped from the wagon. They met there a
dozen paces from me, Thornton catching her in his arms, and the woman
clasping her arms about his neck.
I heard her sobbing, and I saw Thornton kissing her again and again, and
then the woman pulled his blond head down close to her face. It was
sickening, knowing what I did, and I began helping the driver to throw
off our dunnage.
In about two minutes I heard Thornton calling me.
I didn't turn my head. Then Thornton came to me, and as he straightened
me around by the shoulders I caught a glimpse of the woman. He was
right--she was very beautiful.
"I told you that her husband was a scoundrel and a rake," he said gently.
"Well, he was--and I was that scoundrel! I came up here for a chance of
redeeming myself, and your big, glorious North has made a man of me. Will
you come and meet my wife?"
THE STRENGTH OF MEN
There was the scent of battle in the air. The whole of Porcupine City
knew that it was coming, and every man and woman in its two hundred
population held their breath in anticipation of the struggle between two
men for a fortune--and a girl. For in some mysterious manner rumor of the
girl had got abroad, passing from lip to lip, until even the children
knew that there was some other thing than gold that would play a part in
the fight between Clarry O'Grady and Jan Larose. On the surface it was
not scheduled to be a fight with fists or guns. But in Porcupine City
there were a few who knew the "inner story"--the story of the girl, as
well as the gold, and those among them who feared the law would have
arbitrated in a different manner for the two men if it had been in their
power. But law is law, and the code was the code. There was no
alternative. It was an unusual situation, and yet apparently simple of
solution. Eighty miles north, as the canoe was driven, young Jan Larose
had one day staked out a rich "find" at the headwaters of Pelican Creek.
The same day, but later, Clarry O'Grady had driven his stakes beside
Jan's. It had been a race to the mining recorder's office, and they had
come in neck and neck. Popular sentiment favored Larose, the slim, quiet,
dark-eyed half Frenchman. But there was the law, which had no sentiment.
The recorder had sent an agent north to investigate. If there were two
sets of stakes there could be but one verdict. Both claims would be
thrown out, and then--
All knew what would happen, or thought that they knew. It would be a
magnificent race to see who could set out fresh stakes and return to the
recorder's office ahead of the other. It would be a fight of brawn and
brain, unless--and those few who knew the "inner story" spoke softly
among themselves.
An ox in strength, gigantic in build, with a face that for days had worn
a sneering smile of triumph, O'Grady was already picked as a ten-to-one
winner. He was a magnificent canoeman, no man in Porcupine City could
equal him for endurance, and for his bow paddle he had the best Indian in
the whole Reindeer Lake country. He stalked up and down the one street of
Porcupine City, treating to drinks, cracking rough jokes, and offering
wagers, while Jan Larose and his long-armed Cree sat quietly in the shade
of the recorder's office waiting for the final moment to come.
There were a few of those who knew the "inner story" who saw something
besides resignation and despair in Jan's quiet aloofness, and in the
disconsolate droop of his head. His face turned a shade whiter when
O'Grady passed near, dropping insult and taunt, and looking sidewise at
him in a way that only HE could understand. But he made no retort, though
his dark eyes glowed with a fire that never quite died--unless it was
when, alone and unobserved, he took from his pocket a bit of buckskin in
which was a silken tress of curling brown hair. Then his eyes shone with
a light that was soft and luminous, and one seeing him then would have
known that it was not a dream of gold that filled his heart, but of a
brown-haired girl who had broken it.
On this day, the forenoon of the sixth since the agent had departed into
the north, the end of the tense period of waiting was expected. Porcupine
City had almost ceased to carry on the daily monotony of business. A
score were lounging about the recorder's office. Women looked forth at
frequent intervals through the open doors of the "city's" cabins, or
gathered in two and threes to discuss this biggest sporting event ever
known in the history of the town. Not a minute but scores of anxious eyes
were turned searchingly up the river, down which the returning agent's
canoe would first appear. With the dawn of this day O'Grady had refused
to drink. He was stripped to the waist. His laugh was louder. Hatred as
well as triumph glittered in his eyes, for to-day Jan Larose looked him
coolly and squarely in the face, and nodded whenever he passed. It was
almost noon when Jan spoke a few low words to his watchful Indian and
walked to the top of the cedar-capped ridge that sheltered Porcupine City
from the north winds.
From this ridge he could look straight into the north--the north where he
was born. Only the Cree knew that for five nights he had slept, or sat
awake, on the top of this ridge, with his face turned toward the polar
star, and his heart breaking with loneliness and grief. Up there, far
beyond where the green-topped forests and the sky seemed to meet, he
could see a little cabin nestling under the stars--and Marie. Always his
mind traveled back to the beginning of things, no matter how hard he
tried to forget--even to the old days of years and years ago when he had
toted the little Marie around on his back, and had crumpled her brown
curls, and had revealed to her one by one the marvelous mysteries of the
wilderness, with never a thought of the wonderful love that was to come.
A half frozen little outcast brought in from the deep snows one day by
Marie's father, he became first her playmate and brother--and after that
lived in a few swift years of paradise and dreams. For Marie he had made
of himself what he was. He had gone to Montreal. He had learned to read
and write, he worked for the Company, he came to know the outside world,
and at last the Government employed him. This was a triumph. He could
still see the glow of pride and love in Marie's beautiful eyes when he
came home after those two years in the great city. The Government sent
for him each autumn after that. Deep into the wilderness he led the men
who made the red and black lined maps. It was he who blazed out the
northern limit of Banksian pine, and his name was in Government reports
down in black and white--so that Marie and all the world could read.
One day he came back--and he found Clarry O'Grady at the Cummins' cabin.
He had been there for a month with a broken leg. Perhaps it was the
dangerous knowledge of the power of her beauty--the woman's instinct in
her to tease with her prettiness, that led to Marie's flirtation with
O'Grady. But Jan could not understand, and she played with fire--the fire
of two hearts instead of one. The world went to pieces under Jan after
that. There came the day when, in fair fight, he choked the taunting
sneer from O'Grady's face back in the woods. He fought like a tiger, a
mad demon. No one ever knew of that fight. And with the demon still
raging in his breast he faced the girl. He could never quite remember
what he had said. But it was terrible--and came straight from his soul.
Then he went out, leaving Marie standing there white and silent. He did
not go back. He had sworn never to do that, and during the weeks that
followed it spread about that Marie Cummins had turned down Jan Larose,
and that Clarry O'Grady was now the lucky man. It was one of the
unexplained tricks of fate that had brought them together, and had set
their discovery stakes side by side on Pelican Creek.
To-day, in spite of his smiling coolness, Jan's heart rankled with a
bitterness that seemed to be concentrated of all the dregs that had ever
entered into his life. It poisoned him, heart and soul. He was not a
coward. He was not afraid of O'Grady.
And yet he knew that fate had already played the cards against him. He
would lose. He was almost confident of that, even while he nerved himself
to fight. There was the drop of savage superstition in him, and he told
himself that something would happen to beat him out. O'Grady had gone
into the home that was almost his own and had robbed him of Marie. In
that fight in the forest he should have killed him. That would have been
justice, as he knew it. But he had relented, half for Marie's sake, and
half because he hated to take a human life, even though it were
O'Grady's. But this time there would be no relenting. He had come alone
to the top of the ridge to settle the last doubts with himself. Whoever
won out, there would be a fight. It would be a magnificent fight, like
that which his grandfather had fought and won for the honor of a woman
years and years ago. He was even glad that O'Grady was trying to rob him
of what he had searched for and found. There would be twice the justice
in killing him now. And it would be done fairly, as his grandfather had
done it.
Suddenly there came a piercing shout from the direction of the river,
followed by a wild call for him through Jackpine's moose-horn. He
answered the Cree's signal with a yell and tore down through the bush.
When he reached the foot of the ridge at the edge of the clearing he saw
the men, women and children of Porcupine City running to the river. In
front of the recorder's office stood Jackpine, bellowing through his
horn. O'Grady and his Indian were already shoving their canoe out into
the stream, and even as he looked there came a break in the line of
excited spectators, and through it hurried the agent toward the
recorder's cabin.
Side by side, Jan and his Indian ran to their canoe. Jackpine was
stripped to the waist, like O'Grady and his Chippewayan. Jan threw off
only his caribou-skin coat. His dark woolen shirt was sleeveless, and his
long slim arms, as hard as ribbed steel, were free. Half the crowd
followed him. He smiled, and waved his hand, the dark pupils of his eyes
shining big and black. Their canoe shot out until it was within a dozen
yards of the other, and those ashore saw him laugh into O'Grady's sullen,
set face. He was cool. Between smiling lips his white teeth gleamed, and
the women stared with brighter eyes and flushed cheeks, wondering how
Marie Cummins could have given up this man for the giant hulk and
drink-reddened face of his rival. Those among the men who had wagered
heavily against him felt a misgiving. There was something in Jan's smile
that was more than coolness, and it was not bravado. Even as he smiled
ashore, and spoke in low Cree to Jackpine, he felt at the belt that he
had hidden under the caribou-skin coat. There were two sheaths there, and
two knives, exactly alike. It was thus that his grandfather had set forth
one summer day to avenge a wrong, nearly seventy years before.
The agent had entered the cabin, and now he reappeared, wiping his
sweating face with a big red handkerchief. The recorder followed. He
paused at the edge of the stream and made a megaphone of his hands.
"Gentlemen," he cried raucously, "both claims have been thrown out!"
A wild yell came from O'Grady. In a single flash four paddles struck the
water, and the two canoes shot bow and bow up the stream toward the lake
above the bend. The crowd ran even with them until the low swamp at the
lake's edge stopped them. In that distance neither had gained a yard
advantage. But there was a curious change of sentiment among those who
returned to Porcupine City. That night betting was no longer two and
three to one on O'Grady. It was even money.
For the last thing that the men of Porcupine City had seen was that cold,
quiet smile of Jan Larose, the gleam of his teeth, the something in his
eyes that is more to be feared among men than bluster and brute strength.
They laid it to confidence. None guessed that this race held for Jan no
thought of the gold at the end. None guessed that he was following out
the working of a code as old as the name of his race in the north.
As the canoes entered the lake the smile left Jan's face. His lips
tightened until they were almost a straight line. His eyes grew darker,
his breath came more quickly. For a little while O'Grady's canoe drew
steadily ahead of them, and when Jackpine's strokes went deeper and more
powerful Jan spoke to him in Cree, and guided the canoe so that it cut
straight as an arrow in O'Grady's wake. There was an advantage in that.
It was small, but Jan counted on the cumulative results of good
generalship.
His eyes never for an instant left O'Grady's huge, naked back. Between
his knees lay his .303 rifle. He had figured on the fraction of time it
would take him to drop his paddle, pick up the gun, and fire. This was
his second point in generalship--getting the drop on O'Grady.
Once or twice in the first half hour O'Grady glanced back over his
shoulder, and it was Jan who now laughed tauntingly at the other. There
was something in that laugh that sent a chill through O'Grady. It was as
hard as steel, a sort of madman's laugh.
It was seven miles to the first portage, and there were nine in the
eighty-mile stretch. O'Grady and his Chippewayan were a hundred yards
ahead when the prow of their canoe touched shore. They were a hundred and
fifty ahead when both canoes were once more in the water on the other
side of the portage, and O'Grady sent back a hoarse shout of triumph. Jan
hunched himself a little lower. He spoke to Jackpine--and the race began.
Swifter and swifter the canoes cut through the water. From five miles an
hour to six, from six to six and a half--seven--seven and a quarter, and
then the strain told. A paddle snapped in O'Grady's hands with a sound
like a pistol shot. A dozen seconds were lost while he snatched up a new
paddle and caught the Chippewayan's stroke, and Jan swung close into
their wake again. At the end of the fifteenth mile, where the second
portage began, O'Grady was two hundred yards in the lead. He gained
another twenty on the portage and with a breath that was coming now in
sobbing swiftness Jan put every ounce of strength behind the thrust of
his paddle. Slowly they gained. Foot by foot, yard by yard, until for a
third time they cut into O'Grady's wake. A dull pain crept into Jan's
back. He felt it slowly creeping into his shoulders and to his arms. He
looked at Jackpine and saw that he was swinging his body more and more
with the motion of his arms. And then he saw that the terrific pace set
by O'Grady was beginning to tell on the occupants of the canoe ahead. The
speed grew less and less, until it was no more than seventy yards. In
spite of the pains that were eating at his strength like swimmer's cramp,
Jan could not restrain a low cry of exultation. O'Grady had planned to
beat him out in that first twenty-mile spurt. And he had failed! His
heart leaped with new hope even while his strokes were growing weaker.
Ahead of them, at the far end of the lake, there loomed up the black
spruce timber which marked the beginning of the third portage, thirty
miles from Porcupine City. Jan knew that he would win there--that he
would gain an eighth of a mile in the half-mile carry. He knew of a
shorter cut than that of the regular trail. He had cleared it himself,
for he had spent a whole winter on that portage trapping lynx.
Marie lived only twelve miles beyond. More than once Marie had gone with
him over the old trap line. She had helped him to plan the little log
cabin he had built for himself on the edge of the big swamp, hidden away
from all but themselves. It was she who had put the red paper curtains
over the windows, and who, one day, had written on the corner of one of
them: "My beloved Jan." He forgot O'Grady as he thought of Marie and
those old days of happiness and hope. It was Jackpine who recalled him at
last to what was happening. In amazement he saw that O'Grady and his
Chippewayan had ceased paddling. They passed a dozen yards abreast of
them. O'Grady's great arms and shoulders were glistening with
perspiration. His face was purplish. In his eyes and on his lips was the
old taunting sneer. He was panting like a wind-broken animal. As Jan
passed he uttered no word.
An eighth of a mile ahead was the point where the regular portage began,
but Jan swung around this into a shallow inlet from which his own secret
trail was cut. Not until he was ashore did he look back. O'Grady and his
Indian were paddling in a leisurely manner toward the head of the point.
For a moment it looked as though they had given up the race, and Jan's
heart leaped exultantly. O'Grady saw him and waved his hand. Then he
jumped out to his knees in the water and the Chippewayan followed him. He
shouted to Jan, and pointed down at the canoe. The next instant, with a
powerful shove, he sent the empty birchbark speeding far out into the
open water.
Jan caught his breath. He heard Jackpine's cry of amazement behind him.
Then he saw the two men start on a swift run over the portage trail, and
with a fierce, terrible cry he sprang toward his rifle, which he had
leaned against a tree.
In that moment he would have fired, but O'Grady and the Indian had
disappeared into the timber. He understood--O'Grady had tricked him, as
he had tricked him in other ways. He had a second canoe waiting for him
at the end of the portage, and perhaps others farther on. It was unfair.
He could still hear O'Grady's taunting laughter as it had rung out in
Porcupine City, and the mystery of it was solved. His blood grew hot--so
hot that his eyes burned, and his breath seemed to parch his lips. In
that short space in which he stood paralyzed and unable to act his brain
blazed like a volcano. Who--was helping O'Grady by having a canoe ready
for him at the other side of the portage? He knew that no man had gone
North from Porcupine City during those tense days of waiting. The code
which all understood had prohibited that. Who, then, could it be?--who
but Marie herself! In some way O'Grady had got word to her, and it was
the Cummins' canoe that was waiting for him!
With a strange cry Jan lifted the bow of the canoe to his shoulder and
led Jackpine in a run. His strength had returned. He did not feel the
whiplike sting of boughs that struck him across the face. He scarcely
looked at the little cabin of logs when they passed it. Deep down in his
heart he called upon the Virgin to curse those two--Marie Cummins and
Clarry O'Grady, the man and the girl who had cheated him out of love, out
of home, out of everything he had possessed, and who were beating him now
through perfidy and trickery.
His face and his hands were scratched and bleeding when they came to the
narrow waterway, half lake and half river, which let into the Blind Loon.
Another minute and they were racing again through the water. From the
mouth of the channel he saw O'Grady and the Chippewayan a quarter of a
mile ahead. Five miles beyond them was the fourth portage. It was hidden
now by a thick pall of smoke rising slowly into the clear sky. Neither
Jan nor the Indian had caught the pungent odors of burning forests in the
air, and they knew that it was a fresh fire. Never in the years that Jan
could remember had that portage been afire, and he wondered if this was
another trick of O'Grady's. The fire spread rapidly as they advanced. It
burst forth in a dozen places along the shore of the lake, sending up
huge volumes of black smoke riven by lurid tongues of flame. O'Grady and
his canoe became less and less distinct. Finally they disappeared
entirely in the lowering clouds of the conflagration. Jan's eyes searched
the water as they approached shore, and at last he saw what he had
expected to find--O'Grady's empty canoe drifting slowly away from the
beach. O'Grady and the Chippewayan were gone.
Over that half-mile portage Jan staggered with his eyes half closed and
his breath coming in gasps. The smoke blinded him, and at times the heat
of the fire scorched his face. In several places it had crossed the
trail, and the hot embers burned through their moccasins. Once Jackpine
uttered a cry of pain. But Jan's lips were set. Then, above the roar of
the flames sweeping down upon the right of them, he caught the low
thunder of Dead Man's Whirlpool and the cataract that had made the
portage necessary. From the heated earth their feet came to a narrow
ledge of rock, worn smooth by the furred and moccasined tread of
centuries, with the chasm on one side of them and a wall of rock on the
other. Along the crest of that wall, a hundred feet above them, the fire
swept in a tornado of flame and smoke. A tree crashed behind them, a
dozen seconds too late. Then the trail widened and sloped down into the
dip that ended the portage. For an instant Jan paused to get his bearing,
and behind him Jackpine shouted a warning.
Up out of the smoldering oven where O'Grady should have found his canoe
two men were rushing toward them. They were O'Grady and the Chippewayan.
He caught the gleam of a knife in the Indian's hand. In O'Grady's there
was something larger and darker--a club, and Jan dropped his end of the
canoe with a glad cry, and drew one of the knives from his belt. Jackpine
came to his side, with his hunting knife in his hand, measuring with
glittering eyes the oncoming foe of his race--the Chippewayan.
And Jan laughed softly to himself, and his teeth gleamed again, for at
last fate was playing his game. The fire had burned O'Grady's canoe, and
it was to rob him of his own canoe that O'Grady was coming to fight. A
canoe! He laughed again, while the fire roared over his head and the
whirlpool thundered at his feet. O'Grady would fight for a canoe--for
gold--while he--HE--would fight for something else, for the vengeance of
a man whose soul and honor had been sold. He cared nothing for the canoe.
He cared nothing for the gold. He told himself, in this one tense moment
of waiting, that he cared no longer for Marie. It was the fulfillment of
the code.
He was still smiling when O'Grady was so near that he could see the red
glare in his eyes. There was no word, no shout, no sound of fury or
defiance as the two men stood for an instant just out of striking
distance. Jan heard the coming together of Jackpine and the Chippewayan.
He heard them straggling, but not the flicker of an eyelash did his gaze
leave O'Grady's face. Both men understood. This time had to come. Both
had expected it, even from that day of the fight in the woods when
fortune had favored Jan. The burned canoe had only hastened the hour a
little. Suddenly Jan's free hand reached behind him to his belt. He drew
forth the second knife and tossed it at O'Grady's feet.
O'Grady made a movement to pick it up, and then, while Jan was partly off
his guard, came at him with a powerful swing of the club. It was his
catlike quickness, the quickness almost of the great northern loon that
evades a rifle ball, that had won for Jan in the forest fight. It saved
him now. The club cut through the air over his head, and, carried by the
momentum of his own blow, O'Grady lurched against him with the full force
of his two hundred pounds of muscle and bone. Jan's knife swept in an
upward flash and plunged to the hilt through the flesh of his enemy's
forearm. With a cry of pain O'Grady dropped his club, and the two crashed
to the stone floor of the trail. This was the attack that Jan had feared
and tried to foil, and with a lightning-like squirming movement he swung
himself half free, and on his back, with O'Grady's huge hands linking at
his throat, he drew back his knife arm for the fatal plunge.
In this instant, so quick that he could scarcely have taken a breath in
the time, his eyes took in the other struggle between Jackpine and the
Chippewayan. The two Indians had locked themselves in a deadly embrace.
All thought of masters, of life or death, were forgotten in the roused-up
hatred that fired them now in their desire to kill. They had drawn close
to the edge of the chasm. Under them the thundering roar of the whirlpool
was unheard, their ears caught no sound of the moaning surge of the
flames far over their heads. Even as Jan stared horror-stricken in that
one moment, they locked at the edge of the chasm. Above the tumult of the
flood below and the fire above there rose a wild yell, and the two
plunged down into the abyss, locked and fighting even as they fell in a
twisting, formless shape to the death below.
It happened in an instant--like the flash of a quick picture on a
screen--and even as Jan caught the last of Jackpine's terrible face, his
hand drove eight inches of steel toward O'Grady's body. The blade struck
something hard--something that was neither bone nor flesh, and he drew
back again to strike. He had struck the steel buckle on O'Grady's belt.
This time--
A sudden hissing roar filled the air. Jan knew that he did not
strike--but he scarcely knew more than that in the first shock of the
fiery avalanche that had dropped upon them from the rock wall of the
mountain. He was conscious of fighting desperately to drag himself from
under a weight that was not O'Grady's--a weight that stifled the breath
in his lungs, that crackled in his ears, that scorched his face and his
hands, and was burning out his eyes. A shriek rang in his ears unlike any
other cry of man he had ever heard, and he knew that it was O'Grady's. He
pulled himself out, foot by foot, until fresher air struck his nostrils,
and dragged himself nearer and nearer to the edge of the chasm. He could
not rise. His limbs were paralyzed. His knife arm dragged at his side. He
opened his eyes and found that he could see. Where they had fought was
the smoldering ruin of a great tree, and standing out of the ruin of that
tree, half naked, his hands tearing wildly at his face, was O'Grady.
Jan's fingers clutched at a small rock. He called out, but there was no
meaning to the sound he made. Clarry O'Grady threw out his great arms.
"Jan--Jan Larose--" he cried. "My God, don't strike now! I'm
blind--blind--"
He staggered back, as if expecting a blow. "Don't strike!" he almost
shrieked. "Mother of Heaven--my eyes are burned out--I'm blind--blind--"
He backed to the wall, his huge form crouched, his hands reaching out as
if to ward off the deathblow. Jan tried to move, and the effort brought a
groan of agony to his lips. A second crash filled his ears as a second
avalanche of fiery debris plunged down upon the trail farther back. He
stared straight up through the stifling smoke. Lurid tongues of flame
were leaping over the wall of the mountain where the edge of the forest
was enveloped in a sea of twisting and seething fire. It was only a
matter of minutes--perhaps seconds. Death had them both in its grip.
He looked again at O'Grady, and there was no longer the desire for the
other's life in his heart. He could see that the giant was unharmed,
except for his eyes.
"Listen, O'Grady," he cried. "My legs are broken, I guess, and I can't
move. It's sure death to stay here another minute. You can get away.
Follow the wall--to your right. The slope is still free of fire,
and--and--"
O'Grady began to move, guiding himself slowly along the wall. Then,
suddenly, he stopped.
"Jan Larose--you say you can't move?" he shouted.
"Yes."
Slowly O'Grady turned and came gropingly toward the sound of Jan's voice.
Jan held tight to the rock that he had gripped in his left hand. Was it
possible that O'Grady would kill him now, stricken as he was? He tried to
drag himself to a new position, but his effort was futile.
"Jan! Jan Larose!" called O'Grady, stopping to listen.
Jan held his breath. Then the truth seemed to dawn upon O'Grady. He
laughed, differently than he had laughed before, and stretched out his
arms.
"My God, Jan," he cried, "you don't think I'm clean BEAST, do you? The
fight's over, man, an' I guess God A'mighty brought this on us to show
what fools we was. Where are y', Jan Larose? I'm goin' t' carry you out!"
"I'm here!" called Jan.
He could see truth and fearlessness in O'Grady's sightless face, and he
guided him without fear. Their hands met. Then O'Grady lowered himself
and hoisted Jan to his shoulders as easily as he would have lifted a boy.
He straightened himself and drew a deep breath, broken by a stabbing
throb of pain.
"I'm blind an' I won't see any more," he said, "an' mebbe you won't ever
walk any more. But if we ever git to that gold I kin do the work and you
kin show me how. Now--p'int out the way, Jan Larose!"
With his arms clasped about O'Grady's naked shoulders, Jan's smarting
eyes searched through the thickening smother of fire and smoke for a road
that the other's feet might tread. He shouted
"Left"--"right"--"right"--"right"--"left" into this blind companion's
ears until they touched the wall. As the heat smote them more fiercely,
O'Grady bowed his great head upon his chest and obeyed mutely the signals
that rang in his ears. The bottoms of his moccasins were burned from his
feet, live embers ate at his flesh, his broad chest was a fiery blister,
and yet he strode on straight into the face of still greater heat and
greater torture, uttering no sound that could be heard above the steady
roar of the flames. And Jan, limp and helpless on his back, felt then the
throb and pulse of a giant life under him, the straining of thick neck,
of massive shoulders and the grip of powerful arms whose strength told
him that at last he had found the comrade and the man in Clarry O'Grady.
"Right"--"left"--"left"--"right" he shouted, and then he called for
O'Grady to stop in a voice that was shrill with warning.
"There's fire ahead," he yelled. "We can't follow the wall any longer.
There's an open space close to the chasm. We can make that, but there's
only about a yard to spare. Take short steps--one step each time I tell
you. Now--left--left--left--left--"
Like a soldier on drill, O'Grady kept time with his scorched feet until
Jan turned him again to face the storm of fire, while one of his own
broken legs dangled over the abyss into which Jackpine and the
Chippewayan had plunged to their death. Behind them, almost where they
had fought, there crashed down a third avalanche from the edge of the
mountain. Not a shiver ran through O'Grady's great body. Steadily and
unflinchingly--step--step--step--he went ahead, while the last threads of
his moccasins smoked and burned. Jan could no longer see half a dozen
yards in advance. A wall of black smoke rose in their faces, and he
pulled O'Grady's ear:
"We've got just one chance, Clarry. I can't see any more. Keep straight
ahead--and run for it, and may the good God help us now!"
And Clarry O'Grady, drawing one great breath that was half fire into his
lungs, ran straight into the face of what looked like death to Jan
Larose. In that one moment Jan closed his eyes and waited for the plunge
over the cliff. But in place of death a sweep of air that seemed almost
cold struck his face, and he opened his eyes to find the clear and
uncharred slope leading before them down to the edge of the lake. He
shouted the news into O'Grady's ear, and then there arose from O'Grady's
chest a great sobbing cry, partly of joy, partly of pain, and more than
all else of that terrible grief which came of the knowledge that back in
the pit of death from which he had escaped he had left forever the vision
of life itself. He dropped Jan in the edge of the water, and, plunging in
to his waist, he threw handful after handful of water into his own
swollen face, and then stared upward, as though this last experiment was
also his last hope.
"My God, I'm blind--stone blind!"
Jan was staring hard into O'Grady's face. He called him nearer, took the
swollen and blackened face between his two hands, and his voice was
trembling with joy when he spoke.
"You're not blind--not for good--O'Grady," he said. "I've seen men like
you before--twice. You--you'll get well. O'Grady--Clarry O'Grady--let's
shake! I'm a brother to you from this day on. And I'm glad--glad--that
Marie loves a man like you!"
O'Grady had gripped his hand, but he dropped it now as though it had been
one of the live brands that had hurtled down upon them from the top of
the mountain.
"Marie--man--why--she HATES me!" he cried. "It's you--YOU--Jan Larose,
that she loves! I went there with a broken leg, an' I fell in love with
her. But she wouldn't so much as let me touch her hand, an' she talked of
you--always--always--until I had learned to hate you before you came. I
dunno why she did it--that other thing--unless it was to make you
jealous. I guess it was all f'r fun, Jan. She didn't know. The day you
went away she sent me after you. But I hated you--hated you worse'n she
hated me. It's you--you--"
He clutched his hands at his sightless face again, and suddenly Jan gave
a wild shout. Creeping around the edge of a smoking headland, he had
caught sight of a man and a canoe.
"There's a man in a canoe!" he cried, "He sees us! O'Grady--"
He tried to lift himself, but fell back with a groan. Then he laughed,
and, in spite of his agony, there was a quivering happiness in his voice.
"He's coming, O'Grady. And it looks--it looks like a canoe we both know.
We'll go back to her cabin together, O'Grady. And when we're on our legs
again--well, I never wanted the gold. That's yours--all of it."
A determined look had settled in O'Grady's face. He groped his way to
Jan's side, and their hands met in a clasp that told more than either
could have expressed of the brotherhood and strength of men.
"You can't throw me off like that, Jan Larose," he said. "We're
pardners!"
THE MATCH
Sergeant Brokaw was hatchet-faced, with shifting pale blue eyes that had
a glint of cruelty in them. He was tall, and thin, and lithe as a cat. He
belonged to the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, and was one of the best
men on the trail that had ever gone into the North. His business was man
hunting. Ten years of seeking after human prey had given to him many of
the characteristics of a fox. For six of those ten years he had
represented law north of fifty-three. Now he had come to the end of his
last hunt, close up to the Arctic Circle. For one hundred and
eighty-seven days he had been following a man. The hunt had begun in
midsummer, and it was now midwinter. Billy Loring, who was wanted for
murder, had been a hard man to find. But he was caught at last, and
Brokaw was keenly exultant. It was his greatest achievement. It would
mean a great deal for him down at headquarters.
In the rough and dimly lighted cabin his man sat opposite him, on a
bench, his manacled hands crossed over his knees. He was a younger man
than Brokaw--thirty, or a little better. His hair was long, reddish, and
untrimmed. A stubble of reddish beard covered his face. His eyes, too,
were blue--of the deep, honest blue that one remembers, and most
frequently trusts. He did not look like a criminal. There was something
almost boyish in his face, a little hollowed by long privation. He was
the sort of man that other men liked. Even Brokaw, who had a heart like
flint in the face of crime, had melted a little.
"Ugh!" he shivered. "Listen to that beastly wind! It means three days of
storm." Outside a gale was blowing straight down from the Arctic. They
could hear the steady moaning of it in the spruce tops over the cabin,
and now and then there came one of those raging blasts that filled the
night with strange shrieking sounds. Volleys of fine, hard snow beat
against the one window with a rattle like shot. In the cabin it was
comfortable. It was Billy's cabin. He had built it deep in a swamp, where
there were lynx and fisher cat to trap, and where he had thought that no
one could find him. The sheet-iron stove was glowing hot. An oil lamp
hung from the ceiling. Billy was sitting so that the glow of this fell in
his face. It scintillated on the rings of steel about his wrists. Brokaw
was a cautious man, as well as a clever one, and he took no chances.
"I like storms--when you're inside, an' close to a stove," replied Billy.
"Makes me feel sort of--safe." He smiled a little grimly. Even at that it
was not an unpleasant smile.
Brokaw's snow-reddened eyes gazed at the other.
"There's something in that," he said. "This storm will give you at least
three days more of life."
"Won't you drop that?" asked the prisoner, turning his face a little, so
that it was shaded from the light.
"You've got me now, an' I know what's coming as well as you do." His
voice was low and quiet, with the faintest trace of a broken note in it,
deep down in his throat. "We're alone, old man, and a long way from
anyone. I ain't blaming you for catching me. I haven't got anything
against you. So let's drop this other thing--what I'm going down to--and
talk something pleasant. I know I'm going to hang. That's the law. It'll
be pleasant enough when it comes, don't you think? Let's talk
about--about--home. Got any kids?"
Brokaw shook his head, and took his pipe from his mouth.
"Never married," he said shortly.
"Never married," mused Billy, regarding him with a curious softening of
his blue eyes. "You don't know what you've missed, Brokaw. Of course,
it's none of my business, but you've got a home--somewhere--" Brokaw
shook his head again.
"Been in the service ten years," he said. "I've got a mother living with
my brother somewhere down in York State. I've sort of lost track of them.
Haven't seen 'em in five years."
Billy was looking at him steadily. Slowly he rose to his feet, lifted his
manacled hands, and turned down the light.
"Hurts my eyes," he said, and he laughed frankly as he caught the
suspicious glint in Brokaw's eyes. He seated himself again, and leaned
over toward the other. "I haven't talked to a white man for three
months," he added, a little hesitatingly. "I've been hiding--close. I had
a dog for a time, and he died, an' I didn't dare go hunting for another.
I knew you fellows were pretty close after me. But I wanted to get enough
fur to take me to South America. Had it all planned, an' SHE was going to
join me there--with the kid. Understand? If you'd kept away another
month--"
There was a husky break in his voice, and he coughed to clear it.
"You don't mind if I talk, do you--about her, an' the kid? I've got to do
it, or bust, or go mad. I've got to because--to-day--she was
twenty-four--at ten o'clock in the morning--an' it's our wedding day--"
The half gloom hid from Brokaw what was in the other's face. And then
Billy laughed almost joyously. "Say, but she's been a true little
pardner," he whispered proudly, as there came a lull in the storm. "She
was just born for me, an' everything seemed to happen on her birthday,
an' that's why I can't be downhearted even NOW. It's her birthday? you
see, an' this morning, before you came, I was just that happy that I set
a plate for her at the table, an' put her picture and a curl of her hair
beside it--set the picture up so it was looking at me--an' we had
breakfast together. Look here--"
He moved to the table, with Brokaw watching him like a cat, and brought
something back with him, wrapped in a soft piece of buckskin. He unfolded
the buckskin tenderly, and drew forth a long curl that rippled a dull red
and gold in the lamp-glow, and then he handed a photograph to Brokaw.
"That's her!" he whispered.
Brokaw turned so that the light fell on the picture. A sweet, girlish
face smiled at him from out of a wealth of flowing, disheveled curls.
"She had it taken that way just for me," explained Billy, with the
enthusiasm of a boy in his voice. "She's always wore her hair in
curls--an' a braid--for me, when we're home. I love it that way. Guess I
may be silly but I'll tell you why. THAT was down in York State, too. She
lived in a cottage, all grown over with honeysuckle an' morning glory,
with green hills and valleys all about it--and the old apple orchard just
behind. That day we were in the orchard, all red an' white with bloom,
and she dared me to a race. I let her beat me, and when I came up she
stood under one of the trees, her cheeks like the pink blossoms, and her
hair all tumbled about her like an armful of gold, shaking the loose
apple blossoms down on her head. I forgot everything then, and I didn't
stop until I had her in my arms, an'--an' she's been my little pardner
ever since. After the baby came we moved up into Canada, where I had a
good chance in a new mining town. An' then--" A furious blast of the
storm sent the overhanging spruce tops smashing against the top of the
cabin. Straight overhead the wind shrieked almost like human voices, and
the one window rattled as though it were shaken by human hands. The lamp
had been burning lower and lower. It began to flicker now, the quick
sputter of the wick lost in the noise of the gale. Then it went out.
Brokaw leaned over and opened the door of the big box stove, and the red
glow of the fire took the place of the lamplight. He leaned back and
relighted his pipe, eyeing Billy. The sudden blast, the going out of the
light, the opening of the stove door, had all happened in a minute, but
the interval was long enough to bring a change in Billy's voice. It was
cold and hard when he continued. He leaned over toward Brokaw, and the
boyishness had gone from his face.
"Of course, I can't expect you to have any sympathy for this other
business, Brokaw," he went on. "Sympathy isn't in your line, an' you
wouldn't be the big man you are in the service if you had it. But I'd
like to know what YOU would have done. We were up there six months, and
we'd both grown to love the big woods, and she was growing prettier and
happier every day--when Thorne, the new superintendent, came up. One day
she told me that she didn't like Thorne, but I didn't pay much attention
to that, and laughed at her, and said he was a good fellow. After that I
could see that something was worrying her, and pretty soon I couldn't
help from seeing what it was, and everything came out. It was Thorne. He
was persecuting her. She hadn't told me, because she knew it would make
trouble and I'd lose my job. One afternoon I came home earlier than
usual, and found her crying. She put her arms round my neck, and just
cried it all out, with her face snuggled in my neck, and kissin' me--"
Brokaw could see the cords in Billy's neck. His manacled hands were
clenched.
"What would you have done, Brokaw?" he asked huskily. "What if you had a
wife, an' she told you that another man had insulted her, and was forcing
his attentions on her, and she asked you to give up your job and take her
away? Would you have done it, Brokaw? No, you wouldn't. You'd have hunted
up the man. That's what I did. He had been drinking--just enough to make
him devilish, and he laughed at me--I didn't mean to strike so hard.--But
it happened. I killed him. I got away. She and the baby are down in the
little cottage again--down in York State--an' I know she's awake this
minute--our wedding day--thinking of me, an' praying for me, and counting
the days between now and spring. We were going to South America then."
Brokaw rose to his feet, and put fresh wood into the stove.
"I guess it must be pretty hard," he said, straightening himself. "But
the law up here doesn't take them things into account--not very much. It
may let you off with manslaugher--ten or fifteen years. I hope it does.
Let's turn in."
Billy stood up beside him. He went with Brokaw to a bunk built against
the wall, and the sergeant drew a fine steel chain from his pocket. Billy
lay down, his hands crossed over his breast, and Brokaw deftly fastened
the chain about his ankles.
"And I suppose you think THIS is hard, too," he added. "But I guess you'd
do it if you were me. Ten years of this sort of work learns you not to
take chances. If you want anything in the night just whistle." It had
been a hard day with Brokaw, and he slept soundly. For an hour Billy lay
awake, thinking of home, and listening to the wail of the storm. Then he,
too, fell into sleep--a restless, uneasy slumber filled with troubled
visions. For a time there had come a lull in the storm, but now it broke
over the cabin with increased fury. A hand seemed slapping at the window,
threatening to break it. The spruce boughs moaned and twisted overhead,
and a volley of wind and snow shot suddenly down the chimney, forcing
open the stove door, so that a shaft of ruddy light cut like a red knife
through the dense gloom of the cabin. In varying ways the sounds played a
part in Billy's dreams. In all those dreams, and segments of dreams, the
girl--his wife--was present. Once they had gone for wild flowers and had
been caught in a thunderstorm, and had run to an old and disused barn in
the middle of a field for shelter. He was back in that barn again, with
HER--and he could feel her trembling against him, and he was stroking her
hair, as the thunder crashed over them and the lightning filled her eyes
with fear. After that there came to him a vision of the early autumn
nights when they had gone corn roasting, with other young people. He had
always been afflicted with a slight nasal trouble, and smoke irritated
him. It set him sneezing, and kept him dodging about the fire, and she
had always laughed when the smoke persisted in following him about, like
a young scamp of a boy bent on tormenting him. The smoke was unusually
persistent to-night. He tossed in his bunk, and buried his face in the
blanket that answered for a pillow. The smoke reached him even there, and
he sneezed chokingly. In that instant the girl's face disappeared. He
sneezed again--and awoke.
A startled gasp broke from his lips, and the handcuffs about his wrists
clanked as he raised his hands to his face. In that moment his dazed
senses adjusted themselves. The cabin was full of smoke. It partly
blinded him, but through it he could see tongues of fire shooting toward
the ceiling. He could hear the crackling of burning pitch, and he yelled
wildly to Brokaw. In an instant the sergeant was on his feet. He rushed
to the table, where he had placed a pail of water the evening before, and
Billy heard the hissing of the water as it struck the flaming wall.
"Never mind that," he shouted. "The shack's built of pitch cedar. We've
got to get out!" Brokaw groped his way to him through the smoke and began
fumbling at the chain about his ankles.
"I can't--find--the key--" he gasped chokingly. "Here grab hold of me!"
He caught Billy under the arms and dragged him to the door. As he opened
it the wind came in with a rush and behind them the whole cabin burst
into a furnace of flame. Twenty yards from the cabin he dropped Billy in
the snow, and ran back. In that seething room of smoke and fire was
everything on which their lives depended, food, blankets, even their
coats and caps and snowshoes. But he could go no farther than the door.
He returned to Billy, found the key in his pocket, and freed him from the
chain about his ankles. Billy stood up. As he looked at Brokaw the glass
in the window broke and a sea of flame sprouted through. It lighted up
their faces. The sergeant's jaw was set hard. His leathery face was
curiously white. He could not keep from shivering. There was a strange
smile on Billy's face, and a strange look in his eyes. Neither of the two
men had undressed for sleep, but their coats, and caps, and heavy mittens
were in the flames.
Billy rattled his handcuffs. Brokaw looked him squarely in the eyes.
"You ought to know this country," he said. "What'll we do?"
"The nearest post is sixty miles from here," said Billy.
"I know that," replied Brokaw. "And I know that Thoreau's cabin is only
twenty miles from here. There must be some trapper or Indian shack nearer
than that. Is there?" In the red glare of the fire Billy smiled. His
teeth gleamed at Brokaw. It was a lull of the wind, and he went close to
Brokaw, and spoke quietly, his eyes shining more and more with that
strange light that had come into them.
"This is going to be a big sight easier than hanging, or going to jail
for half my life, Brokaw--an' you don't think I'm going to be fool enough
to miss the chance, do you? It ain't hard to die of cold. I've almost
been there once or twice. I told you last night why I couldn't give up
hope--that something good for me always came on her birthday, or near to
it. An' it's come. It's forty below, an' we won't live the day out. We
ain't got a mouthful of grub. We ain't got clothes enough on to keep us
from freezing inside the shanty, unless we had a fire. Last night I saw
you fill your match bottle and put it in your coat pocket. Why, man, WE
AIN'T EVEN GOT A MATCH!"
In his voice there was a thrill of triumph. Brokaw's hands were clenched,
as if some one had threatened to strike him.
"You mean--" he gasped.
"Just this," interrupted Billy, and his voice was harder than Brokaw's
now. "The God you used to pray to when you was a kid has given me a
choice, Brokaw, an' I'm going to take it. If we stay by this fire, an'
keep it up, we won't die of cold, but of starvation. We'll be dead before
we get half way to Thoreau's. There's an Indian shack that we could make,
but you'll never find it--not unless you unlock these irons and give me
that revolver at your belt. Then I'll take you over there as my prisoner.
That'll give me another chance for South America--an' the kid an' home."
Brokaw was buttoning the thick collar of his shirt close up about his
neck. On his face, too, there came for a moment a grim and determined
smile.
"Come on," he said, "we'll make Thoreau's or die."
"Sure," said Billy, stepping quickly to his side. "I suppose I might lie
down in the snow, an' refuse to budge. I'd win my game then, wouldn't I?
But we'll play it--on the square. It's Thoreau's, or die. And it's up to
you to find Thoreau's."
He looked back over his shoulder at the burning cabin as they entered the
edge of the forest, and in the gray darkness that was preceding dawn he
smiled to himself. Two miles to the south, in a thick swamp, was Indian
Joe's cabin. They could have made it easily. On their way to Thoreau's
they would pass within a mile of it. But Brokaw would never know. And
they would never reach Thoreau's. Billy knew that. He looked at the man
hunter as he broke trail ahead of him--at the pugnacious hunch of his
shoulders, his long stride, the determined clench of his hands, and
wondered what the soul and the heart of a man like this must be, who in
such an hour would not trade life for life. For almost three-quarters of
an hour Brokaw did not utter a word. The storm had broke. Above the
spruce tops the sky began to clear. Day came slowly. And it was growing
steadily colder. The swing of Brokaw'a arms and shoulders kept the blood
in them circulating, while Billy's manacled wrists held a part of his
body almost rigid. He knew that his hands were already frozen. His arms
were numb, and when at last Brokaw paused for a moment on the edge of a
frozen stream Billy thrust out his hands, and clanked the steel rings.
"It must be getting colder," he said. "Look at that."
The cold steel had seared his wrists like hot iron, and had pulled off
patches of skin and flesh. Brokaw looked, and hunched his shoulders. His
lips were blue. His cheeks, ears, and nose were frost-bitten. There was a
curious thickness in his voice when he spoke.
"Thoreau lives on this creek," he said. "How much farther is it?"
"Fifteen or sixteen miles," replied Billy. "You'll last just about five,
Brokaw. I won't last that long unless you take these things off and give
me the use of my arms."
"To knock out my brains when I ain't looking," growled Brokaw. "I
guess--before long--you'll be willing to tell where the Indian's shack
is." He kicked his way through a drift of snow to the smoother surface of
the stream. There was a breath of wind in their faces, and Billy bowed
his head to it. In the hours of his greatest loneliness and despair Billy
had kept up his fighting spirit by thinking of pleasant things, and now,
as he followed in Brokaw's trail, he began to think of home. It was not
hard for him to bring up visions of the girl wife who would probably
never know how he had died. He forgot Brokaw. He followed in the trail
mechanically, failing to notice that his captor's pace was growing
steadily slower, and that his own feet were dragging more and more like
leaden weights. He was back among the old hills again, and the sun was
shining, and he heard laughter and song. He saw Jeanne standing at the
gate in front of the little white cottage, smiling at him, and waving
Baby Jeanne's tiny hand at him as he looked back over his shoulder from
down the dusty road. His mind did not often travel as far as the mining
camp, and he had completely forgotten it now. He no longer felt the sting
and pain of the intense cold. It was Brokaw who brought him back into the
reality of things. The sergeant stumbled and fell in a drift, and Billy
fell over him. For a moment the two men sat half buried in the snow,
looking at each other without speaking. Brokaw moved first. He rose to
his feet with an effort. Billy made an attempt to follow him. After three
efforts he gave it up, and blinked up into Brokaw's face with a queer
laugh. The laugh was almost soundless. There had come a change in
Brokaw's face. Its determination and confidence were gone. At last the
iron mask of the Law was broken, and there shone through it something of
the emotions and the brotherhood of man. He was fumbling in one of his
pockets, and drew out the key to the handcuffs. It was a small key, and
he held it between his stiffened fingers with diffic ulty. He knelt down
beside Billy. The keyhole was filled with snow. It took a long time--ten
minutes--before the key was fitted in and the lock clicked. He helped to
tear off the cuffs. Billy felt no sensation as bits of skin and flesh
came "with them. Brokaw gave him a hand, and assisted him to rise. For
the first time he spoke.
"Guess you've got me beat, Billy," he said.
"Where's the Indian's?"
He drew his revolver from its holster and tossed it in the snowdrift. The
shadow of a smile passed grimly over his face. Billy looked about him.
They had stopped where the frozen path of a smaller stream joined the
creek. He raised one of his stiffened arms and pointed to it.
"Follow that creek--four miles--and you'll come to Indian Joe's shack,"
he said.
"And a mile is just about our limit"
"Just about--your's," replied Billy. "I can't make another half. If we
had a fire--"
"IF--" wheezed Brokaw.
"If we had a fire," continued Billy. "We could warm ourselves, an' make
the Indian's shack easy, couldn't we?"
Brokaw did not answer. He had turned toward the creek when one of Billy's
pulseless hands fell heavily on his arm.
"Look here, Brokaw."
Brokaw turned. They looked into each other's eyes.
"I guess mebby you're a man, Brokaw," said Billy quietly. "You've done
what you thought was your duty. You've kept your word to th' law, an' I
believe you'll keep your word with me. If I say the word that'll save us
now will you go back to headquarters an' report me dead?" For a full half
minute their eyes did not waver.
Then Brokaw said:
"No."
Billy dropped his hand. It was Brokaw's hand that fell on his arm now.
"I can't do that," he said. "In ten years I ain't run out the white flag
once. It's something that ain't known in the service. There ain't a
coward in it, or a man who's afraid to die. But I'll play you square.
I'll wait until we're both on our feet, again, and then I'll give you
twenty-four hours the start of me."
Billy was smiling now. His hand reached out. Brokaw's met it, and the two
joined in a grip that their numb fingers scarcely felt.
"Do you know," said Billy softly, "there's been somethin' runnin' in my
head ever since we left the burning cabin. It's something my mother
taught me: 'Do unto others as you'd have others do unto you.' I'm a d---
fool, ain't I? But I'm goin' to try the experiment, Brokaw, an' see what
comes of it. I could drop in a snowdrift an' let you go on--to die. Then
I could save myself. But I'm going to take your word--an' do the other
thing. I'VE GOT A MATCH."
"A MATCH!"
"Just one. I remember dropping it in my pants pocket yesterday when I was
out on the trail. It's in THIS pocket. Your hand is in better shape than
mine. Get it."
Life had leaped into Brokaw's face. He thrust his hand into Billy's
pocket, staring at him as he fumbled, as if fearing that he had lied.
When he drew his hand out the match was between his fingers.
"Ah!" he whispered excitedly.
"Don't get nervous," warned Billy. "It's the only one."
Brokaw's eyes were searching the low timber along the shore. "There's a
birch tree," he cried. "Hold it--while I gather a pile of bark!"
He gave the match to Billy, and staggered through the snow to the bank.
Strip after strip of the loose bark he tore from the tree. Then he
gathered it in a heap in the shelter of a low-hanging spruce, and added
dry sticks, and still more bark, to it. When it was ready he stood with
his hands in his pockets, and looked at Billy.
"If we had a stone, an' a piece of paper--" he began.
Billy thrust a hand that felt like lifeless lead inside his shirt, and
fumbled in a pocket he had made there. Brokaw watched him with red, eager
eyes. The hand reappeared, and in it was the buckskin wrapped photograph
he had seen the night before, Billy took off the buckskin. About the
picture there was a bit of tissue paper. He gave this and the match to
Brokaw.
"There's a little gun-file in the pocket the match came from," he said.
"I had it mending a trapchain. You can scratch the match on that."
He turned so that Brokaw could reach into the pocket, and the man hunter
thrust in his hand. When he brought it forth he held the file. There was
a smile on Billy's frostbitten face as he held the picture for a moment
under Brokaw's eyes. Billy's own hands had ruffled up the girl's shining
curls an instant before the picture was taken, and she was laughing at
him when the camera clicked.
"It's all up to her, Brokaw," Billy said gently. "I told you that last
night. It was she who woke me up before the fire got us. If you ever
prayed--pray a little now. FOR SHE'S GOING TO STRIKE THAT MATCH!"
He still looked at the picture as Brokaw knelt beside the pile he had
made. He heard the scratch of the match on the file, but his eyes did not
turn. The living, breathing face of the most beautiful thing in the world
was speaking to him from out of that picture. His mind was dazed. He
swayed a little. He heard a voice, low and sweet, and so distant that it
came to him like the faintest whisper. "I am coming--I am coming,
Billy--coming--coming--coming--" A joyous cry surged up from his soul,
but it died on his lips in a strange gasp. A louder cry brought him back
to himself for a moment. It was from Brokaw. The sergeant's face was
terrible to behold. He rose to his feet, swaying, his hands clutched at
his breast. His voice was thick--hopeless.
"The match--went--out--" He staggered up to Billy, his eyes like a
madman's. Billy swayed dizzily. He laughed, even as he crumpled down in
the snow. As if in a dream he saw Brokaw stagger off on the frozen trail.
He saw him disappear in his hopeless effort to reach the Indian's shack.
And then a strange darkness closed him in, and in that darkness he heard
still the sweet voice of his wife. It spoke his name again and again, and
it urged him to wake up--wake up--WAKE UP! It seemed a long time before
he could respond to it. But at last he opened his eyes. He dragged
himself to his knees, and looked first to find Brokaw. But the man hunter
had gone--forever. The picture was still in his hand. Less distinctly
than before he saw the girl smiling at him. And then--at his back--he
heard a strange and new sound. With an effort he turned to discover what
it was.
The match had hidden an unseen spark from Brokaw's eyes. From out of the
pile of fuel was rising a pillar of smoke and flame.
THE HONOR OF HER PEOPLE
"It ees not so much--What you call heem?--leegend, thees honor of the
Beeg Snows!" said Jan softly.
He had risen to his feet and gazed placidly over the crackling box-stove
into the eyes of the red-faced Englishman.
"Leegend is lie! Thees is truth!"
There was no lack of luster in the black eyes that roved inquiringly from
the Englishman's bantering grin to the others in the room. Mukee, the
half Cree, was sitting with his elbows on his knees gazing with stoic
countenance at this new curiosity who had wandered four hundred miles
northward from civilization. Williams, the Hudson's Bay man who claimed
to be all white, was staring hard at the red side of the stove, and the
factor's son looked silently at Jan. He and the half-breed noted the warm
glow in the eyes that rested casually upon the Englishman.
"It ees truth--thees honor of the Beeg Snows!" said Jan again, and his
moccasined feet fell in heavy, thumping tread to the door.
That was the first time he had spoken that evening, and not even the half
Cree, or Williams, or the factor's son guessed how the blood was racing
through his veins. Outside he stood with the pale, cold glow of the
Aurora Borealis shining upon him, and the limitless wilderness, heavy in
its burden of snow, reaching out into the ghost-gray fabric of the night.
The Englishman's laugh followed him, boisterous and grossly thick, and
Jan moved on,--wondering how much longer the half Cree and Williams and
the factor's son would listen to the things that this man was saying of
the most beautiful thing that had ever come into their lives.
"It ees truth, I swear, by dam'--thees honor of what he calls the 'Beeg
Snows!'" persisted Jan to himself, and he set his back to the factor's
office and trudged through the snow.
When he came to the black ledge of the spruce and balsam forest he
stopped and looked back. It was an hour past bedtime at the post. The
Company's store loomed up silent and lightless. The few log cabins
betrayed no signs of life. Only in the factor's office, which was the
Company's haven for the men of the wilderness, was there a waste of
kerosene, and that was because of the Englishman whom Jan was beginning
to hate. He stared back at the one glowing window with a queer thickening
in his throat and a clenching of the hands in the pockets of his
caribou-skin coat. Then he looked long and wistfully at a little cabin
which stood apart from the rest, and to himself he whispered again what
he had said to the Englishman. Until to-night--or, perhaps, until two
weeks ago--Jan had been satisfied with his world. It was a big,
passionless world, mostly of snow and ice and endless privation, but he
loved it, and there was only a fast-fading memory of another world in his
brain. It was a world of big, honest hearts kept warm within caribou
skins, of moccasined men whom endless solitude had taught to say little
and do much--a world of "Big Snows," as the Englishman had said, in which
Jan and all his people had come very close to the things which God
created. Without the steely gray flash of those mystery-lights over the
Arctic pole Jan would have been homesick; his soul would have withered
and died in anything but this wondrous land which he knew, with its
billion dazzling stars by night and its eye-blinding brilliancy by day.
For Jan, in a way, was fortunate. He had in him an infinitesimal measure
of the Cree, which made him understand what the winds sometimes whispered
in the pine-tops; and a part of him was French, which added jet to his
eyes and a twist to his tongue and made him susceptible to the beautiful,
and the rest was "just white"--the part of him that could be stirred into
such thoughts and visions as he was now thinking and dreaming of the
Englishman.
The "honor of the Beeg Snows" was a part of Jan's soul; it was his
religion, and the religion of those few others who lived with him four
hundred miles from a settlement, in a place where God's name could not be
spelled or written. It meant what civilization could not understand, and
the Englishman could not understand--freezing and slow starvation rather
than theft, and the living of the tenth commandment above all other
things. It came naturally and easily, this "honor of the Beeg Snows." It
was an unwritten law which no man cared or dared to break, and to Jan,
with his Cree and his French and his "just white" blood, it was in full
measure just what the good God meant it to be.
He moved now toward the little isolated cabin, half hidden in its drift
of snow, keeping well in the deep shadows of the spruce and balsam, and
when he stopped again he saw faintly a gleam of light falling in a wan
streak through a big hole in a curtained window. Each night, always when
the twenty-odd souls of the post were deep in slumber, Jan's heart would
come near to bursting with joy at the sight of this grow from the
snow-smothered cabin, for it told him that the most beautiful thing in
the world was safe and well. He heard, suddenly, the slamming of a door,
and the young Englishman's whistle sounded shrill and untuneful as he
went to his room in the factor's house. For a moment Jan straightened
himself rigidly, and there was a strange tenseness in the thin, dark face
that he turned straight up to where the Northern Lights were shivering in
their midnight play. When he looked again at the light in the little
cabin the passion-blood was rushing through his veins, and he fingered
the hilt of the hunting knife in his belt.
The most beautiful thing in the world had come into Jan's life, and the
other lives at the post, just two summers before. Cummins, red-headed,
lithe as a cat, big-souled as the eternal mountain of the Crees and the
best of the Company's hunters, had brought her up as his bride. Seventeen
rough hearts had welcomed them. They had assembled about that little
cabin in which the light was shining, speechless in their adoration of
this woman who had come among them, their caps in their hands, faces
shining, eyes shifting before the glorious ones that looked at them and
smiled at them as the woman shook their hands, one by one. Perhaps she
was not beautiful, as most people judge. But she was beautiful here--four
hundred miles beyond civilization. Mukee, the half-Cree, had never seen a
white woman, for even the factor's wife was part Chippewayan, and no one
of the others went down to the edge of the southern wilderness more than
once each twelve-month or so. Her hair was brown and soft, and it shone
with a sunny glory that reached away back into their conception of things
dreamed of but never seen, her eyes were as blue as the early snowflowers
that came after the spring floods, and her voice was the sweetest sound
that had ever fallen upon their ears. So these men thought when Cummins
first brought home his wife, and the masterpiece which each had painted
in his soul and brain was never changed. Each week and month added to the
deep-toned value of that picture, as the passing of a century might add
to a Raphael or a Van Dyke. The woman became more human, and less an
angel, of course, but that only made her more real, and allowed them to
become acquainted with her, to talk with her, and to love her more. There
was no thought of wrong--until the Englishman came; for the devotion of
these men who lived alone, and mostly wifeless, was a great passionless
love unhinting of sin, and Cummins and his wife accepted it, and added to
it when they could, and were the happiest pair in all that vast
Northland.
The first year brought great changes. The girl--she was scarce more than
budding into womanhood--fell happily into the ways of her new life. She
did nothing that was elementally unusual--nothing more than any pure
woman reared in the love of a God and home would have done. In her spare
hours she began to teach the half dozen wild little children about the
post, and every Sunday told them wonderful stories out of the Bible. She
ministered to the sick, for that was a part of her code of life.
Everywhere she carried her glad smile, her cheery greeting, her wistful
earnestness to brighten what seemed to her the sad and lonely lives of
these silent, worshipful men of the North. And she succeeded, not because
she was unlike other millions of her kind, but because of the difference
between the fortieth and the sixtieth degrees--the difference in the
viewpoint of men who fought themselves into moral shreds in the big game
of life and those who lived a thousand miles nearer to the dome of the
earth. At the end of this first year came the wonderful event in the
history of the Company's post, which had the Barren Lands at its back
door. One day a new life was born into the little cabin of Cummins and
his wife.
After this the silent, wordless worship of Jan and his people was filled
with something very near to pathos. Cummins' wife was a mother. She was
one of them now, a part of their indissoluble existence--a part of it as
truly as the strange lights forever hovering over the Pole, as surely as
the countless stars that never left the night skies, as surely as the
endless forests and the deep snows! There was an added value to Cummins
now. If there was a long and dangerous mission to perform it was somehow
arranged so that he was left behind. Only Jan and one or two others knew
why his traps made the best catch of fur, for more than once he had
slipped a mink of an ermine or a fox into one of Cummins' traps, knowing
that it would mean a luxury or two for the woman and the baby. And when
Cummins left the post, sometimes for a day and sometimes longer, the
mother and her child fell as a brief heritage to those who remained. The
keenest eyes would not have discovered that this was so.
In the second year, with the beginning of trapping, fell the second and
third great events. Cummins disappeared. Then came the Englishman. For a
time the first of these two overshadowed everything else at the post.
Cummins had gone to prospect a new trap-line, and was to sleep out the
first night. The second night he was still gone. On the third day came
the "Beeg Snow." It began at dawn, thickened as the day went, and
continued to thicken until it became that soft, silent deluge of white in
which no man dared venture a thousand yards from his door. The Aurora was
hidden. There were no stars in the sky at night. Day was weighted with a
strange, noiseless gloom. In all that wilderness there was not a creature
that moved. Sixty hours later, when visible life was resumed again, the
caribou, the wolf and the fox dug themselves up out of six feet of snow,
and found the world changed.
It was at the beginning of the "Beeg Snow" that Jan went to the woman's
cabin. He tapped upon her door with the timidity of a child, and when she
opened it, her great eyes glowing at him in wild questioning, her face
white with a terrible fear, there was a chill at his heart which choked
back what he had come to say. He walked in dumbly and stood with the snow
falling off him in piles, and when Cummins' wife saw neither hope nor
foreboding in his dark, set face she buried her face in her arms upon the
little table and sobbed softly in her despair. Jan strove to speak, but
the Cree in him drove back what was French and "just white," and he stood
in mute, trembling torture. "Ah, the Great God!" his soul was crying.
"What can I do?"
Upon its little cot the woman's child was asleep. Beside the stove there
were a few sticks of wood. He stretched himself until his neck creaked to
see if there was water in the barrel near the door. Then he looked again
at the bowed head and the shivering form at the table. In that moment
Jan's resolution soared very near to the terrible.
"Mees Cummin, I go hunt for heem!" he cried. "I go hunt for heem--an'
fin' heem!"
He waited another moment, and then backed softly toward the door.
"I hunt for heem!" he repeated, fearing that she had not heard.
She lifted her face, and the beating of Jan's heart sounded to him like
the distant thrumming of partridge wings. Ah, the Great God--would he
ever forget that look! She was coming to him, a new glory in her eyes,
her arms reaching out, her lips parted! Jan knew how the Great Spirit had
once appeared to Mukee, the half-Cree, and how a white mist, like a snow
veil, had come between the half-breed's eyes and the wondrous thing he
beheld. And that same snow veil drifted between Jan and the woman. Like
in a vision he saw her glorious face so near to him that his blood was
frightened into a strange, wonderful sensation that it had never known
before. He felt the touch of her sweet breath, he heard her passionate
prayer, he knew that one of his rough hands was clasped in both her
own--and he knew, too, that their soft, thrilling warmth would remain
with him until he died, and still go into Paradise with him.
When he trudged back into the snow, knee-deep now, he sought Mukee, the
half-breed. Mukee had suffered a lynx bite that went deep into the bone,
and Cummins' wife had saved his hand. After that the savage in him was
enslaved to her like an invisible spirit, and when Jan slipped on his
snowshoes to set out into the deadly chaos of the "Beeg Storm" Mukee was
ready to follow. A trail through the spruce forest led them to the lake
across which Jan knew that Cummins had intended to go. Beyond that, a
matter of six miles or so, there was a deep and lonely break between two
mountainous ridges in which Cummins believed he might find lynx. Indian
instinct guided the two across the lake. There they separated, Jan going
as nearly as he could guess into the northwest, Mukee trailing swiftly
and hopelessly into the south, both inspired in the face of death by the
thought of a woman with sunny hair, and with lips and eyes that had sent
many a shaft of hope and gladness into their desolate hearts.
It was no great sacrifice for Jan, this struggle with the "Beeg Snows"
for the woman's sake. What it was to Mukee, the half-Cree, no man ever
guessed or knew, for it was not until the late spring snows had gone that
they found what the foxes and the wolves had left of him, far to the
south.
A hand, soft and gentle, guided Jan. He felt the warmth of it and the
thrill of it, and neither the warmth nor the thrill grew less as the
hours passed and the snow fell deeper. His soul was burning with a joy
that it had never known. Beautiful visions danced in his brain, and
always he heard the woman's voice praying to him in the little cabin, saw
her eyes upon him through that white snow veil! Ah, what would he not
give if he could find the man, if he could take Cummins back to his wife,
and stand for one moment more with her hands clasping his, her joy
flooding him with a sweetness that would last for all time! He plunged
fearlessly into the white world beyond the lake, his wide snowshoes
sinking ankle-deep at every step. There was neither rock nor tree to
guide him, for everywhere was the heavy ghost-raiment of the Indian God.
The balsams were bending under it, the spruces were breaking into
hunchback forms, the whole world was twisted in noiseless torture under
its increasing weight, and out through the still terror of it all Jan's
voice went in wild echoing shouts. Now and then he fired his rifle, and
always he listened long and intently. The echoes came back to him,
laughing, taunting, and then each time fell the mirthless silence of the
storm. Night came, a little darker than the day, and Jan stopped to build
a fire and eat sparingly of his food, and to sleep. It was still night
when he aroused himself and stumbled on. Never did he take the weight of
his rifle from his right hand or shoulder, for he knew this weight would
shorten the distance traveled at each step by his right foot, and would
make him go in a circle that would bring him back to the lake. But it was
a long circle. The day passed. A second night fell upon him, and his hope
of finding Cummins was gone. A chill crept in where his heart had been so
warm, and somehow that soft pressure of a woman's hand upon his seemed to
become less and less real to him. The woman's prayers were following him,
her heart was throbbing with its hope in him--and he had failed! On the
third day, when the storm was over, Jan staggered hopelessly into the
post. He went straight to the woman, disgraced, heartbroken. When he came
out of the little cabin he seemed to have gone mad. A wondrously strange
thing had happened. He had spoken not a word, but his failure and his
sufferings were written in his face, and when Cummins' wife saw and
understood she went as white as the underside of a poplar leaf in a
clouded sun. But that was not all. She came to him, and clasped one of
his half-frozen hands to her bosom, and he heard her say, "God bless you
forever, Jan! You have done the best you could!" The Great God--was that
not reward for the risking of a miserable, worthless life such as his? He
went to his shack and slept long, and dreamed, sometimes of the woman,
and of Cummins and Mukee, the half-Cree.
On the first crust of the new snow came the Englishman up from Fort
Churchill, on Hudson's Bay. He came behind six dogs, and was driven by an
Indian, and he bore letters to the factor which proclaimed him something
of considerable importance at the home office of the Company, in London.
As such he was given the best bed in the factor's rude home. On the
second day he saw Cummins' wife at the Company's store, and very soon
learned the history of Cummins' disappearance.
That was the beginning of the real tragedy at the post. The wilderness is
a grim oppressor of life. To those who survive in it the going out of
life is but an incident, an irresistible and natural thing, unpleasant
but without horror. So it was with the passing of Cummins. But the
Englishman brought with him something new, as the woman had brought
something new, only in this instance it was an element of life which Jan
and his people could not understand, an element which had never found a
place, and never could, in the hearts and souls of the post. On the other
hand, it promised to be but an incident to the Englishman, a passing
adventure in pleasure common to the high and glorious civilization from
which he had come. Here again was that difference of viewpoint, the
eternity of difference between the middle and the end of the earth. As
the days passed, and the crust grew deeper upon the "Beeg Snows," the
tragedy progressed rapidly toward finality. At first Jan did not
understand. The others did not understand. When the worm of the
Englishman's sin revealed itself it struck them with a dumb, terrible
fear.
The Englishman came from among women. For months he had been in a torment
of desolation. Cummins' wife was to him like a flower suddenly come to
relieve the tantalizing barrenness of a desert, and with the wiles and
soft speech of his kind he sought to breathe its fragrance. In the weeks
that followed the flower seemed to come nearer to him, and this was
because Jan and his people had not as yet fully measured the heart of the
woman, and because the Englishman had not measured Jan and his people he
talked a great deal when enthused by the warmth of the box stove and his
thoughts. So human passions were set at play. Because the woman knew
nothing of what was said about the box stove she continued in the even
course of her pure life, neither resisting nor encouraging the newcomer,
yet ever tempting him with that sweetness which she gave to all alike,
and still praying in the still hours of night that Cummins would return
to her. As yet there was no suspicion in her soul. She accepted the
Englishman's friendship. His sympathy for her won him a place in her
recognition of things good and true. She did not hear the false note, she
saw no step that promised evil. Only Jan and his people saw and
understood the one-sided struggle, and shivered at the monstrous evil of
it. At least they thought they saw and understood, which was enough. Like
so many faithful beasts they were ready to spring, to rend flesh, to tear
life out of him who threatened the desecration of all that was good and
pure and beautiful to them, and yet, dumb in their devotion and faith,
they waited and watched for a sign from the woman. The blue eyes of
Cummins' wife, the words of her gentle lips, the touch of her hands had
made law at the post. She, herself, had become the omniscience of all
that was law to them, and if she smiled upon the Englishman, and talked
with him, and was pleased with him, that was only one other law that she
had made for them to respect. So they were quiet, evaded the Englishman
as much as possible, and watched--always watch ed.
These were days when something worse than disease was eating at the few
big honest hearts that made up the life at the post. The search for
Cummins never ceased, and always the woman was receiving hope. Now it was
Williams who went far into the South, and brought back word that a
strange white man had been seen among the Indians; then it was Thoreau,
the Frenchman, who skirted the edge of the Barren Lands three days into
the West, and said that he had found the signs of strange campfires. And
always Jan was on the move, to the South, the North, the East and the
West. The days began to lengthen. It was dawn now at eight o'clock
instead of nine, the silvery white of the sun was turning day by day more
into the glow of fire, and for a few minutes at midday the snow softened
and water dripped from the roofs.
Jan knew what it meant. Very soon the thick crust of the "Beeg Snow"
would drop in, and they would find Cummins. They would bring what was
left of him back to the post. And then--what would happen then?
Every day or two Jan found some pretext that took him to the little log
cabin. Now it was to convey to the woman a haunch of a caribou he had
slain. Again it was to bring her child a strange plaything from the
forest. More frequently it was to do the work that Cummins would have
done. He seldom went within the low door, but stood outside, speaking a
few words, while Cummins' wife talked to him. But one morning, when the
sun was shining down with the first promising warmth of spring, the woman
stepped hack from the door and asked him in.
"I want to tell you something, Jan," she said softly. "I have been
thinking about it for a long time. I must find some work to do. I must do
something--to earn--money."
Jan's eyes leaped straight to hers in sudden horror.
"Work!"
The word fell from him as if in its utterance there was something of
crime. Then he stood speechless, awed by the look in her eyes, the hard
gray pallor that came into her face.
"May God bless you for all you have done, Jan, and may God bless the
others! I want you to take that word to them from me. But he will never
come back, Jan--never. Tell the men that I love them as brothers, and
always shall love them, but now that I know he is dead I can no longer
live as a drone among them. I will do anything. I will make your coats,
do your washing and mend your moccasins. To-morrow I begin my first
work--for money."
He heard what she said after that as if in a dream. When he went out into
the day again, with her word to his people, he knew that in some way
which he could not understand this big, cold world had changed for him.
To-morrow Cummins' wife was to begin writing letters for the Englishman!
His eyes glittered, his hands clenched themselves upon his breast, and
all the blood in him submerged itself in one wild resistless impulse. An
hour later Jan and his four dogs were speeding swiftly into the South.
The next day the Englishman went to the woman's cabin. He did not return
in the afternoon. And that same afternoon, when Cummins' wife came into
the Company's store, a quick flush shot into her cheeks and the glitter
of blue diamonds into her eyes when she saw the Englishman standing
there. The man's red face grew redder, and he shifted his gaze. When
Cummins' wife passed him she drew her skirt close to her, and there was
the poise of a queen in her head, the glory of mother and wife and
womanhood, the living, breathing essence of all that was beautiful in
Jan's "honor of the Beeg Snows." But Jan, twenty miles to the south, did
not know.
He returned on the fourth night and went quietly to his little shack in
the edge of the balsam forest. In the glow of the oil lamp which he
lighted he rolled up his treasure of winter-caught furs into a small
pack. Then he opened his door and walked straight and fearlessly toward
the cabin of Cummins' wife. It was a pale, glorious night, and Jan lifted
his face to its starry skies and filled his lungs near to bursting with
its pure air, and when he was within a few steps of the woman's door he
burst into a wild snatch of triumphant forest song. For this was a new
Jan who was returning to her, a man who had gone out into the solitudes
and fought a great battle with the elementary things in him, and who,
because of his triumph over these things, was filled with the strength
and courage to live a great lie. The woman heard his voice, and
recognized it. The door swung open, wide and brimful of light, and in it
stood Cummins' wife, her child hugged close in her arms.
Jan crowed close up out of the starry gloom.
"I fin' heem, Mees Cummins--I fin' heem nint' miles back in Cree
wigwam--with broke leg. He come home soon--he sen' great love--an'
THESE!"
And he dropped his furs at the woman's feet....
"Ah, the Great God!" cried Jan's tortured soul when it was all over. "At
least she shall not work for the dirty Englishman."
First he awoke the factor, and told him what he had done. Then he went to
Williams, and after that, one by one, these three visited the four other
white and part white men at the post. They lived very near to the earth,
these seven, and the spirit of the golden rule was as natural to their
living as green sap to the trees. So they stood shoulder to shoulder to
Jan in a scheme that appalled them, and in the very first day of this
scheme they saw the woman blossoming forth in her old beauty and joy, and
at times fleeting visions of the old happiness at the post came to these
lonely men who were searing their souls for her. But to Jan one vision
came to destroy all others, and as the old light returned to the woman's
eyes, the glad smile to her lips, the sweetness of thankfulness and faith
into her voice, this vision hurt him until he rolled and tossed in agony
at night, and by day his feet were never still. His search for Cummins
now had something of madness in it. It was his one hope--where to the
other six there was no hope. And one day this spark went out of him. The
crust was gone. The snow was settling. Beyond the lake he found the chasm
between the two mountains, and, miles of this chasm, robbed to the bones
of flesh, he found Cummins. The bones, and Cummins' gun, and all that was
left of him, he buried in a crevasse.
He waited until night to return to the post. Only one light was burning
when he came out into the clearing, and that was the light in the woman's
cabin. In the edge of the balsams he sat down to watch it, as he had
watched it a hundred nights before. Suddenly something came between him
and the light. Against the cabin he saw the shadow of a human form, and
as silently as the steely flash of the Aurora over his head, as swiftly
as a lean deer, he sped through the gloom of the forest's edge and came
up behind the home of the woman and her child. With the caution of a
lynx, his head close to the snow, he peered around the end of the logs.
It was the Englishman who stood looking through the tear in the curtained
window! Jan's moccasined feet made no sound. His hand fell as gently as a
child's upon the Englishman's arm.
"Thees is not the honor of the Beeg Snows!" he whispered. "Come."
A sickly pallor filled the Englishman's face. But Jan's voice was soft
and dispassionate, his touch was velvety in its hint, and he went with
the guiding hand away from the curtained window, smiling in a
companionable way. Jan's teeth gleamed back. The Englishman chuckled.
Then Jan's hands changed. They flew to the thick reddening throat of the
man from civilization, and without a sound the two sank together upon the
snow. It was many minutes before Jan rose to his feet. The next day
Williams set out for Fort Churchill with word for the Company's home
office that the Englishman had died in the "Beeg Snow," which was true.
The end was not far away now. Jan was expecting it day by day, hour by
hour. But it came in a way that he did not expect. A month had gone, and
Cummins had not come up from among the Crees. At times there was a
strange light in the woman's eyes as she questioned the men at the post.
Then, one day, the factor's son told Jan that she wanted to see him in
the little cabin at the other end of the clearing.
A shiver went through him as he came to the door. It was more than a
spirit of unrest in Jan to-day, more than suspicion, more than his old
dread of that final moment of the tragedy he was playing, which would
condemn him to everlasting perdition in the woman's eyes. It was pain,
poignant, terrible--something which he could not name, something upon
which he could place his hand, and yet which filled him with a desire to
throw himself upon his face in the snow and sob out his grief as he had
seen the little children do. It was not dread, but the torment of
reality, that gripped him now, and when he faced the woman he knew why.
There had come a terrible change, but a quiet change, in Cummins' wife.
The luster had gone from her eyes. There was a dead whiteness in her face
that went to the roots of her shimmering hair, and as she spoke to Jan
she clutched one hand upon her bosom, which rose and fell as Jan had seen
the breast of a mother lynx rise and fall in the last torture of its
death.
"Jan," she panted, "Jan--you have lied to me!"
Jan's head dropped. The worn caribou skin of his coat crumpled upon his
breast. His heart died. And yet he found voice, soft, low, simple.
"Yes, me lie!"
"You--you lied to me!"
"Yes--me--lie--"
His head dropped lower. He heard the sobbing breath of the woman, and
gently his arm crooked itself, and his fingers rose slowly, very slowly,
toward the hilt of his hunting knife.
"Yes--Mees Cummins--me lie--"
There came a sudden swift, sobbing movement, and the woman was at Jan's
feet, clasping his hand to her bosom as she had clasped it once before
when he had gone out to face death for her. But this time the snow veil
was very thick before Jan's eyes, and he did not see her face. Only he
heard.
"Bless you, dear Jan, and may God bless you evermore! For you have been
good to me, Jan--so good--to me--"
And he went out into the day again a few moments later, leaving her alone
in her great grief, for Jan was a man in the wild and mannerless ways of
a savage world, and he knew not how to comfort in the fashion of that
other world which had other conceptions and another understanding of what
was to him the "honor of the Beeg Snows." A week later the woman
announced her intention of returning to her people, for the dome of the
earth had grown sad and lonely and desolate to her now that Cummins was
forever gone. Sometimes the death of a beloved friend brings with it the
sadness that spread like a pall over Jan and those others who had lived
very near to contentment and happiness for nearly two years, only each
knew that this grief of his would be as enduring as life itself. For a
brief space the sweetest of all God's things had come among them, a pure
woman who brought with her the gentleness and beauty and hallowed
thoughts of civilization in place of its iniquities, and the pictures in
their hearts were imperishable.
The parting was as simple and as quiet as when the woman had come. They
went to the little cabin where the sledge dogs stood harnessed. Hatless,
silent, crowding back their grief behind grim and lonely countenances,
they waited for Cummins' wife to say good-bye. The woman did not speak.
She held up her child for each man to kiss, and the baby babbled
meaningless things into the bearded faces that it had come to know and
love, and when it came to Williams' turn he whispered, "Be a good baby,
be a good baby." And when it was all over the woman crushed the child to
her breast and dropped sobbing upon the sledge, and Jan cracked his whip
and shouted hoarsely to the dogs, for it was Jan who was to drive her to
civilization. Long after they had disappeared beyond the clearing those
who remained stood looking at the cabin; and then, with a dry, strange
sob in his throat, Williams led the way inside. When they came out
Williams brought a hammer with him, and nailed the door tight.
"Mebby she'll come back some day," he said.
That was all, but the others understood.
For nine days Jan raced his dogs into the South. On the tenth they came
to Le Pas. It was night when they stopped before the little log hotel,
and the gloom hid the twitching in Jan's face.
"You will stay here--to-night?" asked the woman.
"Me go back--now," said Jan.
Cummins' wife came very close to him. She did not urge, for she, too, was
suffering the torture of this last parting with the "honor of the Beeg
Snows." It was not the baby's face that came to Jan's now, but the
woman's. He felt the soft touch of her lips, and his soul burst forth in
a low, agonized cry.
"The good God bless you, and keep you, and care for you evermore, Jan,"
she whispered. "Some day we will meet again."
And she kissed him again, and lifted the child to him, and Jan turned his
tired dogs back into the grim desolation of the North, where the Aurora
was lighting his way feebly, and beckoning to him, and telling him that
the old life of centuries and centuries ago was waiting for him there.
BUCKY SEVERN
Father Brochet had come south from Fond du Lac, and Weyman, the Hudson's
Bay Company doctor, north through the Geikee River country. They had met
at Severn's cabin, on the Waterfound. Both had come on the same
mission--to see Severn; one to keep him from dying, if that was possible,
one to comfort him in the last hour, if death came. Severn insisted on
living. Bright-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a racking cough that reddened
the gauze handkerchief the doctor had given him, he sat bolstered up in
his cot and looked out through the open door with glad and hopeful gaze.
Weyman had arrived only half an hour before. Outside was the Indian
canoeman who had helped to bring him up.
It was a glorious day, such as comes in its full beauty only in the far
northern spring, where the air enters the lungs like sharp, warm wine,
laden with the tang of spruce and balsam, and the sweetness of the
bursting poplar-buds.
"It was mighty good of you to come up," Severn was saying to the doctor.
"The company has always been the best friend I've ever had--except
one--and that's why I've hung to it all these years, trailing the sledges
first as a kid, you know, then trapping, running, and--oh, Lord!"
He stopped to cough, and the little black-frocked missioner, looking
across at Weyman, saw him bite his lips.
"That cough hurts, but it's better," Severn apologized, smiling weakly.
"Funny, ain't it, a man like me coming down with a cough? Why, I've slept
in ice a thousand times, with snow for a pillow and the thermometer down
to fifty. But this last winter it was cold, seventy or lower, an' I
worked in it when I ought to have been inside, warming my toes. But, you
see, I wanted to get the cabin built, an' things all cleared up about
here, before SHE came. It's the cold that got me, wasn't it, doc?"
"That's it," said Weyman, rolling and lighting a cigarette. Then he
laughed, as the sick man finished another coughing spell, and said:
"I never thought you'd have a love affair, Bucky!"
"Neither did I," chuckled Severn. "Ain't it a wonder, doc? Here I'm
thirty-eight, with a hide on me like leather, an' no thought of a woman
for twenty years, until I saw HER. I don't mean it's a wonder I fell in
love, doc--you'd 'a' done that if you'd met her first. The wonder of it
is that she fell in love with me." He laughed softly. "I'll bet Father
Brochet'll go in a heap himself when he marries us! It's goin' to happen
next month. Did you ever see her, father--Marie La Corne, over at the
post on Split Lake?"
Severn dropped his head to cough, but Weyman say the sudden look of
horror that leaped into the little priest's face.
"Marie La Corne!"
"Yes, at Split Lake."
Severn looked up again. He had missed what Weyman had seen.
"Yes, I've seen her."
Bucky Severn's eyes lit up with pleasure.
"She's--she's beautiful, ain't she?" he cried in hoarse whisper. "Ain't
it a wonder, father? I come up there with a canoe full of supplies, last
spring about this time, an'--an' at first I hardly dast to look at her;
but it came out all right. When I told her I was coming over here to
build us a home, she wanted me to bring her along to help; but I
wouldn't. I knew it was goin' to be hard this winter, and she's never
goin' to work--never so long as I live. I ain't had much to do with
women, but I've seen 'em and I've watched 'em an' she's never goin' to
drudge like the rest. If she'll let me, I'm even goin' to do the cookin'
an' the dish-washing and scrub the floors! I've done it for twenty-five
years, an' I'm tough. She ain't goin' to do nothin' but sew for the kids
when they come, an' sing, an' be happy. When it comes to the work that
there ain't no fun in, I'll do it. I've planned it all out. We're goin'
to have half an arpent square of flowers, an' she'll love to work among
'em. I've got the ground cleared--out there--you kin see it by twisting
your head through the door. An' she's goin' to have an organ. I've got
the money saved, an' it's coming to Churchill on the next ship. That's
goin' to be a surprise--'bout Christmas, when the snow is hard an'
sledging good. You see--"
He stopped again to cough. A hectic flush filled his hollow cheeks, and
there was a feverish glow in his eyes. As he bent his head, the priest
looked at Weyman. The doctor's lips were tense. His cigarette was
unlighted.
"I know what it means for a woman to die a workin'," Severn went on. "My
mother did that. I can remember it, though I was only a kid. She was bent
an' stoop-shouldered, an' her hands were rough and twisted. I know now
why she used to hug me up close and croon funny things over me when
father was away. When I first told my Marie what I was goin' to do, she
laughed at me; but when I told her 'bout my mother, an' how work an'
freezin' an' starvin' killed her when I needed her most, Marie jest put
her hand up to my face an' looked queer--an' then she burst out crying
like a baby. She understands, Marie does! She knows what I'm goin' to
do--"
"You mustn't talk any more, Bucky," warned the doctor, feeling his pulse.
"It'll hurt you."
"Hurt me!" Severn laughed hysterically, as If what the doctor had said
was a joke. "Hurt me? It's what's going to put me on my feet, doc. I know
it now, I been too much alone this last winter, with nothin' but my dogs
to talk to when night come. I ain't never been much of a talker, but she
got me out o' that. She used to tease me at first, an' I'd get red in the
face an' almost bust. An' then, one day, it come, like a bung out of a
hole, an' I've had a hankerin' to talk ever since. Hurt me!"
He gave an incredulous chuckle, which ended in a cough.
"Do you know, I wish I could read better 'n I can!" he said suddenly,
leaning almost eagerly toward Father Brochet. "She knows I ain't great
shucks at that. She's goin' to have a school just as soon as she comes,
an' I'm goin' to be the scholar. She's got a packful of books an'
magazines an' I'm goin' to tote over a fresh load every winter. I'd like
to surprise her. Can't you help me to--"
Weyman pressed him back gently.
"See here, Bucky, you've got to lie down and keep quiet," he said. "If
you don't, it will take you a week longer to get well. Try and sleep a
little, while Father Brochet and I go outside and see what you've done."
When they went out, Weyman closed the door after them. He spoke no word
as he turned and looked upon what Bucky Severn had done for the coming of
his bride. Father Brochet's hand touched the doctor's and it was cold and
trembling.
"How is he?" he asked.
"It is the bad malady," said Weyman softly. "The frost has touched his
lungs. One does not feel the effect of that until spring comes. Then--a
cough--and the lungs begin literally to slough away."
"You mean--"
"That there is no hope--absolutely none. He will die within two days."
As he spoke, the little priest straightened himself and lifted his hands
as if about to pronounce a benediction.
"Thank God!" he breathed. Then, as quickly, he caught himself. "No, I
don't mean that. God forgive me! But--it is best." Weyman stared
incredulously into his face.
"It is best," repeated the other, as gently as if speaking a prayer. "How
strangely the Creator sometimes works out His ends! I came straight here
from Split Lake. Marie La Corne died two weeks ago. It was I who said the
last prayer over her dead body!"
HIS FIRST PENITENT
In a white wilderness of moaning storm, in a wilderness of miles and
miles of black pine-trees, the Transcontinental Flier lay buried in the
snow. In the first darkness of the wild December night, engine and tender
had rushed on ahead to division headquarters, to let the line know that
the flier had given up the fight, and needed assistance. They had been
gone two hours, and whiter and whiter grew the brilliantly lighted
coaches in the drifts and winnows of the whistling storm. From the black
edges of the forest, prowling eyes might have looked upon scores of human
faces staring anxiously out into the blackness from the windows of the
coaches.
In those coaches it was growing steadily colder. Men were putting on
their overcoats, and women snuggled deeper in their furs. Over it all,
the tops of the black pine-trees moaned and whistled in sounds that
seemed filled both with menace and with savage laughter.
In the smoking-compartment of the Pullman sat five men, gathered in a
group. Of these, one was Forsythe, the timber agent; two were traveling
men; the fourth a passenger homeward bound from a holiday visit; and the
fifth was Father Charles. The priest's pale, serious face lit up in
surprise or laughter with the others, but his lips had not broken into a
story of their own. He was a little man, dressed in somber black, and
there was that about him which told his companions that within his
tight-drawn coat of shiny black there were hidden tales which would have
gone well with the savage beat of the storm against the lighted windows
and the moaning tumult of the pine-trees.
Suddenly Forsythe shivered at a fiercer blast than the others, and said:
"Father, have you a text that would fit this night--and the situation?"
Slowly Father Charles blew out a spiral of smoke from between his lips,
and then he drew himself erect and leaned a little forward, with the
cigar between his slender white fingers.
"I had a text for this night," he said, "but I have none now, gentlemen.
I was to have married a couple a hundred miles down the line. The guests
have assembled. They are ready, but I am not there. The wedding will not
be to-night, and so my text is gone. But there comes another to my mind
which fits this situation--and a thousand others--'He who sits in the
heavens shall look down and decide.' To-night I was to have married these
young people. Three hours ago I never dreamed of doubting that I should
be on hand at the appointed hour. But I shall not marry them. Fate has
enjoined a hand. The Supreme Arbiter says 'No,' and what may not be the
consequences'?"
"They will probably be married to-morrow," said one of the traveling men.
"There will be a few hours' delay--nothing more."
"Perhaps," replied Father Charles, as quietly as before. "And--perhaps
not. Who can say what this little incident may not mean in the lives of
that young man and that young woman--and, it may be, in my own? Three or
four hours lost in a storm--what may they not mean to more than one human
heart on this train? The Supreme Arbiter plays His hand, if you wish to
call it that, with reason and intent. To someone, somewhere, the most
insignificant occurrence may mean life or death. And
to-night--this--means something."
A sudden blast drove the night screeching over our heads, and the whining
of the pines was almost like human voices. Forsythe sucked a cigar that
had gone out.
"Long ago," said Father Charles, "I knew a young man and a young woman
who were to be married. The man went West to win a fortune. Thus fate
separated them, and in the lapse of a year such terrible misfortune came
to the girl's parents that she was forced into a marriage with wealth--a
barter of her white body for an old man's gold. When the young man
returned from the West he found his sweetheart married, and hell upon
earth was their lot. But hope lingers in your hearts. He waited four
years; and then, discouraged, he married another woman. Gentlemen, three
days after the wedding his old sweetheart's husband died, and she was
released from bondage. Was not that the hand of the Supreme Arbiter? If
he had waited but three days more, the old happiness might have lived.
"But wait! One month after that day the young man was arrested, taken to
a Western State, tried for murder, and hanged. Do you see the point? In
three days more the girl who had sold herself into slavery for the
salvation of those she loved would have been released from her bondage
only to marry a murderer!"
There was silence, in which all five listened to that wild moaning of the
storm. There seemed to be something in it now--something more than the
inarticulate sound of wind and trees. Forsythe scratched a match and
relighted his cigar.
"I never thought of such things in just that light," he said.
"Listen to the wind," said the little priest. "Hear the pine-trees shriek
out there! It recalls to me a night of years and years ago--a night like
this, when the storm moaned and twisted about my little cabin, and when
the Supreme Arbiter sent me my first penitent. Gentlemen, it is something
which will bring you nearer to an understanding of the voice and the hand
of God. It is a sermon on the mighty significance of little things, this
story of my first penitent. If you wish, I will tell it to you."
"Go on," said Forsythe.
The traveling men drew nearer.
"It was a night like this," repeated Father Charles, "and it was in a
great wilderness like this, only miles and miles away. I had been sent to
establish a mission; and in my cabin, that wild night, alone and with the
storm shrieking about me, I was busy at work sketching out my plans.
After a time I grew nervous. I did not smoke then, and so I had nothing
to comfort me but my thoughts; and, in spite of my efforts to make them
otherwise, they were cheerless enough. The forest grew to my door. In the
fiercer blasts I could hear the lashing of the pine-trees over my head,
and now and then an arm of one of the moaning trees would reach down and
sweep across my cabin roof with a sound that made me shudder and fear.
This wilderness fear is an oppressive and terrible thing when you are
alone at night, and the world is twisting and tearing itself outside. I
have heard the pine-trees shriek like dying women, I have heard them
wailing like lost children, I have heard them sobbing and moaning like
human souls writhing in agony--"
Father Charles paused, to peer through the window out into the black
night, where the pine-trees were sobbing and moaning now. When he turned,
Forsythe, the timber agent, whose life was a wilderness life, nodded
understandingly.
"And when they cry like that," went on Father Charles, "a living voice
would be lost among them as the splash of a pebble is lost in the roaring
sea. A hundred times that night I fancied that I heard human voices; and
a dozen times I went to my door, drew back the bolt, and listened, "with
the snow and the wind beating about my ears.
"As I sat shuddering before my fire, there came a thought to me of a
story which I had long ago read about the sea--a story of impossible
achievement and of impossible heroism. As vividly as if I had read it
only the day before, I recalled the description of a wild and stormy
night when the heroine placed a lighted lamp in the window of her
sea-bound cottage, to guide her lover home in safety. Gentlemen, the
reading of that book in my boyhood days was but a trivial thing. I had
read a thousand others, and of them all it was possibly the least
significant; but the Supreme Arbiter had not forgotten.
"The memory of that book brought me to my feet, and I placed a lighted
lamp close up against my cabin window. Fifteen minutes later I heard a
strange sound at the door, and when I opened it there fell in upon the
floor at my feet a young and beautiful woman. And after her, dragging
himself over the threshold on his hands and knees, there came a man.
"I closed the door, after the man had crawled in and fallen face downward
upon the floor, and turned my attention first to the woman. She was
covered with snow. Her long, beautiful hair was loose and disheveled, and
had blown about her like a veil. Her big, dark eyes looked at me
pleadingly, and in them there was a terror such as I had never beheld in
human eyes before. I bent over her, intending to carry her to my cot; but
in another moment she had thrown herself upon the prostrate form of the
man, with her arms about his head, and there burst from her lips the
first sounds that she had uttered. They were not much more intelligible
than the wailing grief of the pine-trees out in the night, but they told
me plainly enough that the man on the floor was dearer to her than life.
"I knelt beside him, and found that he was breathing in a quick, panting
sort of way, and that his wide-open eyes were looking at the woman. Then
I noticed for the first time that his face was cut and bruised, and his
lips were swollen. His coat was loose at the throat, and I could see
livid marks on his neck.
"'I'm all right,' he whispered, struggling for breath, and turning his
eyes to me. 'We should have died--in a few minutes more--if it hadn't
been for the light in your window!'
"The young woman bent down and kissed him, and then she allowed me to
help her to my cot. When I had attended to the young man, and he had
regained strength enough to stand upon his feet, she was asleep. The man
went to her, and dropped upon his knees beside the cot. Tenderly he drew
back the heavy masses of hair from about her face and shoulders. For
several minutes he remained with his face pressed close against hers;
then he rose, and faced me. The woman--his wife--knew nothing of what
passed between us during the next half-hour. During that half-hour
gentlemen, I received my first confession. The young man was of my faith.
He was my first penitent."
It was growing colder in the coach, and Father Charles stopped to draw
his thin black coat closer to him. Forsythe relighted his cigar for the
third time. The transient passenger gave a sudden start as a gust of wind
beat against the window like a threatening hand.
"A rough stool was my confessional, gentlemen," resumed Father Charles.
"He told me the story, kneeling at my feet--a story that will live with
me as long as I live, always reminding me that the little things of life
may be the greatest things, that by sending a storm to hold up a coach
the Supreme Arbiter may change the map of the world. It is not a long
story. It is not even an unusual story.
"He had come into the North about a year before, and had built for
himself and his wife a little home at a pleasant river spot ten miles
distant from my cabin. Their love was of the kind we do not often see,
and they were as happy as the birds that lived about them in the
wilderness. They had taken a timber claim. A few months more, and a new
life was to come into their little home; and the knowledge of this made
the girl an angel of beauty and joy. Their nearest neighbor was another
man, several miles distant. The two men became friends, and the other
came over to see them frequently. It was the old, old story. The neighbor
fell in love with the young settler's wife.
"As you shall see, this other man was a beast. On the day preceding the
night of the terrible storm, the woman's husband set out for the
settlement to bring back supplies. Hardly had he gone, when the beast
came to the cabin. He found himself alone with the woman.
"A mile from his cabin, the husband stopped to light his pipe. See,
gentlemen, how the Supreme Arbiter played His hand. The man attempted to
unscrew the stem, and the stem broke. In the wilderness you must smoke.
Smoke is your company. It is voice and companionship to you. There were
other pipes at the settlement, ten miles away; but there was also another
pipe at the cabin, one mile away. So the husband turned back. He came up
quietly to his door, thinking that he would surprise his wife. He heard
voices--a man's voice, a woman's cries. He opened the door, and in the
excitement of what was happening within neither the man nor the woman saw
nor heard him. They were struggling. The woman was in the man's arms, her
hair torn down, her small hands beating him in the face, her breath
coming in low, terrified cries. Even as the husband stood there for the
fraction of a second, taking in the terrible scene, the other man caught
the woman's face to him, and kissed her. And then--it happened.
"It was a terrible fight; and when it was over the beast lay on the
floor, bleeding and dead. Gentlemen, the Supreme Arbiter BROKE A
PIPE-STEM, and sent the husband back in time!"
No one spoke as Father Charles drew his coat still closer about him.
Above the tumult of the storm another sound came to them--the distant,
piercing shriek of a whistle.
"The husband dug a grave through the snow and in the frozen earth,"
concluded Father Charles; "and late that afternoon they packed up a
bundle and set out together for the settlement. The storm overtook them.
They had dropped for the last time into the snow, about to die in each
other's arms, when I put my light in the window. That is all; except that
I knew them for several years afterward, and that the old happiness
returned to them--and more, for the child was born, a miniature of its
mother. Then they moved to another part of the wilderness, and I to still
another. So you see, gentlemen, what a snow-bound train may mean, for if
an old sea tale, a broken pipe-stem--"
The door at the end of the smoking-room opened suddenly. Through it there
came a cold blast of the storm, a cloud of snow, and a man. He was
bundled in a great bearskin coat, and as he shook out its folds his
strong, ruddy face smiled cheerfully at those whom he had interrupted.
Then, suddenly, there came a change in his face. The merriment went from
it. He stared at Father Charles. The priest was rising, his face more
tense and whiter still, his hands reaching out to the stranger.
In another moment the stranger had leaped to him--not to shake his hands,
but to clasp the priest in his great arms, shaking him, and crying out a
strange joy, while for the first time that night the pale face of Father
Charles was lighted up with a red and joyous glow.
After several minutes the newcomer released Father Charles, and turned to
the others with a great hearty laugh.
"Gentlemen," he said, "you must pardon me for interrupting you like this.
You will understand when I tell you that Father Charles is an old friend
of mine, the dearest friend I have on earth, and that I haven't seen him
for years. I was his first penitent!"
PETER GOD
Peter God was a trapper. He set his deadfalls and fox-baits along the
edge of that long, slim finger of the Great Barren, which reaches out of
the East well into the country of the Great Bear, far to the West. The
door of his sapling-built cabin opened to the dark and chilling gray of
the Arctic Circle; through its one window he could watch the sputter and
play of the Northern Lights; and the curious hissing purr of the Aurora
had grown to be a monotone in his ears.
Whence Peter God had come, and how it was that he bore the strange name
by which he went, no man had asked, for curiosity belongs to the white
man, and the nearest white men were up at Fort MacPherson, a hundred or
so miles away.
Six or seven years ago Peter God had come to the post for the first time
with his furs. He had given his name as Peter God, and the Company had
not questioned it, or wondered. Stranger names than Peter's were a part
of the Northland; stranger faces than his came in out of the white
wilderness trails; but none was more silent, or came in and went more
quickly. In the gray of the afternoon he drove in with his dogs and his
furs; night would see him on his way back to the Barrens, supplies for
another three months of loneliness on his sledge.
It would have been hard to judge his age--had one taken the trouble to
try. Perhaps he was thirty-eight. He surely was not French. There was no
Indian blood in him. His heavy beard was reddish, his long thick hair
distinctly blond, and his eyes were a bluish-gray.
For seven years, season after season, the Hudson's Bay Company's clerk
had written items something like the following in his record-books:
Feb. 17. Peter God came in to-day with his furs. He leaves this afternoon
or to-night for his trapping grounds with fresh supplies.
The year before, in a momentary fit of curiosity, the clerk had added:
Curious why Peter God never stays in Fort MacPherson overnight.
And more curious than this was the fact that Peter God never asked for
mail, and no letter ever came to Fort MacPherson for him.
The Great Barren enveloped him and his mystery. The yapping foxes knew
more of him than men. They knew him for a hundred miles up and down that
white finger of desolation; they knew the peril of his baits and his
deadfalls; they snarled and barked their hatred and defiance at the glow
of his lights on dark nights; they watched for him, sniffed for signs of
him, and walked into his clever deathpits.
The foxes and Peter God! That was what this white world was made up
of--foxes and Peter God. It was a world of strife between them. Peter God
was killing--but the foxes were winning. Slowly but surely they were
breaking him down--they and the terrible loneliness. Loneliness Peter God
might have stood for many more years. But the foxes were driving him mad.
More and more he had come to dread their yapping at night. That was the
deadly combination--night and the yapping. In the day-time he laughed at
himself for his fears; nights he sweated, and sometimes wanted to scream.
What manner of man Peter God was or might have been, and of the
strangeness of the life that was lived in the maddening loneliness of
that mystery-cabin in the edge of the Barren, only one other man knew.
That was Philip Curtis.
Two thousand miles south, Philip Curtis sat at a small table in a
brilliantly lighted and fashionable cafe. It was early June, and Philip
had been down from the North scarcely a month, the deep tan was still in
his face, and tiny wind and snow lines crinkled at the corners of his
eyes. He exuded the life of the big outdoors as he sat opposite
pallid-cheeked and weak-chested Barrow, the Mica King, who would have
given his millions to possess the red blood in the other's veins.
Philip had made his "strike," away up on the Mackenzie. That day he had
sold out to Barrow for a hundred thousand. To-night he was filled with
the flush of joy and triumph.
Barrow's eyes shone with a new sort of enthusiasm as he listened to this
man's story of grim and fighting determination that had led to the
discovery of that mountain of mica away up on the Clearwater Bulge. He
looked upon the other's strength, his bronzed face and the glory of
achievement in his eyes, and a great and yearning hopelessness burned
like a dull fire in his heart. He was no older than the man who sat on
the other side of the table--perhaps thirty-five; yet what a vast gulf
lay between them! He with his millions; the other with that flood of red
blood coming and going in his body, and his wonderful fortune of a
hundred thousand! Barrow leaned a little over the table, and laughed. It
was the laugh of a man who had grown tired of life, in spite of his
millions. Day before yesterday a famous specialist had warned him that
the threads of his life were giving way, one by one. He told this to
Curtis. He confessed to him, with that strange glow in his eyes,--a glow
that was like making a last fight against total extinguishment,--that he
would give up his millions and all he had won for the other's health and
the mountain of mica.
"And if it came to a close bargain," he said, "I wouldn't hold out for
the mountain. I'm ready to quit--and it's too late."
Which, after a little, brought Philip Curtis to tell so much as he knew
of the story of Peter God. Philip's voice was tuned with the winds and
the forests. It rose above the low and monotonous hum about them. People
at the two or three adjoining tables might have heard his story, if they
had listened. Within the immaculateness of his evening dress, Barrows
shivered, fearing that Curtis' voice might attract undue attention to
them. But other people were absorbed in themselves. Philip went on with
his story, and at last, so clearly that it reached easily to the other
tables, he spoke the name of Peter God.
Then came the interruption, and with that interruption a strange and
sudden upheaval in the life of Philip Curtis that was to mean more to him
than the discovery of the mica mountain. His eyes swept over Barrow's
shoulder, and there he saw a woman. She was standing. A low, stifled cry
had broken from her almost simultaneously with his first glimpse of her,
and as he looked, Philip saw her lips form gaspingly the name he had
spoken--Peter God!
She was so near that Barrow could have turned and touched her. Her eyes
were like luminous fires as she stared at Philip. Her face was strangely
pale. He could see her quiver, and catch her breath. And she was looking
at him. For that one moment she had forgotten the presence of others.
Then a hand touched her arm. It was the hand of her elderly escort, in
whose face were anxiety and wonder. The woman started and took her eyes
from Philip. With her escort she seated herself at a table a few paces
away, and for a few moments Philip could see she was fighting for
composure, and that it cost her a struggle to keep her eyes from turning
in his direction while she talked in a low voice to her companion.
Philip's heart was pounding like an engine. He knew that she was talking
about him now, and he knew that she had cried out when he had spoken
Peter God's name. He forgot Barrow as he looked at her. She was
exquisite, even with that gray pallor that had come so suddenly into her
cheeks. She was not young, as the age of youth is measured. Perhaps she
was thirty, or thirty-two, or thirty-five. If some one had asked Philip
to describe her, he would have said simply that she was glorious. Yet her
entrance had caused no stir. Few had looked at her until she had uttered
that sharp cry. There were a score of women under the brilliantly lighted
chandeliers possessed of more spectacular beauty, Barrow had partly
turned in his seat, and now, with careful breeding, he faced his
companion again.
"Do you know her?" Philip asked.
Barrow shook his head.
"No." Then he added: "Did you see what made her cry out like that?"
"I believe so," said Philip, and he turned purposely so that the four
people at the next table could hear him. "I think she twisted her ankle.
It's an occasional penance the women make for wearing these high-heeled
shoes, you know."
He looked at her again. Her form was bent toward the white-haired man who
was with her. The man was staring straight over at Philip, a strange
searching look in his face as he listened to what she was saying. He
seemed to question Philip through the short distance that separated them.
And then the woman turned her head slowly, and once more Philip met her
eyes squarely--deep, dark, glowing eyes that thrilled him to the quick of
his soul. He did not try to understand what he saw in them. Before he
turned his glance to Barrow he saw that color had swept back into her
face; her lips were parted; he knew that she was struggling to suppress a
tremendous emotion.
Barrow was looking at him curiously--and Philip went on with his story of
Peter God. He told it in a lower voice. Not until he had finished did he
look again in the direction of the other table. The woman had changed her
position slightly, so that he could not see her face. The uptilt of her
hat revealed to him the warm soft glow of shining coils of brown hair. He
was sure that her escort was keeping watch of his movements.
Suddenly Barrow drew his attention to a man sitting alone a dozen tables
from them.
"There's DeVoe, one of the Amalgamated chiefs," he said. "He has almost
finished, and I want to speak to him before he leaves. Will you excuse me
a minute--or will you come along and meet him?"
"I'll wait," said Philip.
Ten seconds later, the woman's white-haired escort was on his feet. He
came to Philip's table, and seated himself casually in Barrow's chair, as
though Philip were an old friend with whom he had come to chat for a
moment.
"I beg your pardon for the imposition which I am laying upon you," he
said in a low, quiet voice. "I am Colonel McCloud. The lady with me is my
daughter. And you, I believe, are a gentleman. If I were not sure of
that, I should not have taken advantage of your friend's temporary
absence. You heard my daughter cry out a few moments ago? You observed
that she was--disturbed?"
Philip nodded.
"I could not help it. I was facing her. And since then I have thought
that I--unconsciously--was the cause of her perturbation. I am Philip
Curtis, Colonel McCloud, from Fort MacPherson, two thousand miles north
of here, on the Mackenzie Kiver. So you see, if it is a case of mistaken
identity--"
"No--no--it is not that," interrupted the older man. "As we were passing
your table we--my daughter--heard you speak a name. Perhaps she was
mistaken. It was--Peter God."
"Yes. I know Peter God. He is a friend of mine."
Barrow was returning. The other saw him over Philip's shoulder, and his
voice trembled with a sudden and subdued excitement as he said quickly:
"Your friend is coming' back. No one but you must know that my daughter
is interested in this man--Peter God. She trusts you. She sent me to you.
It is important that she should see you to-night and talk with you alone.
I will wait for you outside. I will have a taxicab ready to take you to
our apartments. Will you come?"
He had risen. Philip heard Barrow's footsteps behind him.
"I will come," he said.
A few minutes later Colonel McCloud and his daughter left the cafe. The
half-hour after that passed with leaden slowness to Philip. The fortunate
arrival of two or three friends of Barrow gave him an opportunity to
excuse himself on the plea of an important engagement, and he bade the
Mica King good-night. Colonel McCloud was waiting for him outside the
cafe, and as they entered a taxicab, he said:
"My daughter is quite unstrung to-night, and I sent her home. She is
waiting for us. Will you have a smoke, Mr. Curtis?"
With a feeling that this night had set stirring a brew of strange and
unforeseen events for him, Philip sat in a softly lighted and richly
furnished room and waited. The Colonel had been gone a full quarter-hour.
He had left a box half filled with cigars on a table at Philip's elbow,
pressing him to smoke. They were an English brand of cigar, and on the
box was stamped the name of the Montreal dealer from whom they had been
purchased.
"My daughter will come presently," Colonel McCloud had said.
A curious thrill shot through Philip as he heard her footsteps and the
soft swish of her skirt. Involuntarily he rose to his feet as she entered
the room. For fully ten seconds they stood facing each other without
speaking. She was dressed in filmy gray stuff. There was lace at her
throat. She had shifted the thick bright coils of her hair to the crown
of her head; a splendid glory of hair, he thought. Her cheeks were
flushed, and with her hands against her breast, she seemed crushing back
the strange excitement that glowed in her eyes. Once he had seen a fawn's
eyes that looked like hers. In them were suspense, fear--a yearning that
was almost pain. Suddenly she came to him, her hands outstretched.
Involuntarily, too, he took them. They were warm and soft. They thrilled
him--and they clung to him.
"I am Josephine McCloud," she said. "My father has explained to you? You
know--a man--who calls himself--God?"
Her fingers clung more tightly to his, and the sweetness of her hair, her
breath, her eyes were very close as she waited.
"Yes, I know a man who calls himself Peter God."
"Tell me--what he is like?" she whispered. "He is tall--like you?"
"No. He is of medium height."
"And his hair? It is dark--dark like yours?"
"No. It is blond, and a little gray."
"And he is young--younger than you?"
"He is older."
"And his eyes--are dark?"
He felt rather than heard the throbbing of her heart as she waited for
him to reply. There was a reason why he would never forget Peter God's
eyes.
"Sometimes I thought they were blue, and sometimes gray," he said; and at
that she dropped his hands with a strange little cry, and stood a step
back from him, a joy which she made no effort to keep from him flaming in
her face.
It was a look which sent a sudden hopelessness through Curtis--a stinging
pang of jealousy. This night had set wild and tumultous emotions aflame
in his breast. He had come to Josephine McCloud like one in a dream. In
an hour he had placed her above all other women in the world, and in that
hour the little gods of fate had brought him to his knees in the worship
of a woman. The fact did not seem unreal to him. Here was the woman, and
he loved her. And his heart sank like a heavily weighted thing when he
saw the transfiguration of joy that came into her face when he said that
Peter God's eyes were not dark, but were sometimes blue and sometimes
gray.
"And this Peter God?" he said, straining to make his voice even. "What is
he to you?"
His question cut her like a knife. The wild color ebbed swiftly out of
her cheeks. Into her eyes swept a haunting fear which he was to see and
wonder at more than once. It was as if he had done something to frighten
her. "We--my father and I--are interested in him," she said. Her words
cost her a visible effort. He noticed a quick throbbing in her throat,
just above the filmy lace. "Mr. Curtis, won't you pardon this--this
betrayal of excitement in myself? It must be unaccountable to you.
Perhaps a little later you will understand. We are imposing on you by not
confiding in you what this interest is, and I beg you to forgive me. But
there is a reason. Will you believe me? There is a reason."
Her hands rested lightly on Philip's arm. Her eyes implored him.
"I will not ask for confidences which you are not free to give," he said
gently.
He was rewarded by a soft glow of thankfulness.
"I cannot make you understand how much that means to me," she cried
tremblingly. "And you will tell us about Peter God? Father--"
She turned.
Colonel McCloud had reentered the room.
With the feeling of one who was not quite sure that he was awake, Philip
paused under a street lamp ten minutes after leaving the McCloud
apartments, and looked at his watch. It was a quarter of two o'clock. A
low whistle of surprise fell from his lips. For three hours he had been
with Colonel McCloud and his daughter. It had seemed like an hour. He
still felt the thrill of the warm, parting pressure of Josephine's hand;
he saw the gratitude in her eyes; he heard her voice, low and tremulous,
asking him to come again to-morrow evening. His brain was in a strange
whirl of excitement, and he laughed--laughed with gladness which he had
not felt before in all the days of his life.
He had told a great many things about Peter God that night; of the man's
life in the little cabin, his loneliness, his aloofness, and the mystery
of him. Philip had asked no questions of Josephine and her father, and
more than once he had caught that almost tender gratitude in Josephine's
eyes. And at least twice he had seen the swift, haunting fear--the first
time when he told of Peter God's coming and goings at Port MacPherson,
and again when he mentioned a patrol of the Royal Northwest Mounted
Police that had passed Peter God's cabin while Philip was there, laid up
during those weeks of darkness and storm with a fractured leg.
Philip told how tenderly Peter God nursed him, and how their acquaintance
grew into brotherhood during the long gray nights when the stars gleamed
like pencil-points and the foxes yapped incessantly. He had seen the dewy
shimmer of tears in Josephine's eyes. He had noted the tense lines in
Colonel McCloud's face. But he had asked them no questions, he had made
no effort to unmask the secret which they so evidently desired to keep
from him.
Now, alone in the cool night, he asked himself a hundred questions, and
yet with a feeling that he understood a great deal of what they had kept
from him. Something had whispered to him then--and whispered to him
now--that Peter God was not Peter God's right name, and that to Josephine
McCloud and her father he was a brother and a son. This thought, so long
as he could think it without a doubt, filled his cup of hope to
overflowing. But the doubt persisted. It was like a spark that refused to
go out. Who was Peter God? What was Peter God, the half-wild fox-hunter,
to Josephine McCloud? Yes--he could be but that one thing! A brother. A
black sheep. A wanderer. A son who had disappeared--and was now found.
But if he was that, only that, why would they not tell him? The doubt
sputtered up again.
Philip did not go to bed. He was anxious for the day, and the evening
that was to follow. A woman had unsettled his world. His mica mountain
became an unimportant reality. Barrow's greatness no longer loomed up for
him. He walked until he was tired, and it was dawn when he went to his
hotel. He was like a boy living in the anticipation of a great
promise--restless, excited, even feverishly anxious all day. He made
inquiries about Colonel James McCloud at his hotel. No one knew him, or
had even heard of him. His name was not in the city directory or the
telephone directory. Philip made up his mind that Josephine and her
father were practically strangers in the city, and that they had come
from Canada--probably Montreal, for he remembered the stamp on the box of
cigars.
That night, when he saw Josephine again, he wanted to reach out his arms
to her. He wanted to make her understand how completely his wonderful
love possessed him, and how utterly lost he was without her. She was
dressed in simple white--again with that bank of filmy lace at her
throat. Her hair was done in those lustrous, shimmering coils, so bright
and soft that he would have given a tenth of his mica mountain to touch
them with his hands. And she was glad to see him. Her eagerness shone in
her eyes, in the warm flush of her cheeks, in the joyous tremble of her
voice.
That night, too, passed like a dream--a dream in paradise for Philip. For
a long time they sat alone, and Josephine herself brought him the box of
cigars, and urged him to smoke. They talked again about the North, about
Fort MacPherson--where it was, what it was, and how one got to it through
a thousand miles or so of wilderness. He told her of his own adventures,
how for many years he had sought for mineral treasure and at last had
found a mica mountain.
"It's close to Fort MacPherson," he explained.
"We can work it from the Mackenzie. I expect to start back some time in
August."
She leaned toward him, last night's strange excitement glowing for the
first time in her eyes.
"You are going back? You will see Peter God?"
In her eagerness she laid a hand on his arm.
"I am going back. It would be possible to see Peter God."
The touch of her hand did not lighten the weight that was tugging again
at his heart.
"Peter God's cabin is a hundred miles from Fort MacPherson," he added.
"He will be hunting foxes by the time I get there."
"You mean--it will be winter."
"Yes. It is a long journey. And"--he was looking at her closely as he
spoke--"Peter God may not be there when I return. It is possible he may
have gone into another part of the wilderness."
He saw her quiver as she drew back.
"He has been there--for seven--years," she said, as if speaking to
herself. "He would not move--now!"
"No; I don't think he would move now."
His own voice was low, scarcely above a whisper, and she looked at him
quickly and strangely, a flush in her cheeks.
It was late when he bade her good-night. Again he felt the warm thrill of
her hand as it lay in his. The next afternoon he was to take her driving.
The days and weeks that followed these first meetings with Josephine
McCloud were weighted with many things for Philip. Neither she nor her
father enlightened him about Peter God. Several times he believed that
Josephine was on the point of confiding in him, but each time there came
that strange fear in her eyes, and she caught herself.
Philip did not urge. He asked no questions that might be embarrassing. He
knew, after the third week had passed, that Josephine could no longer be
unconscious of his love, even though the mystery of Peter God restrained
him from making a declaration of it. There was not a day in the week that
they did not see each other. They rode together. The three frequently
dined together. And still more frequently they passed the evenings in the
McCloud apartments. Philip had been correct in his guess--they were from
Montreal. Beyond that fact he learned little.
As their acquaintance became closer and as Josephine saw in Philip more
and more of that something which he had not spoken, a change developed in
her. At first it puzzled and then alarmed him. At times she seemed almost
frightened. One evening, when his love all but trembled on his lips, she
turned suddenly white.
It was the middle of July before the words came from him at last. In two
or three weeks he was starting for the North. It was evening, and they
were alone in the big room, with the cool breeze from the lake drifting
in upon them. He made no effort to touch her as he told her of his love,
but when he had done, she knew that a strong man had laid his heart and
his soul at her feet.
He had never seen her whiter. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap.
There was a silence in which he did not breathe. Her answer came so low
that he leaned forward to hear.
"I am sorry," she said. "It is my fault--that you love me. I knew. And
yet I let you come again and again. I have done wrong. It is not
fair--now--for me to tell you to go--without a chance. You--would want
me if I did not love you? You would marry me if I did not love you?"
His heart pounded. He forgot everything but that he loved this woman with
a love beyond his power to reason.
"I don't think that I could live without you now, Josephine," he cried in
a low voice. "And I swear to make you love me. It must come. It is
inconceivable that I cannot make you love me--loving you as I do."
She looked at him clearly now. She seemed suddenly to become tense and
vibrant with a new and wonderful strength.
"I must be fair with you," she said. "You are a man whose love most women
would be proud to possess. And yet--it is not in my power to accept that
love, or give myself to you. There is another to whom you must go."
"And that is--"
"Peter God!"
It was she who leaned forward now, her eyes burning, her bosom rising and
falling with the quickness of her breath.
"You must go to Peter God," she said. "You must take a letter to
him--from me. And it will be for him--for Peter God--to say whether I am
to be your wife. You are honorable. You will be fair with me. You will
take the letter to him. And I will be fair with you. I will be your wife,
I will try hard to care for you--if Peter God--says--"
Her voice broke. She covered her face, and for a moment, too stunned to
speak, Philip looked at her while her slender form trembled with sobs.
She had bowed her head, and for the first time he reached out and laid
his hand upon the soft glory of her hair. Its touch set aflame every
fiber in him. Hope swept through him, crushing his fears like a
juggernaut. It would be a simple task to go to Peter God! He was tempted
to take her in his arms. A moment more, and he would have caught her to
him, but the weight of his hand on her head roused her, and she raised
her face, and drew back. His arms were reaching out. She saw what was in
his eyes.
"Not now," she said. "Not until you have gone to him. Nothing in the
world will be too great a reward for you if you are fair with me, for you
are taking a chance. In the end you may receive nothing. For if Peter God
says that I cannot be your wife, I cannot. He must be the arbiter. On
those conditions, will you go?"
"Yes, I will go," said Philip.
It was early in August when Philip reached Edmonton. From there he took
the new line of rail to Athabasca Landing; it was September when he
arrived at Fort McMurray and found Pierre Gravois, a half-breed, who was
to accompany him by canoe up to Fort MacPherson. Before leaving this
final outpost, whence the real journey into the North began, Philip sent
a long letter to Josephine.
Two days after he and Pierre had started down the Mackenzie, a letter
came to Fort McMurray for Philip. "Long" La Brie, a special messenger,
brought it from Athabasca Landing. He was too late, and he had no
instructions--and had not been paid--to go farther.
Day after day Philip continued steadily northward. He carried Josephine's
letter to Peter God in his breast pocket, securely tied in a little
waterproof bag. It was a thick letter, and time and again he held it in
his hand, and wondered why it was that Josephine could have so much to
say to the lonely fox-hunter up on the edge of the Barren.
One night, as he sat alone by their fire in the chill of September
darkness, he took the letter from its sack and saw that the contents of
the bulging envelope had sprung one end of the flap loose. Before he went
to bed Pierre had set a pail of water on the coals. A cloud of steam was
rising from it. Those two things--the steam and the loosened flap--sent a
thrill through Philip. What was in the letter? What had Josephine McCloud
written to Peter God?
He looked toward sleeping Pierre; the pail of water began to bubble and
sing--he drew a tense breath, and rose to his feet. In thirty seconds the
steam rising from the pail would free the rest of the flap. He could read
the letter, and reseal it.
And then, like a shock, came the thought of the few notes Josephine had
written to him. On each of them she had never failed to stamp her seal in
a lavender-colored wax. He had observed that Colonel McCloud always used
a seal, in bright red. On this letter to Peter God there was no seal! She
trusted him. Her faith was implicit. And this was her proof of it. Under
his breath he laughed, and his heart grew warm with new happiness and
hope. "I have faith in you," she had said, at parting; and now, again,
out of the letter her voice seemed to whisper to him, "I have faith in
you."
He replaced the letter in its sack, and crawled between his blankets
close to Pierre.
That night had seen the beginning of his struggle with himself. This
year, autumn and winter came early in the North country. It was to be a
winter of terrible cold, of deep snow, of famine and pestilence--the
winter of 1910. The first oppressive gloom of it added to the fear and
suspense that began to grow in Philip.
For days there was no sign of the sun. The clouds hung low. Bitter winds
came out of the North, and nights these winds wailed desolately through
the tops of the spruce under which they slept. And day after day and
night after night the temptation came upon him more strongly to open the
letter he was carrying to Peter God.
He was convinced now that the letter--and the letter alone--held his
fate, and that he was acting blindly. Was this justice to himself? He
wanted Josephine. He wanted her above all else in the world. Then why
should he not fight for her--in his own way? And to do that he must read
the letter. To know its contents would mean--Josephine. If there was
nothing in it that would stand between them, he would have done no
wrong, for he would still take it on to Peter God. So he argued. But if
the letter jeopardized his chances of possessing her, his knowledge of
what it contained would give him an opportunity to win in another way. He
could even answer it himself and take back to her false word from Peter
God, for seven frost-biting years along the edge of the Barren had surely
changed Peter God's handwriting. His treachery, if it could be called
that, would never be discovered. And it would give him Josephine.
This was the temptation. The power that resisted it was the spirit of
that big, clean, fighting North which makes men out of a beginning of
flesh and bone. Ten years of that North had seeped into Philip's being.
He hung on. It was November when he reached Port MacPherson, and he had
not opened the letter.
Deep snows fell, and fierce blizzards shot like gunblasts from out of the
Arctic. Snow and wind were not what brought the deeper gloom and fear to
Fort MacPherson. La mort rouge, smallpox,--the "red death,"--was
galloping through the wilderness. Rumors were first verified by facts
from the Dog Eib Indians. A quarter of them were down with the scourge of
the Northland. From Hudson's Bay on the east to the Great Bear on the
west, the fur posts were sending out their runners, and a hundred Paul
Reveres of the forests were riding swiftly behind their dogs to spread
the warning. On the afternoon of the day Philip left for the cabin of
Peter God, a patrol of the Royal Mounted came in on snowshoes from the
South, and voluntarily went into quarantine.
Philip traveled slowly. For three days and nights the air was filled with
the "Arctic dust" snow that was hard as flint and stung like shot; and it
was so cold that he paused frequently and built small fires, over which
he filled his lungs with hot air and smoke. He knew what it meant to have
the lungs "touched"--sloughing away in the spring, blood-spitting, and
certain death.
On the fourth day the temperature began to rise; the fifth it was clear,
and thirty degrees warmer. His thermometer had gone to sixty below zero.
It was now thirty below.
It was the morning of the sixth day when he reached the thick fringe of
stunted spruce that sheltered Peter God's cabin. He was half blinded. The
snow-filled blizzards cut his face until it was swollen and purple.
Twenty paces from Peter God's cabin he stopped, and stared, and rubbed
his eyes--and rubbed them again--as though not quite sure his vision was
not playing him a trick.
A cry broke from his lips then. Over Peter God's door there was nailed a
slender sapling, and at the end of that sapling there floated a tattered,
windbeaten red rag. It was the signal. It was the one voice common to all
the wilderness--a warning to man, woman and child, white or red, that had
come down through the centuries. Peter God was down with the smallpox!
For a few moments the discovery stunned him. Then he was filled with a
chill, creeping horror. Peter God was sick with the scourge. Perhaps he
was dying. It might be--that he was dead. In spite of the terror of the
thing ahead of him, he thought of Josephine. If Peter God was dead--
Above the low moaning of the wind in the spruce tops he cursed himself.
He had thought a crime, and he clenched his mittened hands as he stared
at the one window of the cabin. His eyes shifted upward. In the air was a
filmy, floating gray. It was smoke coming from the chimney. Peter God was
not dead.
Something kept him from shouting Peter God's name, that the trapper might
come to the door. He went to the window, and looked in. For a few moments
he could see nothing. And then, dimly, he made out the cot against the
wall. And Peter God sat on the cot, hunched forward, his head in his
hands. With a quick breath Philip turned to the door, opened it, and
entered the cabin. Peter God staggered to his feet as the door opened.
His eyes were wild and filled with fever.
"You--Curtis!" he cried huskily. "My God, didn't you see the flag?"
"Yes."
Philip's half-frozen features were smiling, and now he was holding out a
hand from which he had drawn his mitten.
"Lucky I happened along just now, old man. You've got it, eh?"
Peter God shrank back from the other's outstretched hand.
"There's time," he cried, pointing to the door.
"Don't breathe this air. Get out. I'm not bad yet--but it's smallpox,
Curtis!"
"I know it," said Philip, beginning to throw off his hood and coat. "I'm
not afraid of it. I had a touch of it three years ago over on the Gray
Buzzard, so I guess I'm immune. Besides, I've come two thousand miles to
see you, Peter God--two thousand miles to bring you a letter from
Josephine McCloud."
For ten seconds Peter God stood tense and motionless. Then he swayed
forward.
"A letter--for Peter God--from Josephine McCloud?" he gasped, and held
out his hands.
An hour later they sat facing each other--Peter God and Curtis. The
beginning of the scourge betrayed itself in the red flush of Peter God's
face, and the fever in his eyes. But he was calm. For many minutes he had
spoken in a quiet, even voice, and Philip Curtis sat with scarcely a
breath and a heart that at times had risen in his throat to choke him. In
his hand Peter God held the pages of the letter he had read.
Now he went on:
"So I'm going to tell it all to you, Curtis--because I know that you are
a man. Josephine has left nothing out. She has told me of your love, and
of the reward she has promised you--if Peter God sends back a certain
word. She says frankly that she does not love you, but that she honors
you above all men--except her father, and one other. That other, Curtis,
is myself. Years ago the woman you love--was my wife."
Peter God put a hand to his head, as if to cool the fire that was
beginning to burn him up.
"Her name wasn't Mrs. Peter God," he went on, and a smile fought grimly
on his lips. "That's the one thing I won't tell you, Curtis--my name. The
story itself will be enough.
"Perhaps there were two other people in the world happier than we. I
doubt it. I got into politics. I made an enemy, a deadly enemy. He was a
blackmailer, a thief, the head of a political ring that lived on graft.
Through my efforts he was exposed, And then he laid for me--and he got
me.
"I must give him credit for doing it cleverly and completely. He set a
trap for me, and a woman helped him. I won't go into details. The trap
sprung, and it caught me. Even Josephine could not be made to believe in
my innocence; so cleverly was the trap set that my best friends among the
newspapers could find no excuse for me.
"I have never blamed Josephine for what she did after that. To all the
world, and most of all to her, I was caught red-handed. I knew that she
loved me even as she was divorcing me. On the day the divorce was given
to her, my brain went bad. The world turned red, and then black, and then
red again. And I--"
Peter God paused again, with a hand to his head.
"You came up here," said Philip, in a low voice.
"Not--until I had seen the man who ruined me," replied Peter God quietly.
"We were alone in his office. I gave him a fair chance to redeem
himself--to confess what he had done. He laughed at me, exulted over my
fall, taunted me. And so--I killed him."
He rose from his chair and stood swaying. He was not excited.
"In his office, with his dead body at my feet, I wrote a note to
Josephine," he finished. "I told her what I had done, and again I swore
my innocence. I wrote her that some day she might hear from me, but not
under my right name, as the law would always be watching for me. It was
ironic that on that human cobra's desk there lay an open Bible, open at
the Book of Peter, and involuntarily I wrote the words to
Josephine--PETER GOD. She has kept my secret, while the law has hunted
for me. And this--"
He held the pages of the letter out to Philip.
"Take the letter--go outside--and read what she has written," he said.
"Come back in half an hour. I want to think."
Back of the cabin, where Peter God had piled his winter's fuel, Philip
read the letter; and at times the soul within him seemed smothered, and
at times it quivered with a strange and joyous emotion.
At last vindication had come for Peter God, and before he had read a page
of the letter Philip understood why it was that Josephine had sent him
with it into the North. For nearly seven years she had known of Peter
God's innocence of the thing for which she had divorced him. The
woman--the dead man's accomplice--had told her the whole story, as Peter
God a few minutes before had told it to Curtis; and during those seven
years she had traveled the world seeking for him--the man who bore the
name of Peter God.
Each night she had prayed God that the next day she might find him, and
now that her prayer had been answered, she begged that she might come to
him, and share with him for all time a life away from the world they
knew.
The woman breathed like life in the pages Philip read; yet with that
wonderful message to Peter God she pilloried herself for those red and
insane hours in which she had lost faith in him. She had no excuse for
herself, except her great love; she crucified herself, even as she held
out her arms to him across that thousand miles of desolation. Frankly she
had written of the great price she was offering for this one chance of
life and happiness. She told of Philip's love, and of the reward she had
offered him should Peter God find that in his heart love had died for
her. Which should it be?
Twice Philip read that wonderful message he had brought into the North,
and he envied Peter God the outlaw.
The thirty minutes were gone when he entered the cabin. Peter God was
waiting for him. He motioned him to a seat close to him.
"You have read it?" he asked.
Philip nodded. In these moments he did not trust himself to speak. Peter
God understood. The flush was deeper in his face; his eyes burned
brighter with the fever; but of the two he was the calmer, and his voice
was steady.
"I haven't much time, Curtis," he said, and he smiled faintly as he
folded the pages of the letter, "My head is cracking. But I've thought it
all out, and you've got to go back to her--and tell her that Peter God is
dead."
A gasp broke from Philip's lips. It was his only answer.
"It's--best," continued Peter God, and he spoke more slowly, but firmly.
"I love her, Curtis. God knows that it's been only my dreams of her that
have kept me alive all these years. She wants to come to me, but it's
impossible. I'm an outlaw. The law won't excuse my killing of the cobra.
We'd have to hide. All our lives we'd have to hide. And--some day--they
might get me. There's just one thing to do. Go back to her. Tell her
Peter God is dead. And--make her happy--if you can."
For the first time something rose and overwhelmed the love in Philip's
breast.
"She wants to come to you," he cried, and he leaned toward Peter God,
white-faced, clenching his hands. "She wants to come!" he repeated. "And
the law won't find you. It's been seven years--and God knows no word will
ever go from me. It won't find you. And if it should, you can fight it
together, you and Josephine."
Peter God held out his hands.
"Now I know I need have no fear in sending you back," he said huskily.
"You're a man. And you've got to go. She can't come to me, Curtis. It
would kill her--this life. Think of a winter here--madness--the yapping
of the foxes--"
He put a hand to his head, and swayed.
"You've got to go. Tell her Peter God is dead--"
Philip sprang forward as Peter God crumpled down on his bunk.
After that came the long dark hours of fever and delirium. They crawled
along into days, and day and night Philip fought to keep life in the body
of the man who had given the world to him, for as the fight continued he
began more and more to accept Josephine as his own. He had come fairly.
He had kept his pledge. And Peter God had spoken.
"You must go. You must tell her Peter God is dead."
And Philip began to accept this, not altogether as his joy, but as his
duty. He could not argue with Peter God when he rose from his sick bed.
He would go back to Josephine.
For many days he and Peter God fought with the "red death" in the little
cabin. It was a fight which he could never forget. One afternoon--to
strengthen himself for the terrible night that was coming--he walked
several miles back into the stunted spruce on his snowshoes. It was
mid-afternoon when he returned with a haunch of caribou meat on his
shoulder. Three hundred yards from the cabin something stopped him like a
shot. He listened. From ahead of him came the whining and snarling of
dogs, the crack of a whip, a shout which he could not understand. He
dropped his burden of meat and sped on. At the southward edge of a level
open he stopped again. Straight ahead of him was the cabin. A hundred
yards to the right of him was a dog team and a driver. Between the team
and the cabin a hooded and coated figure was running in the direction of
the danger signal on the sapling pole.
With a cry of warning Philip darted in pursuit. He overtook the figure at
the cabin door. His hand caught it by the arm. It turned--and he stared
into the white, terror-stricken face of Josephine McCloud!
"Good God!" he cried, and that was all.
She gripped him with both hands. He had never heard her voice as it was
now. She answered the amazement and horror in his face.
"I sent you a letter," she cried pantingly, "and it didn't overtake you.
As soon as you were gone, I knew that I must come--that I must
follow--that I must speak with my own lips what I had written. I tried to
catch you. But you traveled faster. Will you forgive me--you will forgive
me--"
She turned to the door. He held her.
"It is the smallpox," he said, and his voice was dead.
"I know," she panted. "The man over there--told me what the little flag
means. And I'm glad--glad I came in time to go in to him--as he is. And
you--you--must forgive!"
She snatched herself free from his grasp. The door opened. It closed
behind her. A moment later he heard through the sapling door a strange
cry--a woman's cry--a man's cry--and he turned and walked heavily back
into the spruce forest.
THE MOUSE
"Why, you ornery little cuss," said Falkner, pausing with a forkful of
beans half way to his mouth. "Where in God A'mighty's name did YOU come
from?"
It was against all of Jim's crude but honest ethics of the big wilderness
to take the Lord's name in vain, and the words he uttered were filled
more with the softness of a prayer than the harshness of profanity. He
was big, and his hands were hard and knotted, and his face was covered
with a coarse red scrub of beard. But his hair was blond, and his eyes
were blue, and just now they were filled with unbounded amazement. Slowly
the fork loaded with beans descended to his plate, and he said again,
barely above a whisper:
"Where in God A'mighty's name DID you come from?"
There was nothing human in the one room of his wilderness cabin to speak
of. At the first glance there was nothing alive in the room, with the
exception of Jim Falkner himself. There was not even a dog, for Jim had
lost his one dog weeks before. And yet he spoke, and his eyes glistened,
and for a full minute after that he sat as motionless as a rock. Then
something moved--at the farther end of the rough board table. It was a
mouse--a soft, brown, bright-eyed little mouse, not as large as his
thumb. It was not like the mice Jim had been accustomed to see in the
North woods, the larger, sharp-nosed, rat-like creatures which sprung his
traps now and then, and he gave a sort of gasp through his beard.
"I'm as crazy as a loon if it isn't a sure-enough down-home mouse, just
like we used to catch in the kitchen down in Ohio," he told himself. And
for the third time he asked. "Now where in God A'mighty's name DID YOU
come from?"
The mouse made no answer. It had humped itself up into a little ball, and
was eyeing Jim with the keenest of suspicion.
"You're a thousand miles from home, old man," Falkner addressed it, still
without a movement. "You're a clean thousand miles straight north of the
kind o' civilization you was born in, and I want to know how you got
here. By George--is it possible--you got mixed up in that box of stuff
SHE sent up? Did you come from HER?"
He made a sudden movement, as if he expected an answer, and in a flash
the mouse had scurried off the table and had disappeared under his bunk.
"The little cuss!" said Falkner. "He's sure got his nerve!"
He went on eating his beans, and when he had done he lighted a lamp, for
the half Arctic darkness was falling early, and began to clear away the
dishes. When he had done he put a scrap of bannock and a few beans on the
corner of the table.
"I'll bet he's hungry, the little cuss," he said. "A thousand miles--in
that box!"
He sat down close to the sheet-iron box stove, which was glowing red-hot,
and filled his pipe. Kerosene was a precious commodity, and he had turned
down the lamp wick until he was mostly in gloom. Outside a storm was
wailing down across the Barrens from the North. He could hear the swish
of the spruce-boughs overhead, and those moaning, half-shrieking sounds
that always came with storm from out of the North, and sometimes fooled
even him into thinking they were human cries. They had seemed more and
more human to him during the past three days, and he was growing afraid.
Once or twice strange thoughts had come into his head, and he had tried
to fight them down. He had known of men whom loneliness had driven
mad--and he was terribly lonely. He shivered as a piercing blast of wind
filled with a mourning wail swept over the cabin.
And that day, too, he had been taken with a touch of fever. It burned
more hotly in his blood to-night, and he knew that it was the
loneliness--the emptiness of the world about him, the despair and black
foreboding that came to him with the first early twilights of the Long
Night. For he was in the edge of that Long Night. For weeks he would only
now and then catch a glimpse of the sun. He shuddered.
A hundred and fifty miles to the south and east there was a Hudson's Bay
post. Eighty miles south was the nearest trapper's cabin he knew of. Two
months before he had gone down to the post, with a thick beard to cover
his face, and had brought back supplies--and the box. His wife had sent
up the box to him, only it had come to him as "John Blake" instead of Jim
Falkner, his right name. There were things in it for him to wear, and
pictures of the sweet-faced wife who was still filled with prayer and
hope for him, and of the kid, their boy. "He is walking now," she had
written to him, "and a dozen times a day he goes to your picture and says
'Pa-pa--Pa-pa'--and every night we talk about you before we go to bed,
and pray God to send you back to us soon."
"God bless 'em!" breathed Jim.
He had not lighted his pipe, and there was something in his eyes that
shimmered and glistened in the dull light. And then, as he sat silent,
his eyes clearing, he saw that the little mouse had climbed back to the
edge of the table. It did not eat the food he had placed there for it,
but humped itself up in a tiny ball again, and its tiny shining eyes
looked in his direction.
"You're not hungry," said Jim, and he spoke aloud. "YOU'RE lonely,
too--that's it!"
A strange thrill shot through him at the thought, and he wondered again
if he was mad at the longing that filled him--the desire to reach out and
snuggle the little creature in his hand, and hold it close up to his
bearded face, and TALK TO IT! He laughed, and drew his stool a little
more into the light. The mouse did not run. He edged nearer and nearer,
until his elbows rested on the table, and a curious feeling of pleasure
took the place of his loneliness when he saw that the mouse was looking
at him, and yet seemed unafraid.
"Don't be scairt," he said softly, speaking directly to it. "I won't hurt
you. No, siree, I'd--I'd cut off a hand before I'd do that. I ain't had
any company but you for two months. I ain't seen a human face, or heard a
human voice--nothing--nothing but them shrieks 'n' wails 'n' baby-cryings
out there in the wind. I won't hurt you--" His voice was almost pleading
in its gentleness. And for the tenth time that day he felt, with his
fever, a sickening dizziness in his head. For a moment or two his vision
was blurred, but he could still see the mouse--farther away, it seemed to
him.
"I don't s'pose you've killed anyone--or anything," he said, and his
voice seemed thick and distant to him. "Mice don't kill, do they? They
live on--cheese. But I have--I've killed. I killed a man. That's why I'm
here."
His dizziness almost overcame him, and he leaned heavily against the
table. Still the little mouse did not move. Still he could see it through
the strange gauze veil before his eyes.
"I killed--a man," he repeated, and now he was wondering why the mouse
did not say something at that remarkable confession. "I killed him, old
man, an' you'd have done the same if you'd been in my place. I didn't
mean to. I struck too hard. But I found 'im in my cabin, an' SHE was
fighting--fighting him until her face was scratched an' her clothes
torn,--God bless her dear heart!--fighting him to the last breath, an' I
come just in time! He didn't think I'd be back for a day--a black-hearted
devil we'd fed when he came to our door hungry. I killed him. And they've
hunted me ever since. They'll put a rope round my neck, an' choke me to
death if they catch me--because I came in time to save her! That's law!
"But they won't find me. I've been up here a year now, and in the spring
I'm going down there --where you come from--back to the Girl and the Kid.
The policemen won't be looking for me then. An' we're going to some other
part of the world, an' live happy. She's waitin' for me, she an' the kid,
an' they know I'm coming in the spring. Yessir, I killed a man. An' they
want to kill me for it. That's the law--Canadian law--the law that wants
an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, an' where there ain't no
extenuatin' circumstance. They call it murder. But it wasn't--was it?"
He waited for an answer. The mouse seemed going farther and farther away
from him. He leaned more heavily on the table.
"It wasn't--was it?" he persisted.
His arms reached out; his head dropped forward, and the little mouse
scurried to the floor. But Falkner did not know that it had gone.
"I killed him, an' I guess I'd do it again," he said, and his words were
only a whisper. "An' to-night they're prayin' for me down there--she 'n
the kid--an' he's sayin', 'Pa-pa--Pa-pa'; an' they sent you up--to keep
me comp'ny--"
His head dropped wearily upon his arms. The red stove crackled, and
turned slowly black. In the cabin it grew darker, except where the dim
light burned on the table. Outside the storm wailed and screeched down
across the Barren. And after a time the mouse came back. It looked at Jim
Falkner. It came nearer, until it touched the unconscious man's sleeve.
More daringly it ran over his arm. It smelled of his fingers.
Then the mouse returned to the corner of the table, and began eating the
food that Falkner had placed there for it.
The wick of the lamp had burned low when Falkner raised his head. The
stove was black and cold. Outside, the storm still raged, and it was the
shivering shriek of it over the cabin that Falkner first heard. He felt
terribly dizzy, and there was a sharp, knife-like pain just back of his
eyes. By the gray light that came through the one window he knew that
what was left of Arctic day had come. He rose to his feet, and staggered
about like a drunken man as he rebuilt the fire, and he tried to laugh as
the truth dawned upon him that he had been sick, and that he had rested
for hours with his head on the table. His back seemed broken. His legs
were numb, and hurt when he stepped on them. He swung his arms a little
to bring back circulation, and rubbed his hands over the fire that began
to crackle in the stove.
It was the sickness that had overcome him--he knew that. But the thought
of it did not appall him as it had yesterday, and the day before. There
seemed to be something in the cabin now that comforted and soothed him,
something that took away a part of the loneliness that was driving him
mad. Even as he searched about him, peering into the dark corners and at
the bare walls, a word formed on his lips, and he half smiled. It was a
woman's name--Hester. And a warmth entered into him. The pain left his
head. For the first time in weeks he felt DIFFERENT. And slowly he began
to realize what had wrought the change. He was not alone. A message had
come to him from the one who was waiting for him miles away; something
that lived, and breathed, and was as lonely as himself. It was the little
mouse.
He looked about eagerly, his eyes brightening, but the mouse was gone. He
could not hear it. There seemed nothing unusual to him in the words he
spoke aloud to himself.
"I'm going to call it after the Kid," he chuckled, "I'm goin' to call it
Little Jim. I wonder if it's a girl mouse--or a boy mouse?"
He placed a pan of snow-water on the stove and began making his simple
preparations for breakfast. For the first time in many days he felt
actually hungry. And then all at once he stopped, and a low cry that was
half joy and half wonder broke from his lips. With tensely gripped hands
and eyes that shone with a strange light he stared straight at the blank
surface of the log wall--through it--and a thousand miles away. He
remembered THAT day--years ago--the scenes of which came to him now as
though they had been but yesterday. It was afternoon, in the glorious
summer, and he had gone to Hester's home. Only the day before Hester had
promised to be his wife, and he remembered how fidgety and uneasy and yet
wondrously happy he was as he sat out on the big white veranda, waiting
for her to put on her pink muslin dress, which went go well with the gold
of her hair and the blue of her eyes. And as he sat there, Hester's
maltese pet came up the steps, bringing in its jaws a tiny, quivering
brown mouse. It was playing with the almost lifeless little creature when
Hester came through the door.
He heard again the low cry that came from her lips then. In an instant
she had snatched the tiny, limp thing from between the cat's paws, and
had faced him. He was laughing at her, but the glow in her blue eyes
sobered him. "I didn't think you--would take pleasure in that, Jim," she
said. "It's only a mouse, but it's alive, and I can feel its poor little
heart beating!"
They had saved it, and he, a little ashamed at the smallness of the act,
had gone with Hester to the barn and made a nest for it in the hay. But
the wonderful words that he remembered were these: "Perhaps some day a
little mouse will help you, Jim!" Hester had spoken laughingly. And her
words had come true!
All the time that Falkner was preparing and eating his breakfast he
watched for the mouse, but it did not appear. Then he went to the door.
It swung outward, and it took all his weight to force it open. On one
side of the cabin the snow was drifted almost to the roof. Ahead of him
he could barely make out the dark shadow of the scrub spruce forest
beyond the little clearing he had made. He could hear the spruce-tops
wailing and twisting in the storm, and the snow and wind stung his face,
and half blinded him.
It was dark--dark with that gray and maddening gloom that yesterday would
have driven him still nearer to the merge of madness. But this morning he
laughed as he listened to the wailings in the air and stared out into the
ghostly chaos. It was not the thought of his loneliness that come to him
now, but the thought that he was safe. The Law could not reach him now,
even if it knew where he was. And before it began its hunt for him again
in the spring he would be hiking southward, to the Girl and the Baby, and
it would still be hunting for him when they three would be making a new
home for themselves in some other part of the world. For the first time
in months he was almost happy. He closed and bolted the door, and began
to WHISTLE. He was amazed at the change in himself, and wonderingly he
stared at his reflection in the cracked bit of mirror against the wall.
He grinned, and addressed himself aloud.
"You need a shave," he told himself. "You'd scare fits out of anything
alive! Now that we've got company we've got to spruce up, an' look
civilized."
It took him an hour to get rid of his heavy beard. His face looked almost
boyish again. He was inspecting himself in the mirror when he heard a
sound that turned him slowly toward the table. The little mouse was
nosing about his tin plate. For a few moments Falkner watched it, fearing
to move. Then he cautiously began to approach the table. "Hello there,
old chap," he said, trying to make his voice soft and ingratiating.
"Pretty late for breakfast, ain't you?"
At his approach the mouse humped itself into a motionless ball and
watched him. To Falkner's delight it did not run away when he reached the
table and sat down. He laughed softly.
"You ain't afraid, are you?" he asked. "We're goin' to be chums, ain't
we? Yessir, we're goin' to be chums!"
For a full minute the mouse and the man looked steadily at each other.
Then the mouse moved deliberately to a crumb of bannock and began
nibbling at its breakfast.
For ten days there was only an occasional lull in the storm that came
from out of the North. Before those ten days were half over, Jim and the
mouse understood each other. The little mouse itself solved the problem
of their nearer acquaintance by running up Falkner's leg one morning
while he was at breakfast, and coolly investigating him from the strings
of his moccasin to the collar of his blue shirt. After that it showed no
fear of him, and a few days later would nestle in the hollow of his big
hand and nibble fearlessly at the bannock which Falkner would offer it.
Then Jim took to carrying it about with him in his coat pocket. That
seemed to suit the mouse immensely, and when Jim went to bed nights, or
it grew too warm for him in the cabin, he would hang the coat over his
bunk, with the mouse still in it, so that it was not long before the
little creature made up its mind to take full possession of the pocket.
It intimated as much to Falkner on the tenth and last day of the storm,
when it began very business-like operations of building a nest of paper
and rabbits' fur in the coat pocket. Jim's heart gave a big and sudden
jump of delight when he saw the work going on.
"Bless my soul, I wonder if it's a girl mouse an' we're goin' to have
BABIES!" he gasped.
After that he did not wear the coat, through fear of disturbing the nest.
The two became more and more friendly, until finally the mouse would sit
on Jim's shoulder at meal time, and nibble at bannock. What little
trouble the mouse caused only added to Falkner's love for it.
"He's a human little cuss," he told himself one day, as he watched the
mouse busy at work caching away scraps of food, which it carried through
a crack in the sapling floor. "He's that human I've got to put all my
grab in the tin cans or we'll go short before spring!" His chief trouble
was to keep his snowshoes out of his tiny companion's reach. The mouse
had developed an unholy passion for babiche, the caribou skin thongs used
in the webs of his shoes, and one of the webs was half eaten away before
Falkner discovered what was going on. At last he was compelled to suspend
the shoes from a nail driven in one of the roof-beams.
In the evening, when the stove glowed hot, and a cotton wick sputtered in
a pan of caribou grease on the table, Falkner's chief diversion was to
tell the mouse all about his plans, and hopes, and what had happened in
the past. He took an almost boyish pleasure in these one-sided
entertainments--and yet, after all, they were not entirely one-sided, for
the mouse would keep its bright, serious-looking little eyes on Falkner's
face; it seemed to understand, if it could not talk.
Falkner loved to tell the little fellow of the wonderful days of four or
five years ago away down in the sunny Ohio valley where he had courted
the Girl and where they lived before they moved to the farm in Canada. He
tried to impress upon Little Jim's mind what it meant for a great big,
unhandsome fellow like himself to be loved by a tender slip of a girl
whose hair was like gold and whose eyes were as blue as the wood-violets.
One evening he fumbled for a minute under his bunk and came back to the
table with a worn and finger-marked manila envelope, from which he drew
tenderly and with almost trembling care a long, shining tress of golden
hair.
"That HERS," he said proudly, placing it on the table close to the mouse.
"An' she's got so much of it you can't see her to the hips when she takes
it down; an' out in the sun it shines like--like--glory!"
The stove door crashed open, and a number of coals fell out upon the
floor. For a few minutes Falkner was busy, and when he returned to the
table he gave a gasp of astonishment. The curl and the mouse were gone!
Little Jim had almost reached its nest with its lovely burden when
Falkner captured it.
"You little cuss!" he breathed revently. "Now I know you come from her! I
know it!"
In the weeks that followed the storm Falkner again followed his
trap-lines, and scattered poison-baits for the white foxes on the Barren.
Early in January the second great storm of that year came from out of the
North. It gave no warning, and Falkner was caught ten miles from camp. He
was making a struggle for life before he reached the shack. He was
exhausted, and half blinded. He could hardly stand on his feet when he
staggered up against his own door. He could see nothing when he entered.
He stumbled over a stool, and fell to the floor. Before he could rise a
strange weight was upon him. He made no resistance, for the storm had
driven the last ounce of strength from his body.
"It's been a long chase, but I've got you now, Falkner," he heard a
triumphant voice say. And then came the dreaded formula, feared to the
uttermost limits of the great Northern wilderness: "I warn you! You are
my prisoner, in the name of His Majesty, the King!"
Corporal Carr, of the Royal Mounted of the Northwest, was a man without
human sympathies. He was thin faced, with a square, bony jaw, and lips
that formed a straight line. His eyes were greenish, like a cat's, and
were constantly shifting. He was a beast of prey, as much as the wolf,
the lynx, or the fox--and his prey was men. Only such a man as Carr,
alone would have braved the treacherous snows and the intense cold of the
Arctic winter to run him down. Falkner knew that, as an hour later he
looked over the roaring stove at his captor. About Carr there was
something of the unpleasant quickness, the sinuous movement, of the
little white ermine--the outlaw of the wilderness. His eyes were as
merciless. At times Falkner caught the same red glint in them. And above
his despair, the utter hopelessness of his situation, there rose in him
an intense hatred and loathing of the man.
Falkner's hands were then securely tied behind him.
"I'd put the irons on you," Carr had explained a hard, emotionless voice,
"only I lost them somewhere back there."
Beyond that he had not said a dozen words. He had built up the fire,
thawed himself out, and helped himself to food. Now, for the first time,
he loosened up a bit.
"I've had a devil of a chase," he said bitterly, a cold glitter in his
eyes as he looked at Falkner. "I've been after you three months, and now
that I've got you this accursed storm is going to hold me up! And I left
my dogs and outfit a mile back in the scrub."
"Better go after 'em," replied Falkner. "If you don't there won't be any
dogs an' outfit by morning."
Corporal Carr rose to his feet and went to the window. In a moment he
turned.
"I'll do that," he said. "Stretch yourself out on the bunk. I'll have to
lace you down pretty tight to keep you from playing a trick on me."
There was something so merciless and brutal in his eyes and voice that
Falkner felt like leaping upon him, even with his hands tied behind his
back.
He was glad, however, that Carr had decided to go. He was, filled with an
overwhelming desire to be rid of him, if only for an hour.
He went to the bunk and lay down. Corporal Carr approached, pulling a
roll of babiche cord from his pocket.
"If you don't mind you might tie my hands in front instead of behind,"
suggested Falkner. "It's goin' to be mighty unpleasant to have 'em under
me, if I've got to lay here for an hour or two."
"Not on your life I won't tie 'em in front!" snapped Carr, his little
eyes glittering. And then he gave a cackling laugh, and his eyes were as
green as a cat's. "An' it won't be half so unpleasant as having something
'round your NECK!" he joked.
"I wish I was free," breathed Falkner, his chest heaving. "I wish we
could fight, man t' man. I'd be willing to hang then, just to have the
chance to break your neck. You ain't a man of the Law. You're a devil."
Carr laughed the sort of laugh that sends a chill up one's back, and drew
the caribou-skin cord tight about Falkner's ankles.
"Can't blame me for being a little careful," he said in his revolting
way. "By your hanging I become a Sergeant. That's my reward for running
you down."
He lighted the lamp and filled the stove before he left the cabin. From
the door he looked back at Falkner, and his face was not like a man's,
but like that of some terrible death-spirit, ghostly, and thin, and
exultant in the dim glow of the lamp. As he opened the door the roar of
the blizzard and a gust of snow filled the cabin. Then it closed, and a
groaning curse fell from Falkner's lips. He strained fiercely at the
thongs that bound him, but after the first few minutes he lay still
breathing hard, knowing that every effort he made only tightened the
caribou-skin cord that bound him.
On his back, he listened to the storm. It was filled with the same
strange cries and moaning sound that had almost driven him to madness,
and now they sent through him a shivering chill that he had not felt
before, even in the darkest and most hopeless hours of his loneliness and
despair. A breath that was almost a sob broke from his lips as a vision
of the Girl and the Kid came to shut out from his ears the moaning tumult
of the wind. A few hours before he had been filled with hope--almost
happiness, and now he was lost. From such a man as Carr there was no hope
for mercy, or of escape. Flat on his back, he closed his eyes, and tried
to think--to scheme something that might happen in his favor, to foresee
an opportunity that might give him one last chance. And then, suddenly,
he heard a sound. It traveled over the blanket that formed a pillow for
his head. A cool, soft little nose touched his ear, and then tiny feet
ran swiftly over his shoulder, and halted on his breast. He opened his
eyes, and stared.
"You little cuss!" he breathed. A hundred times he had spoken those
words, and each time they were of increasing wonder and adoration. "You
little cuss!" he whispered again, and he chuckled aloud.
The mouse was humped on his breast in that curious little ball that it
made of itself, and was eyeing him, Jim thought, in a questioning sort of
way, "What's the matter with you?" it seemed to ask. "Where are your
hands?"
And Jim answered:
"They've got me, old man. Now what the dickens are we going to do?"
The mouse began investigating. It examined his shoulder, the end of his
chin, and ran along his arm, as far as it could go.
"Now what do you think of that!" Falkner exclaimed softly. "The little
cuss is wondering where my hands are!" Gently he rolled over on his side.
"There they are," he said, "hitched tighter 'n bark to a tree!"
He wiggled his fingers, and in a moment he felt the mouse. The little
creature ran across the opened palm of his hand to his wrist, and then
every muscle in Falkner's body grew tense, and one of the strangest cries
that ever fell from human lips came from his. The mouse had found once
more the dried hide-flesh of which the snowshoe webs were made. It had
found babiche. And it had begun TO GNAW!
In the minutes that followed Falkner scarcely breathed. He could feel the
mouse when it worked. Above the stifled beating of his heart he could
hear its tiny jaws. In those moments he knew that his last hope of life
hung in the balance. Five, ten minutes passed, and not until then did he
strain at the thongs that bound his wrists. Was that the bed that had
snapped? Or was it the breaking of one of the babiche cords? He strained
harder. The thongs were loosening; his wrists were freer; with a cry that
sent the mouse scurrying to the floor he doubled himself half erect, and
fought like a madman. Five minutes later and he was free.
He staggered to his feet, and looked at his wrists. They were torn and
bleeding. His second thought was of Corporal Carr--and a weapon. The
man-hunter had taken the precaution to empty the chambers of Falkner's
revolver and rifle and throw his cartridges out in the snow. But his
skinning-knife was still in its sheath and belt, and he buckled it about
his waist. He had no thought of killing Carr, though he hated the man
almost to the point of murder. But his lips set in a grim smile as he
thought of what he WOULD do.
He knew that when Carr returned he would not enter at once into the
cabin. He was the sort of man who would never take an unnecessary chance.
He would go first to the little window--and look in. Falkner turned the
lamp-wick lower, and placed the lamp on the table directly between the
window and the bunk. Then he rolled his blankets into something like a
human form, and went to the window to see the effect. The bunk was in
deep shadow. From the window Corporal Carr could not see beyond the lamp.
Then Falkner waited, out of range of the window, and close to the door.
It was not long before he heard something above the wailing of the storm.
It was the whine of a dog, and he knew that a moment later the Corporal's
ghostly face was peering in at the window. Then there came the sudden,
swift opening of the door, and Carr sprang in like a cat, his hand on the
butt of his revolver, still obeying that first governing law of his
merciless life--caution, Falkner was so near that he could reach out and
touch Carr, and in an instant he was at his enemy's throat. Not a cry
fell from Carr's lips. There was death in the terrible grip of Falkner's
hands, and like one whose neck had been broken Carr sank to the floor.
Falkner's grip tightened, and he did not loosen it until Carr was black
in the face and his jaw fell open. Then Falkner bound him hand and foot
with the babiche thongs, and dragged him to the bunk.
Through the open door one of the sledge-dogs had thrust his head and
shoulders. It was a Barracks team, accustomed to warmth and shelter, and
Falkner had no difficulty in getting the leader and his three mates
inside. To make friends with them he fed them chunks of raw caribou meat,
and when Carr opened his eyes he was busy packing. He laughed joyously
when he saw that the man-hunter had regained consciousness, and was
staring at him with evident malice.
"Hello, Carr," he greeted affably. "Feeling better? Tables sort of
turned, ain't they?"
Carr made no answer. His white lips were set like thin bands of steel.
"I'm getting ready to leave you," Falkner explained, as he rolled up a
blanket and shoved it into his rubber pack-pouch. "And you're going to
stay here--until spring. Do you get onto that? You've GOT to stay. I'm
going to leave you marooned, so to speak. You couldn't travel a hundred
yards out there without snowshoes, and I'm goin' to take your snowshoes.
And I'm goin' to take your guns, and burn your pack, your coat, mittens,
cap, an' moccasins. Catch on? I'm not goin' to kill you, and I'm going to
leave you enough grub to last until spring, but you won't dare risk
yourself out in the cold and snow. If you do, you'll freeze off your
tootsies, and make your lungs sick. Don't you feel sort of
pleasant--you--you--devil!"
Six hours later Falkner stood outside the cabin. The dogs were in their
traces, and the sledge was packed. The storm had blown itself out, and a
warmer temperature had followed in the path of the blizzard. He wore his
coat now, and gently he felt of the bulging pocket, and laughed joyously
as he faced the South.
"It's goin' to be a long hike, you little cuss," he said softly. "It's
goin' to be a darned long hike. But we'll make it. Yessir, we'll make it.
And won't they be s'prised when we fall in on 'em, six months ahead of
time?"
He examined the pocket carefully, making sure that he had buttoned down
the flap.
"I wouldn't want to lose you," he chuckled. "Next to her, an' the kid, I
wouldn't want to lose you!"
Then, slowly, a strange smile passed over his face, and he gazed
questioningly for a moment at the pocket which he held in his hand.
"You nervy little cuss!" he grinned. "I wonder if you're a girl mouse,
an' if we're goin' to have a fam'ly on the way home! An'--an'--what the
dickens do you feed baby mice?"
He lowered the pocket, and with a sharp command to the waiting dogs
turned his face into the South.
THE END
End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Back to God's Country and Other Stories
by James Oliver Curwood